Chapter 34: Rented Futures

We woke.

Freya was smiling at me. “That was a surprise.”

“I thought they had derezzed the spider and would have to pay a fortune to re-rez it,” I said.

“They must have swapped the spider somewhere else. That’s a White Tree trick if I’ve ever seen one. But don’t worry. We cost them over ten billion today. They don’t protect something with Death Tetrads unless they have something to hide. Speaking of which, those were my memories in that server.”

Right. I’d almost forgotten what was there. “Are you OK?”

“Always feels a bit weird to reexperience something on someone else’s terms, or on the terms of the storage substrate, I guess. But I’ll be OK. I’ve been through rougher servers.”

We were stretching our bodies and disconnecting wires and spooling them back up and taking down the sticky cams. Freya produced a stack of bills to hand to our security outside the tent.

“Sorry,” I said somewhat belatedly.

“Don’t be. I suggested a race. Which I won, by the way.”

“So what?”

“So if we do this thing, you operate my hardware, at least to start. Because I’m the better runner.”

She cocked her hip and smiled at me.

I couldn’t disagree with that. “You run like a goddamn machine.”

Suddenly her expression appeared vacant.

“Freya? Are you OK?”

She shook her head like she was saying no. Then she said, “I’m fine.”

“What is it?”

“Just don’t say that again.”

“That you’re fast?”

“That I’m a machine. Just don’t say it, Rawls.”

And she carried her gear out of the tent.

###

Freya and I became partners. The terms of our partnership were simple: I set up her rig and she ran the breakers. With the sub-subs in my fingertips, I tuned up her console, her backups, and her regulators. I made them match her brain patterns and her pulse. Running was a physical sport. Always.

Downserver, nobody could compete with her. She broke ice like a machine, although I’d promised her I’d never say that again.

She’d coded a custom breaker suite for herself with the help of her pet AI, Zizek. Even I didn’t know exactly how her programs worked. It wasn’t my job to understand—it was only my job to ensure that her rig could access enough power to get Freya into any server, any time. That was what she needed, and when I say needed, I mean she needed it like she needed a place to sleep.

The first two breakers she made, for handling platformers and shooter ice, were simple and elegant. But she struggled with a breaker for puzzle ice. The first one she coded, called Smoke Mountain, she sold because she wasn’t happy with it.

“Who did you sell it to?”

“Not Davies, that’s for sure.” She referred to her usual fence, a guy I’d never met. “He wouldn’t give me a fair price. I sold it to Gerty.”

“You know Gerty?”

“Everyone knows her. She can find what others can’t. Although, sometimes I don’t know about her. She tried to sell me a child’s stuffed possum for 40K the other day.”

A memory came to me, something that I could almost grasp, but it was fleeting.

Freya told me that running kept bad feelings at bay. She took on trauma when White Tree had linked her to the brains of untold numbers of other people to do processing. Running helped her recapture her sense of self.

Me? I ran to help her. But the money was nice, too. With Freya, the money could be unbelievable. Sometimes it was scarce. Sometimes it was gone entirely. But that was how it went for every runner. With Freya, a big score was never more than a few weeks away. Within a few weeks of reuniting with her, she’d introduced me to her suppliers and fences, as well as the people who scouted out runs for her.

We were living together in Bull City when the name “Niflheim” popped up again. I was making my daily circuit of the underground shopping malls—still the best way to know what was happening in the city. It didn’t matter who you were: corporate drudge, executive, hungry artist, hoodlum, or permanent member of the working class, if you wanted something in Bull City in the summertime, you went below ground.

Sure, there was surveillance. A few hundred cameras monitored me from the moment I left the metro station at Duke. But for those in the know, surveillance wasn’t a problem until you let it become a problem. For now, I didn’t care if my face was showing up on monitors and facial recognition scans across half a dozen corporate and government security centers. The holographic overlays on the contact lenses of loss-prevention specialists in clothing stores lit up at my presence but that was OK. I wasn’t shoplifting leather jackets.

I only cared about one thing. I cared about the underworld semaphore. I cared about the foil streamer on a scent-engine wafting out of a teenage clothing boutique called Skullwire. I cared that the foil streamer’s position on the second vent from the left instead of the third meant that Freya's contact—Davies was his name—had something for me.

