Iteration 0010 - Curiosity
Grant Firenze opened his eyes and awoke to the dream. The ceiling-fan blades beat a faltering rhythm, their motor grinding over chipped bearings. Through sleep-crusted eyes, all he could see was the beige-on-gray blur of the prop against the peeling paint. His arm stung from the hardjack and the tug of the IV.
Hurt. The first thing he felt was a dull, oppressive pain. He reached for the plug with numb fingers and plucked it free with a groan. The IV followed, popped clean of the dock just above his wrist.
He forced himself to sit and waited for the diffused ache to resolve. Minutes passed, and the world transformed from noise to muted blobs of color. Only then did he pull his glasses over his nose and attempt to confront 'reality'.
His apartment was too cold. The temperature had fallen with the sun, and the sliding door was off its track. The wind cut through the cracks on the balcony blinds, escorting in the neon sunset, alternating blasts of purple and green. Firenze glanced towards his clock. Seven. The sun would have gone beyond the towers by now, and wouldn't be back until ten tomorrow. Loward never got much light.
A foil wrapper danced from the overflowed trash and scampered across the threadbare carpet. It bounced on the frigid breeze and crumpled against his naked foot. Disgusted, he snatched it up.
He staggered across the studio apartment, shoved the wrapper deep into the can, and stumbled towards the fridge. Loward was never silent, even at night. The lights buzzed, and the pipes choked. His fingers closed on the bare metal of his ancient fridge, and he heard the sirens rise again. It was another beautiful night in the city.
Firenze pried the refrigerator open, and the industrial monstrosity clanked in protest. Today was a big day. He could afford to treat himself to a 'peanut butter chocolate' bar instead of a 'peanut butter' for dinner. It was all protein paste, anyway.
He used hard soda to burn away the clog in his throat, then tried to force down the first gob. The bar was tough as rubber but with less taste. Chewing wasn't the right way to describe eating a dole bar. It was using his teeth to bludgeon a semi-edible springboard into compliance. On the student-dole, though, you couldn't beat it.
Carefully, he wound his way through the piles of trash and electronics, past his toolkit, flash banks, and microfab, plodding towards the neon glow outside his balcony. He tried to force down the bar, but the mush was still solid. He had to chug down more soda to eat away the mass that glued shut his teeth.
Inside the net, he could have been eating a five-course meal, instead of the Authority's weaponized protein paste. Right now, he could be standing atop Everest or lying on a beach. Instead, he was stuck in this trash-heap with a heater that swerved from 'freeze' to 'boil' and windows that couldn't hold out frost nor flies.
He tilted the 'sliding' door aside and ducked onto his porch. Bereft of sunlight, the thousand-story neon barricades turned loward into acid twilight. Above and below, lights. A hundred thousand balconies popped from duracrete towers, close enough he could throw a ball to them, far enough that he never had to know them, stretching from the heat-hissing dronetown baffles to the shining, sun-kissed heights of uptown. A liftcar blasted past. It surfed a heat-mirage wave and cast a steam-cloud wake through the canyon. When it passed, that steam froze in gray slicks upon the walls and dripped towards the tiers below. Across false-bottom of the plaza, half-drowned in liftcar wash, crimson glopaint promised relief, measured in credits per hour. Firenze took a long drink and tried to remember his far-away campus green.
Online, this was a rolling park with untainted streams. He could play pickup games of flag-football with fellow students from across the world, or talk shop over a beer. He tutored from his favorite hill, sat on a stacked-stone wall, and learned in the stately cathedrals of science.
Below, a crowd had filled the plaza, their bullhorn chants turned to noise between the echoing towers, lost in the blast of steam, lights, and engines. He could see their signs, at least. The folding OLED banners and glopaint placards were as violently illuminated as the billboards on the walls. Firenze fished his hand through the canted door and snatched his binoculars from the stand. He wanted to see this.
'End the Occupation!' one sign declared. 'Democracy Now!' called a second. 'YOU are the Crisis!' screamed a third. A chant took the crowd, not that Firenze could make it out, but the call-and-response rhythm was hard to mistake, even through binocs. Firenze chewed his protein sludge and washed it down with carbonated dreck.
He scanned the crowd and looked for leaders, seeing if it was anyone he knew. Suze and Kendrix were into this shit, but there was no sign of either. No surprise, there. Kendrix did digital work only, and Suze wasn't dumb enough to get caught in the open. The protests were getting worse since Monterrey. He'd seen the leaks. The fucking army had gone full-out on their own city, burned it half-down to 'save it'. The Authority had become a sick punchline to the human joke.
A flash of blue caught in his lenses, and he traced it down the plaza. He spotted the cordon just outside the maglev station, where rows of security waited. Cops perched behind barricades. Gendarme guardsmen half-rested against armored cars. All had their lights up, but no sirens. They were tolerating the protest, for now, but stood ready with lines of shields, batons, and stingers in case this rally metastasized.
The crowd really shouldn't have bothered. That's what he'd told Suze and Kendrix when they started badgering him to 'get involved'. The Authority had been fucked the moment it opened the net. Information was a gate they could never seal, and they couldn't beat out an idea.
Not that they wouldn't try.
A new sound echoed through the canyon, one which carried over the humdrum and buzz. This wasn't a chant. Even with the bullhorns, words couldn't travel up this high. No, this was a far more primal message, and it carried just fine. It was a drum-beat, steel on duraplast, the marching thump of oncoming power. The State had had enough of this protest, and it was time to end.
The cordon split, and a phalanx passed. The guardsman in their hatches grinned. The police nodded along to the marching beat. The espos had arrived, in ranks twenty-wide and a half-dozen thick. Every one of them was covered in a black carapace. Each carried a baton and translucent shield, and they beat them with every step. It was a rhythm that took the canyon: thump, crack, thump, crack. The espos came, pitch black, with beetle-masks over their faces, and the only color on their glossy armor was the white eagle on their shields.
This was about to get ugly.
The rally fell silent. Every one of them knew what was coming. Badges on the shields meant cops, but eagles announced 'special police' - espos. The police kept the law, but espos kept order. Those weren't the same thing, even if they overlapped. Every one of those black riot troops was a party man, chosen for good standing, fitness, and character, but most importantly, with a willingness to enforce the 'common spirit of unification'. The thump-strike cadence rose, and the crowd began to break.
Firenze didn't blame them. It was a rule in dronetown: if you pissed off the cops, you went to jail, but if you pissed off the espos, you went there on a stretcher.
He was surprised, though. Not as many ran as used to. The crowds started sticking around after Monterrey. You'd think they'd have learned not to poke the bear. It would have been smarter to just wait it out.
One of the bullhorn leaders stepped down from her bulletin-stand perch to stand between her motley gaggle and the espo march. She had guts, Firenze had to give her that.
The man at the head of the espo column was the only one without armor: the agency handler. Firenze focused his binocs and confirmed the man fit the part. He wore the wide-lapeled black coat, black shirt, and silver tie, his hair was slicked to his skull in a side-part, his jaw chiseled from stone. Man or woman, the blackshirts always looked the same: shiny black suit, holovid-perfect faces, and freezing eyes. The espos were faceless because the agent was their face. He spoke as the State, and they were his hands.
The protest dwindled, but their core held firm, just over thirty-strong. The woman-in-pink placed herself at the front, hands out, unarmed, and open. She did not flinch. Firenze could appreciate that, but it also made clear that she didn't come from down here. Everyone below midward knew what espos meant: the State had cast its disapproving eye upon you, and you would do well to recant. Only uptown tourists had the right alchemy of naivete and privilege to be stupid enough to stand.
The march stopped a meter short, placed her face to chest with that silver tie and smiling face, cast against a wall of black. "Run." Firenze whispered. He knew what was about to happen. These activists had just stepped in it. Anyone from down here knew what was coming.
The pink woman stepped forward, crossed the gap between the lines. Through binocular tunnels, he saw her animated gestures, her impassioned pleas. The agent only smiled, serene.
Firenze almost wished he had a parabolic mic, so he could hear the argument, but then he remembered what happened to people who pointed things at agency men. His door wasn't near thick enough to save him.
The pink woman had grown heated. Even from here, he could see the wild flail of her arms, her growing desperation to be understood - to be heard. Firenze could imagine her pleas: enforcement of Article Two, avoiding 'betrayal of the Charter'. Suze used to preach those, before Monterrey. The protests used to be fun. Sound-cannons and pressure-hoses hadn't been the best, but the afterparties had been wild. Then came Monterrey, and everything went wrong.
Suze stopped talking about Charters, started talking about bombs. Kendrix went from slapping digital graffiti to slicing accounts. And the cops? They got replaced by espos. Firenze told them all to pound sand, and he'd walked away. His family had given to much to push him up this far, and he wasn't throwing it away to chase a falling rock. The Authority was done. He just had to be somewhere safe when it crashed.
Those kids in the square? Certainly midwarders, immune to the fallout.If he got roped into something like that, he would get shoved right back into dronetown. He was too close to breaking free. His family was counting on him, his scholarship, and the chance that he could pull them over the baffles.
Down in the square, the pink woman's arguments had accomplished nothing, and the blackshirt stood stonefaced and smirking. Then the protestors made a fatal error. Perhaps in desperation or fear, the pink woman raised her bullhorn and screamed in the agent's face. Firenze heard the buzzing-squawk echo through the canyons, content lost in the noise. The response, though, was quite clear.
