Chapter 31. Two Point Oh
I felt like someone had opened up my arm and corkscrewed a piece of sparking metal into me. Spider Wasp dug into my arrowhead avatar and Ichnovirus followed. Whispering their secrets, burning themselves into me, they faded from my vision because now I saw through them. It was like being told a very long and boring bedtime story but I loved it because it was the only thing that could distract me from the molten pain.
When I awoke, the sunset came through the window in orange and lavender. The backup substrates had unemulsified, separated themselves into a thin layer of water over hard gray putty. I poured out the water and shut the cases. They had no more use for me. The programs they had contained were part of me now.
Program
Spider Wasp
Type
Icebreaker
Subtype
Shooter
Base Nguyen-Okafor complexity
2
Cost to break
2K for 3 subroutines
Cost to boost
2K for 3 complexity
Comment
Relatively efficient breaker for shooter ice
Program
Ichnovirus
Type
Virus
Subtype
-
Base Nguyen-Okafor complexity
-
Effect
Lowers the complexity of shooter ice
I looked at the bathroom mirror and noticed the dirty pores, the oily surface. I needed to wash my skin but didn’t want to wash my DNA down the drain.
Using the laptop, I took a look at the connections in the room. Aside from the router, screens, and phone, all of which I could avoid connecting to, there were two other devices. Clipped to the inside of each drain was a DNA sniffer that fed into the room’s router. As gently as lifting a single fallen hair from the sink, I removed the contacts from my eyes and then blinked to disconnect each of the drain’s sensors. Then I slipped the mesh contacts back over my eyes to kill the signal traffic.
Could I risk sleeping here? I wanted to.
I was tired of running. But if the DNA sniffers were connected to the room’s router, it was possible my eyes had connected to that router for just a moment, too, or to cell towers out in the world.
I wasn’t safe here but I wasn’t totally safe anywhere. Safety was probabilistic now, unlike where I grew up, where I could almost assume that life would go on without much danger outside the occasional wolf or pack of coyotes or flood. Or terminal illness.
I was close to Freya; I knew it. I turned over the Prophet Ezra’s wafer of circuitry in my fingers. The hardware looked as if it had been grown rather than fabricated. At one end was a circular arrangement of connector pins that slotted into my net port, so that the wafer stuck out of me like a gnarled stake.
I was a runner, a hexrunner. I was invinc—
###
She lived in an apartment in a narrow tower in a middle-class neighborhood called Old West, where children of all races played together in the street and fixed their pedal bikes in a co-op garage housed in a corrugated metal shed tucked up against the tower’s rear. The address was laser-etched above the sheet metal door: 843 Gin Street.
She worked for FUTUR Design. She had a real talent for rotating code structures in her mind to reveal hidden possibilities in their logic. Her specialized data jack, courtesy of White Tree, let her interface with the code structures more efficiently than other employees.
She made money, lots of money, amounts that were scandalous by her standards, but she felt nothing except fear and doom. Panic attacks kept her confined to her apartment some days. Depression and anxiety left her unable to enjoy things she used to enjoy, such books, coffee, and sunny days.
She fixated on what she saw as problems with her body. First she was worried that she was losing her eyesight. She tried to take care of that with simple outpatient laser surgery at a university clinic in Bull City. When that didn’t satisfy her, she went back to have semi-opaque white shields implanted to block UV rays.
She read up on the experiences of other people who had been networked to the grid in the White Tree facility. She began to suspect that she’d been damaged by exposure to the childhood traumas of other people on the grid, or perhaps by exposure to AI dreams. She read that she had likely experienced these traumas and dreams as if they had happened to her.
She installed an upgraded net jack and took up netspace meditation. It sort of worked.
She tried freerunning. She had met up with a group who taught her the basics: bodyweight exercises and safety routines. They told her she didn’t need equipment to do it.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
###
The images stuttered, some of the sounds repeated. Something was glitching the memories.
