Chapter 6. Run First Click
Gloss produced a pair of lineworker’s pliers from his vest and cut into the data cable coming from the console. Using the pliers, he stripped the insulation from both cut ends and twisted the wires that lay within around the ends of the switch he had brought from the hollow book. He wrapped the ends with vinyl tape and handed me the data cable. Its end matched the shape of my net port perfectly.
“Whenever you’re ready,” Gloss said.
“Let me make sure I understand what I’m doing. I’m running on a White Tree remote. We know it’s protected by ice but we don’t know what kind. Inside, we think there is information on clinical trials conducted by Melody Biologics.”
“But we don’t know for sure,” Enrique said. Gloss nodded approvingly. He seemed to be training his boss to be more circumspect.
“It sounds iffy,” I said.
“Ever play poker?” Enrique said. “It’s a game of incomplete information. Running is the same way.”
A game. Well, I liked games. I tried to gin up some courage.
“OK,” I said. “See you when I jack out.”
I pulled the cable up to my net port. I felt it click as I twisted the cable to lock it in place. “That’s odd,” I said. “I don’t see any—”
—I was moving along that dark highway again but it was different this time. Connecting through my net port, without the VR goggles, I felt more in tune with myself. I could hear the net. It sounded like wind whistling. I could even smell it, like new plastic.
In the distance, a city similar to the last one drew closer and closer. It was ringed by something, something circular, perhaps something like Ludo’s wall. Whatever it was, the resolution was poor at this distance.
This city was larger, with skyscrapers that were more numerous and and taller. I felt momentarily afraid that when I reached the center of the city I wouldn’t know what to do. But that fear receded quickly. I was getting better and living in the moment.
Here, in netspace, I felt like I could move in any direction at any speed. I felt powerful. I wasn’t just some nineteen year-old kid. I was a thief who could break into a corporate server defended by billions of dollars worth of ice.
Even the shape of my avatar was somewhat different. Instead of the simple flying wedge that I had been the first time, I was a more complicated arrowhead shape now, serrated and sharp and aerodynamic. My shape was reminiscent of the arrowheads my grandpa used to hunt deer with.
I could even feel the icebreaker at my side, its insect-like form full of power, just waiting for me to activate it with a thought. Enrique and Gloss had told me that an AI icebreaker was simple to use.
That explanation disappointed me. I wanted it to be my skill that prevailed. Even if this was the last time I ever made a run, even if the center of this server told me exactly what had happened to Freya, I wanted to impress Enrique and Gloss.
Something hissed.
Maybe I had been too ambitious.
I felt myself being lifted from the black, invisible highway as a bright, digital serpent coiled around me faster than I could think. Its scales were hard and red and cut into me as they passed over the edges of my avatar. This thing was huge, and wordless, nothing like that polite little boy playing with cubes.
I was afraid. I could feel this thing’s immense strength, and I could see its complexity. The serpent was dense with data, bright and opaque, shaded blood red and magenta and deep, deep crimson, blotting out my view of the city and of anything else. I knew at once that this thing had multiple ways of killing me, whether it was going to flay me or squeeze the life out of me.
Then something happened, something odd but also familiar.
The scales began lifting off the serpent and traveling at me like tiny knives. I found that I was faster than them, just barely. At first there were fewer then ten, and then dozens, and then hundreds. It was odd that this was happening but dodging them felt like playing one of Dad’s old video games, the kind that he called shooter or shmup or bullet hell. The patterns created by the lethal snake scales were beautiful, like flowers or fungal networks, and I found my way through them with a kind of serenity that I had just discovered in myself.
Even though I was afraid, I wasn’t panicking. Panic only ever seemed to intrude on me in moments where I was afraid but not in any real danger. Now, entangled in something that could actually kill me, I felt as if I had been preparing for this all my life.
In the distance, I could almost hear voices. Were they talking about the switch?
I tried to shake my head no, but I had no body.
Don’t take me away. Let me fight this out.
I thought about the water strider. It leapt from my side, glittering and green, and started to move up the body of the serpent. It stuck to the hard scales, uncut by them, uncaught by the constricting muscles that were closing around my avatar reducing my room to maneuver.
I urged the water strider on, and it followed my direction. I piloted it up the serpent’s body, under the flying knives, around and around the outside of the coil, until I reached the top of the serpent’s head, its hyper-dense digital fangs dripping with lethal data.
The water strider looked almost transparent in comparison with the serpent. It didn’t look promising. Even so, what could I do but direct the water strider to ram the serpent’s brain? With a sickening crack, the water strider bounced off, slid down the body of the serpent.