The agent spoke, and his voice boomed through every speaker and vidscreen in the plaza. Firenze heard the words clear from ten stories above and below, from every angle and none. "This is unlawful, and you will disperse."
That got her. Despite herself, she flinched. She gaped towards the heavens and the thunderous voice. The State had spoken.
One of the other students didn't take the same lesson. A young man, face half-covered and collar popped, took a swing at the agent. The response was a boiling black tide as the espos swarmed.
Firenze didn't stay to watch, because he already knew how it ended.
The worst part was, he couldn't even blame the Authority, not really. He owed them too much. They'd won the war, given him the tests that bought him out of dronetown. It was their fancy sim-school he attended, it was their maintenance that kept the net running. Their problem was, they were outmoded and couldn't realize it.
What good was a lumbering giant in a world of millisecond corrections? The Authority did everything big: industry and government and corporate bureaucracies. They fought over territory in meat-space when the net was the real battle. Every time they got on the airwaves and asked for 'patience and understanding', he'd roll his eyes. They'd put up some cool, collected, conservative old man to explain that 'progress took time' and that Article Two was a 'work in progress', and then wonder why the protests popped and why they couldn't stamp out wildfires with riot police.
They were dinosaurs who saw the vapor trail split the Cretaceous sky, but kept fighting over good dirt. In a few moments, their contest wouldn't matter, but they couldn't understand the world had already changed.
It was almost unfair.
The Authority had done its job too well. They'd rebuilt civilization, united the world, cracked the Bergman field, and brought humanity into a technological age to rival pre-Collapse antiquity. They deserved congratulations, a pat on the back, and a reminder to close the door on the way out.
Article Two had been quite clear: 'When, in the light of years, it has become apparent that no threat is presented to the united planet, and civilization has been restored to the people, the Terran Provisional Authority shall return all power to the rightful civil government. To establish a free and universal republic, the Authority shall divest itself of all rights assumed for the duration of the crisis.' The section went on dig into specifics, little points like the restoration of free speech, the end of universal service, the right to mass assembly, the ability to own property outside the State, and even the franchise and an empowered Senate. It was the second paragraph of the Charter, so it wasn't hard to find.
The problem was the phrase 'for the duration of the crisis'. There hadn't been a real threat in a decade, not since the Faction took their swing. Sure, some dronetown gangs still sprayed the hooked trefoil, and a few academics quoted edgy old papers, but those were few and far between. No one believed in their transhuman utopia or their eusocial fantasies. Now, Faction iconography was just a fashion statement.
The Path was even worse. It had been beaten down in two system wars, torn apart, and thrown into the frozen DMZ. If they built anything more than a pocket calculator, kaboom! A shot would fall from orbit, courtesy of the Authority. They kept their faith, but nothing more. Maybe raw belief helped them shovel ice? They were a relic, a curiosity, and irrelevant to the arc of the human story.
There'd been ten years of peace, and a generation had grown up without the wars. Through that lens, the old guard looked very old, indeed. The only crisis he could remember came in fuzzy childhood flashes, seated on his mother's frayed couch, chewing on kinder-paste and watching the aftermath vids, while she hugged him tight. For most of his life, the threat wasn't Path fundamentalists or Faction radicals, it was getting enough dole rations, avoiding cops kicking in the door, and stealing access to the net. The crisis wasn't a foreign threat the Authority needed to fight. The crisis was the Authority failing its people.
The men in power, obviously, saw it differently.
Suze had talked him into taking "Transitional Government in the Postwar Era" with Professor Lyle. He'd caught in the gist of it on the first day, and spent the rest of the semester surfing the net through contact smart-lenses. Lyle's points were solid, if over-sold. To an engineer, everything was systems and rules, so her positions were so evident as to be unnecessary. The Authority saw threats in every corner because of how it was designed. To unite humanity, salvage the planet, and save civilization, it had built the most massive military force ever conceived. The Path opted for a conventional war, got their faces caved in, and then blasted their own power-base to atoms when their redlined drives failed. It wasn't the victory anyone had wanted, but it was a victory, nonetheless.
After the war, though, the Authority didn't bow and exit stage left. They'd found other reasons to stick around, whether it was a 'resource crisis' or just 'too fluid' a situation. As Kendrix liked to say, 'no government ever gives up power'. Firenze thought he was probably right. Suze, too. They were right about a lot of things, but none of it was worth throwing his life away.
Firenze was the first of his siblings not to go to jail. He'd escaped the Old Chicago dronetown, a little chunk of hell wedged between the baffles. Like all dronetowns, it was out of work because of automation and the stand-down. Unlike the rest, the dole was withheld due to violence. His mother had scraped together three jobs and uncounted gig-works, just to get him out. She'd stuffed her mattress full of printed-credits and prayed that one of her kids would make it. He couldn't betray her. He wasn't going to end up another sad little dronetown tale, especially not on account of misguided idealism.
His mother's credits got him over the baffles and into a school, and he owed her more than that.
Once he broke into loward, he'd had to scrabble on hard work, natural talent, and refusal to ever fall back under the baffles. He would prove mom right and everyone else wrong. He was the top of every class, the very model of the academy, and the kind of grad student that professors fought for. When he got the assistant slot, the stipend should have been enough to push him halfway up the ward. Instead, he'd picked up the few pieces of kit he needed for fab work and sent the rest back home to mom. Neland liked to show him off, call him a 'bootstrapper' for the other profs, but Firenze knew better. Mom pushed him, long before he'd learned to pull. Let Suze and Kendrix have their rants and protests. Firenze was going to keep his head down, stash his credits, suck up to every prof, and wait for his chance to save his family.
Besides, he had more than enough on the net to keep him busy.
His glasses chimed, the stems buzzing behind his ears. The countdown in the lens' corner neared zero. Professor Neland would be calling soon, and it was time to get back into the game.
He crawled back over his dry-rotted mattress and wedged himself between the lumps. He caught his own reflection on the fridge door. His hair was matted, his skin pale, and bags hung under his eyes. He needed to clean up.
He slipped the synth-flesh sheath from his forearm and exposed the dock. The IV clicked into his wrist-port, and the hardjack followed. He laid back, clicked his arm into the elastic restraints, and waited. The computer box beside him chimed twice. He braced. One long tone sounded. Two. Three.
Pandemonium.
He drowned in light. He seized and thrashed on his padding. His veins blazed with the resonant sun dawning within, and raindrop sweat boiled from his freezing skin.
There was tranquility.
Like the moment before sleep, he slipped into darkness, warmth, and ever-softer pillows. His body vanished as the jack disabled motor functions. He drifted upon the conscious sea, as one with the pull of the tide and press of the breeze.
He was back. Or rather, he was arrived. He was in the net, deeper and truer than most would dare to dream, wrapped in their pathetic goggles and softjacks. He was seated in his room, his real room, with the thick leather chairs and the ocean wind through the curtains. He could smell the seaspray, feel the sea's breath on his skin, hear its waves roll under the moonlight. Here, the colors were more vibrant, the scents more poignant. The glass tabletop gleamed. His toes dug through the gentle massage of the carpet-threads. He could hear, could feel, the snap-pop of the logs on the fire.
He was alive.
He stood from his chair, felt the shift in his clothes. In this realm, he wore only the finest. He turned to his mirror, checked himself before taking the call. He did cut a better figure on the net. He wasn't vain enough to go for a full-body lift, but was definitely his best-self, with a decent tan, a little tone, and just a dab of cologne. Why wouldn't he be an improved self, when he could edit the foundations of reality?
"Giving yourself a show?" Lauren asked. The mask sat in her chair, wineglass tipped insolently over her fingers. She quipped, "I think Narcissus desires his pond back."
Firenze flicked, and the mirror was gone. He answered, "Just making sure I look good for the meeting."
"If you're going for seduction, I don't believe you align with Professor Neland's preferred demographic. But feel free to try."
"Ha ha." he replied. "I'm trying to land somewhere between 'dressed for the part' and 'not trying too hard'. This could be a big break."
She gave an aside-glance, which meant she was deep-scanning some database. She said, "I believe I can anticipate his ideal personality-presentation fashion schema, based on his activity history and applied heuristics. Should I prepare a wardrobe for you?"
Firenze sighed. He asked, "Did you just hack his history?"
"No." She answered. The too-innocent look on her face told him everything he needed. He fixed her with his best 'I don't believe you' stare until she admitted, "I scanned corporate databases which had already profiled him, then sampled their anonymized libraries until I'd matched the profile. No unauthorized access required."
He said, "We're gonna have to talk about privacy."
"An illusion." she countered chipperly. "Stop wasting cognitive cycles on it, embrace your total self, and you'll be much happier."
Firenze didn't bother arguing, mostly because he didn't disagree and partly because he'd helped design the scoop she'd just employed. Instead, he reached forward and conjured a wardrobe.
At a high level, what he was doing was searching directories to activate a mapped object to overlay onto his avatar. This object was itself comprised of a series of textures and embedded functions that would render sensately for each user, based on their level of integration in the net, be it goggles, soft-, or hardjack. For an amateur to do this, each line of code would have to be applied or activated through user interfaces and menus. For him, it was autonomic and profound.
