Chapter 33: Death Tetrads

Delilah Vyskocil, the chief architect of FUTUR Design’s ice, was my mother?

I thought back to the moment I engineered an encounter with her in the atrium at FUTUR Design HQ. She had seemed to recognize something in me, and I recognized something in her. What Freya said was true. There was no doubt at all.

But so what? This woman had never been around when I was a kid. Even if she gave birth to me, she didn’t raise me. I didn’t owe her much. I didn’t owe her anything. I didn't.

Freya continued her story. “At HQ, Delilah gave me a different task: training a brand new simulant.”

As she spoke, I recalled my encounters with the simulants Ludo and Starbuck, and passing each of them was a matter of mastering their particular games. There was a part of me that thought that speaking with Freya about this could be useful. I felt queasy at that thought. I wasn’t here to improve my status as a runner. I was here to make sure that my childhood best friend was OK. Wasn’t I?

“Usually simulants are trained by conversation and board games. This simulant training routine was different,” Freya said. “The way I was supposed to train her was to dream about her. They hooked me up to their own version of the pools. At the time, I figured I could do it, as uncomfortable as it was, because they were paying me a lot of money. But when I was done, I felt sick. Really sick. Worse than when I had separated from White Tree. I asked if I could speak to the simulant. But Delilah said that I couldn’t. I don’t even know if she’s been released.”

Something clicked in my head. Don’t worry, the click was only figurative.

“She has been released,” I said, remembering my encounters with Freya 1.0 and Freya 2.0. “They have her protecting HQ. And she’s evolving.”

“Oh. Does she look like me?”

“In a way.”

“It’s almost like having a sister.” Freya gave a tiny smile that I didn’t believe for a moment.

I reached out for her hand. “If you believe that ice can be a person.”

“Simulant ice can be, Rawls. Trust me.” There was sadness in her voice, and a sense of grievance. I didn’t understand what she had been through but it must have been painful. I didn’t understand what she was saying and I didn’t like it.

“What happened next?” I said.

“Your mother sent me back to RTA and I worked on low-level simulant lines again.”

Freya spoke slowly and in monotone. It was clear she was trying to tell me everything exactly as she experienced it. “I applied for the job under the name that White Tree gave me. But Delilah told me she knew me by my real name—Freya Alexander. It was written in the Root, backbone of the net, jointly owned by the megacorps. White Tree had told me that the name was dead but you know how that goes—information can never be destroyed once it’s on the net. Delilah said she would help my career, guide me as much as I wanted, and that she hoped she could see what had become of you.”

“Did she know where I was?”

“She asked me. I said that last I knew, you were still in Canton.”

I thought back to the atrium. Did she know who I was? If my eyes had been transmitting to FUTUR Design at that moment, surely someone in that corp would have identified me. I felt like I was being manipulated. I didn’t like any of this.

Freya continued. “Delilah told me that in order to save your eyesight they had to enucleate and replace your eyes. But it wasn’t just your eyes that were affected by your illness. It was your whole nervous system. So the only implants that would work for you were these experimental eyes created by FUTUR Design in collaboration with White Tree. To afford the implants and the nervous system upgrade that went with it, Delilah had to sign a 30-year indenture with FUTUR Design.”

“Oh my goodness.”

“And as part of the indenture, she had to leave you behind.”

“She gave up her freedom for me?”

“At the highest executive levels, either the family lives in corporate housing or becomes no family at all.”

I didn’t want to owe my mother anything. But she gave me life, and she saved my vision. And she paid a cost, a cost that I couldn’t even understand. Maybe she could have taken me with her.

“But Dad didn’t want to leave Canton,” I said.

Freya shook her head. “I’m glad he didn’t.”

I knew what she meant and squeezed her hand. “I am, too. So you’re corporate now?” I said, feeling uncomfortable with the question. It was like asking someone what color their blood was.

Freya brushed her hair back. “I’m low-level enough that they don’t demand 100% of my time. As therapy, I began making runs on other megacorps by myself. I hide it from them. I half-suspect my employer knows but doesn’t care as long as I’m not running against FUTUR Design’s servers. I know for a fact they employ runners to breach White Tree.”

“So you’re a runner.”

“Valkyrie,” she said.

Of course. Val43rie. She’d cracked the top 500 last time I had checked.

“I’ve seen you on the board,” I said.

“I run alone. But I’m making my name. You need a handle,” she said. She punched my knee.

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“So I gather. Hey. It’s good to see you.”

“It’s good to see you, too, Rawls. Thanks for coming to find me.”

“Any time.”

We gave each other an awkward sideways hug, all our hardware digging into each other’s soft skin, so different than when we were teenagers made of nothing but lean muscle and soft skin.

“What about you? Who you running with?” she said.

I told her about everyone I had met. “Then my mentor got nabbed. Once we figured out my eyes were transmitting to FUTUR Design and maybe White Tree, my crew didn’t want me around anymore. So I guess I’m on my own, too.”

“We could be partners,” she said.

“Really?”

“I have some connections here. It could be sweet.”

###

In the evening, Freya and I took a short ride on the BRUTE to a place near a weedy old highway, a restaurant with kitchens distributed among a low collection of buildings surrounding a courtyard with koi swimming among lily pads.

As we sat on a stone bench in a bamboo grove, eating from paper trays, I realized why we were here. Between the concrete waterfall that fed the koi pond and the wind in the bamboo, microphones would have a hard time picking up our conversation.

Freya confided in me the details of the runs she’d been making. She’d been targeting White Tree, making some extra cash, hindering her employer’s competitor, and reclaiming a sense of agency after White Tree had stripped it from her by connecting her to their pools. That was how Freya explained it. Running was like seeing a counselor, except you got paid to do it.

