Chapter 32. In the Flesh

The ice looked like Freya. She had promised to send me to hell.

The skin of the ice swam with interlocking lines, like a jigsaw puzzle. I reached for Hungry Creek, for Spider Wasp, for Ichnovirus, but as they unfolded from me they passed through her without interacting with her. None of them were optimized for puzzle ice.

I tried to reverse away but she reached out for me, her arm appearing to be a normal length but in fact becoming impossibly long, and she took the tip of my arrowhead between her thumb and forefinger. Her fingertips were sharp with fractal edges, grooved like a cortex, ready to fit into my synapses and jam them.

Gray ice. A traumatic brain injury was only nanoseconds away. I saw the code running along her skin and was about to speak when I saw a way through, even without a breaker—

—I traveled through endless halls, tall and sparkling, lined with glass cases displaying uncut precious stones and weird, brilliant minerals like deranged skyscrapers on plinths or velvet cushions, like a museum in which I was the only visitor—

“Sir?” the security guard was shaking my shoulder, the librarian standing behind him.

I found myself slouched at the public library terminal. I disconnected the cable from my chest.

“You’re not allowed to be here for hours and hours,” the security guard said. The librarian standing behind him remained silent and looked ambivalent about this situation. The guard’s words made me flash back to that unsettling encounter with the simulant ice. “Other people are waiting.”

I muttered an apology and moved away from the terminal, feeling disturbed and lonely. As I walked up the stairs to the street, I saw that it was early in the evening. I’d lost most of the day to what should have been a simple run. I checked the balance on my credit chip and saw that I’d lost almost 2K as well.

Bled for time and money by that ice. That ice that looked like Freya. But was that her? Had I finally found her? Only one way to find out.

I hunkered down in a diner nearby. My laptop was making a whining noise, as if a fan were about to snap a blade. Still, in the booth, nursing half a mug of tepid dark water that they told me was coffee, I dug the laptop out.

Touching the bag made me ache with loneliness. It was one of Gloss’s bags, made of ballistic nylon and stained with sweat, dirt, cooking oil, blood, and half a dozen exotic machine and biomedical lubricants.

The shell of the bag was beyond cleaning but I wouldn’t get rid of it because it felt like a link between me and the other runners. Even if they didn’t want anything to do with me. We were the ones who made millions and lost it just as easily. Hell, thirty minutes ago I had 2K vanish from my account. That would have been a rent payment, maybe even two, for most people. For me, it meant nothing. I didn’t run for the money.

When I opened the laptop I saw it hadn’t powered down. Not only that but my foray into FUTUR Design’s HQ had not been a total failure. Somehow I must have made it into the server, even if I didn’t remember breaching it, as disturbing as that was.

After my spooky encounter with ice that imitated Freya’s appearance, I had lost track of what was happening. Fortunately, this little laptop had been watching over me, and more importantly, it had recorded everything. There, among the charts of vital signs and the sheets and sheets of quotidian corporate data, in one plain text file among thousands, was “Kristin Dearborn’s” employee record.

FUTUR Design had hired “Kristin Dearborn” four months ago, which was about three months before the words COME FIND ME started flashing at me every time my implanted eyes connected to the net. The record told me her home address, 843 Gin Street, which I already knew. And it told me that she had been at work today.

Which meant that she might be home now. I was only a few blocks from 843 Gin. It was funny: I had considered waiting outside her building all day, but had been restless and jacked in instead, and ended up losing the day to simulant ice.

I shivered. I didn’t know what that meant about me. Was I savvy or just reckless?

I set out for 843 Gin Street. This time I pressed the button on the ancient panel next to the name “Dearborn,” handwritten in blue ink, and a voice that I recognized spoke to me, fuzzily, from the speaker above the panel.

“Yeah?”

“Freya,” I said. “It’s Rawls. I’ve come to find you.”

There was a strange pause.

“302.”

The voice said nothing else. The static coming from the speaker ceased, and the sheet metal door shook with an electric pulse that disengaged the locks. I pulled the door open and stepped through into an old apartment building, the floor unlevel and the paint peeling. There were shoes in the hallway, and a child’s bicycle. I climbed the stairs to the third level, feeling the bannister creak under my hand.

At 302 I knocked. I thought I saw something block the light streaming through the peephole, and then the door opened.

There she was, wearing a tank top and denim cut-offs, her feet bare. She gave me a smile that was cautious, maybe even ambivalent. Even slouching and holding the door jamb, she looked tall and strong.

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She was also studded with sockets. I could see them running from the side of her head down her neck, shoulder, near her collarbone, and under her shirt. Her arms ran with circuitry tattooed into her. On the front of one thigh was a jeweled access panel bearing heavy two chrome knobs.

It spoke to something new about her. She was noticing that I’d been modified, too.

“Faraday mesh contacts, right?” was the first thing she said.

“Freya,” I said. I threw my arms wide.

She let me hug her but stood stiffly, as if she didn’t know why I would want to embrace the friend I hadn’t seen in much more than a year.

“Yeah,” I whispered, my whiskered chin brushing the place where her neck met her shoulder muscle. “Mesh contacts.”

“I was wondering why I stopped being able to find you reliably. But I’m glad you’re covering your tracks now. Come on in,” she said and turned away from the door.

I followed her inside and closed the door to her apartment behind myself. The smell of her place reminded me of the smell of Freya’s parents’ kitchen when we were growing up. Freya had to do most of her own cooking, and it smelled like she cooked the same things here as she did back home: succotash, tomato stew, and buttered sweet potatoes.

