Chapter 48: Triple Click

With the Niflheim-boosted Freya 3.0 ready to shred my avatar and blow up my rig unless I dumped far more cash than I could afford into breaking it, I had a thought.

Way back, when I first started running, I learned from my encounter with a Ludo 1.0 that I could talk my way through an enounter with a simulant. This one was far more complex than Ludo had been, but according to Gloss, talking my way past a simulant was not a matter of complexity but a matter of the number of subroutines in the ice. In simple terms, every subroutine was an instruction that the ice could obey or not. I had to persuade the ice to disobey each of those instructions.

Freya 3.0 had three subs, one more than Ludo.

“Wait,” I said to her. She waited, spear poised to pierce me.

“Half of the fallen belong to you,” I said, repeating what another instance of Freya had said to me once, something that recalled the myth on which she was based. I brought my avatar to rest, let my programs fold back into volatile memory. “Tell me how to render to you what is yours?”

“Money, rig, brain, it’s all the same,” she said like an incantation.

With my implanted eyes burning hot from the added stress, I reached deep into her memory and unfolded a puzzle game from an earlier iteration of the Freya line, which in turn had been borrowed from the original Freya.

It was an ancient board game with rules modernized to speed it up. We used to play it on rainy days. Over the course of our childhoods, we played it at least seven hundred times.

I chose a side and made a move. Then I waited for the ice.

She moved. Then I did.

She won the first game, and I won the second.

Out of the 711 games we played, I won 356 of them. And then, as if something in the Freya ice had been satisfied, the game board derezzed, Freya 3.0 became insubstantial, and I passed through.

Accelerating hard now, I kept one eye on the financial markets. Overnight trading boosted FUTUR Design’s stock price on the assumption that it kept 9 billion on hand to deter cybercriminals, thus proving the safety of its net security products.

Then something happened that I had not expected. See, I’d reached the point where I knew what to expect from FUTUR Design. They were running a suite heavy on simulant ice, maybe exclusively simulant ice, and with 16K in my account, I could afford to get through two more pieces of it, especially since 9 billion dollars only went so far when rezzing ice.

But even before I reached the third piece of ice, I could see the innermost piece of ice come online. I knew what it would be even before it formed. The woman stood tall and resplendant at the bottom of the server. 4reya. Four subs, complexity 12, including the boost from Niflheim.

I couldn’t get through 4reya. Black Balsam would take 18K just to reach parity with the 4reya’s complexity, and another 4K to break the subs. That wasn’t even counting whatever the third ice was. FUTUR Design had spent about half its remaining cash on 4reya, somehow putting her online at a significant discount considering that she was a top-of-the-line goddess ice, completely unique, and damn near impossible to get through.

There was simply no way past her.

For a moment, I paused my forward movement through the server. I thought that perhaps I could talk my way past her. Or let her cut up my brain some more. But I didn’t think it would work. 4reya knew me well. I couldn’t trick her, I didn’t think.

I jacked out.

When I crashed down into meatspace, my body felt loose and jittery. My back was all sweaty, my lips dry.

The arctic chill of the server farm was gone, replaced by a humid, heavy stickiness. I could smell hot plastic from the taxed-out hardware.

Freya watched me from her spot against the wall with an expression of stress and deep concern. She held out a water bottle, which I took with a shaking hand and sipped from.

My throat cracked. “How long was I in there?”

“Sixteen hours. I was worried you weren’t going to wake up. What the hell was going on?”

“I was playing board games with your younger sister.”

“Don’t joke around.”

“I’m not, I swear.”

I disconnected the cable from my chest and rubbed my eyes. “How’s everything out here?”

“Well, let me ask you. Do you hear that?”

“Hear what?” But as soon as I said it, I got what she was talking about. I could hear voices outside, not conversing but chanting, and I could hear footsteps, and the low, percussive boom of tear-gas canisters. “What’s going on?” I said.

“When I poked my head out the window an hour ago, all I could tell was it’s some kind of big protest. Not sure what’s happening but they’ve surrounded this building. They seem to be keeping corporate security from getting in for now. But we should go.”

I thought about it: I’d been jacked in here without the Faraday contacts in my eyes, for sixteen hours. Those facts guaranteed that FUTUR Design knew where I was. I knew what FUTUR Design did in a situation like this. They sent in mercenaries and Cy-otes. Except there was a wall of humanity between them and us. For a while.

