Chapter 7. The Whole Crew

“Hide your wallets,” the middle-aged punk rocker said as Enrique, Gloss, and I approached. She wore a shiny vegan leather jacket and a black t-shirt messily cut off into a halter. What was left of the printing seemed to read: “I’d rather be smashing capitalism.”

But I was more interested in the college student next to her, the pretty young woman who was looking off into the distance. If she glanced at me, I was half-certain I would run from the bar in terror.

“Everyone, I want you to meet Rawls,” Enrique said, laying a hand on my shoulder. “Rawls,” he said, gesturing around the table, “the foul-mouthed one is the CheRRy, with capital ‘R’s, and don’t forget the definite article when addressing her. Next to the CheRRy, nonlineardynamics, all lowercase, who should be studying for her calculus final.”

The one called nonlineardynamics gave Enrique the bird and it made me fall in love with her on the spot.

Enrique gestured around the table. There was an old man, possibly Chinese, in wire-frame glasses and wearing a dirty hoodie and a long, filthy duster. “Kent,” Enrique said.

Next to him was a tall Black man in a navy blue pinstripe suit who looked like a corporate executive. “Pleasure to meet you. I’m Ohm,” he said. Next to him was an armored briefcase, open to reveal a plush stegosaurus peeking out from inside.

“As in resistance?”

“That’s right,” Ohm said.

Sitting across from Ohm was a mixed-race middle-aged woman in bright colors wearing chunky silver headphones. “Sunya Xiong, bored out of my mind. How you doing, Gloss?”

Gloss took a seat next to Sunya and said, “Has Wren been here tonight?”

“Alway the first question he asks,” Sunya said, and Ohm laughed.

“Sit next to me, young gun,” the CheRRy said to me. “I’m not going to let that slick a-hole corrupt you into his own brand of capitalism any more than he already has.”

“What do the capital ‘R’s stand for?” I said as I worked my way onto the long bench.

“Reckless and ribald,” the CheRRy said.

She moved over and I took a seat between her and nonlineardynamics, who shifted her backpack so I could sit down. I saw an ancient mechanical keyboard sticking out of her backpack. As brightly colored as the CheRRy’s rainbow hair was, my eye was drawn to the quieter nonlineardynamics, in her neat wool sweater and preppy collared shirt. She reminded me of the rich girls in my hometown.

“So, I overheard you just had a run in with a big red snake,” the CheRRy said.

“This young man,” Enrique said, “broke a Ludo in eleven hours on his first crack, and then broke a neural python with a water strider.”

Pride flushed through me. I was aware of nonlineardynamics watching my reaction. I tried not to appear boastful. “Enrique got me a good breaker.”

“Not good enough,” Gloss said from down the table, and Enrique shot him a sharp look.

“I’m alive, anyway,” I said, feeling fluttery. My beer was practically empty—I wasn’t sure how that had happened.

The CheRRy slapped me on my back and jogged to the bar. She returned almost instantly with another pint for me and one for herself.

“What’s your story?” she said. “Want to make more money than the corps think you should make, like Lima over here?”

Before I could answer, Enrique said, “Missing girlfriend.”

The CheRRy made a condescending expression and I could feel nonlineardynamics shift slightly next to me.

“She’s not my girlfriend,” I said. “She’s my oldest friend. She came here for a clinical trial with a White Tree subsidiary, and that was the last I heard of her.”

When I said that, I could feel the mood among the runners change. Some of them looked down at their drinks. Ohm stirred his cocktail. Sunya busied herself with her music player.

The CheRRy looked at Enrique. “You better not be giving him false hope,” she said. She looked at me. “I’m sorry. I’d say I hope she’s OK, but ... ”

“But what?” I said.

The CheRRy shrugged. “It’s a White Tree clinical trial. Bad things happen there.”

Gloss moved over and whispered in my ear. “I got something.” He motioned for me to stand.

I followed Gloss outside the bar, where the night air was surprisingly chilly for the Carolina Piedmont. “We’ve sorted the data you exfiltrated.”

“And?”

“It’s clinical trial data, and recent. These are the kind of files that could be worth a couple hundred thousand to the right White Tree competitor. Of course, the fence will take half. Enrique’s communicating with fences right now. New drugs rise and fall on data like this. We’ve found the confidential patient records as well as the identifiers. That means name, date of birth, photo.”

