Chapter 36. Half of the Fallen

The evening I came back from Chicago, Freya and I drank coffee at her drafting table under a bright lamp. We were sketching out the plan on paper, the way I liked to have it.

Bell Wolf had agreed to send a shutdown command that would take Niflheim’s ice offline for fourteen seconds, an eon in infosec. At that moment, Freya, working out of a makeshift crash space on the next block, would jack in and deactivate the meatspace security. That would let me into the Niflheim building’s sub-basement to disengage the manual interlock on Niflheim’s secret simulant project. Then Freya would crack the final layer of ice. This was ice that rarely went down for maintenance. It operated autonomously from any sysop, and not even Bell Wolf could shut it down. Finally, Freya would grab the data while I fled the scene.

We went over it twenty or thirty times that night. By the end we were exhausted.

Toward midnight we debated whether we should jack into the area around Niflheim now, just to observe the outer layer of ice. She thought we should. I thought that doing so might lead to a stronger showing by Niflheim security during the job. Ultimately, she convinced me that she could keep it quiet.

It was last click for real.

She jacked in, silk scarf around her neck, connected to the subdermal net port she’d had installed. I was wearing a display rig over my eyes, looking over her shoulder, only observing, not connected via net port. We’d left Zizek behind because some ice was keyed to the presence of an AI.

Niflheim appeared as a castle of magenta vectors in the commercial haze of the upper Midwest. The ice was watching us, but it was watching all the net traffic.

Freya floated in the net, perfectly still. At first I didn’t know why. Then I began to look at what she might be seeing. Eventually I noticed. There was a hole in the ice, small, but definite. She began moving toward it.

I tried to message her to stop, but she’d muted me. I pulled the display from my eyes and touched her shoulder in meatspace. But she didn’t respond. I put the rig back over my eyes and accompanied her as she drifted down through the hole in the ice into a tunnel. Nothing stopped us. Nothing was following us. Nothing seemed to be watching us. I had never seen anything like it.

We traveled deeper and deeper. At the bottom of the tunnel was a plume of stellar matter. And as we came to the whorl of stars and gas clouds, it became someone I recognized: a young blond girl in red robes. She watched us. She smiled. And then she became a young woman with a radiant helm, crying tears that started as blood, changed to copper, and fell at her feet as gold, and I recognized her, too. It was Freya 2.0. I started to say something—

My display went blank.

I pulled the rig from my eyes. Freya was still jacked in, still breathing, but otherwise not moving at all. This time I didn’t bother tapping her on the shoulder. I reached under her chin and lifted delicately, feeling the magnetic contacts detach as I disconnected her console from the subdermal port in her neck.

She opened her eyes. They were wet with tears.

“What happened in there?” I said.

But she didn’t say anything. She wrapped up her scarf and set it in its hard-shell case.

“I have to go,” she said.

“Where?”

“I have to talk to Riz,” she said. And she walked out the door to go see her boyfriend carrying the case with her console.

I voice-called Riz as soon as Freya left. No answer. I left a message. I said I was worried about Freya. I said something had happened on the net and I didn’t know what.

I was left alone in the apartment once she was gone. I made myself a drink, soaked in the tub, tried to think about saving Enrique, getting back to my friends at Mr. Grid’s. It didn’t work. I couldn’t feel relaxed.

As I was toweling off, I heard a faint chime from the main room. I pulled on a pair of trousers and walked into the space. The chime was still very faint, and it was coming from Freya’s workstation. I climbed the spiral staircase, my feet clanging on the steel. At the top, Zizek hovered, visible for my benefit, clearly worried.

There was a message on one of Freya’s terminals. It just said: SEE YOU SOON. I opened the logs to see where it originated from. The message had come directly from Niflheim.

So they knew we were coming.

I looked at Zizek. He returned my gaze with his usual arch attitude, as if to say that it was pointless to resist this bad turn, that any attempt to resist would ultimately lead to surrender.

I was exhausted. Even though I tried to stay awake, I fell asleep not long after.