I pulled the wafer out of my chest. I knew where Freya was. These were memories encoded into cultured flash memory. It meant that she’d seen the Prophet Ezra recently. He didn’t need to tell me where she was because he could simply show me.
It was too late in the night to go find her so I took advantage of the room. I ordered room service, tipped the server heavily with paper money. I ate what was probably the best fried chicken sandwich I’d ever eaten, and that included the sandwiches made from live chickens that I used to get at my uncle’s farm. Unworried about the DNA collectors, I took a hot bath, allowed the tax of the last few days soak from my muscles. For the first time in a long while, I felt almost relaxed.
Of course, as soon as that feeling passed through me I started to expect pounding at the door. I sat up in the tub, thinking about the memories of Freya’s I had experienced, the feelings of anxiety and desperation encoded in them, and how she had sought out relief on the net with an upgraded jack. Freya was suffering.
###
In the morning, I left a tip for the housekeepers and checked out of the hotel room. Goodbye, comfort. Goodbye, bathtub and bed.
In the tent city near the Private Highway pylons, I asked around until someone told me where I could find the Prophet Ezra. He was sitting on a shop stool inside a tent covered by a patchy blue tarp, sunlight streaming down through threadbare synthetic fabric. With a soldering iron in one hand, he seemed to be making either jewelry or hardware.
I shuffled my feet to make some noise. When that didn’t get his attentin, I cleared my throat as I set the subtrate cases on the compacted dirt. He turned, assessed me with a neutral eye. Then he gestured at me with the smoking tip of the soldering iron. “Good to see you again, hexrunner. Tell me, did you slot what I gave you?”
“I did.”
“And what did you see?”
“Memories.”
“Of your friend.” The Prophet Ezra said so carefully, as if he didn’t want to put words in my mouth.
“That’s right.”
“Then it’s working,” he said. He set the soldering iron in its coiled metal holder and stood from the stool. He walked across the tent to where a pot of tea steamed. He poured two cups and talked, partly to me, partly to himself. “Excellent. For years I have been trying to grow a medium that would accept memories as naturally as vinyl used to accept sound waves. Perhaps I’m getting there.”
He handed me a cup of tea and I thanked him with a nod. “I need to know something,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“When were those memories laid down?”
“Last week.”
“So she’s nearby.”
“Quite.”
“Thank you,” I said. I nudged the cases with my feet. “These contain worn out substrate. Have a use for these?”
The Prophet Ezra stroked his beard. “I know someone who can re-emulsify them. I always have a use for what’s been discarded, thrown away, or made to disappear. Nothing is ever truly useless. Remember that, hexrunner, and good luck.”
“Thank you.”
“No, thank you for testing my product. Any side effects?”
“Not sure.”
He shrugged. “Well, seek medical attention if you need to. But don’t sue me! I’m judgment proof!” He laughed and turned back to his soldering iron.
###
843 Gin Street rose above a busy road, full of buses and e-bikes moving through the outer edge of Carthage. The directory panel outside the building’s metal door displayed a long list of names. There was no Freya Alexander or any variant of it, but there was a “Dearborn.” That was the name White Tree had given Freya when she had left the pools, the name she had rejected.
I stared at it for a while and then considered using my eyes to see what the local drive knew. The trouble was this system was homemade and not networked. It was simply a display panel soldered to a single board computer. It was as if the landlord was some hobbyist electrical engineer. The people moving in and out of the building avoided my eye. I didn’t want to make them uncomfortable or to attract the attention of security or law enforcement, so I abandoned the front of the building and decamped to the coffee shop across the road.
Sitting before the long, street-facing window at a varnished bar with a mug of coffee at my elbow, I thought about my options. One, I could wait here all day to see whether Freya entered or exited the building. It was a weekday, and she was likely at work, so perhaps closer to evening I might get lucky. Two, I could see if I could breach the FUTUR Design employee database and find out something else about her. I’d accessed FUTUR Design’s HQ before but hadn’t looked at the employee records that time.
