Chapter 49: Spin

I prepared to access whatever was left of FUTUR Design’s HQ. I didn’t even need the Vista processor because the corp, probably at the direction of my mother, had practically emptied itself to keep us out.

But we were in, me and Freya, and we were going to see everything left of the corp’s executive-level operations.

I felt myself pass into the glowing tower.

There was nothing there.

No long-term plans, no Moravec process, no location data for Enrique or for any other captive or guest or employee or contractor. There was nothing but a public relations team working hard on preparing a response to the disruptions caused by FUTUR Design’s overnight shake-up.

Information could never be destroyed. That was the first rule of the conservation of the net. Everything else that used to be here was now somewhere else.

It had required all my resources to make it in here. Almost all my money, damn-near all my time, every spare bit of my rig. I couldn’t do it again, and couldn’t get in anywhere else protected by even rudimentary ice.

The corp had won again. As it always did.

“Rawls,” Freya said as we remained suspended, in a flow of time that worked differently than meatspace time, both faster and slower, in which I had all the time in the world to decide what to do but could do almost nothing.

“Yeah?” My voice must have been corroded by bitterness.

“I think I know what’s happening,” she said. Her voice sounded keyed-up. “I’ve seen White Tree do this, too.”

“What’s that?”

“The public relations team is getting ready to explain away some things that are already out there.” She spoke fast, practically spitting the words.

“The layoffs, the restructuring.”

Her smooth avatar shook. “No, those are ordinary. They don’t require explaining away. It must be something else, something that hasn’t yet surfaced in the media. FUTUR Design held this team in HQ instead of getting rid of it along with everything else. There’s something else they’re trying to protect.”

Her intensity scared me. But I was grateful for the help. I wasn’t sure I would have seen it on my own. “But nothing is here.”

“So where else could it be?” Her tone wavered.

“The trash,” I said. At a glance, I could tell I was correct. Before we had run, FUTUR Design’s public archives were up to date. But now the size of the archive had changed, although no one knew what was in there.

With the last of my cash, I cracked and line-item edited everything related to the public relations team. I rescinded their contracts, gave up their work space, laid off their team, revoked their privileges in the corporate systems, and sent them straight to oblivion.

###

Back in the humid and crackling server farm, Freya huddled against the wall, very still.

“Freya?” I whispered. She didn’t respond. I touched her shoulder, felt her breathing, but she didn’t move at all under my hand.

Oh no. What had I asked her to do?

I was so focused ony my goal, I didn’t think about what jacking in would do to her.

Then my console pinged, Possum’s eyes lighting up. I held the stuffed animal, pulled back fur on its back to reveal a small display.

On that display, 4reya burned like a hearth. “She’s having a seizure,” 4reya said. “Stay with her.”

“I won’t leave,” I said, and the screen winked out.

Outside the server farm, I could hear the protests grow fiercer. There came the sound of a bottle breaking, the whoosh of ignition, the sirens of a fire truck.

The air in the server farm smelled of smoke, but I wasn’t sure if it had come from the overtaxed electronics or something burning in the street.

And my head hurt. My thoughts moved like molasses. They just did not gather the way I wanted them to gather. I remember what Dr. Qin had said. My cortex couldn’t take much more punishment.

It was near dawn. The markets were soon to open, salaried employees were waking to eat breakfast, maybe to doomscroll before work.

What I wanted remained in a FUTUR Design archive, at a server address I knew, protected by only a single piece of ice, just enough to keep out the curious.

I could run it; I couldn’t run it.

It was last click. I had no money, brain, or friends. I’d damn near lost my grip on reality. I needed to stay with Freya.

I made a call through my oculars.

“Yeah?” came the scratchy voice.

“Gloss, man. It’s Rawls.”

“You’re verbal.”

“And everything else. Listen, I got in.”

I heard a low whistle, almost like a machine tone. But it was no machine, just Gloss signalling that I had impressed him. “What did you find?”

“Public relations.”

“You trash them?”

“Snap trash, man. But check this out. I think Enrique’s location is in archives.”

“You’re talking about the FUTUR Design archive.”

