Chapter 45: Become the One
I looked up at the brilliant golden image of the last ice I bounced off.
“4reya?” I said.
She turned to the chromosome lock, and the diamond lattice denatured before her. With a gesture she pushed me forward and I found myself swimming amid the caverns etched with the DNA of every suspected criminal or adverse actor White Tree had ever encountered. I found mine, I found Freya’s, which I discovered I knew based on seeing the clinical trial data weeks ago. These strings of DNA were the oldest codes, now no different to me, no more personal to me, than any other.
A query to the system came back: I possessed write access to the Registry because I had come through 7Wonders’s trusted portal. Using the scrambler now built into my body, I overwrote both our DNA.
Then I jacked the hell out.
I felt Freya stroking my face, her fingers avoiding the bruise. I became aware that my body was covered in sweat, my clothing soaked through, and I was shivering.
“She was there,” I said. “Your sister. She helped me.”
Freya’s look was knowing, as if she expected that. “She really is my sister, isn’t she?”
“I’m happy that you have one,” I said.
“You have one too, you know,” she said.
“Let’s get back to the city.” As we took a hold of each other’s forearm, Freya hauled me to my feet with her surprising freerunner’s strength. Then she embraced me. I felt momentarily embarrassed by how sweaty I was until I felt that she was the same way.
###
It was some dumb FroYo shop outside Old Charlotte but at that moment it was the best thing ever. Far from the coast, I luxuriated in the dry, chill air in the white-lit storefront. I spooned the sweetened, tangy frozen yogurt into my mouth in a kind of trance.
Freya laughed at me from the next stool, hiding her face behind one long sleeve. Her brow and cheeks were still streaked with dirt even after she’d gone to the restroom to try to remove it and some dried blood—whose blood, I wasn’t sure.
“What now, hacker?” she said when she had stopped laughing.
“Don’t call me that.”
She laughed. “I just never imagined that Jasper Rawls, the laziest student and spaciest kid I have ever known, would gin up enough focus and competence to become—” her voice went deep, like a news announcer reading an advertisement, “—number one cyber threat!”
“I’m not number one yet,” I said through a mouthful of yogurt. Freya punched me in the arm and I directed her attention across the street to the storage lockers. “I’m about ready to walk in there. If I’m not back in five minutes, leave. Don’t go to your apartment. Don’t go back to Canton. Just get far away.”
“You know I’m not doing that.”
“Yeah.” I smiled at her. “I had to say it, though.”
“Hey,” she said. “If you pick up this parcel, and if you find a fence dumb enough to buy from your tagged-up ass, what’s the plan?”
“The plan is buy a shit-hot breaker and use it to get past your army of sisters and extract Enrique’s location.”
She waved me off while attacking her frozen yogurt. “Yeah yeah yeah, I know that, but you’re going to need more than a breaker for whatever weird defenses your mother set up.” It was as if I were boring her.
“I have more than a breaker.”
Her spoon hovered, a melty bite not quite making it to her lips. “How’s that?”
“See, there’s one more thing, something the Prophet Ezra told me.”
She waited for me to keep going. A drop fell from her spoon onto the counter.
“I’m a hexrunner,” I said. “I can do things that should be impossible. Some of that ability comes from the eyes my mother implanted. But I’m convinced that I was born to do this. When I run, I create.”
“Create what?”
“You wouldn’t believe me,” I said. “I wasn’t sure I believed it myself. In fact, until the last time I saw Dr. Qin, I hadn’t formed the words in my mind.”
“Try me.”
“I think my body manufactures cybernetics when I run on corporate research servers.”
“Like you become more of a cyborg each time you run?”
“Yeah.”
“That makes no sense.”
“I know. But it happens. The docs keep finding these things in my body that I never asked to be installed.”
She looked at me. “Isn’t there a simpler explanation?”
“Such as?”
“Maybe the doctor is installing things without your knowledge.”
“Why would she do that?”
“Maybe she’s running a clinical trial.”
The words cast a pall over the conversation. Freya didn’t exactly have a lot of trust in modern industrial medicine.
I thought about Dr. Rashida Qin.
“I trust my doctor,” I said, almost embarrassed. Anyway, Freya was moving on.
“Do you have any control over that process?”
“Not so far. Not unless I stop running research and development servers.”
“So what’s the plan?”
“The plan is to rig up. Then let’s get me a scan and test my theory.”
