Chapter 47: Central Pressure
Gloss stood. “It’s great to see you, little bro, but I can’t be a part of what you’re planning. I hope I don’t read about you on the news tonight.”
“You won’t,” I said. Gloss clapped me on the shoulder and ambled off down the hall.
When he was gone, Freya said, “Was I supposed to say something there?”
“No.”
“That seemed intense.”
“Well, it was.”
“You OK?”
“No. But I will be once we find him.”
“Enrique.”
“Yeah.”
“You ready?”
I sank into the chair, still warm from Gloss’s body. “Yeah.” I fished in my bag for a star-head screwdriver. “There are captive set screws on the face of each of the servers. Tighten them and it will let me overlcok them.”
“Holy shit, really?”
“Simple hardware,” I said. “I’ve got a delivery coming in thirty minutes. We’re running first thing tomorrow morning.”
Freya cocked her head. “I thought you had your chronotype shifted so you could pull an all-nighter.”
The image of the cybernetic readout from the data dealer’s loft flitted through my mind and I smiled.
“So you caught that, huh? It’s true, I homebrewed a nightshift implant in my hypothalamus, but if I’m right about what we’re going to face, running at night is not a winning move. We’ll run early. Which means, and you’re going to like this, we still need to sort out breakfast.”
“Let me handle that.” Freya clapped her hands together and rubbed them. For a moment we were both sixteen and skipping school by the river, plotting how best to sneak into the fancy hotel downtown and lift a pecan pie from the room service cart.
Her deep eyes held mine, and I said, “I know I might die tomorrow, but I’m glad I found out you were OK before it happened.”
She tousled my hair. “I’m not going to let you flatline, Jasper Rawls. Thanks for coming to check on me.”
Gently, I lifted her fingers from my hair. “Seriously, though. If it looks grim for me, I want you to get out of here.”
“No. The hell with that. No.” Freya held my hand and squeezed. “Never,” she said softly.
###
There was a knock at the door. A middle-aged man with a shock of white hair wearing the coolest satin jacket I had ever seen stood astride a motorcycle, the door to the rear cargo compartment softly rising to reveal a compostable sack bearing two bowls of ramen and a pair of ultralight sleeping bags compacted into tiny rolls.
I accepted both packages and thanked him. When I tried to tip, he just said, “Do you think I do this for money?” Then he stamped the heel of one boot on the starter and slid into the street.
After dinner, curled up in the low light of the server farm’s telltales, I thought about some things. I had never been very good at math, but it was time for some probabilities. I wanted to be as sure as possible about what I was going to do.
Gloss, the CheRRy, Sunya, and the others had locked FUTUR Design’s remote servers. There was no way the megacorp could put information about Enrique into a remote without them knowing.
Everything in FUTUR Design’s corporate archives up to present had been leaked to the public net. Nothing about Enrique’s location was in there, either. Enrique’s location probably hadn’t been relegated to Research and Development because I had picked through R&D and found nothing. But it wasn’t as if I’d locked R&D, in other words, seen everything FUTUR Design was working on, and there was still a chance I had missed something.
I assumed FUTUR Design kept Enrique alive and captive. If all that was true, then FUTUR Design held data about Enrique in its headquarters.
Headquarters at FUTUR Design usually comprised five divisions: net-architecture, finance, human resources, simulant resources, and operations. Based on the traffic passing in and out of HQ on the net, visible from my laptop, all five divisions were active tonight. They could have hidden the information about where Enrique was detained in any one of those. On a simple run on HQ I could get access to one of those five divisions, but since HQ was in a constant state of reorganization, a standard megacorp tactic to deter lawsuits and hackers, what I saw would be up to chance. Fortunately, my Vista Processor was still installed, which meant I could access a second division before the server dumped me. It gave me a two-in-five chance to find Enrique’s location if I could get in.
They’d stacked the ice over HQ four-deep and they had rerranged things since the last time I was there. All of it was unrezzed and there was billions and billions in cash on hand for net defense, according to FUTUR Design’s last shareholder call. Unlike the time I ran HQ to shut down their defenses, they had set aside plenty of money to deter attacks. There was going to be no sneaking past unrezzed ice on this run.