“It’s there. But I can’t get in. Can you get in?”

I heard the clacking of fingers on an old-school mechanical keyboard. I could hear the wariness in Gloss’s voice. He didn’t want to make a run that I had marked. “I’m not in a place I can run from right now. What’s the ice on that?”

I could visualize the server map, saw the shooter ice searching for a target. I hadn’t run it but someone else had and now everyone could see what was over the server.

“It’s an autoturret, already rezzed. Complexity zero.”

“What if I could transfer you a little cash?”

“Two K is enough. I think I can find him.”

I felt my wrist buzz.

“It’s in your account, little bro. You get in there and I’ll call the lawyer.” Gloss ended the call.

Taking one last look at Freya, I realized that I couldn’t be in two places at once. I couldn’t stay here and watch her and also jack in.

Not knowing what else to do, I called for Zizek. But he wasn’t there.

I called Gloss back. He didn’t answer this time. He must be occupied trying to find the lawyer.

Hell, I’d let myself get excited, and now where was I? It wouldn’t take long before FUTUR Design found itself another way to clean up its archives. There was a window to run it but it had to be now.

I called Gloss again. No answer. I called again. This time, I got a gruff, “What?”

“It’s Rawls again. I can’t jack in. I need to keep an eye on Freya. She’s having a seizure, man.”

There was silence on the other end of the connection. “I’m heading to the lawyer’s office,” Gloss said.

“I need you to make the run,” I said.

“I told you, I can’t.”

“Are you telling me you can’t find a crash space for a few hours?”

He was quiet. He knew he couldn’t credibly make that claim.

“Look,” I said, “I know that it feels weird to have me telling you where to run. I know that’s not comfortable for you. Because you’re the older brother and the more experienced runner. You tell me where to run, right? That’s how it has gone up until now. But I’m telling you, FUTUR Design is out of money. They spent everything on keeping me out of HQ, and now there’s no one home. You can get into archives. You just have to acknowledge that I know what I’m doing. But it has to be done now.”

There was silence on the connection again. “I’ll find a crash space,” he said. “When I get it you’ll see.”

The connection ended.

I took my laptop over to where Freya was huddled against the wall and slid down next to her. I watched the slow pulse of archives surrounded by a single ring of trivial ice.

I let my hand fall to my side, palm up. My fingers brushed Freya’s.

Meanwhile, the chaos outside started to subside as dawn approached.

Time, it felt like it had no meaning. Seconds took hours. I heard the distant scream of a smoke detector.

Suddenly everything fell quiet, as if all the people outside had gone home. My chest clenched. If there were corporate paramilitaries out there waiting to get in, now was their chance.

If there was anyone left in FUTUR Design’s finance office to pay them, that was.

The door at the front of the server farm remained closed. I didn’t hear boots outside it, nor the scrabbling of Cy-ote claws.

Then I felt Freya’s fingers on my palm. I looked down and saw her lift her head and open her eyes. She curled up against me and I put an arm around her.

We watched my laptop screen, that winking light, blink, blink, blink.

PULSE.

All the leak sites received the dump at the same time: a massive trove of FUTUR Design documents, showing their positions in multiple hedge funds, a line of non-simulant ice they had never deployed and now never would, the launch plans for their executive simulant project, and finally, detailed specifications for Moravec process experiments, including the locations of the facilities in which the experimental guests were housed.

Idaho. They held Enrique in Idaho.

Gloss’s lawyer filed his habeas petition in the court within three seconds.

I could feel every muscle in my body relax. For the first time since that awful day in Kansas, the future felt brighter than the past. I wanted to cry but there was a part of me that remained numb.

Turning to face Freya, I could see the concern on her face. Never mind that she’d just come out of a seizure, she looked worried. “We need to take you to the doctor,” she said. “Like right now.”

“It’s not far,” I said. “I’d like to walk.”

With her reliable strength, she helped me up to my feet. I felt like I had aged a decade in the last few hours, my legs unused to walking, my throat dry and sore. We tidied up our nest as best we could, rolling up the sleeping bags and putting the compostable food containers in the bin. But as we looked around, we realized the server farm was wrecked. Soot marked the walls, the telltales were mostly dead, and only a few routers still functioned.

