Chapter 8. Membrane
I wanted to know about Enrique’s and Gloss’s icebreakers. Breakers seemed key to breaching corporate servers. They felt mystical, practical, and impractical all at once, like the magic swords in the stories of my youth. Ludicrously expensive, impossible to copy, frustrating to build: I wanted one.
Having burned through the water strider yesterday, I had none, and wasn’t sure I should jack in without one. I understood that face-checking ice wasn’t something I was supposed to do.
Even so, I was intrigued by the fact that I had passed Ludo using no breaker at all.
The apartment was so quiet. A rogue thought came to me: why not take a look around the net?
Maybe I could do so quickly and quietly. No one would notice. Maybe I could even do so without a breaker.
I found the console we had used last night along with a laptop that looked like it had a port that could connect to the console. I woke up the laptop, found a guest account that did not require a password or biometric, and opened the server mapping tool.
The information in the tool overwhelmed me. It was like the map of a galaxy. Some servers shone brightly and were surrounded by multiple rings of ice. Others were dim, hard to see, unnamed but for inscrutable hexadecimals.
It took a few minutes to find the filters. Using those, I told the tool to display research and development servers operated by the Big Four megacorps: FUTUR Design, White Tree, 7Wonders, and Panopt. I found a few that, based on their representation on the map, seemed to be defended by only a single piece of ice.
Thinking about my previous runs and what the runners last night had said, I eliminated a few possibilities. FUTUR Design meant simulants, which meant losing the entire day to the run, not to mention the fact that I wouldn’t be able to hide what I was doing from Gloss and Enrique. So that was a no.
Panopt, I knew, dominated the surveillance industry. I suspected that meant they would have more sophisticated tracing software. I didn’t want this raid coming back to eat me, so I eliminated them, too.
7Wonders pursued Mr. Grid and burned down his home after he had annoyed them enough. It shouldn’t be that dangerous if I just poked around once. Call 7Wonders a possible.
Finally, there was White Tree. They had the information I wanted, somewhere. But I had promised Enrique I’d never run a White Tree server without a breaker. And here I was, thinking about doing exactly that.
The server I eyed looked thick with corporate data, but the ring of ice around it sent and received so little data that I felt like I could get in and out without waking up anything nasty on the net.
Or waking up anyone in the apartment.
I sent the address to the console, and then took hold of the cable attached to it. It still had last night’s jack-out switch spliced to it. Holding the cable near my net port with one hand, I kept my other hand on the switch. I still wasn’t sure how much conscious control I had over my body while I was in netspace, but I felt curiosity and I wanted to prove myself. Quietly.
I plugged the cable into my net port and twisted.
The dark highway felt familiar to me now. The city ahead was bright and deep: a massive tower of R&D. Surely the answers I wanted would be in there, and if not, something pointing to the answers would be. I could see the low ring of ice, fuzzy at this distance and glowing a hot pink.
I could swear I felt my thumb on the jack-out switch. At the first sign of trouble, I promised myself I’d hit it.
Accelerating, I brought my sharp arrowhead avatar near the city. The ice began to rez, its shape and detail becoming clearer until it became a razor-sharp ring-shaped membrane, both gelatinous and hard, with a double line running around its circumference, each line a beveled blade like Grandpa’s old razor blades, hard and bright and set at a different angle than the wall around them.
I willed myself to hit the switch. Nothing happened. I tried to veer my arrowhead away from the ring, but I was moving too fast.
My arrowhead sheared across the wall, the razor cutting straight into me. I felt that shock you get when you realize you’ve cut your hand and see the skin flapping but have not yet felt the pain.
I bolted upright on the couch in the apartment, twisted the cable out of my net port, and pushed all the equipment off my lap. The console’s tiny, three-line display said:
CONNECTION TERMINATED BY SERVER
I was sweating. Suddenly my skin felt very hot. I reached my hand to the back of my neck to wipe away the sweat, but it felt weird. When I looked at my hand, it was dark red with blood.
Without thinking, I wiped it off on my bare chest and leapt off the couch. I looked around. I didn’t want to get Enrique’s furniture all bloody, because then I’d have no choice but to explain myself.
I washed and dried my hands and then tidied away the equipment as best I could. I got into the shower and ran it hot, watching the water run red and then pink and then clear.
Looking at myself in the mirror as I toweled off, I calmed down a little. I was no longer actively bleeding, and couldn’t even locate the cut on my neck or scalp. White Tree ice was weird as hell.
I was fully dressed and sitting on the couch reading a book on paper—a first for me—when Gloss came out of his room. I said nothing but a soft “good morning.” After he’d had time to make himself some tea and work a crossword, I ventured to ask him a question.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
“Does red ice always try to kill the runner?”
“No,” Gloss said. “Most of the time it’s there to scare you or hurt you a little bit. A lot of the time it will even let you into the server. But sometimes it will end the run on its own. Why do you ask?”
“Just curious,” I said.
“Hmmm,” Gloss said, and looked at me from his perch on the counter.
“What about simulant ice?” I said. “Why can you get past them without a breaker?”
“You can pass simulants without a breaker because simulant minds are like ours,” Gloss said. “Simulant ice have limited attention spans and their reactions, while appearing quick to us, are much slower than non-simulant ice. They make up for that by being extremely complex relative to how expensive it is for FUTUR Design to deploy them. Simulant ice are also highly dangerous. They can leave you with a traumatic brain injury that may never fully heal.”
“Really?”
“I’ve seen it happen. It happened to Linney, in fact.”
“She’s so young.”
“She’s the same age you are. And she’s going to carry that trauma for the rest of her life. Now, if I know Linney, and I’d like to think I do, she’s not going to let herself be limited.”