The knives flew closer. Bits of my arrowhead were shearing off from glancing strikes, falling away into endless digital space. I felt renewed appreciation for the power of this ice.
I drew in a deep breath, except it wasn’t oxygen I was breathing, it was voltage and amperes and exocycles. I fed them to the water strider. It grew brighter at the influx of electricity and processing capability. It was still somewhat transparent. I lost my concentration in the maze of knives. My arrowhead was hit, square in its middle, and it deformed.
The netspace world grew dim. The voices became more insistent.
I looked closer at the serpent. Where earlier it had seemed impossibly dense, now, as my eyes began to ache—did I even have eyes here?—I could see into the serpent, see the data pathways swirling within it. It wasn’t so mysterious. It wasn’t so hard to understand. It was like that simple drone in the alley cafe.
My eyes fed information to the water strider. I could smell something metallic burning.
The bright, hot water strider dove into the serpent’s brain again. This time the water strider moved in exactly the right way such that its body broke through the scales, reaching the core of the ice.
All at once the serpent’s multi-hued scales became a uniform brick red, and the coil collapsed into a floating tangle.
I was free.
The water strider flickered and was gone.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
I raced forward to the city, not wanting to waste a single processor cycle. Earlier I had been worried about not knowing what to do. I needn’t have been concerned.
I found myself drawn to the skyscrapers. I immersed myself in data, found it passing through me, my console copying everything, first in one skyscraper and then another and another. I couldn’t get enough. I felt like I could do this all day, soak up everything the megacorp knew. The sense of power that I took from this romp through the data city was intoxicating, better than the beers that Freya and I used to steal from Dad. Better, even, than the feeling of laying next to Freya on the river bank and sharing our hopes. I never wanted to leave—
“Time to get off the horse, cowboy,” came Enrique’s voice as I sat up, the real world intruding on my netspace fantasy. Although at the moment, the netspace world felt real and the real world felt dull.
My hands moved to the cable, twisted it so that it unlocked from the net port. I could smell my own sweat and the scorched circuitry of the water strider. I looked at its case on the floor, saw sweet, resinous smoke rising from within. Poor guy. It had felt almost alive. I felt like I had lost a pet.
My eyes hurt. I rubbed them, looked around the dim room for a glass of water. Gloss handed me one. It tasted of old oak leaves. I didn’t care. It was cold and crisp and helped my throat.
“How’d I do?”
“You didn’t flatline,” Enrique said. Gloss was looking at him, and the expression on Gloss’s face wasn’t happy. It wasn’t even relieved.
“We almost jacked you out a couple of times,” Enrique said, “but you seemed to want to continue the run. Honestly, for a moment I thought the breaker wasn’t going to be able to pull enough power to get through that red ice. It was starting to look as if it really were defective. But somehow it pulled enough.”
“It wasn’t the icebreaker,” I said. “Or not totally. It was also me. I saw something in the ice. I saw how the water strider could move through it.”
“My man,” Enrique said. “Seems like we’ve uncovered your ability.”
“My what?”
“Your ability. Most runners, if they’re any good, have one. An innate talent that takes time to develop into something useful. An ability is also bound to your sense of yourself, whatever that is. If how you identify changes, your ability can, too. I’ve seen that happen more than once. It seems like your ability has to do with the complexity of ice.”
I wanted to contradict him, to say, no, whatever my ability may be, it wasn’t that. That was just my secret cybernetic eyes.
Instead, I just said, “Cool.”
The air in the tiny, dim crash space was beginning to bother my throat. It was dank, and smelled of my sweat and burnt electronics. Enrique and Gloss were watching me, Enrique speaking gently and Gloss glaring at him without speaking.
“What about you two—do you have abilities?”
“Sure,” Enrique said. “Speaking for myself, I have a knack for digging around executive knowledge bases. If I can get into a corp’s nerve center, I can ferret out bits of juicy intelligence on the corp’s top people, then spin that into gold.”
“Stop mixing metaphors,” Gloss said, breaking his long silence. “It makes me sick.”
“How about you, Gloss?” I said. My voice faltered. I was beyond tired after that run.
“I’ve worked for a long time to cultivate this, so don’t go thinking what I do is easy. When a corp rezzes a piece of ice, I can hijack some of the resources they use to do that.”
“Rezzes?”
“Yeah. You know how, when you’re far away from the ice, it looks fuzzy and you can’t tell what it is? Then when it’s in your face it snaps into high resolution?”