I set down my cup and walked across the street—empty late at night—into the storage locker rental place. Passing by the automated kiosk at the front, ostensibly a security system but one that was trivial to crack with a single piercing glance, the door to the lockers slid open and I replaced the contacts in my eyes.
In the corner near the locker I had rented, a bulky form waited for me. “Thanks for coming,” I said.
Kent stepped into the light cast by the dirty, old tubes in the ceiling. He still wore a grimy hoodie and long coat. He held some kind of baroque weapon in his hand, like a handgun with a knife strapped to the bottom of the barrel. “Not that I don’t trust you, kid, but I don’t trust you. You got me out of bed, but before anything else happens, I need insurance.”
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He tossed me a glossy package. I took a look at it. There was a tiny needle capped in plastic attached to a plastic vial with a chip at the bottom. I guess I knew what this was.
“I just got done scrubbing my DNA out of the Registry,” I said. “You think I’m going to give you some?”
“Do you have a choice?” he muttered.
I held his eye for a long moment and then did what he asked.
Uncapping the vial, I made sure that Kent had a good view of my finger as I disinfected it with an alcohol wipe, pricked it, and let the drop of blood fall onto the chip. A tiny light at the bottom of the vial glowed through the blood, turning the dark red drop into something else, something fiery.
I capped the needle and pocketed the vial. Then I noticed the firm bead of blood that had risen to the surface of my finger and found a bandage helpfully slipped into the package.
While I wrapped up my finger, Kent withdrew a grubby tablet from his jacket with his free hand and looked at the screen for a long minute. Then he put the weapon away. “Congratulations. Ohm and Sunya say you don’t exist. Not sure how you pulled that off, but well done.”
I gave Kent what I hoped was a cocky expression—I was tired of being called “kid” all the time—and stepped to the locker. No biometric security here: the passcode was a thirty-character string that I’d stored in one of the many pieces of cybernetic hardware now occupying my body.
“And not too soon, neither,” Kent said. “Sunya says that FUTUR Design has enough cash on hand that they could just put all their simulants on the task of copying Enrique’s brain in less than twenty-four hours if they wanted to.”
That seemed creepy. “Hey, if they finish early, perhaps they’ll release him.”
Kent gave me a contemptous look and said, “Don’t get your hopes up. Ohm thinks they’re going to run a Moravec process on him.”
I must have looked confused because Kent continued. “Think of a big stainless steel deli meat slicer over a flatbed scanner. Now feed it a brain. That’s a Moravec process.”
He nudged me aside to take a look inside the locker, and reached in with a gloved hand to pull out the wafer of flash memory.
“It’s—”
“Don’t say it here,” he said. “But I know a place you can take this. Your friend can come, too. I won’t be there. I’d rather not know what you’ve got.”
I looked around, thinking that Freya had somehow snuck in, but she was nowhere to be found.
Kent showed me his ancient resin watch, its face looking out from the inside of his wrist. On the watch face, I saw a grainy monochrome image of Freya waiting at the FroYo place across the street.
###
The data dealer’s loft looked down from more than a hundred stories up. It claimed two entire floors inside a slim tower a few blocks from the storage locker in Old Charlotte. No other residential tower had been built tall enough to challenge the height of the megacorp presence here.
The elderly data dealer himself was thin to the point of being gaunt. He wore a long, white jacket chased with gold thread. He carried a crystal rocks glass of some perfumed liquor over to a low chair but offered us none. When I tried to introduce myself, he said, “You have no name and neither do I.”
In the sunken conversation pit on the lower level, Freya and I sat on a long, firm couch in front of a coffee table where the flash memory lay on a cloth.
“So FUTUR Design is finally releasing their executive simulants,” the man said as he took a seat before us. He crossed his legs at the thigh and swirled his drink. “The details are certainly worth something.”
I could tell he was chromed from head to toe. The motions he made with his head and his free hand suggested that he was interacting with a set of implanted hardware, but unlike many old people it seemed like his was all functioning in tip-top shape. He must have had the money required to maintain and replace the hardware as it wore out.
Perhaps it meant something that I never expected to be able to do that when I was his age, if I lived that long at all.
“You know,” he continued, “that corp has been trying to bring this simulant line to market for years, possibly even decades. It’s an open secret that they’ve been working on simulant copies of real people. It’s all highly illegal. The question is why is FUTUR Design getting ready to admit that it’s breaking the law?”
“Maybe the executives who were supposed to buy these things decided they didn’t want copies of themselves running around.” I said.
