Chapter 44: Old Codes
Restoration Consulting’s facility on the irradiated coast was bigger than I remembered. It seemed to have added another skyway and another set of scaffolding since my last visit. The double-towered bronze fortress caught the last rays of the sun and gleamed like a pair of flaming arrowheads. I could almost feel the bruises returning to the surface of my skin.
Freya and I left the BRUTE and walked against the current. Day-shift workers were leaving the building and heading into the quiet town of Southport further inland. A line of muni buses sat silent next to the BRUTE, waiting to bring commuters back to their neighborhoods. Freya and I threaded through them. She carried a pack heavy with ropes and other climbing equipment, which I understood was somewhat frowned upon in the freerunning community, but how else were we going to make sure we didn’t fall off the face of this giant corporate ediface?
“I like the scaffolding,” Freya said.
“Don’t get eager. The security here likes to inflict pain. Maybe more than they like to provide actual security.”
Freya shrugged. “Compared to the horrors I’ve seen, this is nothing.”
“You’re not anxious?”
“These days I only get anxious when I’m safe. When I’m in danger I’m as calm as a mountain stream.” She tousled my hair and started walking faster, pushing aside commuters as if she couldn’t wait to put her life at risk.
I tried to keep up. Freya had always been faster than me, whether running, walking, or figuring things out. As a freerunner she moved with a meatspace fluency that I felt like I could never match. I found myself breathing hard as I followed the bouncing of the gleaming carabiners on her pack moving through the crowd. Just after we had crossed the drawbridge-looking thing over the wetlands, she broke away from the stream of commuters and moved along the side of the building, where food stalls sent purple smoke into the evening sky.
She walked in the direction of a place selling skewered possum, but then darted between that and a coffee stall and vanished into shadow. I found her pressed up against the skin of the building, running a rosin-covered hand along big rivets. The piney scent of the sticky powder on her fingers brought me back to childhood, to Dad’s house.
Then she was climbing. I suddenly realized that I had no way to follow her.
“What should I do?” I hissed.
“Just stay there and be ready to jack in,” she said, turned her face to her building, and kept climbing. I crouched against the side of the building behind a tuft of monkey grass. Too afraid to watch her, I looked out for wandering security guards instead. Above, I heard the soft sounds of her body moving up the metal edifice, until suddenly I heard nothing at all. I looked up, and there was no sign of Freya.
I found a sticky cam in my pocket and placed it on the wall near me.
I waited a long moment, listening hard for the sounds of struggle, for a call for help. Instead, the only thing I heard was the laser-sharp sound of a net cable whipping through the air.
The cable tinked against the metal side of the building and bounced before me. I took it and brought it to the port in my chest.
“This is gonna hurt,” I said, dabbed the mesh contacts from my eyes, and twisted the cable home.
There was no black highway, no gentle approach to the eternal nighttime city of corporate data. Instead, I was up against a rezzed Resheph already streaming a dark cloud of arrows at me. Resheph was god ice, not a simulant but still built with a proprietary sense of self that would permit no other copies to be rezzed at once.
The act of Resheph rezzing here destroyed the other Resheph I had encountered. That was how determined the corp was to keep me out.
The memory of my rig blowing up on the Kansas prairie made me shudder, made the gridlines fuzz for a nanosecond.
This time I was ready for him. My eyes ran a deep packet inspection subroutine and all at once I saw the shifting pattern of the arrows, designed to be dense as a rainstorm, but always leaving a path through for those who knew how to find it.
Ichnovirus slipped away from me and started working its way toward Resheph, its path guided by one part of my brain while my own path was guided by another. At least, that was how it felt. All at once I became aware of every part of my body, every part of my hardware, and the fertile rivets between them.
The Ichnovirus burrowed into Resheph’s skin. Snipping through Resheph’s complex routines and rendering the ice much simpler in its representation, suddenly half the arrows dropped out out netspace.
Simultaneously, Spider Wasp leapt from the tip of me and flew to the top of Resheph’s head. Resheph interrupted his archery subroutine, cutting off the drizzle of arrows, to harden his skin against the wasp, but Ichnovirus kept him from completing the motion. Spider Wasp’s stinger sunk into Resheph’s head, turning Resheph transparent and letting me through.
I dove into the Emerald Labyrinth that I recognized from my last two runs in this facility, Hungry Creek already working its way through the crystalline walls to to the Root access at its hard. With Hungry Creek carving its way through, Platform ice became trivial, and my avatar bounded through, bouncing off walls or crashing through them according only to my whim.
I opened a window to my sticky cam as I began to feel my body shudder as if buffeted by heavy blows from a trained fighter. On camera I saw my head twitch and flinch. I saw myself cough sour, metallic spit onto my shirt.
The molten Root came up fast. For a moment, I felt like I would be sucked into it. But then I found myself hanging suspended above it, caught by threads that I couldn’t see.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
A voice was speaking to me. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“Linney?”
“What do you think you’re doing, Rawls?”
Another window opened in my vision. I could see Linney, wired to a cubicle via net port but also via ocular interface. She was hunched over. She looked stressed. A glass vape dangled from her lips.
“Better if you didn’t know,” I said. “Can you let me slip by?”
“Why? You chasing a big score?”
“It’s not about money. It’s about Enrique.”
I saw the young woman lean forward. On the monitor, she looked so familiar but also unrecognizable under all that hardware. Her eyes still obscured by the chunky ocular interface, I couldn’t tell if she felt sympathetic towards me or if she had already adopted the cool hostility that professional life demanded.
“I told you that you don’t have to do everything he tells you,” she said.
“He didn’t ask me to do anything.”
“I’ll ask you again: what are you trying to do?”
“I’m backing up a friend. The way I once backed you up.”