“Yeah.” I laughed. “I’ve seen that happen a couple times.”
“That’s rezzing. That ice you just broke? That was level four in terms of its complexity, in the middle of the range. Red ice is much harder to build. It was damn expensive for White Tree to rez it. They must have been trying to protect something valuable.”
Enrique broke in. “Corps only rez ice when they think they have to. Unless they’re richer than god.”
“Aren’t they always richer than god?”
“You’d be surprised,” Enrique said. “Corps have money problems just like anyone else. The trick is knowing when they’re strapped for cash. That’s the best time to run.”
I finished my water. Gloss took the empty glass and washed it carefully in the sink.
“Let’s go through what we found in that server,” I said.
Enrique handed me my shirt. “All in good time. The console is still analyzing it. But we can’t sit around here waiting for it to finish. Let’s go celebrate.”
“Celebrate what?”
“Your second run. Your first encounter with red ice. Your first ride on an AI icebreaker. Take your pick.”
Gloss finally seemed to relax. “Mr. Grid’s?” he said.
“Mr. Grid’s,” Enrique said.
I buttoned my shirt. I felt a bit woozy, but I was excited, and thrilled that I was still alive. “Let’s go.”
###
Mr. Grid’s bar was a long metro ride away from the crash space, clear on the other side of Carthage, not far from Enrique’s condo and Dr. Qin’s clinic.
While my second run had felt like it had taken the same amount of time as my first run, it had only lasted three hours. That meant it was mid-afternoon by the time we left the crash space, and early evening by the time we reached the vast area of old tobacco warehouses where Mr. Grid ran his bar.
“Innkeeper!” Gloss shouted as we walked into the room, his voice uncharacteristically loud. “A flagon of ale for the young squire!”
The man behind the bar was tall and mustached, with a friendly expression. Instantly I felt that I could trust him. He filled a pint glass from a tap and handed it to me as I approached the bar.
Gloss leaned in confidentially. “Rawls here just encountered and broke a neural python,” he said.
The bartender looked impressed. He poured himself a taste of beer in a small gibraltar so that he had something to clink against my raised pint. “Not everyone survives that,” he said. “Good work.”
We each drank. When I say that this was the best-tasting beer I have ever had, I mean that there was nothing on earth so bright, sweet, bready, and bitter, all at once. Being alive had never felt so good. “Thanks,” I said.
Gloss grabbed a grubby tablet in a polished oak case from a stand at the far end of the bar. He cleaned off the fingerprint sensor with a napkin and pulled up the display. “Check it out,” he said.
HI SCORES NAME SCORE 1 KT Thorn
1,345,103
2 Cynosure 1,292,098 3 EVE
1,174,411
4 The CheRRy 1,101,329 5 Sunya Xiong 989,224 6 Enrique Lima 910,626 7 Kent 888,755 8 Coilpath 824,743 9 nonlineardyn 744,912 10 Gloss 743,001 11 Ohm 700,125 100 Wren 23,007 5,000 Val43rie 1,975 5,132 Jasper Rawls 1,228
“You’re on the board, little bro,” he said.
I took a long drink of beer, felt it play on my tongue. Hell yes I was on the board.
For a long time I stared at that list of high scores, the names and numbers mesmerizing me. My eyes sought out round numbers, and number 5,000 stopped me short. “Val43rie” looked like it could be a form either of “Valerie” or “Valkyrie.” It caught my attention because Freya was always reading about the Valkyries in her free time, because of the mythological associations with her name. And from time to time on the net, she’d gone by “Val,” which people had sometimes assumed meant she was named “Valerie.”
For an idle moment, I fantasized that Val43rie was Freya and that we would find each other not only as friends but as runners. My fantasy broke apart when I heard Gloss speaking to Enrique. “Complexity four? You said it would be a two. You could have got him killed.”
Enrique hissed back. “He handled it.”
The bartender savored his drink, then set down his empty glass and reached out his hand. “I’m Mr. Grid.”
“Rawls.”
Mr. Grid poured beers for Gloss and Enrique and the three of us took them to a table in back where five other people were in raucous conversation.
There were two young white women talking, one middle-aged and dressed like a punk rocker, and the other about my age, clearly a college student from her preppy sweater and the white-collared shirt beneath.
When I saw her, a wave of nervousness shot through me. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.
Gloss’s Encyclopedia of Ice
Name
Neural Python
Manufacturer
White Tree
Cost to rez
high
Nguyen-Okafor complexity
4
Type
shooter
Subtype
red
Subroutines
2: bleeds a runner, bleeds a runner