Chapter 35: Narco Palace
And with the life-changing payday that would come from running Niflheim R&D, I thought, I could hire a big-shot lawyer to habeas Enrique out of whatever corporate prison he was stuck inside. I could return as a hero to the runner community who had given me my start.
But Freya worked for Niflheim’s owner, FUTUR Design. I expected to have to convince her. It turned out that I didn’t.
“We have to run it,” Freya said. “Forget my straight career.”
According to this tape, FUTUR Design ran a project inside Niflheim that violated the order of the world, such as it was.
There were laws that stated that simulants had to be told they were simulants and could not be told they were human. But FUTUR Design was raising simulants to believe they were human, specifically to believe they were corporate executives. These simulants were copies of naturally born people. The simulants would then be sold to the megacorps, where they could improve a CEO’s productivity as long as the simulants never learned the truth. Not even FUTUR Design was supposed to do that. They weren’t supposed to be above the law.
In some ways, it was admirable. From what I had seen of simulants during my encounters with them in netspace, they might have been as much of a person as I was. I knew there was a simulant rights movement, and while I didn’t have a strong opinion on that issue, I was sympathetic to the idea that simulants weren’t corporate property.
And that was the problem with FUTUR Design, in my view. They wanted simulants to be people and they wanted control over them at the same time. That wasn’t right.
Supposedly, Freya wanted to run Niflheim for the money. But as I watched her look over the information on the tape, I wondered if that were true. I thought about the ice that Freya had dreamed up, the Freya-series ice. What would it be like if she encountered that ice in the net?
###
In those first few weeks of partnership, I worked differently with Freya than when I did when I first started running. My practice now was to scout the meatspace before a run. It didn’t matter how far away we were going to be; I wanted someone on the ground. Even if Freya was going to be jacking into bank in Charleston, I wanted a sense of the local grid around the target. I wanted the chance to set up some watchers, whether robotic or biological or somewhere in between.
Corporations had immune systems, just like people. Under attack, they showed symptoms. They ran fevers. They bled personnel, data, and even wet ink once the bankruptcy lawyers came in and the executives turned started eating each other. You could make an educated guess at what a corp was going to do next if you could watch the traffic in and out of its headquarters, assuming you had been watching for a while and established a baseline. You could anticipate the reprisal and get out from under it.
But that wasn’t the only reason I went in person. Sometimes we couldn’t run down a score in netspace alone. Sometimes we needed an assist in the meat. Particularly when looking at a FUTUR Design target, we needed to be aware of the lag time and the load on the network. FUTUR Design’s Tomorrow Division built its reputation on turning the infinitesimal delays that were a part of any network against a runner. Those tiny delays could mean the difference between Freya slipping by some alert simulant hunter manifesting in the net and her brain splattered across the inside of her rig. The amount of lag told us how far away we could afford to be when we ran down the score.
So I flew to Chicago.
###
Riding the enormous maglev line along Lake Michigan filled me with a dueling feelings of peace and anxiety. As the train approached the FUTUR Design arcology further up the north shore, I saw Niflheim in person for the first time: a purple-gray tower, unremarkable from the outside, with no indication of the terrible energies contained inside. I left the train at the arcology stop. About half the passengers were going inside, residents on furlough or contractors come to sweep the halls, take out the trash, cook the meals, or maybe clean up the bloodstains.
Nilfheim was the premier facility for the Tomorrow Division. Its R&D server was thick with illegal data.
In the Carthage back channels there were rumors of a louche FUTUR Design sysop in the Chicago arcology, and I was here to see if I could compromise her. I was pretty sure I knew who it was based on my previous experience with Niflheim.
If I could compromise this sysop, and if I could get the hardware we needed, we might be able to crack the arcology using an inside agent to prop the door open, so to speak.
The approach to the sysop had to be delicate. FUTUR Design were notoriously good with counterintelligence and they kept deep AI surveillance looking for suspicious patterns in the behavior of all their employees.
When the train reached the arcology, I kept riding. My eye wasn’t drawn to the arcology itself but to the small patchwork of corrugated huts and quick-install strip malls next to it, the kind of improvised village that always sprung up next to corporate campuses, places to eat and sleep for the people who cannot get into the arcology itself or who work there and do not have the time to make it home and back again before their next shift. Even with the maglev line, it wasn’t uncommon for arcology contractors to endure eight-hour commutes each way. The sysops, of course, weren’t contractors but stayed in the arcologies 24/7 except when granted furlough.
I rode the maglev to its far northern terminus, and then rode it back south again. The Carthage rumor mill had given me a place, a time, and a description, but no name. Still. On the ride south, passing the arcology in the early evening, I saw her on the platform waiting to board. Early thirties, tweed three-piece suit, chromed ear implants, blue marble eyes. Augmented. Off on her biweekly descent into the narco palaces of southside Chicago. Bell Wolf, my sysop.
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I rode all the way, one car behind her. In downtown, another woman got on, almost a double of my sysop. In the crush, I almost didn’t see my sysop reverse her jacket and trade bags with the double. So that was how my sysop ditched surveillance.
Bell Wolf debarked at the next stop. I followed her toward Eliza’s, a notorious narco palace. As I saw her walk down the stairs, I unzipped the wallet of mycological flash Freya had given me for the trip; a lifetime of underworld knowledge, courtesy of the Prophet Ezra, and all cut to size. I slotted a circular wafer into my net port and a veritable encyclopedia of drugs opened somewhere behind my eyes.