So I did what I always did when something urgent came along—I wasted time. I had a coffee at a glassed-in franchise and watched the students and professionals crowd the mirrored concourses between morning classes and morning meetings. When I finished my coffee, I walked another block underground and I had another coffee in another branch of the same franchise. I watched for familiar faces, anything that might suggest that the surveillance I was under was more than routine. Surveillance was just another name for the human condition these days. But if the corps take special interest in you at the wrong time, things go sick and wrong.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

But today? Today it was looking good. No familiar faces. No prickly sensation on the back of my neck—that was where I had a new interferometer implanted to let me know of any tight-beam laser or radio scanners that might sweep me.

Amid the crush of students making for the entrance to campus, I left the concourse of the mall by an unmarked service door. In the staff corridors behind the stores, the air was damp and reeked of rotting cardboard. But it was quiet enough, the cameras were mostly nonfunctional, and there were hardly any people around.

Life was different now, working with Freya. Those who were around knew me.

I made my way down the corridor, handing out vapor cigarettes, workaday stims, airport bottles of Ghanaian whisky that fell off the back of a truck in New England. As with any relationship, I needed to take care of my friends. They took care of me.

I wished Gloss or Enrique could see me. I wasn’t some kid anymore. People knew me here. They knew me as someone who could take down corporate servers, who could get them what they wanted.

With every step I was further from the corporate grid. Behind the service corridor were the tiny warehouses, many with bootleg electrical wiring and net servers providing power and data to the extralegal residents who lived in the walls of the underground malls. Ninety percent of them appeared in no census, collected no government benefits, and worked only for tiny electronic payments into accounts tattooed on their wrists. Their only toehold in the mainstream world came from their friends and relations who held down documented jobs cleaning the floors and walls of the mall, hauling trash, hauling goods, and working twice as hard as any megacorp executive for one forty-thousandth the pay.

It wasn’t easy for Freya to come down here. With her salaried job for FUTUR Design, she lived her life under more surveillance than I did. That was why she needed me to find jobs, find gear.

Behind a piece of thick plastic sheeting that had once been transparent but was now semi-opaque from years of smoke and grit and the oil of human hands was Freya’s friend Davies. He was on his couch in the middle of the warehouse, lost in some VR runner simulation. He liked to pretend he was cracking megacorp servers, but the truth was, he feared what might come out of the ice.

I didn’t look down on him. I had that fear myself.

“Rawls, my man, how’s your mysterious partner?” Davies said, coming up from the simulation. Overhead, I heard the whirring of his drone monitoring his local grid as it departed now that its owner was back in meatspace.

“You do much VR?” he said.

“Gives me nausea,” I said.

“But you run.”

“That’s different,” I said. “Like an old school video game.”

I shook Davies’s hand and sat down on the couch. “You should get this thing cleaned,” I said, running my hand along the matted magenta velour.

“I’ll let you in on a little secret,” Davies said. “I store all my most sensitive data in a smart biofilm on the surface of the couch, disguised as an ordinary stain.”

I stared at him.

“I’m just messing with you,” Davies said. “To business?”

“Business,” I said.

Davies got up and walked across his empty warehouse. It didn’t look like much now, but when he had parties, he turned on the full laser overlay, and suddenly you could be in the high arcologies, or deep in a maze of killer ice.

“This is the score,” he mumbled, digging through a box. That was his style: security through obscurity. Some corporate paramilitary raided him, all the important data was likely to go into the trash can with the old grease rags. Which were a fire hazard, as any gearhead will tell you. Which was, come to think of it, another form of security for Davies.

He came back with a cassette. There was a piece of quantum film inside, wound reel-to-reel like an ancient pop single. The case itself was sturdy plastic with heavy steel rivets. The outside was plenty scratched up.

“Don’t ask me any questions because I don’t have any answers. If I didn’t think you would be interested, I wouldn’t even have picked it up. And don’t ask me where I picked it up because frankly I did a little self-neurosurgery when I got back from that shopping expedition, edited my itinerary right out of my skull. I literally don’t remember and I don’t want to. That’s how bad this is. That’s also how good this is.”