“And?”

He unrolled a screen from his pocket. I didn’t have to know how to read clinical trial data to understand what it meant. In one place it listed a number, and next to that number was the word DECEASED. In another place it listed the same number, and next to that number was the name Freya Alexander and her birth date.

“I’m sorry, man,” Gloss said. He didn’t move to put a hand on my shoulder the way that Enrique would do, especially if he was trying to get me to do something. He just stood there. I felt like he’d embrace me if I wanted him to, but there was no pressure.

I just stood there. I felt numb. “It says she’s dead.”

He nodded.

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“Does that mean she’s dead?”

“You heard what the CheRRy said. White Tree engages in scary, bad practices. And I promise I will never try to give you hope unless the evidence supports it. So you have to consider the real possibility that your friend is dead.”

We stood in the unseasonably cold night air. It was the kind of night that Freya would have loved, the kind of night that still came to the mountains regularly. Down here I figured cool nights were a rarity, considering how people were dressed in short-sleeved shirts, shivering as they walked. I missed Freya.

Suddenly a feeling of despair broke through my numbness and I felt tears forming. I didn’t want to cry in front of Gloss, but at the same time, I knew that I could.

“It’s OK, little bro,” Gloss said.

“Thanks. You said that there was a possibility she’s dead. Is there any other possibility?”

“Don’t take this to mean anything, but corps make records for one purpose: to protect themselves.”

“You mean corp records don’t necessarily reflect the truth.”

Gloss nodded again. “It’s up to you what you do with this information. If you decide that you got what you came for, you can go home and know that you accomplished something, risked harm, even death, to find out what happened.”

“Or?”

“Or you can stay with us. Enrique will make sure you have a place to sleep and something to eat. You can help us earn our living, and then, when you’ve assembled your own rig, you can dive deeper and figure out if this—” he tapped the screen “—is really the end of her story.”

It was too heavy. I felt I couldn’t move underneath this burden. In that moment, I didn’t believe that Freya was dead. I’m not sure I was capable of believing it. And I didn’t want to go home, even if I didn’t know how to keep looking for her just yet. I’d seen too much over the last couple of days, met too many interesting people. I’d tasted power. For one moment, I had been as strong as billion-dollar corp defenses.

At the same time, what Enrique and Gloss did was risky, and I didn’t believe that Enrique would always keep me safe. Not that he would go out of his way to put me in danger, but he lived a fast and dangerous life, and if I were working with him, I would, too.

I looked for clues in Gloss’s expression. But he looked the way he often did: sleepy, and somewhat concerned.

Finally, I asked him. “What do you think I should do?”

“I can’t decide for you, little bro. Enjoy tonight and decide in the morning. Or tomorrow. Or next week.”

“I can do that.”

We returned to the bar, and I saw nonlineardynamics lift her head briefly when I came in the door. A wave of excitement came over me but was accompanied by a feeling of guilt. Not as though Freya would have been upset if she saw me flirting with a girl—it wasn’t like that between Freya and me. I felt like all my attention and energy should be focused on finding her, if she could be found.

But Gloss had implied that perhaps I had done all I could do for the moment, and that I needed to build a rig before I restarted my search. Whatever a rig was. A console and some icebreakers, I figured. For the meantime, I had half a pint of beer left and some new friends for company. That was worth something. It was time to enjoy life while I could.

As I rejoined the CheRRy and nonlineardynamics at the long table, the CheRRy was saying to the rest of the runners, “—could smear netspace with any of us.”

“Except perhaps Sunya,” Ohm said.

“Who are they talking about?” I whispered to nonlineardynamics.

“Mr. Grid. Do you know his story?” she said.

I shook my head. “Does everyone call you nonlineardynamics?”

“In netspace, sure. In meatspace, people call me Linney.”

“Hi Linney.”

“Hi.”

“What’s Mr. Grid’s story?”

But before Linney could speak, the CheRRy leaned over, spilling her beer on me. “Mr. Grid used to be a damn hot runner out of Montreal. He used the right mixture of caution and aggression, stole millions, and managed to lose it or spend it or give it away, I don’t know. Then he got the 7Wonders Conglomerate on his ass. Rumor has it they leveled an entire city block just to try to wipe him out. Emphasis on ‘try.’”