In the smoky funk of the bar, I watched her paste disposable contacts over her eyes for the more efficient delivery of digital narcotics, lean back on a velvet cushion, and hook up a port in her arm to what was likely an illegal stimulant that would cause her a bit of permanent nerve damage before the night was through. She accepted a lap dance from a androgynous, bright-eyed simulant with chrome skin. Over a whiskey, I saw the two of them vanish into a cubicle.
Then I made my move. I walked to the cubicle door in the back of the bar, inserted the lead of a hardware code cracker into the keyway, popped it open, and walked in on the sight of a woman completely lost to herself. The smell of biological and machine lubricants mixed was like a tire shop crossed with a college dorm. I locked the door behind myself and, on a portable speaker, played a frequency override courtesy of Freya that caused the simulant sex worker to curl up and go to sleep on the carpet.
I yanked the viscose sheet from the bed and draped it over the simulant for modesty.
Bell Wolf was thrashing and asking what was happening. I knelt before her and gestured at my eyes with two fingers, which nudged her to remove the contacts from her own eyes. I reached forward and slowly closed the valve outside her arm that was still pumping her full of stim. Her eyes went wide in the dark red light of the room. I found a vial of ammonia salts on the table and held it under her nose to bring her around somewhat. She jerked and sat up. I kicked open the mini-bar and offered her a plastic bottle of sparkling water on her own tab.
“Oh no,” she said when he finally got a look at me. The last time we’d seen each other had been in netspace on opposite ends of a server. No telling whether she knew what I looked like in meatspace but I knew she was starting to get the picture.
“You’re all kinds of violating your indenture tonight, Bell,” I said. It felt weird playing the heavy, but with Freya as my partner, I felt invincible.
Bell Wolf’s name made her sit a little straighter. I went on. “I can’t say it’s entirely a surprise. When someone likes to fry runner brains as much as you do, it only makes sense that that someone would want a taste of what they’re serving.”
“What do you want?”
“That’s the central question of the evening. Maybe even the central question of your career. What do I want? A backdoor into Niflheim. Five days from now. The window only has to be open for a minute. For fifteen seconds, in fact. We’ll cover our tracks, you can be sure.”
“I need details,” she said. Her reply read wrong. I felt that prickle on my neck—something scanning me. I turned, fast, caught a whisper drone carrying a glinting hypodermic in my hand. I crushed it, my flesh and bone snapping brittle plastic, and turned back to Bell Wolf.
Her ploy failed, she looked defeated.
“I can’t,” she said.
“Of course you can’t,” I said. “But you will.”
I tossed her a disposable, off-the-shelf tablet, bought with a stolen credit chip in another city in another year.
“I’ll be in touch,” I said.
###
Back in Bull City, I saw that Freya hadn’t been sleeping much. She looked wired. She moved stiffly around the condo. In the three days I’d been gone, she’d updated her breaker suite to be more efficient against FUTUR Design’s heavy simulant ice. She’d even coded in panic-button self-erasure routines to cut connections before they started melting synapses.
She had named the icebreakers in her custom suite according to their musicality. When she was up against a piece of ice that hunted her and sought to strike at her, she beguiled it slowly with an adagio until the ice no longer recognized her as a foe. When she was facing an impenetrable wall of code, she liked to bite into it at maximum speed, before it could adapt, with the presto. Then there was the ice that did strange things. For that, she used the allegro to confound it long enough for her to figure a way through. While she still used a keyboard to code, she’d long since abandoned it when making a run.
Her muscle memory was bound up with her musical knowledge, and so the only way that she felt comfortable making a run was with a console that wrapped around her throat like a scarf made of silk. She had much greater control over her software while singing along to the code-song in her head than she had clacking on an archaic piece of twentieth-century tech.
One night, a few weeks ago, not long after I first started running with her, we were running an ad agency’s servers on a contract for a competing agency, and Freya was running off-the-shelf breakers she’d lifted from a code hub known to any script kiddie. I was jacked in, too, over her shoulder, just observing in case I need to pull the plug. Below the flocks of ravens and the resistors, we ran into a piece of ice that was clearly imported from outside the agency. It was one of FUTUR Design’s more complex security simulants, a Starbuck 2.0, and it just watched Freya as it tried to get a fix on the channel that led from her netspace presence to her meatspace brain. Suddenly Freya dove right for it, skewering it with a sharp knife of code, and as we sank deep into the agency’s server, the pieces of the defeated simulant swirled around Freya.
I drifted for a moment—maybe a minute, maybe an hour, in netspace you often forgot to check the time—when I suddenly realized that she wasn’t copying the data that we were under contract to copy. She was coding. She was using the processing power of the ad agency’s servers along with the fragmented husk of the simulant to fashion the first in her series of breakers. It was beautiful. It was perhaps the only time that I saw netspace as she did, as music. I saw the adagio fold itself together, a slow, forlorn song that could corrupt even the deadliest cybernetic sentry. I wanted to let her finish, but when I finally remembered to look at the clock, we had been downserver for two hours too long.
I pulled the plug and we both sat up in our borrowed space, a disused auto shop in Mebane.
“We gotta go,” I said, and we got out a minute before the corporate paramilitaries rolled up. But Freya had managed to keep the code she’d formed down there. How she did it, I didn’t know.
But it scared me.
The CheRRy’s Guide to the Hardware Store
Name
Skikkja (Freya’s Console)
Manufacturer
Freya Alexander
Legal status
Unknown
Description
A console in the shape of a silk scarf or cloak, fastened with a magnetic catch
Cost
Thirty of forty K
Function
Translates singing into code, a good and efficient choice for someone who grew up musical and turned to running in adulthood; particularly useful for charming simulant ice, lowering their Nguyen-Okafor complexity relative to the complexity of breakers