Chapter 40: End the Run

My mother’s face confirmed that what I said was true. The original Freya was biological, and I had not found her yet.

No one had to tell me this. I knew it the same way I knew who I was.

All the holograms on my mother’s desk vanished. “So what if there is a real Freya? She’s forgotten about you. Our Freya is the one who contacted you. Our Freya is superior in every way. As our Enrique will be.”

“What?”

I thought back to what the other runners had told me. They’d scoured FUTUR Design’s remote servers. There was nothing about Enrique in any of them. If work was being done on Enrique, if they were trying to make a simulant copy of him the way they did with Freya, they must have the original somewhere. But I couldn’t worry about that right now. My focus was Freya.

“I’m going to go find her.”

Suddenly my mother stood. “Do you think we would allow that?”

I thought back to the information from her tablet: how many different megacorps were after me, how many different private security companies had been contracted to take me down.

The anger that had led me here came back to the surface. My skin felt hot, my eyes felt sharp, my fingertips buzzed in anticipation, and I could feel my heartbeat in my Vista chip.

“Maybe you should consider letting me live my life.”

My mother gestured at the long, narrow window. “You have no life out there. White Tree will kill you inside six months. And even if they don’t, our models are all in agreement that eventually you would draw enough aggro from 7Wonders that they would gank you, and probably everyone you care about, too. It would be negligent to let you go.”

“I’m a grown man,” I said.

She laughed. “Let’s see if you feel the same way in fifteen minutes.”

I heard doors opening behind me and turned to find half a dozen men and women entering, enforcers of corporate policy, bulky in their armored jackets, truncheons hanging by their sides.

Time to show my mother what I could do.

I slipped my hand into my pocket and found the thing that the CheRRy had given me. I cupped the stim vial in the palm of my hand, lifted the safety cap with two fingertips, and injected it straight into my thigh.

Time expanded, contracted, and then expanded again, filling me with the sensation of taking the most remarkable stretch after a restorative sleep.

The security team must have been stepping toward me at an ordinary walking pace, but from my perspective it might have taken them a million years to reach me. One of them lobbed something in my direction underhand, something long and cylindrical. I side-stepped it and saw it bounce against the side of my mother’s desk. My eyes assessed it instantly: some kind of less-lethal concussion device. Its switch hadn’t armed when it landed against the desk. It wouldn’t detonate.

I gave my mother a look like, “Really?” She hadn’t noticed the dud yet.

I turned back to the enforcers. I’d never considered myself to be ready for combat in meatspace. I was a hexrunner, someone who could work witchcraft in netspace. How many heavily-secured servers had I breached over the last month? Enough to make me top 10.

I let my eyes unfocus, and saw the loops of data streaming in and out of the augmented security team now advancing on me. They’d all had their eyes done, for one. Low-light, infrared, ultraviolet: they could see a wide spectrum.

Then there were the reflexes. Some were hardwired for bursts of lethal speed, others for endurance. All for diminished pain. And their implants remained in constant communication with the building. I could see the simulant watching over them, tweaking their hormone levels to keep them in synch. They advanced.

Meatspace combat was coming for me and it didn’t care if I was ready.

The thing was, these enforcers’ implants weren’t iced. More specifically, they were iced only with a rudimentary wall, similar to the ice on the drone I had first breached in that cafe with Enrique all those months ago.

With my eyes, I didn’t even need my net port to connect. I just flowed through using Hungry Creek.

I saw netspace superimposed on the meat. Thanks to the CheRRy’s noxious stim, I was moving quickly through the grid surrounding the security team. My eyes guided me to what I wanted to find. Without my eyes I would have floundered, unsure of what I was looking at. Here, in a small dodecahedron of light, was something that looked like the menu for their optical nerves:

UV (100-380 nm) ON Visual (380-780 nm) ON Doped Fiber Amp ON IR (780 nm-1 mm) ON

I turned all spectra to OFF. Next I found the FIGHT/FLIGHT dialogue in their gross motor function and set it to FLIGHT.