Quick arithmetic: I had 17K in my account and 5K worth of processing power in the overclocked server. With the boost from my ocular implants, Black Balsam could get through a Freya 2.0 for 2K. Spider Wasp and Ichnovirus could handle a single piece of big shooter ice for about 4K. That gave me 16K to handle the two inner ice plus whatever the upgrade was.
Hell, that upgrade. My mother had installed some unknown defense behind all the ice in HQ. It could be anything. The only thing I knew about it was that there was a fair amount of traffic between the new defense and the Niflheim facility in Chicago.
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“Close the laptop and go to sleep, Rawls,” Freya’s voice said through the layers of sleeping bag. I glanced over at her. I couldn’t see her face through the cinched up material, just a tiny hole for breathing.
I closed the laptop.
###
The smell of coffee and croissants woke me. I sat up to find Freya perched on top of a high rack of servers, swinging her legs, pleased with herself. Her head almost touched the ceiling. She ate a hard-boiled egg.
I cocked my head at her. “But I smell pastries.”
She nodded to a paper sack. “I like them as much as the next girl, but my body is a precision machine and prefers more protein. Unlike yours, apparently.”
I had already bit into a croissant and taken a long pull on a mug of hot coffee. She laughed behind her hand.
After I’d licked the buttery flakes from my fingers, I prepared a nest for myself with my sleeping bag. The night before, we’d readied the servers to be overclocked. With a screwdriver, we’d loosened the potentiometers that throttled current.
Then I logged into them on my laptop and altered their settings. My sub-subs had coded a simple readout to my display that would show their temperature, even when I was in netspace.
I pulled up the address for FUTUR Design’s HQ and pointed Possum at it and stroked its fake fur for luck. I ran a quick inventory to make sure all my programs and hardware were functional.
Then I took the Faraday contacts from my eyes. I looked at Freya with my naked eyes for what felt like the first time in a long time. Surrounding her I could see a halo of data even though she kept herself disconnected from the net. It was strange, the way that old counter-culture people in the mountains sometimes said they could see auras. I had never noticed hers before, a swirling purple and gold storm cloud.
I reached my hand to hers and she took it. “Listen,” I said. “If it gets hot in here, and I mean that literally, there’s a switch on the tail of my console. Flip it and it will get my attention.”
“And if it gets metaphorically hot?”
“Flip it back and forth a whole bunch.”
Freya smiled. “Run it down, cowboy. I’ll be here when you get back.”
I held her eye as I brought the net cable to my port.
###
Midnight highway, high violet tower. I traveled a lane of legitimate data accompanied by login requests from remote workers, vendor invoices, product updates to simulant ice subscribers.
My sub-subs flittered like digital fingers. I ruffled my breakers like cards in a poker deck. Hey, I earned that.
Ahead, net traffic ghosted through hazy ice, deep packet inspection routines letting in the drudges. I wasn’t Gloss, I wasn’t Enrique: I wasn’t going to sneak through without anything rezzing and wasn’t going to bypass it once it was rezzed. I wasn’t the CheRRy, I wasn’t Kent: I wasn’t going to smash face-first into the ice just because that was the simplest way in. I was going to pick this server apart with the right tools at the right time.
I ran because I had to win. I could imagine the deli meat slicer of Kent’s paranoid fantasies, installed just above Enrique’s head. That was the Moravec process.
The first ice rezzed. The midnight highway before me fragmented into a network of dark country roads and I slid into them as if into a maze. I was familiar with these gambits by this point, and knew how to respond. It was a Chigurh 2.0, a piece of shooter simulant ice that could trash my breakers and trace me to my server room in meatspace. A complex and relentless piece of security but nothing I couldn’t handle.
Then I saw that the upgrade linked to FUTUR Design HQ was also rezzing. Billions changed hands and suddenly the net links between Carthage and Niflheim were hot. Niflheim churned with hellish energies.