We could hear the hiss of a water cannon outside. Perhaps some remnant of the fires.

Freya and I walked through the row of burned-out servers. She said, “Do you think this place will—”

Then the building shuddered as a wrecking ball hit the side of it, bringing a stream of daylight through the dust.

We made it out the back before the ball hit a second time.

###

“Remind me,” Dr. Qin said, “Did I or did I not tell you to stop slamming brain-first into gray ice?”

“You did.”

She clicked her tongue. “Just checking. Do you want to see the scan?”

“Please.”

She swung the monitor on its beefy robot arm.

Resonance Scan Results

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Rawls, Jasper

19 year-old male

RECENT NEUROLOGICAL TRAUMA (SEVERE)

IMPLANTS FOUND:

FDWT NET OCULA L

Serial *87

FDWT NET OCULA R

Serial *10

PEGASUS BANK IND

Serial *93

ACCUNET NET PORT

Serial *22

PANOPT VISTA PROC (JAILBROKEN)

Serial *74

OCBD SUBCUT SUBROU L1

Serial *XX

9 DUPLICATE ENTRIES

WIREJACK EPIFLEX (NANOCYTES 0.003g/mm)

NOMFR NIGHTSHIFT

NO OTHER IMPLANTS FOUND

PROGRAMS FOUND

HUNGRY CREEK

BLACK BALSAM

SPIDER WASP

NO OTHER PROGRAMS FOUND

“Hey,” the doctor said, “Your account here has some credits. Quite a few credits in fact. Almost 50K. Want to complete that nervous system upgrade?”

From my perch on the exam table, it felt impossible to process financial information. Then again it felt impossible to process a lot of things these days.

“Where did the credits come from?”

Dr. Qin shrugged and said, “Ask the billing office.”

“What will the nervous system upgrade do?”

“Well, it will knock you down for a few weeks, but it should help you cope with some of this trauma. Nothing ever erases that trauma, but like I said the last time we spoke, people are remarkable. We can thrive after all kinds of injuries. But my advice to you is the same as last time: you need to stop running.”

We looked at each other. I didn’t say a word. But it felt like she understood me. I wasn’t going to stop running. I had just started.

We scheduled the nervous system upgrade for a couple days from now, and then I went to speak to the billing office, which was a green fabric-lined booth at the back of the clinic. It seemed to absorb all sound, making the discussion of money something hushed.

The woman on the other side of the booth said, “It looks like the credit to your account came directly from White Tree.”

“Why would White Tree do that?”

She shook her head. “I have no idea. Megacorps have huge accounting departments for this kind of magic. The only answer that is always true is that they did it because they believed it was in their interest to do so.”

I found Freya in the waiting room when I came out of the billing office. She was smiling and bright-eyed, her tan skin looking strange under the cold lights of the clinic. “I’m bored and hungry,” she said. “Let’s go get waffles.”

You would never have known that the downtown streets had hosted a fiery protest the night before. The streets were clean and the air smelled fresh. Heavy street sweepers were moving along in the distance, and Freya was walking quickly ahead of me, her eyes on what looked like a breakfast place on the next block.

Over waffles drenched in syrup that came all the way from Canada, she said to me, “You look different.”

“How so?”

“When we found each other again, you had this hunched-over posture. Like you were trying to curl up and hide. Since then, we’ve been running from one bad situation to another. We’ve been broke and desperate. But now? You’re sitting with your back straight for the first time. You’re actually smiling. I don’t feel like you’re so tense that you’re in danger of snapping.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“So what now?” She took a long drink of coffee to give me time to think about it.

“I’d like to find the others.”

“The runners?” The way she said it, it was like she didn’t even believe they existed. I admired her for that. It made me feel that no matter what else happened, we would be friends.

“Yeah.”

“You sure that’s a good idea?”

“I don’t know.” I moved the last few bites of waffle around my plate. I finished off my coffee and paid the check with my wrist.

“What if they don’t want to see you?”

“Because I’m hexed?”

“I was going to say bad luck, but yeah.”

“One way to find out.”