Chapter 42. Bounced
Freya smiled and squeezed my hand again. “If you want help locating your friend, I’ll do what I can. But you’re in rough shape. I think you need to see a doctor.”
I looked out the window. We were still in the NCD, not far from Dr. Qin’s office. “You’re right. Pull up here.”
Freya looked at her watch. It wasn’t an in-eyeball display of the kind so many people had, but an old, chunky bombproof plastic LCD. “I’m going to have to let the limo go. I don’t have any more money for it.”
I thought about the corporate data sitting in a storage locker—lots of money there if we could fence it. But I had no connects any more. Looking through my pockets I came up with enough paper money for a scan at Dr. Qin’s.
###
Freya and I walked along the street, which felt at once crowded and muted. The people we passed seemed far away and too close. Even my own hands felt alien.
Knowing that I was being hunted had made me feel like I wasn’t really alive anymore. It seemed like only a short amount of time was the difference between breathing and not breathing.
Even Dr. Qin noticed, once we were finished waiting for an appointment.
“You look like hell,” she said. “Need a scan?”
“I had one not too long ago, but I’ve added a couple things since then and I’m due to finish hardwiring my nerves.”
“Hop up here, cowboy.” She swung the multi-armed robot around toward the exam table.
Resonance Scan Results
Rawls, Jasper
19 year-old male
RECENT NEUROLOGICAL TRAUMA (MODERATE-TO-SEVERE)
FDWT NET OCULA L
Serial *87
FDWT NET OCULA R
Serial *10
...
WIREJACK EPIFLEX (NANOCYTES 0.003g/mm)
Serial *55
NECK INTERFEROMETER
Serial *14
AMPEREFIBER
No serial
NO OTHER IMPLANTS FOUND
“Go easy on that cortex,” she said, indicating the top line of the scan results.
Then she pointed to the last line. “Amperefiber for better bioelectric capability. When did you have this put in?”
I looked at the display. “I don’t know,” I said. “I never asked for that.”
I thought about Dr. Adler’s trailer on the way home from Kansas. Could she have injected me with something aside from the first step of the nervous system upgrade?
Dr. Qin went on. “Looks like you were prepped for a top-to-bottom nerve upgrade. I see someone injected you with Epiflex nanocytes, branded as Wirejack. The generic would have been cheaper but hey, I get it. I install Wirejacks twice a week. When I look deeper at yours ... it appears to me you that you busted up your right parietal lobe, so I don’t think I can complete the upgrade right now.”
“Not sure I have the cash anyway.”
“I guess that also means we’re also not doing the DNA Scrambler today. Your face is telling me it’s too late for that. Help me understand the nerve damage: are you feeling any disorientation?”
“In the meat? Or on the net?”
“I’m asking about the meat.”
“Yeah, now that you mention in. But not in the net.”
Dr. Qin looked at her screen. “I wouldn’t expect net disorientation with damage in this area.” She tapped me on the shoulder. “But no more facechecking gray ice. There’s only so much undamaged tissue up here. Got it?”
“You’re saying I have brain damage?”
She shrugged. “Your brain has suffered trauma. Whether it affects you for the medium- or long-term is unknown. Even if the damage does linger, you can still live a full and happy life. I’m not just saying that. It’s perfectly possible. Sooner or later, every runner experiences this kind of damage. I know I did.”
“You used to run.”
“That’s right. Then I went corporate. Then I went into private practice. I know my limits. I use augmentation to get around them when it makes sense.”
“You’re saying I should stop running for a while.”
She crossed her arms and looked at me seriously.
“I’m saying your cortex can’t take much more punishment.”
###
On the street with Freya again, she noticed my hunched posture, my hands shoved into the pockets of the hoodie I was borrowing from her.
If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
“Bad news from the doctor?” she said.
“Yeah. I shouldn’t run.”
“Shouldn’t run or shouldn’t encounter dangerous ice?”
“The second one.”
Freya stopped where she was walking in the street. “What if it were friendly ice?”
I stood close to her, moving her out of the stream of people walking on the sidewalk. We stood against the side of the building, in between a shop entrance and a doorway leading to walk-up apartments. “You’re talking about your sisters.”
“Yeah.”