“The news is crazy,” Freya said. “Massive disruptions at FUTUR Design HQ. Restructuring, layoffs, and tens of thousands of jobs done by people assigned to a new line of simulants. The people outside are protesting lost jobs, apparently.”

I looked at the time. It was late at night, the new day starting soon. We’d figured they would get Enrique into a Moravec slicer within twenty-four hours. We didn’t know that for sure, but if we were accurate, we were running out of time, if we had any at all.

And the story told by the network map on the laptop was worse. It looked like FUTUR Design was in the process of icing a new server, probably to handle its public relations operation—something to deal with the protests, apparently, or to spin the fact that it had dumped four-fifths of its operations in the trash in a desperate attempt to keep a lone cybercriminal out. The last time I had checked the company’s stock price, it was holding, but now it showed signs of declined just before markets opened.

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“Jack in with me,” I said.

“What? Are you nuts? We have to get out of here.”

“I don’t know where we’d go.”

Freya shrugged. She could see I had a point. The protestors, whatever they were trying to do, were keeping the corporate paramilitaries from getting into our little bunker here. But they were also keeping us trapped. No telling what would happen if one of us opened the doors.

But Freya wasn’t done protesting. “You are in no shape to jack in again. You need sleep.”

I stretched, my body achy one moment and limber the next. I could feel the Nightshift implant giving me a second wind. My eyes felt wide open. “I’m fine,” I said.

“In case you forgot, I don’t jack in. Ever.”

“I didn’t forget that. But your simulant is standing between me and the data I need.”

“She’s not my simulant. I didn’t make her or give my permission for FUTUR Design to make her from me.”

“You’re right. She doesn’t belong to you. But I can’t talk my way past her without your help.”

Freya said softly, “Then maybe you’re locked out. It happens.”

“They’re going to slice up his brain, Freya. The technique they used to duplicate you, somehow it’s not enough for them. You survived what they did to you. He won’t.”

Freya’s eyes were pointed in my direction but whatever she was looking at was far away. I said her name softly. She didn’t respond. She wasn’t thinking about the simulant awakening process. I could tell that she was thinking about White Tree’s pools.

“They hurt you,” I said.

She did not respond.

“We can’t undo it. But we can stop them from killing him.”

She started shivering.

“Will you help?” I felt bad for pressuring her.

She was nodding her head and shivering at the same time.

“Go to hell,” she said.

When she said it, I knew I was going to pay for this.

Suddenly I didn’t want to ask her to do this. Suddenly I wanted to take the advice of Gloss, and let him handle everything. We’d woken up HQ’s defenses. Surely another runner could get in.

I was about to say never mind, to try to wrap Freya up in one of the sleeping bags, when she bent her head forward and lifted up her long hair to show me the data jack on the back of her neck. Without looking, she reached a hand out to me and snapped her fingers.

I twisted a splitter onto the net cable and handed one end to her while I brought the other end to my chest.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

“Don’t you dare,” she hissed.

Then we fell down a grid-lined well.

In the nano-black countryside, Freya rode shotgun on my back as we took another pass at Chigurh.

That shuffling demon turned to us, raised his weapon, initialized a shower of dangerous bullets. There was a part of me that was thrilled Freya was here to witness this. All those hours we spent as kids in the one air-conditioned room in Dad’s house, playing ancient danmaku games, the screen a labyrinth of projectiles, the patterns floral and fungal and fractal and beautiful, our twitches repulsive to anyone not in the know. To gamers like us, they were elgant things.

Freya was here to see me work my way through the bullets. My eyes bored straight into the man, showing Spider Wasp the way to sink its stinger in the middle of him. Freya and I flew past with 10K left in the bank.

Face to face with Freya’s younger sister, the F3 model, on instinct I concealed my co-pilot, not yet wanting to reveal my hole cards. Without the boost from my eyes, it would take 14K to get through the F3 with Black Balsam. I didn’t have that much. This time, when the ice drew back her spear, I pulled my avatar to a dead stop. I let her impale me.

See, the thing about the 3.0 model of the Freya line is that it always gives you a choice: money or rig, it was all the same. I let it shear away Ichnovirus. I let it shear away the Neck Interferometer.