“You should stop looking out for other people, Rawls, and start looking out for yourself.” But her voice was already far away, as if someone was turning down the volume. Her window closed, and I felt the invisible threads release me, just as the current surrounding the Root grabbed me.
I let it draw me into itself by capillary action, as if it were a great world tree, and I were the smallest cluster of free nutrients, stretched out and practically one-dimensional.
I was somewhere I had never been before.
I felt floaty and numb, as if I’d been given a good, hospital-grade anesthetic. Accessing the Root after breaching a server was stepping from a cool, dark old-style movie theater into a summer day.
For a moment I could see nothing; it was too much. Then I began to pick out shapes and details, and feel the insistent wet heat of the radiant source above.
My first instinct was to retreat back to the cold dark. But I was here for a purpose. The bruise forming on my eye, visible even in the grainy medium-def window of the sticky cam, was there for a reason. I intended to take that bruise. To come here. Freya, somewhere above, threw down the cable for a reason.
And that reason was to help me become a ghost. I ran what I thought was a simple search routine, something built into the Root. After all, the Root was a giant database, the sum total of public knowledge available to the megacorps that subscribed to it. It was the thing that used to be called the internet, before it had been carved up into walled gardens and darknets and overlaid by apps and diluted.
Hits for my name turned up: demographic data, location data, my Registry entry. I entered variants, misspellings. More hits.
With 7Wonders’s access to the Root, I also had access to their scrubbers. Just as someone had scrubbed Freya’s data after her participation in the clinical trial, I could scrub myself. I found them, in a panel that was somehow in front of me and connected to my hand, rows and rows of coders in office parks in suburbs across America, Argentina, Spain, Romania, India, and Malaysia. Workers with one job: find a string in the Root, and replace it with something else, anything else. No one had automated them out of work yet for reasons I didn’t understand and was not going to question right now. I stayed under for what felt like days. By the clock in the corner of the sticky cam, by the progress of the bruise under my eye, it was only hours.
On the sticky cam, I saw Freya crouched next to my body now, keeping watch. There remained one task: the Registry.
“Can I get access to the Registry from here?” I said to myself.
My eyes were drawn to a current within the bright, hot stream of the Root.
I moved forward, into it. I knew that I could gain favored access to White Tree’s DNA registry from here. White Tree and 7Wonders have historically enjoyed a good relationship. 7Wonders liked to license White Tree’s digital ambushes, and White Tree contracted with 7Wonders’s meatspace assassins to protect their highest-value research.
As the gleaming flow branching from the Root narrowed, all that lay between me and whatever was beyond was a single piece of ice, indistinct at this distance.
I still had no way of getting through puzzle ice. That put my odds of making it across at one in three, or slightly better if it were just some puzzle ice that messed me up without stopping me cold.
In a rush that appeared to move faster than I could process, the ice cohered into a sharp double-helix, a spiky lattice that rose in front of me and then duplicated itself again and again, forming an impenetrable puzzle that maybe I could solve given enough time and resources.
Hell, it had to be a chromosome lock. What better way to secure the Registry than ensuring that anyone who tried to break in was logged by itself?
In less than a millisecond, I was going to smack into it. But within that time, I possessed hundreds of thousands of nanoseconds to figure out what to do.
Hungry Creek flowed through the lattice without affecting it.
Ichnovirus latched on but it had been taxed out by Resheph and was not very deep into the ice. The virus barely affected it.
It looked like I was going to break this with my face. Considering that White Tree had access to my DNA and my body had already been battered by Restoration Consulting’s lockdown protocols, I was not sure that I could survive this.
Expending a few thousand nanoseconds, I expressed a silent wish to Freya to keep herself safe. I knew she was alive now. Had I not accomplished what I came to Carthage to do?
And another few thousand nanoseconds became a wish to Enrique for the same. And to Gloss to find him.
With the remainder, I used Root access to take a look at myself, to inventory every biological and digital and cybernetic process that might be able to help me.
There was nothing new, except for this entry in my hippocampus’s hardware index, etched onto the side a fungal silicon chip:
DNA SCRAMBLER Serial *32
That was new. I had never had a DNA Scrambler installed, and remembered that whenever I discussed it with a doctor, it wasn’t the right time, either because of the Fabricytes or because I lacked the cash. Had I known my body was hosting a DNA Scrambler, maybe I wouldn’t even have to be here.
It wasn’t going to stop the chromosome lock from slicing into me. That was the final irony of my life.
My Dad’s old console games made me a runner. My stupid hometown made me desperate to leave. My running got me killed.
With an affordable seven thousand nanoseconds, I sent a message to him, delayed delivery: “Dear Dad, If you’re reading this, it means I’ve flatlined trying to breach White Tree’s DNA Registry. In the time since you last saw me, I’ve become one of the top ten cybercriminals in the state. My sincerest apologies. I love you and Mom. Your son, Jasper.”
Then I did what I did best with the rest of my time: I wasted it.
A sense of calm came over my body as I prepared to die. I watched my body on the sticky cam, saw the twitching stop, saw the muscles in my arms relax, almost adopt a posture of meditation, or perhaps I imagined that. At this timescale, at the sticky cam’s refresh rate, I wouldn’t see anything new. I wouldn’t see Freya stroke my face, wouldn’t see her concern.
Let’s do this.
I came to a stop just in front of the chromosome lock’s razor lattice.
Between me and the ice were the flaming red robes of a familiar warrior goddess.
Gloss’s Encyclopedia of Ice
Name
Blaisdell
Manufacturer
FUTUR Design
Cost to rez
high
Nguyen-Okafor complexity
7
Type
Shooter
Subtype
Simulant-red-gray
Subroutines
Bleeds runners; causes severe neurological trauma