When I woke the next morning, Zizek informed me that Freya had left for the airport directly from Riz’s apartment. She had her console with her, along with all the software she would need.

Freya and I had tickets for different flights with layovers in different cities. Apart from her console, she’d left behind any electronics that could be traced to her. There was no way to reach her before the job.

I voice-called Riz. This time I got through.

“What happened to Freya?” I said.

“I was going to ask you the same thing,” he said.

“Did she say anything last night?”

“She was quiet. She was scared. She kept asking me how well I thought I knew her. And then I got scared, too.”

“Did she say anything else?”

“She said she had to know for sure.”

“Know what for sure?”

Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

“Who she was.”

“Did she sound like she was coming back?”

“I don’t know,” Riz said. Then he said, “Rawls, you’re going to look out for her, aren’t you?”

“Of course I am. What else did she say?”

According to Riz, they held each other quietly all night and Freya didn’t say anything else.

I took a walk to clear my head. This was bad and getting worse. I had imagined that I had brought the job to Freya, but maybe that wasn’t the case. Maybe somebody had used me as the conduit. Or maybe Freya had reached out and contacted someone in Niflheim behind my back while she was at her day job.

I knew why Freya made runs. Freya ran for to recover from what White Tree did for her.

But maybe she also ran for the challenge of altering the digital world to her design, reclaiming the sense of agency that she had lost when White Tree had hooked her up to the pools. I thought we had been doing this together. But maybe I was wrong.

I went back to her place and packed up Zizek and a few other tools. I rented space at a consumer-grade server farm down Hillsborough Road and plugged Zizek in. It wasn’t terribly secure but I couldn’t take him with me on the plane under federal law and didn’t want him to be lost in case Freya’s place got raided.

###

If I had wanted to be safe, I would have walked away. But Freya was my partner and I couldn’t leave her on her own. When I landed in Chicago, I felt rigid with stress. I couldn’t stop looking over my shoulder.

Riding the maglev toward the crash space, I watched every other passenger. The teenage girl with fuzzy boots and a tablet spitting holograms was the corporate spy. No, it was the old woman with the shopping bags between her knees. No, it was the middle-aged man in a sportscoat, open collar, and bad jeans.

Our crash space was among the corrugated prefabs clustered at the base of Niflheim. I paid rent using the proceeds of half a dozen viruses leeching off corporate accounts, all feeding into our landlord’s shell company. The guy didn’t have a place to live other than the shed we were using, but he was the CEO of half a dozen LLCs.

I liked the place because it had no windows and a great connection to the net. The connection was stolen, obviously, and when I had scouted it, all my amped-up eyes saw were routers and modems suspended by a tangle of cables in an otherwise-empty elevator shaft. I had no idea how it worked or how much of that cruft was redundant. All I knew was that it had almost no latency and was therefore perfect for Freya.

When I arrived at the crash space, I opened the door to something that wasn’t exactly silence, more like a sibling of silence. It was the high, nearly-inaudible whine of a data jack working at top speed. It was the kind of frequency that kids could hear, and teenagers, though not many adults. I guess I wasn’t yet an adult.

I stepped inside the dark room and sniffed. I feared the signature ozone-and-burning-hair smell of a frying brain. But I didn’t smell that. All I smelled was the delicate scent of Freya’s hair oil. I turned the corner and there she was, scarf around her neck, jacked in, totally still, totally silent.

I pulled over a shop stool and laced my fingers together and thought about what to do. I could watch over her shoulder through a display rig, but the last time I’d tried that, I had been shut out. By her, by something else, I didn’t know.

Or I could try to get into Niflheim. The problem was I didn’t know whether Freya had shut down the meatspace security.

Or I could forcibly disconnect her from whatever it was that she was connected to. I placed my thumb on the emergency disconnect switch on her console and flipped it.

Freya blinked like someone coming out from anesthesia.

“Rawls,” she said, “I was so close.”

“Close to what, Freya? Close to her?”

“She was going to tell me something about myself.”

“What was it?”

“I think,” she said, suddenly blinking at tears, “she was going to tell me I’m not human.”