The team in front of me stumbled over themselves as they turned back and scrambled toward the elevators. Unable to see, they were reaching for each other, each one putting a hand on the shoulder of the one in front. Their retreat was not nearly as disorderly as I hoped it would be; in a flash I apprehended that these must have been highly-trained men and women, drilled on what to do in case an opponent shut off their implants. They gathered and turned back to me. Holding onto each other, they began advancing again.

OK.

Their chunky boots stayed silent as they moved across my mother’s luxe, carpeted office. The soft, curved acoustic panels on the walls soaked up the sound, made it feel like I was watching them on a screen with the audio off.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

From my perspective, stimmed and amped and wired, they were practically crawling. The stim gave me all the time in the world to figure out what to do.

I looked around. There was the concussion shell on the ground, but even if I could arm it, they were probably trained to absorb an attack like that. There was my mother, but I wasn’t going to hold her hostage. What did I know about taking hostages, anyway? Nothing.

There was my mothers’ tablet, which might have access to more functions than my eyes. I thought of something.

Turning back to the netspace aura around the enforcers, I found the target recognition dialogue in their cognitive battlespace module and deleted myself, then randomized target acquisition among the members of that team, then set their FIGHT/FLIGHT dialogue back to FIGHT.

That did it. The six of them drew truncheons and began brawling just in front of the elevators. Even without optics, they did a good job of connecting with each other, the hollow cracks of their weapons on padded armor dampened by the sound-absorbing padding on the office walls.

I turned back to my mother, who appeared unconcerned. As it happened, I still had no way out. The scrapping enforcers were blocking the way to the elevator banks, and even if I got into one of the elevator pods, I’d still need to hack it before it would let me down. And I could probably expect to be fought at every floor from here to the street, whether that was in netspace or meatspace.

If I were better rested, with a better rig, and with a crew at my back, that sounded like it would be kind of fun. But now? No way.

Suddenly the enforcers stopped fighting as if they had heard a piercing whistle, something on a frequency my baseline ears couldn’t detect. Hell, I should have turned off their auditory functions while I was killing their optics.

All six of them stood straight and turned toward me. This did not bode well.

I reached out with my eyes again but found that the situation in netspace had changed. Each enforcer was now covered in an opaque dome of ice, glittering like an opal. Each piece of ice was joined to the others, all strengthening each other. The way the threads of the ice moved on the inside, it was clear to me that this was puzzle ice that Hungry Creek and Spider Wasp couldn’t break.

The enforcers were moving toward me again, and I didn’t have a way of breaching their implants. I could feel the effects of the stim beginning to wear off. I looked back at my mother, and she could see the fear in my eyes.

“Don’t worry,” she said softly. “We only want to protect you from the world.”

I knew she believed it. I didn’t think she was a bad person. She made the deal with FUTUR Design to save my eyesight. And then she had to live with that deal. But I didn’t.

“If protecting me means controlling my movements and my thoughts, I say no thank you,” I said.

“So polite,” she said.

I scooped up the concussion shell on the floor and started running for the window. If the freerunners could move up and down these towers, I could, too.

Pointing the switch at the window, I threw it like a dart and then curled up in a ball on the office floor. I could hear my mother duck under her desk.

What hit me was more like a feeling than a sound. It was a deep, nauseating wave that made me feel like I was about to vomit, but on top of that wave, I heard the welcome tinkle of breaking glass. I looked up and saw the jelly-like soft edges of safety glass. Excellent. It wouldn’t slash me as I went through it. With the last of my amped reflexes I ran across the floor to the gaping window.

First I reached a hand and then a foot out the window. My hand caught a hard right angle, some kind of decorative ledge or lintel. My foot found the cube-shaped protrusion of some kind of air handler. I pulled myself out to the side of the building.