My console shuddered in my arms. Peering through the chaos of the deep server, I could see that FUTUR Design was undergoing a crash reorganization of HQ. Entire divisions were being reassigned, long-plannned operations scrapped. All of the high-level executive focus that ran HQ was now turned to Niflheim.
FUTUR Design was sending itself to hell. The chaos at Headquarters, channeled through Niflheim, was changing the ice before me. It was as if all the employees in the egg-shaped pits underneath the walkway on my mother’s level were linking their nervous systems to Nilfheim, bent on a single purpose.
Suddenly I saw FUTUR Design’s entire ghastly plan. Niflheim existed to simulate human brains, turning all that processing power into network security infrastructure. Now, through channeling practically everything in Headquarters, FUTUR Design had turned its entire workforce into auxiliary brains for its simulants. It was making an enormous sacrifice to keep me out.
Only a single division remained in HQ to run the show. I figured it was the one that knew about Enrique.
Chigurh 2.0’s complexity had started at Nguyen-Okafor level 6—the same as Resheph and a challenge for Spider Wasp—but now it was 10, by far the most complex ice I’d ever encountered. Even with my ocular implants, I couldn’t see through it.
Through the maze of country roads a shambling, dark figure stalked me. Then it began shooting.
As the storm of bullets entered the maze, just like my dad’s old arcade games, I started to move. The bullets forced me backward, and for the first time since I learned how to contend with shooter ice I felt myself compelled to retreat. Pinned down and unable to get close to the center of the ice, I needed a plan.
I managed to let Ichnovirus flit away from me, seeking the central, moving point of the bullet storm, the dark figure of Chigurh. Juking between the projectiles, my eyes perceived the path in the churning labyrinth as the sub-subs under my fingertips guided me through. I kept my focus on the hunter at the center, that slow, dark, loping simulation of a man who believed he was unstoppable.
Ichnovirus had worked its way under his skin now, dialing down the complexity to 8—a breakpoint that was good for Spider Wasp. Using 4K worth of the overclocked server’s processing power, I boosted Spider Wasp to parity. Then I sent the insectile breaker straight into Chigurh, and snapped through its two program trashing subroutines and its trace subroutine with the last bit of power in the server and 1K of real money.
The bullets around me vanished and the grid of country roads became insubstantial. I could almost smell hot silicon, like a tantalizing but poisonous piece of toast.
Between Ichnovirus and the overclocked server, I’d only spent 1K, but now I used up both those tools.
Cash on hand: 16K.
FUTUR Design’s cash on hand: 15 billion.
When the second ice coalesced before me, I recognized her at once: Freya 3.0, the warrior goddess who had scarred me in Niflheim. It was her older sister who had coded Black Balsam, my puzzle breaker, and Black Balsam was designed to make it easy to cut through an F3 with an assist from my ocular implants.
But a baseline F3 was complexity 5, and this one, backed by the full might of everyone working at Niflheim and four out of every five employees at HQ, was complexity 9.
I could feel the breaker rumbling through me now, transforming my arrowhead avatar into a solid mountain. Freya 3.0 drew back with her flaming spear, her intricate loom surrounding me, seeking to hold me in place so that she could either bounce me off the server or cut through my brain again.
I ran the numbers, and it didn’t look good. My ocular implants boosted Black Balsam to 5, but to get it to 9 would cost half of the funds that I had available, and to fully break F3 would cost another 2K, leaving my with only 6K to make it through the last two ice.
There was no question: I had made an error. I should have boosted Spider Wasp with my implants, figuring that the Niflheim-enhanced Freyas wouldn’t be possible to get through simply with a breaker. Then perhaps I could have got out in time, and could make a new plan.
As it was, Freya 3.0 was about to wreck me again. She released her spear, and I saw its tip travel netspace toward me, slowly and instantly all at once, in the mind-bending way of a hyper-complex puzzle. If I were 4reya, maybe I would have had a chance. But I was me, and I was about to damn near break myself.
Gloss's Encyclopedia of Ice DISK NOT FOUND ABORT RETRY IGNORE FAIL