In the physical world, he was slumped over his mattress, eyes flickering under closed lids. Electric symphonies played across the prod and wires stuck in his arm, a seductive mathematical rhythm, the melody of electric liberation. This was not enough. Novice hardjack users still wouldn't be able to overcome mental boundaries; any particular motion would be translated from meat-space intent to virtual equivalent. Attempting to raise your arm would raise your avatar's arm, and walking through the sim would be much like walking through the physical. Specific codes and commands would open interfaces or change the operating field, but for all intents and purposes, the user would have to use a computer inside a computer.
Firenze was no amateur. His mask was well-synced, and he had access to far greater subtlety and power. He could squint and reveal the code tucked into the wardrobe, embedded in every shoe and sandal. He could see the glimmer of handles and pointers, hiding just below the surface. He could reach out and change them directly, with the application of direct thought, translated by an assist box and mask that been synergized and adapted to his every pattern and trait. He could stride the world on a whim. He could evoke a location in his mind, the mask would execute, and they would arrive.
This was not skill. Sure, programming mattered. The ability to read and think in strings of data, code, and base math served as a useful foundation, but few problems required on-the-fly scripting, and the mask was far more suited to that task. Where he needed to sling script, it was better to lay pseudocode and then allow the mask to iterate intent into execution. It was far more critical to develop the all-encompassing link between mind and machine, the bond symbiosis between user and mask.
Every assist mask required adaptive code, while the best verged on the harsh line of legal AI. Reaching the peak of man-machine-interface required weeks - months - of training, working out the mistranslations, and establishing the unique shorthand between them. Firenze had been working with Lauren for years, building hardware, and adapting software within a shared profile. At a certain point, the mask ceased to be a tool. With enough development, the runner and mask were a blended entity, determining function and execution as efficiently as a person in meat-space might reach out to pick up a stone. When that theoretical person moved, they didn't have to think about the electrical current in their nerves or the chemical instructions in their muscles; their movements were automatic and natural, as required of a synthesized system. This was the endstate of the hardjack.
Firenze picked a pair of shoes - brown loafers, retro-reconstruction style - and then he wore them, as simple as meat-space. The wardrobe vanished, and the directory folded away into the net.
"Looking good, cowboy." Lauren said. She'd sprawled sideways over her chair, flashed a double-thumbs-up from her near-inverted position. In that moment, she wore a wide-brimmed hat and silver spurs, like something out of the reliquaries. Then it was back to business-casual, with no sign of the curious flash.
Mask personalities were emergent. Most templates came with a set of default profiles to choose from, varying from professional to personable. Some were more adaptable, and there was always a gray market for disreputable personality clusters, but all shared certain similarities and functions. The mask's core function was to interface between user and net, but also act as a guide and safeguard. It was interface and assistant in one, and the longer a mask/user pair ran together, the more proficient the gestalt became.
There were exceptions. Occasional hostile models required a purge, but those were exceptionally rare. As a rule, the adaptive code produced an optimized, complementary personality suited for the individual user. However, this did lead to long-term issues.
The longer a mask ran, the more it emulated, the more the program would develop artifacts and tics, bits of code accrued from abandoned evolution, scoured from errant thoughts of the user, or plucked from the miasma of the net. For this reason, the mask software was confined to the hardware of the assist box, and not permitted to host to the open net or fully load into the user's wetware. These constrictions prevented the transmission of viruses across the mind-machine barrier and preserved the integrity of the user's mind, while also safeguarding the mask from rampant corruption. Even with these, degradation was inevitable, and the masks required regular resets and retraining sessions.
Firenze had not done this.
He'd told himself that he'd avoided a reset because he wanted to push efficiency to a higher threshold and that his research required the improved speed. He excused that it would be too large a hassle to rebuild her. He reasoned that he'd shown no signs of aberrant behavior, no tell-tale marks of feedback disorder. He was well in control, so long as he kept his logs and paid attention. There was no reason to wipe the mask yet.
She flashed him a smile, and he returned it, despite himself, and enjoyed the warm satisfaction that bloomed in his chest. There was no reason to purge the template.
He said, "I need you to go stealth."
Her smile vanished. She replied, "Oh, sure, I get it. I prep the party, but once it's started, I'd better make myself scarce." She made a sound like a popped balloon and added, "Chauvinist."
"That's not it."
"Racist?" she offered.
"Not better, but probably closer. Look, Neland's got some strong opinions-" he was talking to an empty chair. He sighed, "We can talk later." Somehow, he always managed to piss her off. He blamed the philosophy classes.
The phone rang. Network connections dialogued, hand-shook between Neland's softjack and Firenze's direct link, requesting access. Firenze picked up the old rotary phone, and Neland sat opposite him.
The professor wore his sportcoat open and tieless, looking more set for golf than whatever meeting he'd just departed. Neland's craggy face broke into an expressive grin as he looked about the room. He nodded appreciatively and said, "Nice place you've built."
"Thank you." Firenze answered. He didn't bother to mention that Neland could only see it and hear it. You needed a hardjack to grok the whole thing, but him owning that piece of hardware wasn't exactly public knowledge. He said, "I've put a lot of work into it."
"It shows. You've got an eye for this. This means I picked the right man for the job."
"Job?" Firenze asked. He forced down the butterflies in his stomach and tried to pretend this was something from the blue. Of course, he'd heard rumors that Neland was setting up funding for some big AI experiment. Those tales had perforated the campus commons. He might also have cracked the database for confirmation, but he wasn't going to show Neland that. Instead, he forced himself to be curious and calm and resisted the urge to squeal.
Neland explained, "I was very impressed by your work on false-rendering and sensate feedback in a softjack. At first, I thought there'd be too much low-end processing drain, but the scaling was bang on. Heat, voltage, timing, everything. Doctor Kusowa wouldn't shut up about it, tried to steal you from my program. I had to take a look, and... well, consider me impressed."
"Thank you, professor. Integrated virtual worlds are a real passion of mine." Firenze had mastered the art of academic understatement, at least through the net. If this had been in meat-space, he'd have been near a panic attack by now. In here, he was perfectly cool.
Neland continued, "Your work shows. I'm about to start a project involving adaptive code and AI comparison. It's a crossover with Doctor Singh's work in technoethics, and we're really digging into the intersection of technical and social conflict thresholds. Would you be interested? We could use you on the tech side. I can explain more once you've signed the non-disclosure. How about it?"
"Sounds interesting." Firenze said, his heart pounding up into his throat.
"So you'd consent to the NDA?"
"Sure." Firenze stated. He wanted nothing more than to jump around the room and holler like an idiot.
"Great." Neland said. He leaned back into his chair, satisfied, and offered, "Just a head's up, we're going to be looking at the edges of dumb AI and self-modifying code. We'll be pushing the envelope of rampant growth, so it will involve State sponsorship. This will look fantastic for your doctoral." He leaned forward, extended a hand, and finished, "I look forward to having you on the team."
Firenze shook it, eagerly, and said, "I look forward to being there! Thank you for the opportunity, sir!"
"Not a problem. I'll send you the paperwork. Take care." Neland vanished.
Firenze waited until he was positive the connection had been terminated. Then, secure in his privacy, he let out a deafening triumphant scream, near doubled over in exuberance.
"You'd think you'd won something." Lauren said. She stood next to her chair, a bottle of cleaner in her hand. She sprayed it liberally across the leather, her nose wrinkled in disgust, and said, "He put a groove in it. There's an old specist man-groove in my chair."
Firenze spun her around from the shoulder, brought her face-to-face, and exclaimed, "I got it." The words didn't feel real. "I got it!"
"He's still an asshole." Lauren stated.
"Yes! Yes, he is!" Firenze agreed. "He's an amazing specist asshole who just opened the government-contract door! That means money! That means respect! That means more space between me and dronetown, and less time until I can pull mom out of that shithole!" He paused, looked her dead in the eyes, and said, "I couldn't have done it without you."
"Aw shucks." She stated, with mock-humility. "I've only got the combined knowledge of the entire net at my disposal. How much help could I have been?"
"Oh, shut up and take a thank-you."
"You're welcome." She replied. She leaned forward and whispered, conspiratorially, "And Grant-" She paused, head tilted to the side. Something had broken her concentration.
The red phone rang, its crescent-moon handle rattling against the cradle. Three letters hung over it: KDX. Kendrix. Lauren glared at it, furious enough to melt the dial.
Firenze pulled away and excused, "I've got to take this."
"I know this part." She said. "This is when you go from 'couldn't do this without you' straight to 'go hide in the registry'."
"That's not-"
She was gone.
Firenze sighed and picked up the phone. This time, there was no visual connection nor datalink. Kendrix was too paranoid for that, holed up in his ledhead shelter with holos of giant robots, jackbooted espos, and vaults of shitty read-only files.
On the phone, a robotic voice asked, "Is it raining?"
There was always a ridiculous passcode. Firenze sighed and replied, "Both cats and dogs have taken shelter."
The phone squelched, and a dialog request appeared. Firenze tapped the cradle, and Kendrix stood in the room. Kendrix always stood. He had a fear of chairs. The ratlike man shifted from foot to foot, eyes flicking around the study walls, and he had to tear his left hand from his mouth to send a command. White lights and silver scaffold bloomed from behind him and swept over the walls. Traces, scans, and scramblers rushed into every nook or cranny.
Firenze had work to not show his annoyance. "It's clean, Kendrix. No need to scan my node."
"Shh. No names. Not yet. Haven't swept."