“I tapped my head. “Who do you think cut up my brain?”
“Freya 2.0 and Freya 3.0. I’m talking about the one you worked with, briefly, Freya 4.0. The one who told me where you were.”
“You’re suggesting she betrayed her corporate employer once ... ”
“So she might do it again.” Freya stood close to me, almost embracing me. She believed in me, believed in her sister so much. It felt almost rude to say the thing I had to say next. When the words came out of me, they were scratchy, barely a whisper.
“What if Freya 4.0 didn’t betray the corp? What if she were supposed to lead you to me?”
“Freya 4.0 broke the rules,” Freya said. “I don’t think she was instructed to do that.”
I looked around the evening street, saw people leaving work, or moving to their second-shift jobs. Small drones above the crowd monitored traffic and provided passive surveillance to any one of a number of entities. I hadn’t forgotten that every major corp wanted me dead, penniless, imprisoned, or on the payroll (same old thing).
“Maybe FUTUR Design wanted you and me on the street. Maybe they want to see what White Tree is going to do to us.”
“How would that even work?” Freya said. Her tone wasn’t hostile, only curious.
“How am I supposed to know?” I said. “I’m not a corp.” I hadn’t meant to snap at her. I quickly added, “I’m sorry. It’s just been a long day, and I want to rest.”
“Come back to my place, and we’ll figure it out in the morning.”
Freya took my hand and I let my friend lead me to the metro. I could sense by the way that she moved that she maintained a spooky level of total situational awareness. Her head kept moving, the way I’ve seen cops do, or military, or corporate paramilitaries. She knew what was behind us, what was on either side of us. She wasn’t wired for it but I saw a monitor strapped to her wrist with a thick elastic band showing what looked like drone surveillance. My heart melted at the sight of her hypervigiliance. I wanted her to be able to rest, too.
I dozed on her shoulder while we rode the train. It felt good to let someone else handle security for a change. I realized that I had been on my own for a long time, in some ways ever since I had left Gloss behind, or Gloss had left me behind. The brief time I had worked with Freya 4.0 felt like a dream more than a life. Like I was pretending to be someone I wasn’t.
I recalled pressuring Bell Wolf. I was embarrassed about that.
Freya and I left the metro at Bull City station, which I thought was interesting. She lived so close to her simulant sister. We took the muni down a rutted road, the bus’s hydraulics rocking as it tried to navigate the deep wells of broken asphalt lined with small red-brick houses. We were suddenly far away from the skyscrapers of downtown Bull City, and even further from the hulking cubes studding the Research Triangle Arcologies.
Leaving the muni, we found ourselves in a leafy neighborhood with a canopy of old oaks, shady and breezy and cooler, and much quieter than the downtowns. It reminded me of the place in Old Winston where Linney, Gloss, Wren, and I had cracked some heavy servers.
Freya opened the door to a brick cottage with an old-fashioned brass key. “Guest bed’s that way,” she said. “Shower’s straight ahead. See you in the morning.”
And she vanished into her bedroom. At first, her brusque attitude felt like hostility but then I recalled that she only wanted to look out for me, to give me a chance to rest.
The bed was a humble mattress on a simple wooden frame. The heavy blankets on top of it had been sewn together from other, older blankets, not as complex as a quilt, but in the same family. The blankets smelled like Freya, like her skin, and their weight comforted me. I slept better than I had in a long time.
And woke to the smell of coffee in the kitchen. Sunlight came in through cracked, eggshell-colored plastic blinds, the kind Dad had installed in the house because you could often find them on the curb for free after folks got evicted.
I could hear a familiar roar, dim and distant but unmistakable: the sound of water moving over rocks.
“You found a river,” I said, coming into the kitchen where Freya was sipping coffee at an old wooden table in the sunlight. Just outside the window I could see the water foaming as it pushed past the stones. I’d been so blitzed the previous night that I hadn’t even noticed it.
She smiled. “It’s not the same as back home, but I realized that I needed to live near the water.” Her words made me think of Linney, working for 7Wonders on the coast.
“Been to the ocean since coming out here?” I asked. I poured myself a mug and sat across from her. She looked so happy, her skin glowing in the sun.
“A couple times with other freerunners.”
“How many freerunners do you know?”