Listening to her speak felt like coming home. I’d done what I had set out to do: found Freya, made sure that she was all right. In the process I had made some friends, developed a new set of skills, and learned a few things about myself. I’d learned how my body had been modified when I was too young to know what was happening, and then I’d paid to have it modified further. I’d fashioned myself into a runner, maybe not in the top 500 like Freya, but a runner, and a hexrunner, too. And I knew that I wasn’t running for money. And I didn’t think I had political beliefs, not really.

So what was left for me? Could I go back home with the knowledge that I had accomplished what I had set out to do?

No. There wasn’t a life back home in Canton. My life was here, as a runner, and so was Freya’s. That was the best possible outcome. We could run together, grow together, crack the top 100. Maybe even the top 10.

And as she told me how she thought a partnership between us could work, a plan began to form. There were targets she wanted to take down, rich targets, but she needed someone running her hardware.

That stopped me. “Run your hardware? I thought I would be on the breakers, or we would together.”

“Oh that’s what you thought, huh?” she smiled the way she used to when challenging me to a foot race across the meadow as kids. “Maybe we should have ourselves a competition.”

“You and me? Like a race?”

“You pick the server,” she said.

“Where are we running from?”

“I know a place.”

###

She wanted to jack in from the tent city beneath the Private Highway pylons in central Bull City. We set up the consoles and connected the net cables to them. Her method of connecting was more complicated than mine, and her console looked like something that had come from a custom auto-body shop, if auto-body shops made computers. It was an aerodynamic-looking elongated trapezoid, with two jewel-like eyes, gleaming with sparkling dark green metallic paint. “This is Deinosuchus,” she said, and I saw it then. Her console was shaped like head of a prehistoric alligator.

The Prophet Ezra set up a couple of cots and promised to put someone at the door to keep watch over us. Even so, I noticed Freya peeling the paper backs from half a dozen sticky cams and placing them on the ceiling of the tent surrounding the cots. She wrote their frequencies in marker on the palm of my hand then gestured with the marker at the laptop. “Whatcha got?”

I spun the open screen toward her so she could see the server map showing the White Tree remote server with the single bright ring of ice.

“Looks intense,” she said. “What’s the ice?”

“Mean Red Spider.”

“You’ve been here before?”

“Yeah. But not with the rig I have now.”

She folded her arms. “All right. Let’s do this.” She reclined in one cot and pulled an assembly of cords up to her body. She connected them at her head, neck, and shoulder, and then I pulled mine to my chest.

###

Instantly I knew I was outclassed. Freya ran fast. Her avatar was a Valkyrie and she traveled through the net the way code travels through the net. She moved the way that the simulant Freya moved. It seemed as though I was wrong when I said that Freya 2.0 did not move like the real thing.

The ice ahead appeared cloudy, semi-transparent, no trace of the mean red spider that I had seen on my last run. White Tree must have derezzed it to recoup costs, calculating that they wouldn’t have to rez it again. The digital incarnation of a spider god wasn’t cheap; Gloss had taught me that. We were about to make White Tree learn that lesson again.

I could see Freya far ahead of me when the ice began to concretize in front of her. Instead of the strands of web that I expected to see, perhaps the long, lethal legs of the spider, almost invisible except from the proper angle, the ice was blockier, and assembled itself with spinning shapes: lines, squares, and L-, S-, and T-shaped pieces each made of four cubes, as in an old-school video game.

“Death Tetrads,” Freya hissed over the voicelink. Her Valkyrie took evasive action to avoid faceplanting across the razor edge of a T-shaped block that was sliding into a T-shaped gap directly in front of her.

I slowed, readying my programs. The visual representation of the ice combined with the data from my console told me that this was a platformer type ice, and that meant Hungry Creek was my breaker of choice.

The problem was, these things were slow, and as slowly as I was moving, I could feel the Death Tetrads pulling me in. The surface of the ice glowed hot and sharp. It looked painful, like a jumped-up version of the razor-lined membrane that had cut me when I was still new to running.

I worried about Freya. I’d led her into this server anticipating one kind of ice. What if she wasn’t prepared for this? What if she was exhausted from the workday? What if this thing killed her? I looked above, to where her Valkyrie glowed, ringed in flame.

I shouldn’t have worried about Freya. She hovered near the surface of the nearest Death Tetrad, its glow mixing with the glow surrounding her avatar. Some kind of harmonic resonance was coming from her avatar. She was singing.

And as she sang, a hole opened in the Death Tetrad. The song came to me as if from far away. Even as my avatar was pulled inescapably toward the Death Tetrad, I opened a window to one of the sticky cams she had left in the tent.

There, I saw her, on the cot, her mouth and chest moving exactly as if in song, her upper body swaying slightly on the thin mattress, if one could be said to sway at all while supine. The sticky cam did not transmit audio, so I couldn’t be sure that she was singing audibly, but something in me felt that she was.

The hole above opened enough for her Valkyrie avatar to pass through. Meanwhile, I called Hungry Creek to my side and pushed the torrent of water forward. On my own, I wasn’t sure I could have made it through. But all I had to do was dissolve my way to the hole that Freya had opened and pass through behind her.

Ahead, in the tall tower of the server’s data, she was spinning, spinning ...

Gloss’s Encyclopedia of Ice

Name

Death Tetrads

Manufacturer

White Tree

Cost to rez

extremely high

Nguyen-Okafor complexity

6

Type

platformer

Subtype

red; anti-AI

Subroutines

3: bleeds a runner (lethal 80% of the time); stops a run; shreds AI icebreakers