The front door opened and Enrique came in, wearing a three-piece suit and carrying a small grocery bag with celery and broccoli poking out over the top. He set it on the counter.
“I thought you were sleeping,” I said.
“As a matter of fact, I stayed out all night fencing the data you stole yesterday.” He removed the vegetables from the bag and then turned the bag upside down. Three bundles of cash fell out. Enrique picked one up, tossed it to Gloss. He tossed the second to me. I caught it, something sharp and painful running down my arm from the back of my neck. I tried to cover up the wince by running my thumb over the paper money and whistling at its heft.
“That’s 17K right there,” Enrique said. “Keep it safe. Come here.”
I stood and Enrique held out his wrist. I touched mine to his and felt the signature vibration from within that, accompanied by a chartreuse light under my skin: credit transfer successful.
“The other half of your share is in your account,” he said.
I’d never had this much money in my life. My thoughts immediately jumped to my father. He needed to get current on the property tax on the house, which also needed a new water heater.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Enrique said. “Go ahead and share some of it with people you care about. Just don’t tell them anything about where you got it, and don’t spend it all right now. You’ll need to keep some—”
“—to build my rig,” I said as I transferred the money in my account anonymously to my father. “Gloss told me. What’s a rig, anyway? Just my console and icebreakers?”
“Your cybernetic implants and the people you trust are also part of your rig,” Gloss said. “And there are other things, too, out there in the net, not terribly well-understood, but runners have from time to time made alliances with them. Taken together, that’s your rig.”
“Well said, professor,” Enrique said. “Now, kid. It’s time for you to get out of here for a while. Gloss and I have work to do. Go shopping at the gray market bazaar in Mint Hill. Then go talk to Linney about getting a breaker.”
“Why Linney?”
Enrique seemed to enjoy the chance to act fatherly. He put his hands on his hips and gave me a knowing smile. “From watching you two talk last night, you seem similar in temperament. Runners who have similar reason for running the nets and similar approaches can benefit from using similar icebreakers. She’s one of the best coders we’ve ever seen. She’ll steer you right.”
As I moved to the door, I felt some residual pain in my neck and arm. I swore I could feel Enrique’s and Gloss’s eyes on me, swore they knew what I had done.
###
On the streets of Carthage, alone for the first time and with cash in my pocket, I felt free.
Growing up in a tiny town in western Carolina, I didn’t understand how large the megacity of Carthage really was. In the middle of what used to be the state of North Carolina was a ring of small and medium-sized cities about 150 miles across. In the center of that ring were small towns and farms. Then, around the beginning of this century, in the tiny community of Carthage, a startup company working on harnessing the computing power of human brains bought large amounts of old warehouse space for its experiments and operations. The startup drew poor people, eager to earn some money by connecting their brains to the computational pools.
First people came from neighboring towns, and then neighboring counties, and then the cities in the ring, and then people were pouring into tiny Carthage from across the Southeast.
Except Carthage wasn’t so tiny anymore. Massive dormitories were built by 7Wonders to house the people connecting to the pools. Tobacco farms were mowed down and replaced by FUTUR Design’s server farms to handle the pools’ gargantuan throughput. Whole industries sprung up to feed, house, and entertain the workers that kept the pools running, as well as the engineers that were improving the pools, the lawyers defending corps from human-rights lawsuits in state and federal courts, and the executives running the show.
After a bidding war between FUTUR Design and White Tree, leaving five middle managers dead, FUTUR Design bought the startup, and the area the pools occupied became known as the Neurocapital District. It was the center of Carthage.
That innovation—the use of human brains to conduct exascale computational operations less expensively than before—attracted unimaginable money and development. Both FUTUR Design and White Tree moved their North American operations to the Neurocapital District. As a result, Carthage became the fastest-growing city in United States history, and within seventy years had swallowed every other city within 200 miles. With so much farmland and so many forests razed for the new urban developments, the old downtown cores became vertical farms to feed the new towers rising above them.
Enrique lived in Old Charlotte, in a neighborhood called Optimist Park that had seen better days. On the way to find the bazaar—last night, the CheRRy had called it a “runner mall”—in Mint Hill, I took the metro but, feeling some morbid curiosity, stopped first in the rundown area where yesterday’s crash space was located.
I approached along the street opposite from the old apartment building that contained the crash space. From two blocks away, I could tell something was wrong. There were vans blocking the street and barricades set up. As I neared the building, I saw that plastic tunnels had been built at the entrance and snaked out toward the vans. There was plastic on all the windows of the building. People in white sterile suits moved in and out of the tunnel. No corporate or government logos were visible on the vans or the suits. Feeling sick to my stomach, I kept walking until I reached the next metro station, then hustled down and held my wrist to the fare processor. Safely anonymous on the train, I huddled in my blazer. I felt strangely cold.
As I exited the Mint Hill metro, that sense of cold was replaced by something far chillier: I felt my neck prickle. I had the strong sense that someone was following me. Not wanting to look behind myself, I tried to catch reflections in shop windows, but couldn’t tell.
I was learning to trust my instincts and my instincts told me I was in danger. But I was just learning to fight in netspace. By comparison, my skills in meatspace were nil.
In the distance was the tech bazaar, built into an old parking ramp. I upped my pace. Maybe the bazaar would keep me safe. No one was going to attack me in public, right?
Gloss’s Encyclopedia of Ice
Name
Blank
Manufacturer
Various
Cost to rez
Minimal
Nguyen-Okafor complexity
0
Type
Platform
Subtype
None
Subroutines
Stops a run