“It’s hard to say. Our community is fluid, mostly anonymous. When someone is out on a run, others might join, for an hour or a few minutes or even just a few seconds, then slip away. Autonomy and freedom are what we prize, and we don’t compromise those things.”
As she spoke, I could see how important this was to her, this community. She spoke slowly and ponderously, as if saying a prayer. As if holding on to the last thing anchoring her to the world.
Knowing some of her memories, talking with Freya 4.0, and talking with the original, I could tell that she had been hurt badly during her time in White Tree pools. But she’d found a way to survive.
“So,” I said. “What we were talking about yesterday. A way of getting Enrique out of prison.”
“Yeah.” She bathed her face in the steam from her mug. “I think Freya 4.0 is worth a shot.”
I leaned back in the chair and looked at the ceiling. “Let’s figure out how that would work. We could locate a server that she’s protecting and try to speak with her in the net. Maybe she could point us to the place where Enrique’s location is stored.”
“You sound skeptical.”
“Even finding her is going to be difficult.”
“I’m not so sure. You’ve had trouble with the Freyas in the past, and they know you’re looking for your friend. So if FUTUR Design wants to keep you out, they’ll put a Freya in front of the server containing Enrique’s location. It’s basic strategy.”
“I’m disturbed by how easy it is for you to talk about ‘the Freyas.’”
She laughed. “How long has it been possible to simulate another person’s image? Simulate another person on video? Simulate a person’s voiceprint? Almost a hundred years give or take? The Freyas, I’m fond of them, because we share some things. They have personalities based on mine. They have my childhood memories. But I know they’re not me. And I don’t feel like I have to be the only one. In some ways it’s a relief not to be the only one.”
She looked out the window, where we could see old willow oaks swaying in the wind.
“How do you mean?” I asked softly.
“If something happens to me,” she said, “then part of me carries on, immortal and digital.”
“And property of FUTUR Design.”
“For now. And property of White Tree, too. Some of their digital constructs were built on my hardware.” She tapped her head. “In a way, I’ll live forever.”
I took her hand across the table. “I wish I could see the world the way you do.”
“No choice, champ,” she said. “I’m messed up.”
“Let’s do it,” I said. “I mean, your plan. Let’s ask your sister.”
###
Step one was finding Freya 4.0, or 4reya we had taken to calling her. We rode the muni and then the metro to a heavily-populated consumer area not far from the Research Triangle Arcologies. Sitting in the bright white enclosure of the mall, it was odd to see all the people below living their lives. These were young workers not far into their corporate indentures. They didn’t rate a berth at any of the arcologies, or if they did, they were furloughed to visit one of the approved consumer palaces. They walked about with thick, oversized paper bags jammed full of purchases. They sipped on synth-pulp. They ate steaming, oily synth-meat.
I envied them and at the same time felt contempt for them. While I wished I could be as comfortable as they were, I also disliked their confinement. I wanted to be a person who would be happy in their life, but I didn’t think I could be.
Freya brought us some synthetic strawberry smoothies “to blend in,” she said, laughing at her own joke. While she drank from hers, I opened the small laptop I was carrying and poked around the area near Niflheim, where I’d last seen 4reya.
Ice and sysops appear a certain way in the net, even at the low-level of detail possible on the laptop. I removed the mesh contacts from my eyes, and as I felt the algorithmic surveillance network of FUTUR Design swing its thousands of eyes toward me, I peered into the data coming through the rudimentary visual display on the laptop.
My eyes saw patterns that other people’s didn’t. That and my experience with 4reya as a partner and co-conspirator made it easy to recognize her patterns in the net. She was moving about at the base of Niflheim, securing it as both ice and sysop.
I closed the laptop and replaced the contacts in my eyes. Freya slammed both our drinks, one after the other. I smiled. This was my oldest friend—she would never waste a drop.
Gloss's Encyclopedia of Ice
Name
4reya
Manufacturer
FUTUR Design
Cost to rez
very high
Nguyen-Okafor complexity
8
Type
Puzzle
Subtype
Simulant-toll-gray-rigshooter
Subroutines
Stops a runner; may drain a runner’s money; may damage a runner’s nervous system; may destroy a runner’s rig