Hers was a studio like you found in many towers these days, like Linney’s had been: a single long room with a big picture window on one end, with kitchen and hygiene alcoves. Her bed was right up against the window. Her view looked out at the far expanse of pine and mixed forests that stretched to Occoneechee Mountain and the foothills in the distance. The places outside Carthage where people like Freya and I—people such as we used to be—still lived.

She filled a jam jar with cold water and handed it to me. I drank it heartily and she joked that I must be dehydrated. I nodded in agreement even as the jar remained pressed to my lips.

“It’s so good to see you,” I said, and felt a great release of tension in my chest as I spoke the words.

She turned away and busied herself rearranging bits of gear on her couch. The fact that she didn’t acknowledge my second attempt at a warm greeting made all the tension that had just been released come rushing back to clutch me. I sighed.

“What?” she said. She didn’t look up at me.

“It’s just that you have no idea how hard I’ve been looking for you, and I’m here, and I’m happy to see you, happy to see you’re still alive, and it’s like you don’t care.”

She looked up at me and straightened her back and dumped all the components in her arms back on the couch. There were tears in her eyes. “You didn’t come see me in the hospital.”

I put my hands in my pockets. I couldn’t meet her eyes just now. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Panic attack.”

“Oh.”

I removed my hands from my pockets and held them out. “I’m not trying to make this about me. I definitely messed up by not coming to see you.”

“Thanks,” she said quietly. She started walking around the place, her arms crossed. She was looking at the floor when she spoke. “Then they asked me come to Carthage all alone, to the NCD, and that was terrifying. I was scared that I was going to die, or become a shell of who I once was, or become inhabited by an AI. And then when I left the pools I came here and called for you and I wasn’t sure you were ever going to come.”

“Here I am,” I said.

Her smile was tight-lipped. “I wish you had come sooner. Now I don’t know if it’s a good thing you came at all.”

“What in the world are you talking about?” I said. My words stopped her where she was. I hadn’t meant to raise my voice. It was just that I felt such happiness to see her, followed by uncertainty, and then guilt, and then reconnection, then confusion. And finally, what I felt more than anything else was frustration at how this reunion was playing out.

She looked at me with wet, fierce eyes. “FUTUR Design is hunting you. They’re my employer.”

“Yes, I know. I know both those things.”

“That means it’s a bad idea for you to be standing in my apartment.”

“Even though you called me here.”

“Even though.”

“It was you, wasn’t it? That sent the messages to my eyes?”

“Yes. Of course it was.”

I sighed again. “Freya, I don’t know why you say obviously, because it wasn’t obvious to me. It took a good amount of detective work. I didn’t even know about my eye implants. How is it that you do?”

“Oh, that. That’s what I was getting at. The real problem.”

“So what is it?”

“If I told you, you wouldn’t understand, so just sit down and let me tell you a story. Coffee first?”

“Is it good coffee?”

“The hell with you, Rawls,” she said brightly.

I grinned wide. That was the Freya I knew. Back home, I remember trawling the stores and flood relief depots looking for the coffee that most approximated the real thing. It was always Freya’s nose that found it.

She glanced at the kitchen and I heard the sound of a grinder spinning up, of water boiling against a hot coil.

“Networked kitchen?”

“Worth the risk.”

“Tell me that when someone DDoSes your brewer and you can’t make your morning cup.”

Freya gave me the finger and moved to the cabinet to take down two thick ceramic mugs. On one was printed, “#1 Grandma” and on the other, “I lost myself at Blooming Prairie Arcology.”

A minute later, steaming mugs in our hands, sitting next to each other on her couch, her leg with its knobs against the outside of my thigh.

I noticed a photograph, printed on paper and framed, on the wall. Freya and a young, dark-skinned man with a buzzcut. “Boyfriend?” I said.

“Riz,” she said. “He’s great. We don’t see each other enough.”

“I’m happy for you.” I said it automatically, and I meant it, although there was a part of me that wanted all of Freya’s attention to myself now that I had found her.

“You seeing anyone?” She poked my knee.

“Not right now. There was someone, but she took a job and moved.”

“Like me.”

“Yes and no.” The silence threatened to get weird. “You said you had a story,” I said.

“Right,” she said. “Well, I started to work for FUTUR Design after I’d left the pools. The Prophet Ezra pointed me here. You may have met him. Anyway, I was recruited into the ice development division at Research Triangle Arcology. They put me on a low-level simulant product line right away. Have you ever seen a Marlowe?”

“No.”

“Well, I worked on him for a few weeks. But then the chief architect visited our facility.”

Chief architect. Wait. I knew this, from my visit to FUTUR Design HQ with Gloss.

“Delilah Vyskocil,” I offered.

Freya leaned forward and looked over at me, her face serious. “How do you know her? I mean, of course you know her, but how do you know her by that name?”

“I ran an operation against her.”

“Well, Chief Architect Vyskocil, or Delilah, as she insisted I call her, plucked me out of simulant lines and took me to HQ. I think she had noticed the evidence on my body that I had been part of White Tree’s pools. No one else had quite understood what these sockets and these circuits meant. Delilah took me out for a glass of wine at a fancy hotel downtown and told me two very important things.”

“What were they?”

“The first one is private. I’m sorry. But the second one is this: Delilah is your mother.”

Gloss's Encyclopedia of Ice

Name

Marlowe 1.0

Manufacturer

FUTUR Design

Cost to rez

Low

Nguyen-Okafor complexity

2

Type

Platformer

Subtype

Simulant-tracer

Subroutines

Stops a run; attempts to trace runner location