Chapter 46. Run It Down
If I walked away now, I wasn’t sure I’d have enough cash to find a breaker that would get me through Freya 3.0. Possibly I could talk my way past her the way I did with Ludo. That was supposed to be possible with most simulants. Even then, I was broke, and if there was other ice apart from the Freya, there was no way I’d be able to breach the server.
Everything must be played to the limit. That was the bargain I had made with myself. And I had another motivation, too.
“I’ll sell you everything for 112K,” I said, “but I have two conditions. One: I need meatspace access to a very fast network exchange in the NCD. Two: I want you to reach out to our mutual friend and give him the address of that exchange.”
The data dealer seemed amused, perhaps wistful, as if he wished he were about to make the run I was planning to make. He wasn’t surprised at all by my request. But I could tell that he felt his age now. I had made him feel old, out of the game.
Still he seemed to be happy to be useful to a hellion like me. “By this afternoon I can find you a rack of servers that should be easy to overclock,” he said. “You’ll have to monitor the heat and you’ll need to get out once you’re done but it should suit your purpose. And I’ll inform our friend as you request. One-hundred twelve K. Do we have a deal?”
“Deal.” I extended my hand.
He didn’t take it. “I’ve got enough of your DNA,” he said. “No need to contaminate the place further.”
###
The data dealer passed me the location through Kent. Freya and I were sitting in Mr. Grid’s far away from the other runners, who still watched me warily, even though I no longer existed in any database. I could see them walk into the bar, glance at me, and either turn around or take a seat on the opposite side of the room with Sunya and Ohm and some others. But Kent approached the table, and with an old man’s intentional heaviness, he set down a piece of junk, just a printed circuit board with a universal adapter. When I plugged it into my laptop, I saw that the display buffer contained an address a couple blocks from FUTUR Design HQ.
I didn’t want to look at the Hi Scores at the bar. I felt like doing so would jinx me. Freya didn’t say a word, barely glanced at me. I knew she wasn’t angry, not exactly. Maybe she knew I needed space. Maybe she thought I might die. Both were true.
I felt my wrist vibrate: my account had just been credited with 112K, the first money I’d seen in a long time and the most money I had ever had. I dispatched 45K of that to my Dad just so he wouldn’t lose the house. I figured that should be enough for the back taxes and a new roof, maybe even a climate control system that actually worked instead of just making noise. Freya watched me do it.
“Growing up,” I said, “the fear was always that Dad would lose his job, then we would lose the house.”
Freya nodded but I knew her fears were different. She didn’t have a parent dedicated to looking out for her.
“Ready?” she said. I held my wrist out to hers and dropped around 5K in her account. I muttered something about expenses over the next few days. But really I was thinking she would need something to help her flee if I flatlined.
I closed my laptop and we stood.
###
The old hydrogen conversion van rattled down the quiet residential street, its white paint worn. I’d seen it a couple times before, outside Jiibay’s, and before that in Winston, when Gloss and Wren were buying components.
The driver’s side window rolled down. Gerty leaned out on her elbow. “What you ordered is in the back,” she said, and held out her wrist. I extended mine over hers, and felt the vibration as the 45K left my account.
When the back doors opened, I don’t know what I expected for 45K. Maybe a stack of heavy cases like Gloss and I had lugged to Kansas.
But what I found was different. On the otherwise bare metal floor of the van was a small hardshell plastic box and a little humming box next to it. The box glowed with a bright green telltale next to the words “Black Balsam” written on it in permanent marker. The case was more generic. I took both of them and handed the case to Freya.
Waving to Gerty, I closed the doors and watched as the van drove off.
“What’s that?” Freya said.
“A little something your sister coded and sold off.” The breaker buzzed with intent, or seemed to. I remembered what Gloss had said about breakers long ago, that they needed to be kept under power, that they were almost alive. “I need to find a moment to get this down,” I said.
###
Underneath the pylons of the Private Highway, amid the blue tarps of an encampment of urban nomads, Freya and I found a patch of soft grass where we set down the goods. The hardshell unlatched with two satisfying thunks.
Runners carried on a tradition of building custom consoles for themselves. Building one’s own console was the mark of an experienced runner. Many of the consoles didn’t look like what people thought of as computers at all, as each runner modified the case and the interfaces to suit their personal needs. Gloss and Enrique had told me stories of runners who installed curated processors into all kinds of objects: a motorcycle, a book, a boat, an antique astronomy instrument, a pair of headphones. That took time, which I didn’t have. Instead, I’d bought this one secondhand.
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
It had once belonged to a well-known runner who had only a brief career before dying or retiring or going on the lam. That was all I knew. I’d heard that it was for sale, and that Gerty kept it in stock.
“It’s a stuffed animal,” Freya said. “A child’s toy.”
“A stuffed possum,” I said. I picked it up. The synthetic fur was matted, as if it had been squeezed once too often by a sweaty kid. But it was heavier than a stuffed animal should be. I felt around its belly with my fingers. There, in its marsupial pouch, was a set of switches. Its eyes glowed dark purple. Its tail contained a flexible wire and terminated in a net port.
“You runners are weird,” she said.
I picked up the softly humming, dimly glowing breaker, the one named Black Balsam, and connected it to the console. Then I stretched out the collar of my t-shirt and jacked in.
And was transported to the top of Black Balsam Knob. It was more than a still image, less than an immersive environment. 4reya had coded this, somewhere in the deep net, drawing on memories tha that hadn’t originated with her but that now belonged to her. As far as I knew, 4reya had never been here. All she had were the tapes of Freya’s memories. A rush of excitement passed through me, and I felt the impulse to tell Freya to jack in and see this.