I looked around his warehouse. I didn’t know he had that kind of surgical equipment here, let alone a room clean enough to use as an operating theater. Davies was full of surprises.

“How much?” I said.

“Thirty K.”

I didn’t have that much, but Freya did. “Steep for a down payment,” I said. “How much is your share when we pull down the score?”

“No shares this time. I don’t want to know whatever you do with what’s on there. And if you try to tell me what you’re going to do or what you did, I swear I will edit out every memory I had of you.”

I tapped my wrist. “Money’s in your account,” I said.

Freya was going to be intrigued.

###

I felt the weight of the cassette all the way back to the loft. I’d wedged it into my waistband like a pistol. I felt hyper-aware of my surroundings. With something like this, I couldn’t afford any hassle. I don’t often lose my cool, but I was convinced that I appeared as the world’s most suspicious character on the surveillance cameras that studded my route home: a slim country boy in a black denim jacket with a don’t-mess-with-me swagger suddenly looking over his shoulder every five meters.

I stopped at a Thai noodle stand and bought two bags of takeout just to give my hands something to do. After the long metro ride, when I arrived home, I was shaking head to toe. I set the bags down then sprawled on our couch—much cleaner than Davies’s—staring at the ceiling.

I’d persuaded her to move to a bigger apartment, one with a mezzanine level that we used for our gear. Come to think of it, it looked a lot like Enrique’s old condo.

“What’s wrong?” came Freya’s voice from the upper level. I saw her appear at the railing on the upper level, silhouetted by the glow of the bank of monitors behind her.

She was a tall woman with a powerful body. When we were kids she took dance class for years. Then in high school she started weight-lifting. When she got sick she’d lost a lot of muscle mass, but she was rebuilding herself now, partly through exercise, partly through installing stronger parts. I admired her more than anyone I knew.

“Freya, I just dropped 30K on a job lead,” I said.

“I hope it’s worth it,” she said.

I kept silent.

“Well?” she said. “What is it?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

A lot of runners would be angry if their partner spent half their roll on a single piece of intel of unknown quality. But not Freya. She trusted my instincts, just as I trusted her skill at breaking ice.

I forced myself to sit up. I carried the cassette up the spiral staircase. I handed it to her.

“Let’s have a look-see,” she said. “Don’t be scared.”

She slotted the cassette into an old universal data reader I’d picked up from a Talibama market out in Alamance.

“Encrypted, of course,” she said. “We do this wrong, it’s going to turn the q-film to slag.”

I reached for the fire extinguisher.

“Zizek, little help?” she said.

Zizek’s avatar, in a laser lit hologram, appeared before us. He was a wild-eyed professor-type dressed in a tracksuit. He arched an eyebrow. Where Freya picked him up, I had no idea.

Instantly the monitors came to life with a tessellation of schematics. At first it was impossible to make sense of the sheer quantity of the data.

But then emerged a picture, intelligible to slow humans like us. A corporate arcology in Chicago. Owned by FUTUR Design.

I knew exactly what it was because I’d run it before. Niflheim. I’d just spent 30K of Freya’s money to hear about Niflheim?

“Simulants who think they’re human executives,” she said.

That changed things. It was against the law to build simulants who did not know they were simulants. It must be well hidden, because my last run didn’t turn up that project.

“This could be big.” I was seeing zeroes.

“But it’s a FUTUR Design target,” Freya said. “If I do this, I’ll have to flee.”

“How much longer were you planning on working for them anyway?” I said.

“I need the health insurance.”

“You won’t if we pull this off.”

She looked at me as if she didn’t know which way to take my comment. I looked back at her, suddenly unsure of which way to play it.

“The ice on this will be intense,” she said.

“This is Niflheim. I’ve run it before, you know, part of it. Handled the sysop. But not the R&D server. This is big. Big. You have to admit the payday could be life-changing,” I said.

She just looked at me. But we both knew we were going to try.

###

The CheRRy’s Guide to the Hardware Store

Name

Neck Interferometer

Manufacturer

Cypherpunx, LLC

Legal status

Legal

Description

A simple sensor and processor that detects anomalous patterns in electromagnetic interference

Cost

A few hundo

Function

An electronic eye in the back of your head