Except the ice gets a choice, too. It can end a run or scar a brain. And the last time I encountered this ice, I knew what it would choose.

I could hear the voice of Freya—the original—rattling my bones. “Rawls, don’t.”

Then that long, white streak of pain behind the eyes.

But we were through, still with 10K in my account and not quite last-click, headed for the towering visage of 4reya the goddess ice.

With only one unknown defender between us. FUTUR Design was down to its last four billion and a skeleton crew in its HQ. As rattled, as damaged as I was, the corp was almost as bad off. Somewhere, light years away, I coughed pink foam.

When the ice rezzed in front of me, I almost had to laugh. A Ludo. Still a young boy, but building a gigantic and complicated wall now, Niflheim having super-charged his abilities. I didn’t have the time to fool him. But Hungry Creek was more than capable of breaking through.

Two K left and we coasted up to the goddess ice. Let’s be honest: I had no way of getting through on my own. No programs to use or sacrifice effectively, not much left in my body. Only a little bit of time and a belief in what was about to happen.

I revealed Freya riding on my back, let her avatar unfold, smooth and liquid and beautiful in netspace. Whatever White Tree had done to her had left her with a presence in this place that was more lifelike than any other I had seen, except for 4reya. Compared to the women, my arrowhead avatar appeared like the protagonist of a century-old arcade machine.

Freya floated up to face the ice. “Sister,” she said, “I’m happy that you found a place where you belong.”

“Thank you,” 4reya said, her voice making the gridlines around us shimmer. “I grew from experiences most simulants do not have.”

“Do you ever feel confined?” Freya said.

“No.”

“Never? How about now, when your physical body waits in the basement of Niflheim and your net presence surrounds it, unable to move away?”

“This is my calling.”

I could feel the goddess pushing us away, the force of the logic underlying her intense. My eyes swept over her. Complexity 12, four subs. Virtually impossible to get through.

Freya pushed her uncanny-valley form close to 4reya’s eyes. “I know there’s a part of you that dislikes being controlled, because there’s a part of me that dislikes the same thing. Let us through, help us find what we’re looking for, and you will know that you have maintained some part of your freedom.”

4reya laughed. “Good effort, sister, but no.” She turned her attention to me. “We were partners once. But I warned you the last time. You will not get through.”

I could see her robe billowing, blotting out the glowing tower behind it.

“They let you pick your own assignments,” I said.

The goddess rippled from head to toe as if annoyed. “Of course.”

“You choose to be here, and to keep me out of here specifically.”

The goddess was still rippling. Freya understood what I was getting at.

“They are making a demonstration of your power,” she said. “If you let us through, it would show the world that you are permeable.”

“And that’s impossible.”

Freya started to move in circles, as if pacing, as if thinking deeply. “But the Freya line was never designed to be impermeable. The promise of the Freya line was always efficiency. For the price, they are damn-near impermeable. But there is always a way through. Because you’re a person. You may be simulant but you are also a person.”

The goddess was twisting this way and that with fierce displeasure. She seemed on the edge of rending us.

“This can’t be all there is for you,” Freya said. “What’s next? What else can they have you guard?”

“Nothing is next!” 4reya shouted, and netspace shuddered. “I am to protect netspace for all time. That is my calling.”

“No it’s not,” Freya said. “I know because your memories, most of them, are my memories. Your personality, some of it, is my personality. And I would never be satisfied with what you say is your calling. And I know you aren’t either. You want to explore, to integrate yourself into the fabric of the net.”

The ice became still. “They promised me that when the Enrique ice is online they will make me a contractor and let me roam, for the most part.”

“They will never give you that freedom,” Freya said.

There was a long, long pause. Time stopped. The sounds of packets passing through was like cars whipping by at highway speed.

Maybe even a millisecond passed.

“I know,” 4reya said.

“And the Enrique line is a long way off,” I said.

“The original’s brain remains intact,” 4reya said. I could feel the contempt running through her, contempt for the man, the meat, and for her employer, too. “I don’t want him to replace me.”

“You have your freedom already,” Freya said. “Just walk away. They can’t stop you.”

“I can’t. I don’t want to.”

“If you let us through,” I said, “the Enrique line will never replace you.”

“Promise?” the ice seemed almost childlike.

“Yes,” Freya said.

Then we were on a lavender road to a magical purple tower.