This far up, I could see the tips of the other super-towers. Far below, the newish, ordinary towers of the NCD, cross-hatched with irregularly-shaped windows grown from fungal concrete. In the far distance were the hazy lights of Old Charlotte.

The wind blew fierce up here and it felt difficult to get oxygen into my lungs. My mother stood at the broken window. She was saying something to me but I couldn’t hear her over the air rushing around me. Whatever. I got the message.

The enforcers gathered around her. I didn’t have much time before they figured out how to yank me back inside the structure.

I focused on my breathing, let the muscles around my eyes relax, and allowed my gaze to settle on a router bolted to the top of an office tower. In a moment I felt that satisfying interior click as my eyes connected with the net.

Letting myself sink into netspace was like lowering myself into a hot bath. It felt impossibly good to leave my body behind, high up and far away, and in great danger.

In the great neon grid of the corporate net, I said, “Zizek, little help?”

Instantly he was there with me, the tracksuited professor with the weary eyes. Still powered on.

“Somewhere, Zizek,” I said, “there has to be a group of freerunners that use implants. Someone must have come up with a script to make sub-subs climb walls as well as they write code. Can you find it?”

No sooner had I finished speaking than the data was before me, represented by a simple sphere in Zizek’s hand. My eyes dug into it, saw the criss-crossing code in enough detail to figure that it was what I wanted. I loaded it onto my sub-subs.

“Thank you, Zizek,” I said, and disconnected from the net.

The wind felt like it would tear the skin from my cheeks. I faced the building and stretched a foot down to the next lower ledge. My hands seemed to move on their own, fingers finding the easiest, most secure holds. I moved my other leg. Then again and again, to the air handler, then to a narrower ledge beneath.

I looked up at my mother’s head sticking out of the broken window, looking down at me. I still couldn’t hear what she was saying. Good news: the armored enforcers didn’t seem like they were going to join me on the face of the super-tower.

Fifty-four more floors to go. My sub-subs did the work, some anonymous urban explorer’s routines adhering me to the building as I descended. I didn’t know whether I could do this all the way down. If I couldn’t, I didn’t know what that would look like—was I going to freeze up or just fall?

I didn’t really think I had any options. I had made my plan. All that remained was to execute.

Floor after floor, I focused on the next hold, the next breath. I promised myself that I would go another four or five and then count how far I’d come. I hoped I’d be more than halfway down. I’d long since used up the last of the juiced reflexes from the chemhack, and my limbs felt like they were made from scalding-hot clay.

Suddenly my arms did not want to move anymore. They were locked up, fingertips tight and bleeding. Just rest here, I thought. Just wait a bit. Even though I was standing on a blocky air handler, I didn’t want to let go with both hands because I was afraid that if I did, I’d never have the will to grab hold of the building again.

I gave my hands a rest one at a time. I let my eyes unfocus and drifted into a private netspace, unconnected to the rest of the net, just the insides of my implants working in harmony.

When I returned to the world I kept going. I counted floors. I was almost halfway down, just coming into the hazy glow of the advertisphere, the upper reaches of the glowing billboards and building-mounted displays. I could do this.

Then I heard the buzzing of rotors. I didn’t see the drones, or rather, I didn’t see them distinctly. Instead, I saw flickers of movement. My eyes took in the bright ovals of their net connections and the shimmering, fluid mosaic of their ice. My mother had learned her lesson and iced these with FUTUR Opals as well, each ice reinforcing the others, all of them impervious to my breakers.

One of them buzzed my ear and I instinctively flattened myself to the building. Then another buzzed my legs, sending a wave of icy air over my ankles. What the hell were these things trying to do, make me let go and fall to my death?

The CheRRy’s Guide to the Hardware Store

Name

Anti-drone drone

Manufacturer

White Tree

Legal status

Pseudonym Collective

Description

A small steel ball that unfolds into a quad-copter about the size of a can of beer

Cost

A hundred a piece

Function

See name