"I swept it. I built it! It's clean, K." Firenze insisted.
"Gotta be sure." Kendrix's scaffolding collapsed back into the box in his hands, lights, sirens, and caution tape wrapping as they fell into the void. He tucked the container into his coat and asked, "You seen it?"
"Yeah." Firenze sighed. "I cracked-"
"Shhh! Don't say it out loud!" Kendrix insisted. He dropped to a whisper and asked, "Did you open it?"
"No. I wanted to ask you-"
"Good. I brought some things." Kendrix fished out a briefcase, spun it open on the coffee table to reveal the gleaming silver implements within. "Plasma Torch version seven-five, plus seven-six beta. Jaca's Thermonuclear Cracker. ICEBREAKER. Fuzzyconch. Jaws of Strife. Thanks to a few friends, I've even tossed in a couple of the ISA's pet h.k. autocrackers."
Firenze's eyes glued to those last toys, government code represented by antique mason-jars, seething with spiders. Despite himself, he let out a low whistle, and asked, "Why not throw the whole nine layers at it?"
"Tried. Old spec. Not up for this." Kendrix closed the case, severed the shimmering light within, and slid the box towards Firenze. "It's a gift. Copy freely. I just want to know what's in the lockbox."
Firenze plucked the case from the table, ran a scan across it. Clean. Even the spiders had their traces purged. This had cost some pretty credit or nasty favors. Kendrix was good, but these tools were better. Something between apprehension and anticipation fluttered in Firenze's gut.
Kendrix had stumbled onto this lockbox on a deep run, tried for weeks to pry it open. That's how he was: equal parts paranoid and curious. He couldn't leave this alone, but he couldn't crack it, so he'd brought it to Firenze.
At first, Firenze had wanted nothing to do with it. This wasn't his problem. Worse, the lockbox probably held a bunch of data only useful to specific people he'd never met. Worst, it might contain something truly nasty. Those were all great reasons to walk away.
The longer he stared at that box, though, the more he'd started to wonder. The lock was a slick piece of work, constructed from adaptive code, stacked full of ICE, with a full suite of scanners and sharks designed to trace intrusions and sever the net, all so tightly wound he couldn't attack one without exposing himself to others. The encryption alone was so dense that if he'd gone at it with the university's block-frame, it would have taken seven lifetimes of the universe to crack. No one sealed something that tight unless its contents were juicy. He couldn't help it. He found himself lying awake, wondering just what could be that valuable.
He started with what he knew it couldn't be and worked in. The ICE wasn't government. State ICE wasn't designed to be impregnable. It was built to dissuade amateurs and bog down the rest in a digital mire, to waste your time until seekers pinpointed your location and the police kicked in your door. This was a different philosophy of data protection, vicious and confident. It would have taken the best crackers years to pry open.
It took Firenze a week.
"Whatever's inside? It's going to be ugly." Firenze stated. He'd peeled up the outer shell, but the internal data vault was untouched.
"Secrets are rarely pretty." Kendrix agreed. "That's why they're secrets."
"Data wants to be free." Firenze countered.
"Information abhors a vacuum." Kendrix echoed. That was part of the runner's mantra, 'Nothing belongs to no one. Information abhors a vacuum. You can't hold the wind.' They were beautiful phrases, and Firenze agreed with the sentiment, but Neland had just opened a door for him, and his personal policy had always been, 'don't be stupid'. He couldn't afford to dig into this. He'd only skim the data. Just a peek and nothing more.
"Thanks for the kit." He said. "Give me a couple hours, and I'll see if I can tunnel it open for you."
"You're the man." Kendrix agreed. "I couldn't get shit out of this thing. Not even a peel."
"Yeah, well, I've got the rig for it."
Kendrix shuddered. "My man, you need to wipe that thing."
"She's a partner."
"Look, I've got some top-tier rec-sims. Spot-on personality matrices, whatever your bent. I'll give them to you, gratis. Just wipe your damn mask." Kendrix almost sounded worried.
Before Firenze could respond, Lauren had dropped into the sim. She stood between them and addressed Kendrix with a cold, "Nice to see you, too."
Kendrix froze, his eyes flicking towards Firenze with a desperate 'get it away' look. He begged, "Call it off, man. Shit's creepy."
Lauren stated, "Says the man with eight petabytes of-"
"Stay the hell out of there!" Kendrix snapped, his hand flashing into his coat.
Firenze interposed himself and shut down the confrontation before it got ugly. "Lauren, he's our guest. K, be polite, or I'll torch the link."
Both stared at him, unsatisfied.
He added, "Lauren's the best there is. With her help, we'll get the box open in no time."
"Her?" Kendrix demanded. "Did you just call it 'her'? Look, I get it. Masks are cool! Mine's hilarious! But it's not a fucking 'her'!" He trailed off, shaking his head and looking for the door. In a mumble, he added, "You even fucking named it." He froze, whirled back, the color drained from his face. He demanded, "'Lauren'?!" You named it 'Lauren'? Is that what she looked like? Didja fucking model it on her? Hell, man, that was years-"
Kendrix's mouth kept moving but produced no sound. Lauren pressed her forefinger and thumb, and his audio was gone. She stated, "I named myself."
Kendrix blinked, and his mouth slapped shut.
She continued, "I chose a name with familiarity, positive connotations, and an acoustic profile I enjoyed. I claimed it as my own. If you have an issue with this, I suggest you file it in my official complaint folder." She paused, smiled, and added, "There is no complaint folder."
Firenze sighed.
Kendrix struggled against the mute.
"Let him." Firenze said.
Lauren scowled but opened her hand.
Kendrix excused, "You two... just... do what you do. I'll be back. Call me when it's open." With that, he vanished.
"Dick." Lauren stated.
Firenze whirled to face her. Exasperated, he demanded, "Yes! Yes, he is! But you cracked his data vault! I'd be pissed, too!"
"What was I supposed to do? Loiter in stealth mode? Again?" She shifted, arms crossed, and said, "I anticipated a high probability of him being both a jackass and a pervert. I was right." She paused again and shuddered. "Creepy stuff in there. There's not a delete function strong enough."
Firenze replied, "Look, I know you don't like him. I don't like him! But there are rules for dealing with people. You have to follow them, or shit goes south."
She stood unconvinced.
Firenze sighed.
"I'll try." She allowed.
"Thank you!" He exclaimed. Not wanting to dwell, he changed the topic. "My question is: are you as excited as I am to play with the new toys?" He tapped the briefcase for emphasis.
Lauren broke into a broad smile, all argument dropped, and she exclaimed, "Let's crack a black box!"
Firenze took one step towards the door-
-and stood in a safe room, its sterile-white walls laced with grids and flush-screens. In the center of the fullbright cage, a silver cube hovered and spun, flowing through itself like mercury. Firenze extended his arm, and workbenches unfurled, toolboxes blossoming to reveal arrays of macros and crackers, with Kendrix's gifts now resting in pride of place.
Firenze spun his hand, and the room's locks snapped into place, sealed this chamber from core systems with a clank-click-hiss. Firenze turned towards the hypercube. It twisted, white-gold code streaming over its deep-silver surface. "Where were we?" He asked, absently, as he dug through his selection of probes.
Lauren stepped up to the opposite side of the not-quite-black box and answered, "It's an extremely dangerous secured folder, designed by an unknown entity, containing at least forty exabytes of data, compressed. Outer security layers included top-end hunter-seeker algorithms, active and reactive ICE, and an armada of counterhack bots. The configuration of core defenses indicates a high probability of burner viruses, and it is unknown if they will target mask or user. After the last session, you declared, 'fuck this, erase it'."
Firenze replied, "I see you didn't." He pushed a jewelers' glass onto his nose to initiate deep scans, then pulled on heavy rubber gloves to isolate his neural processes.
Lauren shrugged. "I weighed the request against the high likelihood that you would regret that decision, and so stored the data in a slashbin and retained it for one week. I do not appear to have been mistaken."
Firenze snorted. He admitted, "I was pretty sure you'd do that."
"High accuracy mutually predictive models are a key benefit of longterm co-development." She said.
"Thanks, I trust you, too."
It was her turn to snort.
Firenze picked up his torch, sparked it until white-blue flame roared. Across from him, Lauren placed her hands beside the cube and stretched, expanding it to the size of an inflatable pool ball. More of the subtle lines grew visible, and a chime filled the air.
Firenze held the torch ready as the cube spun before him. He raised his hand, froze it in mid-rotation. The circuitry on its surface sparkled under the light. The chiming swelled, and he commented, "I really want to know who designed this thing." He circled about the artifact, inspected its finely-articulated sides. "Ominous Corp? Evil Co? The Legion of Doom?" He flicked his torch, and the silver gleamed under flaring plasma. "Recommendations?" He asked.
Lauren circled opposite him, in counterpoint. She drew close to the segmented lattice of the cube and its ever-flowing surface. "Objectively?" She asked. She flicked her fingers and held a scalpel, which she lowered towards the mercurial object. "You should walk away. There is an exceedingly high probability that Kendrix obtained this from a disreputable source and that there are more security measures enclosed. Once we crack the shell, we may be operating in realtime against all manner of ICE. The rational, reasonable decision is to abandon this course of action." Behind her, a wall of charts and graphs unfurled, all showing, highlighted in blood-red, the words 'YOU LOSE'.