But Freya didn’t jack in, not anymore. I could almost smell the fir trees, the mountain mint, could almost hear the work of the bees. The breaker attuned itself to my physiology. I could feel my fingers move of their own accord in meatspace, the sub-subs rewriting pieces of Black Balsam to match my preferences.
Black Balsam was a puzzle solver, and a highly-efficient one at that, especially for midrange puzzle ice like Freya 2.0. The breakpoint on Freya 3.0 wasn’t great; the amount of power the breaker drew to break its subroutines was far more than for her younger sister.
Still, it was a good breaker. It could “paint” any ice as a puzzle ice, allowing its prodigious analytical capabilities to solve other types of ice as well.
On Possum’s readout, I saw that it occupied a huge chunk of working memory in my brain, but the console’s expanded memory gave me enough to accomodate it. When Black Balsam had finished compiling, I dumped it to a text file:
Name
Black Balsam
Type
Icebreaker
Matching subtype
Puzzle
Base Nguyen-Okafor complexity
3
Cost to boost
2K for 1 complexity
Cost to break
1K for 2 subroutines
Freya 3.0 came in at complexity five, so I planned to use my ocular implants to boost Black Balsam to match her in complexity during the run.
Between Hungry Creek, Spider Wasp, Ichnovirus, Black Balsam, and Possum, I possessed a full rig. With money in my account and a borrowed server that was fast as a greasy weasel, there wasn’t any ice I couldn’t break. Even if FUTUR Design stacked HQ four or five ice deep, I could get through. At least once.
The problem was that my mother had doubtless installed other defenses in the root of the server. These defenses remained unknown to me, and I knew I needed help to get through them.
I jacked out and looked at Freya. The way she crouched before me in a sweaty tank top and work pants that cut off mid-calf, I could see the line of the muscles in her upper arms, her calves. And beneath the fabric, I could see the impressions left by electronics that had been implanted in her from her chest down to her thighs. I could really use her help in netspace but I had to respect that her trauma didn’t let her go back there.
She helped me to my feet.
###
The network exchange was a dark blue hallway lined with metal shelves and cooled like the meat locker where my Dad worked for a few years when I was a kid. On the shelves flat metal cases hummed and glowed and radiated heat that was immediately diffused by powerful fans blowing dry, frigid air through the place.
There didn’t seem to be any people working. The door to the outside was bolted but only with a mechanical lock that Freya picked using the slivers of titanium she kept strapped to her sleeve. Inside we walked freely through the place, under the dead gaze of cameras that had lost their connection to the net (or so my eyes said once I’d bared them).
At the very end of a branching hallway there were a couple of chairs and a desk. And sitting at the desk, his muscular upper body shivering in a t-shirt, was Gloss.
He looked up at me and Freya. I wasn’t sure I could handle giving him a chance to speak first.
“Gloss,” I said. “This is Freya. She’s going to help us find Enrique.”
That seemed to catch him up short. He had been about to rise from his chair, but sank back down and shook his head. “Not what I expected you to say.”
I unzipped the shoulder bag that crossed my chest, showed him Possum’s head. “I’m ready.”
Now he finally go to his feet. “No way in hell, little bro. I told Enrique I would look after you.”
“And you did. Check the Hi Scores. I’m ready to go.”
Gloss moved slowly and kept his fingers spread, palm out, as if I were a small animal that he was afraid he would frighten. “The last time we spoke, I said I was going to find Enrique. And I meant it.”
“Yet Enrique still hasn’t been found.”
“We’re working on it.” This he said quietly, as if he didn’t want to explain himself to me.
“Let me find him with you.”
Now Gloss let the frustration he must be feeling come to the surface. When he spoke he almost snapped at me. “His incarceration is not your fault. I thought I made that clear.”
“Well, you may have said that, but it was never very clear to me.”
“You can’t blame yourself.”
“I can and do. Now how are we going to find him?”
Gloss gestured at the chilly server room all around us. “I guess that’s what this is about.”
“Rented servers, simple hardware,” I said. “Ready to overclock. One shot. No lag. FUTUR Design is right down the street.”
“You’re going to get flatlined.” He put one big hand over his eyes.
I cinched the strap on my shoulder bag, that zippy nylon sound revving me up. I squared my shoulders. “Well, maybe. But that’s life. Do you have a better idea that doesn’t involve letting Enrique rot?”
His big hand came away from his face again, fingers as tight together as a shovel blade. “You’re not listening. We are working on it.”
We remained at an impasse for a moment. Neither of us was understanding the other. Finally, I spoke.
“FUTUR Design is going to stymie you at every step. But I have a way in. If you won’t accept my help, at least take these servers.”
He looked around. “You think that we can fix this simply by running?”
“Why not?”
“Because the corps are all over us, and all over you. If you haven’t noticed, they hit us pretty darn hard in Kansas. You spent a good long while tagged, and on the Registry from what I hear.”
I waved my hand. “I shook those tags. I scrubbed the Registry. No one knows where I am.”
Gloss looked around again. “It’s a nice set-up you have here. On a normal day, I’d say this is great. But even if you’re right that FUTUR Design has Enrique, and even if you’re right that the game is in HQ, that ice is still stacked four deep with an unknown defensive upgrade on the server. And FUTUR Design has stupid amounts of money to throw at you. You’re not getting in, kid.”
It was the most I think I’d ever heard Gloss say at once outside of one of his lectures on how ice and icebreakers worked. I missed those days.
“Please,” I said. I reached out my hand to him.
Name
Chigurh 2.0
Manufacturer
FUTUR Design
Cost to rez
high
Nguyen-Okafor complexity
6
Type
shooter
Subtype
simulant-righshooter
Subroutines
dismantles rigs; tags runners