The data dealer shook his head. “The executives are not the customers; their corporate employers are. CEOs and their ilk work for megacorps like nearly everyone else in the world. This line of simulants allows them to be in two places at once; that’s all. It was always risky. What happens when the executive simulants learn they aren’t considered people? There could be real chaos at the top of these companies. But the more valuable piece of knowledge, at least to a information trader like me, is why now.”
I looked at Freya, who gave me her permission with a silent nod. Then I leaned forward. “Because FUTUR Design has just completed work on a line of ice based on the executive simulant research. The thing about this ice is that it’s so efficient that it will ensure FUTUR Design remains the top supplier of net security software. All the smaller corps, and probably some of the megacorps, will have no choice but to buy from them.”
The data dealer sipped his drink and leaned back in his chair. I couldn’t tell whether it was the alcohol or my news that had such a narcotic effect on him. “Now that’s more interesting. Illegal business practices only matter if someone has the resources to bring FUTUR Design to court, and who does? Certainly not the government, and even if the government did, the fines from such illegal practices would scarcely cut into the profits from licensing their ice if what you say is true. But how can I be sure that it is true?”
“Because the simulant ice is based on me,” Freya said, taking my hand. “And he’s seen the whole line in the net.”
I tossed another wafer of memory onto the table. “My medical records,” I said. “Etched into my brain are my encounters with this ice.”
The data dealer picked up the memory and took it to a wall-mounted device. A moment later, a holographic representation of my medical history appeared above the coffee table. The data dealer looked through it faster than I could comprehend but he slowed down at the part that was listing my implants.
We’d printed it out hastily at a Rembrandt Medical kiosk on our way here, and I hadn’t even taken the time to read it. A line jumped out at me:
“NIGHTSHIFT” CHRONOTYPE TOGGLE Serial *42
That was as good evidence as any I’d seen about my body’s capacity. For the first time since leaving home, I felt calm and excited and in contol, all at once. I saw the data dealer’s impassive gaze focused on that line as well. “You’ll need it against that ice, young son,” he said.
Something about the way he said it distrubed me.
“You’re not Kent’s friend,” I said.
“No names,” the man snapped.
“Sorry. But the one who introduced us to you, he doesn’t seem like your type.”
The data dealer turned away from the hologram and walked across the cavernous loft.
“He’s not,” the man said as if he were about to tell a story. “We met through someone else.”
“I would ask who it was, but I guess you won’t tell me.”
“That’s true.” He stopped at a decanter of liquor. “Drink?”
“No thank you,” I said. Freya shook her head.
Then I noticed that the data dealer was writing something on a piece of paper with a heavy pen. He made a gesture and I stood and walked over to him. On the paper was written a single name. “Gloss.”
The data dealer’s eyes and mine met. The understanding that we had a mutual friend in Gloss passed between us. Then he took the paper to his antique gas range, where he ignited a burner, the flame blue with illegal methane and trace alkanes. The scrap of paper flared orange and vanished into smoke.
The data dealer turned back to me. “I’ll give you 82K for both memory wafers.”
“My medical records were only for illustration purposes. They’re not for sale.”
The expression on the data dealer’s face took a condescending turn. “Listen. The data you took from FUTUR Design is not worth nearly the price you’re asking without your medical records. As you said yourself, the proof of what those simulants can do is written into your cortex.”
“But the executive simulants—”
“Are old news. This is the third time FUTUR Design has prepared to release that product line. There are new details in what you’ve found, and I could give you fifteen K for that data alone. But if you want enough capital to do whatever it is you are planning, you’ll need to sell me everything.”
I looked across the room at Freya. She said nothing, though she looked concerned. After all I had done to breach the Root and alter or scrub every trace of myself on the net, was I really going to share the most personal details of my physiology—my identity—with someone whose name I didn’t know?
The CheRRy’s Guide to the Hardware Store
Name
Nightshift (Hypothalamic modulator)
Manufacturer
Various
Legal status
Legal
Description
A silk thread coiled around the hypothalamus
Cost
Eight or nine K
Function
Designed for graveyard-shift workers but widespread in urban dance scenes, Nightshift lets the wearer fine-tune their body’s sleep/wake cycles, making it easier to sleep during the day and stay awake all night. For runners, more uptime = more runs. More runs = more attention from the corps. Nothing comes for free, not even pancakes. One day all debts come due. There is no jubilee. We make the pact, we pay the price. Then drops the hard-hitting boom. R.I.P. WarLOCK.