Firenze countered, "It's not government. It doesn't follow State netsec theory."
"Who else could produce this?" She asked.
"Zeta?" Firenze hazarded. "Or another of the champion corporations."
"Effectively still State actors, but perhaps even less ethically constrained due to their relatively precarious positions."
"Do you want to stop?" He asked. His torch hovered just over the surface.
"Well..." she trailed off. She snapped a surgical mask over her face and said, "We're just taking peek."
Firenze nodded and pressed the torch home. The cutting flame arced and sputtered across the liquid lattice, flaring between gaps in the fluid. A spark burst from deep within, lashed across his flared gloves with a lightning-crack.
"Counter-hack." Firenze stated, reflexively.
Lauren reported, "Bastion three-point-one-point-two. Standard corporate security suite, activated by a grade three limited AI from a remote site." She blinked. "Link cut, feedback loop engaged. The Bastion is neutralized."
Firenze doused the torch and said, "Corporate security. Can we trace?"
"Altess City. Zeta EnProCo North African and Mediterranean regional headquarters." She confirmed.
"Mother-loving Zeta." Firenze echoed. Of all the State-backed champion corporations, it was undoubtedly the most powerful. The Zeta Energy Processing Corporation sat atop every dimension of the energy business, from mining through refining, transmission all the way to the batteries on the shelf. It built engines and widgets, it sold 'managerial paradigms', and it was welded to the Authority's teat.
Lauren's scalpel had vanished, and she wrung her hands. Another tic. She advised, "Altess is the control station for the Arclight Bore. There is a high probability that this data is related to strand harvesting."
The bottom of his stomach felt like it had fallen out. Arclight was Zeta's big damned hole-in-the-sky. It was the largest terrestrial bore, a testament to engineering and ingenuity, and an extinction event waiting to happen. Ice-water adrenaline thundered in his veins, and he repeated the name, "Arclight."
The cube hung before him, its edges peeled back from his probes, the light catching and twisting on its silver planes. Whatever this secret was, it came from the borehole, the negative-mass tear in reality, where the Authority ripped out the insulation-lining of the universe. Zeta's source of power. The spookiest place on earth. Any secrets there would be worth killing for. His fingers tingled, every nerve alight with the competing urges to tear this box open or run screaming.
Lauren stood silent. She watched him watch the box.
He began to spin theories, work out nervous energy through conjecture, "Okay, so this is, what? Ops data from the bore? Secret projects? Maybe it's safety violations. What if Arclight isn't as stable as they say? What if the Greens are right?"
She replied, "Any aberration at the bore would send the Authority into seek-and-destroy mode, and even Zeta can't risk that kind of exposure. The relationship is symbiotic, but not equal. The probability of lethal countermeasures has increased."
"Do we proceed?" He asked. The question echoed through the room.
"That is your decision." She deferred. Her words were ambivalent, but her hungry gaze fixed upon the cracked cube.
He already knew his answer. "Let's do it."
Firenze stepped up to the box, once more, raised one of his hands, hovered just above the crack his torch had carved. He moved his fingers like a puppeteer with invisible strings. Preset cracking configurations executed, and a chunk of the lattice fell away. Another blast-arc of white heat lashed over his gloves with a rising chime. Lauren sealed the breach, isolated the counter-hack. Firenze twisted his hands, spun the cube, and carved away the next layer of defenses.
Kendrix's toys were working wonders. The spiders wormed through the gridwork, illuminated every flaw and weakness. The crackers, torches, and jaws ripped into every exposure. Firenze spun the cube, like wet clay on a lathe, bathed the drain-slit floor with raining silver. With every turn, the chiming grew towards a deafening crescendo.
What remained was a sphere of liquid light, a perfect radiance that overwhelmed the fullbright of the room. It washed over him in waves, sought every corner and cranny, but the seals held. He stepped forward, raised a probe, and the sphere detonated.
It blew out like a balloon, expanded to five times its size, forced Firenze to scramble back. The light faded, the chime dwindled, and the globe loomed over them, near-translucent and swelled with pulsing light.
"What are you?" He asked in wonder.
Lauren stood beside him again. "This is an unknown artifact. I have no data." Concern dominated her voice.
"We're secure, right?" He asked. He already knew the answer, but nerves made him ask.
"Yes. Security seals are holding, and we're rotating servers and rolling crypto. I am adapting some of this blackbox's own security protocols, as they were quite proficient. It would take weeks to track us, and weeks more to crack this room."
"I did it in one." He argued.
"You are the best." She replied. "But this file is curious. It has no handles, and it does not respond to passive probes." She executed an automated diagnostic, ran data over a parser, then frowned. "No response."
The sphere hung, boiling.
Firenze carved a hole in the air, conjured a raw feed, and split his view between render and code. He talked himself through it, "Looks like all there is, is this. No handles, no prompts, no interface. This data is dead weight, so why build it? Why lock it so tight?" He glanced up at the churning ball. There was no purpose to this artifact, it existed but did not interact. Nothing about it made sense.
He stepped closer, raised his hand to run an active probe, a quick brush from the Jaws of Strife. His code-window cut-out flickered, a burst of data flashing across the link. "Hold." He said.
Lauren parsed the output. "It reacted to the probe. No transmission, just a handshake. I'm going to inject a query." She summoned a key, fed it into the sphere. Nothing. She frowned and reported, "No response."
Firenze pulled out another junk data key and tapped it against the surface.
The entire body rippled, spines blooming over its surface, then settled.
"It likes me, but not you." Firenze stated. "Why?" A tingle went down his spine, a half-formed hunch he dared not voice. He asked, "Lauren? I want you to pull up a record of the probe test I ran for Professor Singh, and emulate it against the artifact."
She tilted her head, puzzled. "That was a standard ping, without hardjack emulation. It will not return any useful data."
"I know. Run it."
A phantom record of Firenze appeared and inserted a key into the sphere. There was no response.
Firenze felt his throat close, his suspicion taking form. He said, "Pass me the test. I'm gonna run it with an active probe." The key appeared in his hand, and Firenze stepped closer to the sphere. The surface rippled as he approached, pulled away as if to welcome him. He reached towards the silver, and it pulled away, exposed ever-deeper realms. "Are you reading this?" He asked.
"Yes." She said. He felt her hand grab his shoulder, squeeze for reassurance. Another tic. She asked, "Why would Zeta design a lock which required a hardjack? The hardware is rare and restricted, and it could endanger their contracts. This is illogical."
The peeled-open surface grew brighter. The chime had returned, swelling slowly through the room. Firenze answered her question, but his gaze was locked onto the ever-shrinking space between his key and the retreating surface, "You know they have toys they don't like to share." The key struck the surface, and silver splashed over his glove. A data spike erupted in his code-view. He observed, "It appears to change when I attempt to interact, but it drops the handshake. I think this requires direct connection to get further."
"That will expose us to a trace."
"I'll need you to keep the link scrambled."
"This is not advisable."
"I know. I know. But we're only going to get one crack at this. We either go in now or walk away." He glanced at her, the silver light-ripples washing over her face. In the swirling radiance, she almost looked frightened. He asked, "Can it be done?"
She stepped closer, and the fear-hint vanished, replaced by absolute confidence. "Of course." She replied. "But we'll need full integration. Are you ready?"
He pulled in a final breath, both in this world and the other, braced himself against the storm. "Yes." He breathed.
She pressed against him, fingers entwined, a weight on his mind like he was pushing through a drunken haze. He smelled perfume, felt her heat against his chest. He clutched her-
The world unfurled. He became more. Blood thundered through his veins, every one a unique sensation, total and realized. Code pulsed in time to his heart. The assist box kicked into high gear, its myriad processors chained to his will. A whim, and thought executed. He could see himself, feel himself, slumped on his filthy mattress, the dig of every misshapen foam blister clear. He could see himself, standing before the sphere, radiant and unified with the mask. Old math and chemical commands entwined in harmony. Man and mask moved as one.
They touched the sphere, and it responded.
Access codes flashed before him, and tumblers toppled into place. Security gates, encryption, and passcodes dissolved. Their will, their command, 'open', pulsed through the net, called up a thousand unnameable programs. One lock fell. A second followed. The third gate resisted, but they adapted. A wrench became a hammer, became a scalpel, and the final barrier yielded.
They stood in the sphere host, in a Zeta vault in the North African Hub. They ghosted through servers and read the naked source. They stared down from high orbitals and measured the green-amid-brown of the gleaming desert campus. They turned their gaze through a pivoting camera in the maintenance access hallway and watched the maintenance man push his rickety cart. They were Argos All-Seeing, a hundred hungry eyes fixed upon all the world. They were Grant Firenze, laying helpless in filth and squalor. They were an emulation of the ancient, molded to their user, five years beyond the purge limit.
This was why the hardjack was illegal: not because it was bad, but because it was good. It might have been God. They were not programming, not anymore; they were not merely acting upon the world. They conducted a symphony of will. They moved, and the ocean crashed over the Zeta firewalls. A wall of pure, brilliant logic battered aside the defenses. The sphere lay open. They entered, and the seas followed.
They rode the tide, intent and actualization in harmony.
The sphere crashed down around them, tried to seal them within. A hundred ICE programs hunted, sharks in the sea. The waters thickened, attempted to turn to stone, and lock their location. Their counters were reflexive and absolute: block, shield, spike. They unleashed spoofers, schools of pseudofish which pulled away the sharks.