“Sounds like something 7Wonders would do,” Linney said.

“It was one-and-a-half apartment buildings,” Kent said.

Ohm broke in. “Let’s not exaggerate in front of our new colleague. They used four hunter-killer drones to incinerate a single third-floor condominium. The damage to the second level condo was only to the facade.”

Kent continued. “But Mr. Grid made it down here, opened this place, and it’s been a refuge for runners across Carthage ever since. If you ever need anything, come to Mr. Grid’s.”

“But not if you’re tagged,” Sunya said. “I don’t need that kind of conflict in my life.”

“What’s tagged?”

Linney touched my arm. “It means that at least one of the corps knows exactly who you’re doing business with. It makes everyone around you a target.”

“Well, there’s tagged and then there’s tagged,” Sunya said. “The more the corps know about you, your contacts, your rig, the place where you sleep, your current location, your plans, your thoughts, your nightmares, the worse it gets for you.”

“Often they have enough on you that they can close your bank account,” Ohm added. “So keep some cash around. I mean paper money.”

“And sometimes they know enough to put a missile between your eyes,” said the CheRRy, who had finished her beer and was now drinking mine.

“Hey, that’s—”

But Linney set another one in front me. “Here you go. You tangled with red ice today. You shouldn’t pay for drinks tonight.”

“Thank you,” I said. “What about you? What’s your story?”

Linney turned toward me. I was instantly aware of how much I liked sitting next to her. I could still feel the warmth on the place on my arm where she had touched me earlier. I wanted to know everything about her, but didn’t feel like I could just come out and say: tell me everything about yourself.

“I’m working on my degree,” she said. “I explore netspace when I can.”

“What’s your degree in?”

“I’m not sure yet, but I’m thinking of majoring in math.”

“Wow.”

She shrugged. “It’s what I do.”

“How long have you been a runner?”

“Since I was a kid. Growing up, I had a fast computer and not a lot of supervision. I got into trouble.”

“It seems to have worked out.”

“Maybe. Too soon to tell.”

“Are you feeling OK?”

“Yeah. I just don’t share the optimism or recklessness of some of the others. Speaking of which—” she indicated Enrique with her finger. He was deep in conversation with Sunya. “You don’t have to do everything he says.”

“Thanks.”

She stood. “Got to study for my final. But one more thing, Rawls.” I liked hearing her say my name. She leaned down to whisper in my ear. “You got White Tree today. But while you sleep, they work. Keep your eyes open tomorrow.”

A cold sensation traveled down my spine. I watched as she turned, drawing up the hood of her long, thin raincoat, the oversized mechanical keyboard bobbing as she walked away.

The rest of the evening created a pleasurable blur in my memory, as runner voices teased and confided and shouted at each other across the long table—

“—at the bottom of the server was a rashida—”

“—sometimes the best breaker is your face—”

“—hunter-seekered her brain cage—”

“—got drunk and forged the activation orders, bay-bee!”

I felt the table rattle as Gloss sat down next to me. “Drink up, little brother. We got a long metro ride home. Tomorrow you have a new assignment.”

###

Despite the late night, I made sure that I didn’t drink too much. I’d never liked getting drunk, and in high school avoided parties in favor of quiet evenings with Freya or by myself.

What I meant was that I rose early the next morning. The rest of the apartment felt silent.

I figured out how to operate Enrique Lima’s antique coffee maker, grinding the beans—the real thing, from Colombia—and measuring them into the cone. While the pot brewed, I took some time to be a good house guest and tidy up.

I scrubbed the counters and swept the floors, neatened piles of paper books and electronics. Some of the hardware left laying around intrigued me. Much of it looked like it plugged into the console that I had used during my run against the White Tree remote. The devices were boxy and mysterious, covered in stickers and scratches, their telltales glowing even when not plugged in.

I wanted to know what they all did. Maybe Enrique and Gloss wouldn’t notice if I messed around.

Gloss’s Encyclopedia of Ice

Name

Membrane

Manufacturer

White Tree

Cost to rez

medium-low

Nguyen-Okafor complexity

3

Type

Platform

Subtype

Red

Subroutines

2: bleeds a runner, but is only rarely lethal; stops a run