I’d promised Dr. Adler back in Missouri that I wouldn’t try to jack in for few hours, give or take, so maybe hitting FUTUR Design was a bad idea. But I’d already used my eyes a couple times, so maybe my nervous system was up to the job. Or maybe not. Maybe it was better to do this the old-fashioned way, and wait here. In meatspace. Like a lump of pork. Not a chance.
I downed the rest of my coffee and left the shop for the commercial district I could see up ahead. A major road, clogged with vehicles traveling at speeds that appeared, frankly, stupid, cut one side of the commercial area off from the other. A pair of spindly pedestrian bridges arced over the road, and some brave or desperate individuals tried to maneuver across the faded remains of painted crosswalks, the speakers in the traffic lights shouting WAIT WAIT WAIT to people who weren’t listening.
There were memorials on the side of the road: two white-painted pedal bikes, a white e-bikes, and a white wheelchair next to a pile of shoes also spray-painted white. This ordinary road was as deadly and cruel as anything else in the world.
Past restaurants, net cafes, and tiny stores jammed with discount goods I saw the bunker-like form of an old public library branch. I figured there would be a terminal in there I could use for a quick peek at FUTUR Design’s directory. I walked down the old and uneven stairs into the dark basement level, with dusty light streaming in through high windows that just barely found the sky.
Dim lights glowed in ceramic bowls suspended from the ceiling on chains. Along the far wall were bound volumes of ancient magazines. The smell of old glossy paper and binding glue filled me with pleasant memories of the public library back home before the Talibama took over the county and burned it down during their brief reign.
In front of me was a long double-row of terminals, each one occupied by someone hunched over in netspace. They were interfacing through screens, goggles, headphones, haptics, helmets, and net ports. The hardware may have been old and grimy, but it was also indestructible.
A glowing transparent kiosk, the newest thing in the room, asked to scan my library card or chip in exchange for a place in line to use a terminal for forty-five minutes. I slipped the mesh contacts from my eyes and looked into the system’s logic.
The system conducted only a simple reference check to a local database to verify whether a library card was valid. I found a dummy entry in the reference database and entered my number the same way.
“TEST_USER you are number 0000157 in line,” the kiosk reported.
I put the contacts back in. I felt a pang: I really wanted Enrique and Gloss and Linney and Freya to see me now. I wished they knew how fluent I was at navigating netspace. Soon they would.
I was flipping through old issues of Popular Cybernetics when a terminal became available. Lowering myself onto the hard chair, I looked over the hardware available. Connecting to a public net port felt risky, but the library was only giving me forty-five minutes of access, so I risked it and flipped open a laptop with a server map pointed at FUTUR Design HQ. Then I unwound the library terminal’s cable until it reached my chest, pulled down the collar of my t-shirt, and twisted the cable home.
The last time I had run this server, it had been protected by a simulant girl picking flowers in a field. This time, as the skyline of FUTUR Design approached, I was confronted by a tall young woman with red hair wearing a cloak of gold so bright it was practically flaming.
I knew her.
“Freya?” I said.
“You are not allowed to be here,” she said and moved nearer to me. Her cloak swayed as tiny packets of data streamed past us. The way she moved was different than how Freya moved. The simulant’s hair was long and red and curly, different than Freya’s had been, but her face was Freya’s and her voice was Freya’s, and so was her presence, bearing, posture. I felt sure this was her.
“Do you recognize me?” I said.
She looked me over. “I do not know you. I will send you to hell.”
Gloss's Encyclopedia of Ice
Name
Freya 2.0
Manufacturer
FUTUR Design
Cost to rez
Medium
Nguyen-Okafor complexity
3
Type
Puzzle
Subtype
Simulant-toll-gray
Subroutines
Drains runner accounts; occupies runner attention for hours; can cause nervous system trauma