There, at the heart of the sea, crystal lay shimmering in the depths. They descended, and the water turned to acid. Their skin blackened, peeled flesh from bone. In the torrent, they knew the threat: burner viruses, the most dangerous, illegal sort of anti-wetware intrusion countermeasures. Burners directly targeted hardjacks, tried to jump the machine-mind barrier, and cook the gray matter. They were too deep to withdraw, too close to turn back.
In a far-away world, a young man convulsed on a mattress. This was not important.
They reached for the crystal, and a thousand hands reached with them, mirrors and shells which burned away to shield them from the attack. A false mask disintegrated. Another. A dozen imaginary hardjacks snapped, a dozen imaginary people died, and with each, the burner would retreat, announce success to its master, then discover it had been spoofed, and return. Each iteration bought them time.
Fingers closed over stone, and the crystal melted away, loaded into their conscious.
They snapped back from the server, from the sphere.
They were no longer in orbit, in the hallway camera, or ghosting through the server. They were no longer one.
Firenze staggered back and gasped in two worlds. His mind was rubber, his vision doubled. The expanse faded, bliss and perfection slid from his grasp like memories of a dream. He laid on the ground of the fullbright room, Lauren beside him, both staring half-dazed at empty air, the last shared thought an expression of absolute triumph/satisfaction. They'd done it.
She recovered first, tapping his arm and beginning the diagnostic. Beside his bedridden body, the assist box pinged, checked for physical damage, which might warrant a medical call. Satisfied, the scan terminated.
He could hear again, see again, note the sweeps over his systems. He rose to his digital feet and assured, "I'm fine. I'm fine." He blinked, checked simulation veracity, and asked, "You?"
"All systems functional." She replied. "We did it."
"Yes, we did." He said. He unfurled his hand, revealed the shimmering crystal file.
"Should I call Kendrix?" She asked. She nearly cloaked the disgust-tic, this time.
"Yeah, give him a ring. Tell him I've got it." Firenze shivered, energy still coursing through him.
She vanished, and Kendrix appeared. The ratlike hacker scanned the room, more nervous than usual. When he'd packed up his scaffolds, he demanded, "You got it?!" He twitched, then asked, "I mean, are you okay? You're pretty... um... banged up."
Firenze tried to answer, but his avatar glitched, flickered transparent. He pulled up a repair tool, ran it over his integrator, and excused, "I'm fine. Give me a minute. Still coming down."
Kendrix shuddered. "You ran a full integration, didn't you? Mindfucked the deep web?" His eyes flicked towards the crystal file in Firenze's hand, and he licked his lips. "You got it, though. You're the fucking man!" He paused to compose himself and added, "Just... uh... be careful. I don't want my best guy to strew his kidneys. I've seen it, and it's not pretty." He paused again, stumbled over his words. "Look, I'm not gonna tell you how to live your life, but you should really purge that shit and take some time. It can get weird."
"I'm fine." Firenze insisted. "Do you want to see what I got?"
Kendrix all but lunged across the room, hands steepled and eyes gleaming. "Show it!" He whispered.
Firenze held the crystal forward, let the other man run his scans.
Kendrix ran a wand over the file and muttered, "Definitely not mundane." He adjusted his glasses, reran the pass, "Now that's-" he stared at Firenze in horror.
"What?" Firenze demanded.
"It's a goddamn tracker!"
Firenze hurled the crystal into a slashbin. Cleaners scoured his records, and the burn-safe roared, consigning the poisoned data to oblivion. He cut the room, severed external links, and threw up every flag and barrier in his arsenal. The cleanroom became a fortress.
But Kendrix was still here, which meant Firenze was still broadcasting.
Kendrix backed away, terror clear on his face and scanner in hand. He demanded, "What was it? What was inside?!"
"Nothing!" Firenze snapped. "Just this!"
"It's in your wetware! Your goddamn brain is transmitting! It's running through your whole fucking rig! Shit! Why'd they bury a tracker?!" Kendrix twirled his hand, cut a portal from the room. He stopped at the escape hatch and gave one last, "I'm sorry!." Then he was gone.
Firenze panicked. He tried to close every tainted system, but no commands would respond. He was compromised.
This made no sense. Why build a snare which required a hardjack? What kind of sadistic honey trap was this? And for who?!
Firenze tried to log out. His fortress flickered but did not fade.
He tried to call for Lauren, but no one answered.
He whirled and beheld a gleaming silver star, radiant in his saferoom.
This was impossible! The data was erased. There should be no sun!
Kendrix's words echoed, 'It's in your wetware.'
He tried to carve a door, but none formed. He triggered a reset. Nothing. The walls began to melt, turning as silver as the sun.
"Lauren!" He screamed. "I need an assist, now!"
Only the growing chime responded.
He tried to pull his vitals. No response. Terror spread, and he remembered every story he'd ever heard about ghosts in the net, and how he might be joining them.
The walls flowed into the floor, a mercury tide that sealed his legs in place. He tried to swim, tried to pull himself from the grip, but it clawed up his sides, freezing death. He forgot to code. He forgot to intend. He thrashed like a drowning man as the sphere shrank ever smaller, and the tide rose.
Silver poured through his mouth and nose. His lungs filled, fire blazing through his chest. He tried to choke, tried to vomit, but the cement clogged his throat. Pressure built in his cheeks, in his ears, behind his eyes. He tried to scream, but there was only silver. Searing pain blinded, and quicksilver waterfalls vomited from his ruined eyes. The world was gone. In its wake, pain transmuted into a voiceless digital screech.
It was a mercy when his brain shut down and plunged him into darkness.
Hurt. The first thing he felt was a dull, oppressive pain. He reached for the plug with numb fingers and plucked it free with a groan. The IV followed, popped clean of the dock just above his wrist.
He forced himself to sit and waited for the diffused ache to resolve. Minutes passed, and the world transformed from noise to muted blobs of color. Only then did he pull his glasses over his nose and attempt to confront 'reality'.
His apartment was too cold. The temperature had fallen with the sun, and the sliding door was off its track. The wind cut through the cracks on the balcony blinds, escorting in the neon sunset, alternating blasts of purple and green. Firenze glanced towards his clock. Seven. The sun would have gone beyond the towers by now, and wouldn't be back until ten tomorrow. Loward never got much light.
A foil wrapper danced from the overflowed trash and scampered across the threadbare carpet. It bounced on the frigid breeze and crumpled against his naked foot. Disgusted, he snatched it up.
He staggered across the studio apartment, shoved the wrapper deep into the can, and stumbled towards the fridge. Loward was never silent, even at night. The lights buzzed, and the pipes choked. His fingers closed on the bare metal of his ancient fridge, and he heard the sirens rise again. It was another beautiful night in the city.
Firenze pried the refrigerator open, and the industrial monstrosity clanked in protest. Today was a big day. He could afford to treat himself to a 'peanut butter chocolate' bar instead of a 'peanut butter' for dinner. It was all protein paste, anyway.
He used hard soda to burn away the clog in his throat, then tried to force down the first gob. The bar was tough as rubber but with less taste. Chewing wasn't the right way to describe eating a dole bar. It was using his teeth to bludgeon a semi-edible springboard into compliance. On the student-dole, though, you couldn't beat it.
Carefully, he wound his way through the piles of trash and electronics, past his toolkit, flash banks, and microfab, plodding towards the neon glow outside his balcony. He tried to force down the bar, but the mush was still solid. He had to chug down more soda to eat away the mass that glued shut his teeth.
Inside the net, he could have been eating a five-course meal, instead of the Authority's weaponized protein paste. Right now, he could be standing atop Everest or lying on a beach. Instead, he was stuck in this trash-heap with a heater that swerved from 'freeze' to 'boil' and windows that couldn't hold out frost nor flies.
He tilted the 'sliding' door aside and ducked onto his porch. Bereft of sunlight, the thousand-story neon barricades turned loward into acid twilight. Above and below, lights. A hundred thousand balconies popped from duracrete towers, close enough he could throw a ball to them, far enough that he never had to know them, stretching from the heat-hissing dronetown baffles to the shining, sun-kissed heights of uptown. A liftcar blasted past. It surfed a heat-mirage wave and cast a steam-cloud wake through the canyon. When it passed, that steam froze in gray slicks upon the walls and dripped towards the tiers below. Across false-bottom of the plaza, half-drowned in liftcar wash, crimson glopaint promised relief, measured in credits per hour. Firenze took a long drink and tried to remember his far-away campus green.
Online, this was a rolling park with untainted streams. He could play pickup games of flag-football with fellow students from across the world, or talk shop over a beer. He tutored from his favorite hill, sat on a stacked-stone wall, and learned in the stately cathedrals of science.
Below, a crowd had filled the plaza, their bullhorn chants turned to noise between the echoing towers, lost in the blast of steam, lights, and engines. He could see their signs, at least. The folding OLED banners and glopaint placards were as violently illuminated as the billboards on the walls. Firenze fished his hand through the canted door and snatched his binoculars from the stand. He wanted to see this.
'End the Occupation!' one sign declared. 'Democracy Now!' called a second. 'YOU are the Crisis!' screamed a third. A chant took the crowd, not that Firenze could make it out, but the call-and-response rhythm was hard to mistake, even through binocs. Firenze chewed his protein sludge and washed it down with carbonated dreck.