“How many of us are, anymore?” I said, throwing my arms wide for an embrace.

But she shook her head and folded her arms. “I’ve never felt human. I’ve never understood my own feelings. I mean, I have feelings, strong feelings. Feelings that take over my whole body. When I was six, I lost a stuffed rabbit that I had had since I was a baby. I was so full of rage. I can remember everything about it. I wasn’t sad. I was furious. I tore apart my mother’s closet. I didn’t think the rabbit was there. I didn’t think my mother had taken the rabbit. I was just mad.”

“Kids do things like that. You know the kinds of things I used to do.”

“It’s not what I did, Rawls, it’s how I felt. I have no way of regulating it. Doctors never understood. I never had a diagnosis. Which is just another way of saying these feelings are me.”

“That’s a lot for anyone to contend with,” I said. It didn’t feel like enough. I held out my arms to her again.

She just folded into herself, arms shaking. “The only thing that ever helped was breaking ice,” she said in a small voice.

I smiled. It was our great subject of conversation. “You break ice like—” I stopped myself.

“—a machine,” she said. “I know. I think I am a machine.”

“Bullshit. I grew up with you. I’ve seen you bleed.”

“They inject them with marrow now,” she said.

“Did that ice tell you that you were an simulant?”

Freya nodded.

“She said I was like her. She said she would show me the truth.” She picked up her console. She fiddled with the emergency disconnect.

“Of course she said you were like her. You created her.”

Freya shrugged.

“Did she show you the truth?” I made air-quotes.

“She said she would when I was close enough.”

“She was running a Holmes on you, trying to trace your location.”

Freya shook her head.

“She’s trying to trick you,” I said.

“Listen,” she said. “I care for you. I’ll stick around if—”

“If what?”

“If I belong.” She snapped the emergency disconnect away from her console and let it fall to the floor.

She removed a single-use soldering pen from her bag and clicked it. In a moment the tip was red hot. Flux and solder ran down the channels next to the tip. She fused two wires in the console together.

She put the scarf over her shoulder. “I broke the emergency disconnect. Don’t jack me out or the feedback might be lethal. Sorry, Rawls,” she said. “I have to know.”

In a moment she was gone, deep in the net, deep in the embrace of that duplicitous ice. She had abandoned the plan and abandoned me.

Our partnership had lasted mere weeks. Maybe this was the end.

###

I could have walked away. But I didn’t.

I did what I did best—work the connections. I made a call. Flipping open my burner device, I pinged a network exchange in London and routed the call through Tallinn and back to Bell Wolf across the street in Niflheim.

“Yeah,” Bell Wolf said as she answered.

“You ready?”

“Yeah.”

“When you get my text, go.”

I hung up the phone and reached for my old, battered console. I removed the silicone dust plug from the port in my chest and connected the gold-plated leads.

It had been a while since I’d contended with heavy ice. I jacked in anyway.

There was Freya, entwined with the woman from before. They held each other and turned slowly in space. The blond woman in the red robes was now middle-aged, serene and confident. She was armored and carried a long spear. She whispered into Freya’s ear.

Freya appeared as a low-poly vector ghost of herself, green and shimmering. The woman in red appeared lush with painterly detail.

Freya didn’t seem to notice me. But the woman did. She lifted her mouth from Freya’s ear. She looked at me.

“Half the fallen belong to me,” she said.

Then I was back in the shed, watching Freya. The woman had dumped my connection. I brought up the ancient, grimy LCD display on my console. Just as I suspected. It had been wiped clean, along with every bank account linked to the credentials on the console. Just like the last time I’d run into a Freya, in the public library terminal in Bull City.

As for the Freya who was my partner, I couldn’t jack her out. There was only one way through this. Get into Niflheim—the building—and free Freya from that end.

If she wanted to be freed.

Gloss’s Encyclopedia of Ice

Name

Freya 3.0

Manufacturer

FUTUR Design

Cost to rez

High

Nguyen-Okafor complexity

5

Type

Puzzle

Subtype

Simulant-gray-toll

Subroutines

Empties runner accounts; causes nervous system trauma