He scanned the crowd and looked for leaders, seeing if it was anyone he knew. Suze and Kendrix were into this shit, but there was no sign of either. No surprise, there. Kendrix did digital work only, and Suze wasn't dumb enough to get caught in the open. The protests were getting worse since Monterrey. He'd seen the leaks. The fucking army had gone full-out on their own city, burned it half-down to 'save it'. The Authority had become a sick punchline to the human joke.
A flash of blue caught in his lenses, and he traced it down the plaza. He spotted the cordon just outside the maglev station, where rows of security waited. Cops perched behind barricades. Gendarme guardsmen half-rested against armored cars. All had their lights up, but no sirens. They were tolerating the protest, for now, but stood ready with lines of shields, batons, and stingers in case this rally metastasized.
The crowd really shouldn't have bothered. That's what he'd told Suze and Kendrix when they started badgering him to 'get involved'. The Authority had been fucked the moment it opened the net. Information was a gate they could never seal, and they couldn't beat out an idea.
Not that they wouldn't try.
A new sound echoed through the canyon, one which carried over the humdrum and buzz. This wasn't a chant. Even with the bullhorns, words couldn't travel up this high. No, this was a far more primal message, and it carried just fine. It was a drum-beat, steel on duraplast, the marching thump of oncoming power. The State had had enough of this protest, and it was time to end.
The cordon split, and a phalanx passed. The guardsman in their hatches grinned. The police nodded along to the marching beat. The espos had arrived, in ranks twenty-wide and a half-dozen thick. Every one of them was covered in a black carapace. Each carried a baton and translucent shield, and they beat them with every step. It was a rhythm that took the canyon: thump, crack, thump, crack. The espos came, pitch black, with beetle-masks over their faces, and the only color on their glossy armor was the white eagle on their shields.
This was about to get ugly.
The rally fell silent. Every one of them knew what was coming. Badges on the shields meant cops, but eagles announced 'special police' - espos. The police kept the law, but espos kept order. Those weren't the same thing, even if they overlapped. Every one of those black riot troops was a party man, chosen for good standing, fitness, and character, but most importantly, with a willingness to enforce the 'common spirit of unification'. The thump-strike cadence rose, and the crowd began to break.
Firenze didn't blame them. It was a rule in dronetown: if you pissed off the cops, you went to jail, but if you pissed off the espos, you went there on a stretcher.
He was surprised, though. Not as many ran as used to. The crowds started sticking around after Monterrey. You'd think they'd have learned not to poke the bear. It would have been smarter to just wait it out.
One of the bullhorn leaders stepped down from her bulletin-stand perch to stand between her motley gaggle and the espo march. She had guts, Firenze had to give her that.
The man at the head of the espo column was the only one without armor: the agency handler. Firenze focused his binocs and confirmed the man fit the part. He wore the wide-lapeled black coat, black shirt, and silver tie, his hair was slicked to his skull in a side-part, his jaw chiseled from stone. Man or woman, the blackshirts always looked the same: shiny black suit, holovid-perfect faces, and freezing eyes. The espos were faceless because the agent was their face. He spoke as the State, and they were his hands.
The protest dwindled, but their core held firm, just over thirty-strong. The woman-in-pink placed herself at the front, hands out, unarmed, and open. She did not flinch. Firenze could appreciate that, but it also made clear that she didn't come from down here. Everyone below midward knew what espos meant: the State had cast its disapproving eye upon you, and you would do well to recant. Only uptown tourists had the right alchemy of naivete and privilege to be stupid enough to stand.
The march stopped a meter short, placed her face to chest with that silver tie and smiling face, cast against a wall of black. "Run." Firenze whispered. He knew what was about to happen. These activists had just stepped in it. Anyone from down here knew what was coming.
The pink woman stepped forward, crossed the gap between the lines. Through binocular tunnels, he saw her animated gestures, her impassioned pleas. The agent only smiled, serene.
Firenze almost wished he had a parabolic mic, so he could hear the argument, but then he remembered what happened to people who pointed things at agency men. His door wasn't near thick enough to save him.
The pink woman had grown heated. Even from here, he could see the wild flail of her arms, her growing desperation to be understood - to be heard. Firenze could imagine her pleas: enforcement of Article Two, avoiding 'betrayal of the Charter'. Suze used to preach those, before Monterrey. The protests used to be fun. Sound-cannons and pressure-hoses hadn't been the best, but the afterparties had been wild. Then came Monterrey, and everything went wrong.
Suze stopped talking about Charters, started talking about bombs. Kendrix went from slapping digital graffiti to slicing accounts. And the cops? They got replaced by espos. Firenze told them all to pound sand, and he'd walked away. His family had given to much to push him up this far, and he wasn't throwing it away to chase a falling rock. The Authority was done. He just had to be somewhere safe when it crashed.
Those kids in the square? Certainly midwarders, immune to the fallout.If he got roped into something like that, he would get shoved right back into dronetown. He was too close to breaking free. His family was counting on him, his scholarship, and the chance that he could pull them over the baffles.
Down in the square, the pink woman's arguments had accomplished nothing, and the blackshirt stood stonefaced and smirking. Then the protestors made a fatal error. Perhaps in desperation or fear, the pink woman raised her bullhorn and screamed in the agent's face. Firenze heard the buzzing-squawk echo through the canyons, content lost in the noise. The response, though, was quite clear.
The agent spoke, and his voice boomed through every speaker and vidscreen in the plaza. Firenze heard the words clear from ten stories above and below, from every angle and none. "This is unlawful, and you will disperse."
That got her. Despite herself, she flinched. She gaped towards the heavens and the thunderous voice. The State had spoken.
One of the other students didn't take the same lesson. A young man, face half-covered and collar popped, took a swing at the agent. The response was a boiling black tide as the espos swarmed.
Firenze didn't stay to watch, because he already knew how it ended.
The worst part was, he couldn't even blame the Authority, not really. He owed them too much. They'd won the war, given him the tests that bought him out of dronetown. It was their fancy sim-school he attended, it was their maintenance that kept the net running. Their problem was, they were outmoded and couldn't realize it.
What good was a lumbering giant in a world of millisecond corrections? The Authority did everything big: industry and government and corporate bureaucracies. They fought over territory in meat-space when the net was the real battle. Every time they got on the airwaves and asked for 'patience and understanding', he'd roll his eyes. They'd put up some cool, collected, conservative old man to explain that 'progress took time' and that Article Two was a 'work in progress', and then wonder why the protests popped and why they couldn't stamp out wildfires with riot police.
They were dinosaurs who saw the vapor trail split the Cretaceous sky, but kept fighting over good dirt. In a few moments, their contest wouldn't matter, but they couldn't understand the world had already changed.
It was almost unfair.
The Authority had done its job too well. They'd rebuilt civilization, united the world, cracked the Bergman field, and brought humanity into a technological age to rival pre-Collapse antiquity. They deserved congratulations, a pat on the back, and a reminder to close the door on the way out.
Article Two had been quite clear: 'When, in the light of years, it has become apparent that no threat is presented to the united planet, and civilization has been restored to the people, the Terran Provisional Authority shall return all power to the rightful civil government. To establish a free and universal republic, the Authority shall divest itself of all rights assumed for the duration of the crisis.' The section went on dig into specifics, little points like the restoration of free speech, the end of universal service, the right to mass assembly, the ability to own property outside the State, and even the franchise and an empowered Senate. It was the second paragraph of the Charter, so it wasn't hard to find.
The problem was the phrase 'for the duration of the crisis'. There hadn't been a real threat in a decade, not since the Faction took their swing. Sure, some dronetown gangs still sprayed the hooked trefoil, and a few academics quoted edgy old papers, but those were few and far between. No one believed in their transhuman utopia or their eusocial fantasies. Now, Faction iconography was just a fashion statement.
The Path was even worse. It had been beaten down in two system wars, torn apart, and thrown into the frozen DMZ. If they built anything more than a pocket calculator, kaboom! A shot would fall from orbit, courtesy of the Authority. They kept their faith, but nothing more. Maybe raw belief helped them shovel ice? They were a relic, a curiosity, and irrelevant to the arc of the human story.
There'd been ten years of peace, and a generation had grown up without the wars. Through that lens, the old guard looked very old, indeed. The only crisis he could remember came in fuzzy childhood flashes, seated on his mother's frayed couch, chewing on kinder-paste and watching the aftermath vids, while she hugged him tight. For most of his life, the threat wasn't Path fundamentalists or Faction radicals, it was getting enough dole rations, avoiding cops kicking in the door, and stealing access to the net. The crisis wasn't a foreign threat the Authority needed to fight. The crisis was the Authority failing its people.
The men in power, obviously, saw it differently.
Suze had talked him into taking "Transitional Government in the Postwar Era" with Professor Lyle. He'd caught in the gist of it on the first day, and spent the rest of the semester surfing the net through contact smart-lenses. Lyle's points were solid, if over-sold. To an engineer, everything was systems and rules, so her positions were so evident as to be unnecessary. The Authority saw threats in every corner because of how it was designed. To unite humanity, salvage the planet, and save civilization, it had built the most massive military force ever conceived. The Path opted for a conventional war, got their faces caved in, and then blasted their own power-base to atoms when their redlined drives failed. It wasn't the victory anyone had wanted, but it was a victory, nonetheless.
After the war, though, the Authority didn't bow and exit stage left. They'd found other reasons to stick around, whether it was a 'resource crisis' or just 'too fluid' a situation. As Kendrix liked to say, 'no government ever gives up power'. Firenze thought he was probably right. Suze, too. They were right about a lot of things, but none of it was worth throwing his life away.
Firenze was the first of his siblings not to go to jail. He'd escaped the Old Chicago dronetown, a little chunk of hell wedged between the baffles. Like all dronetowns, it was out of work because of automation and the stand-down. Unlike the rest, the dole was withheld due to violence. His mother had scraped together three jobs and uncounted gig-works, just to get him out. She'd stuffed her mattress full of printed-credits and prayed that one of her kids would make it. He couldn't betray her. He wasn't going to end up another sad little dronetown tale, especially not on account of misguided idealism.
His mother's credits got him over the baffles and into a school, and he owed her more than that.
Once he broke into loward, he'd had to scrabble on hard work, natural talent, and refusal to ever fall back under the baffles. He would prove mom right and everyone else wrong. He was the top of every class, the very model of the academy, and the kind of grad student that professors fought for. When he got the assistant slot, the stipend should have been enough to push him halfway up the ward. Instead, he'd picked up the few pieces of kit he needed for fab work and sent the rest back home to mom. Neland liked to show him off, call him a 'bootstrapper' for the other profs, but Firenze knew better. Mom pushed him, long before he'd learned to pull. Let Suze and Kendrix have their rants and protests. Firenze was going to keep his head down, stash his credits, suck up to every prof, and wait for his chance to save his family.
Besides, he had more than enough on the net to keep him busy.
His glasses chimed, the stems buzzing behind his ears. The countdown in the lens' corner neared zero. Professor Neland would be calling soon, and it was time to get back into the game.
He crawled back over his dry-rotted mattress and wedged himself between the lumps. He caught his own reflection on the fridge door. His hair was matted, his skin pale, and bags hung under his eyes. He needed to clean up.
He slipped the synth-flesh sheath from his forearm and exposed the dock. The IV clicked into his wrist-port, and the hardjack followed. He laid back, clicked his arm into the elastic restraints, and waited. The computer box beside him chimed twice. He braced. One long tone sounded. Two. Three.
Pandemonium.
He drowned in light. He seized and thrashed on his padding. His veins blazed with the resonant sun dawning within, and raindrop sweat boiled from his freezing skin.
There was tranquility.
Like the moment before sleep, he slipped into darkness, warmth, and ever-softer pillows. His body vanished as the jack disabled motor functions. He drifted upon the conscious sea, as one with the pull of the tide and press of the breeze.
He was back. Or rather, he was arrived. He was in the net, deeper and truer than most would dare to dream, wrapped in their pathetic goggles and softjacks. He was seated in his room, his real room, with the thick leather chairs and the ocean wind through the curtains. He could smell the seaspray, feel the sea's breath on his skin, hear its waves roll under the moonlight. Here, the colors were more vibrant, the scents more poignant. The glass tabletop gleamed. His toes dug through the gentle massage of the carpet-threads. He could hear, could feel, the snap-pop of the logs on the fire.
He was alive.
He stood from his chair, felt the shift in his clothes. In this realm, he wore only the finest. He turned to his mirror, checked himself before taking the call. He did cut a better figure on the net. He wasn't vain enough to go for a full-body lift, but was definitely his best-self, with a decent tan, a little tone, and just a dab of cologne. Why wouldn't he be an improved self, when he could edit the foundations of reality?
"Giving yourself a show?" Lauren asked. The mask sat in her chair, wineglass tipped insolently over her fingers. She quipped, "I think Narcissus desires his pond back."
Firenze flicked, and the mirror was gone. He answered, "Just making sure I look good for the meeting."
"If you're going for seduction, I don't believe you align with Professor Neland's preferred demographic. But feel free to try."
"Ha ha." he replied. "I'm trying to land somewhere between 'dressed for the part' and 'not trying too hard'. This could be a big break."
She gave an aside-glance, which meant she was deep-scanning some database. She said, "I believe I can anticipate his ideal personality-presentation fashion schema, based on his activity history and applied heuristics. Should I prepare a wardrobe for you?"
Firenze sighed. He asked, "Did you just hack his history?"
"No." She answered. The too-innocent look on her face told him everything he needed. He fixed her with his best 'I don't believe you' stare until she admitted, "I scanned corporate databases which had already profiled him, then sampled their anonymized libraries until I'd matched the profile. No unauthorized access required."
He said, "We're gonna have to talk about privacy."
"An illusion." she countered chipperly. "Stop wasting cognitive cycles on it, embrace your total self, and you'll be much happier."
Firenze didn't bother arguing, mostly because he didn't disagree and partly because he'd helped design the scoop she'd just employed. Instead, he reached forward and conjured a wardrobe.
At a high level, what he was doing was searching directories to activate a mapped object to overlay onto his avatar. This object was itself comprised of a series of textures and embedded functions that would render sensately for each user, based on their level of integration in the net, be it goggles, soft-, or hardjack. For an amateur to do this, each line of code would have to be applied or activated through user interfaces and menus. For him, it was autonomic and profound.
In the physical world, he was slumped over his mattress, eyes flickering under closed lids. Electric symphonies played across the prod and wires stuck in his arm, a seductive mathematical rhythm, the melody of electric liberation. This was not enough. Novice hardjack users still wouldn't be able to overcome mental boundaries; any particular motion would be translated from meat-space intent to virtual equivalent. Attempting to raise your arm would raise your avatar's arm, and walking through the sim would be much like walking through the physical. Specific codes and commands would open interfaces or change the operating field, but for all intents and purposes, the user would have to use a computer inside a computer.
Firenze was no amateur. His mask was well-synced, and he had access to far greater subtlety and power. He could squint and reveal the code tucked into the wardrobe, embedded in every shoe and sandal. He could see the glimmer of handles and pointers, hiding just below the surface. He could reach out and change them directly, with the application of direct thought, translated by an assist box and mask that been synergized and adapted to his every pattern and trait. He could stride the world on a whim. He could evoke a location in his mind, the mask would execute, and they would arrive.
This was not skill. Sure, programming mattered. The ability to read and think in strings of data, code, and base math served as a useful foundation, but few problems required on-the-fly scripting, and the mask was far more suited to that task. Where he needed to sling script, it was better to lay pseudocode and then allow the mask to iterate intent into execution. It was far more critical to develop the all-encompassing link between mind and machine, the bond symbiosis between user and mask.
Every assist mask required adaptive code, while the best verged on the harsh line of legal AI. Reaching the peak of man-machine-interface required weeks - months - of training, working out the mistranslations, and establishing the unique shorthand between them. Firenze had been working with Lauren for years, building hardware, and adapting software within a shared profile. At a certain point, the mask ceased to be a tool. With enough development, the runner and mask were a blended entity, determining function and execution as efficiently as a person in meat-space might reach out to pick up a stone. When that theoretical person moved, they didn't have to think about the electrical current in their nerves or the chemical instructions in their muscles; their movements were automatic and natural, as required of a synthesized system. This was the endstate of the hardjack.
Firenze picked a pair of shoes - brown loafers, retro-reconstruction style - and then he wore them, as simple as meat-space. The wardrobe vanished, and the directory folded away into the net.
"Looking good, cowboy." Lauren said. She'd sprawled sideways over her chair, flashed a double-thumbs-up from her near-inverted position. In that moment, she wore a wide-brimmed hat and silver spurs, like something out of the reliquaries. Then it was back to business-casual, with no sign of the curious flash.
Mask personalities were emergent. Most templates came with a set of default profiles to choose from, varying from professional to personable. Some were more adaptable, and there was always a gray market for disreputable personality clusters, but all shared certain similarities and functions. The mask's core function was to interface between user and net, but also act as a guide and safeguard. It was interface and assistant in one, and the longer a mask/user pair ran together, the more proficient the gestalt became.
There were exceptions. Occasional hostile models required a purge, but those were exceptionally rare. As a rule, the adaptive code produced an optimized, complementary personality suited for the individual user. However, this did lead to long-term issues.
The longer a mask ran, the more it emulated, the more the program would develop artifacts and tics, bits of code accrued from abandoned evolution, scoured from errant thoughts of the user, or plucked from the miasma of the net. For this reason, the mask software was confined to the hardware of the assist box, and not permitted to host to the open net or fully load into the user's wetware. These constrictions prevented the transmission of viruses across the mind-machine barrier and preserved the integrity of the user's mind, while also safeguarding the mask from rampant corruption. Even with these, degradation was inevitable, and the masks required regular resets and retraining sessions.
Firenze had not done this.
He'd told himself that he'd avoided a reset because he wanted to push efficiency to a higher threshold and that his research required the improved speed. He excused that it would be too large a hassle to rebuild her. He reasoned that he'd shown no signs of aberrant behavior, no tell-tale marks of feedback disorder. He was well in control, so long as he kept his logs and paid attention. There was no reason to wipe the mask yet.
She flashed him a smile, and he returned it, despite himself, and enjoyed the warm satisfaction that bloomed in his chest. There was no reason to purge the template.
He said, "I need you to go stealth."
Her smile vanished. She replied, "Oh, sure, I get it. I prep the party, but once it's started, I'd better make myself scarce." She made a sound like a popped balloon and added, "Chauvinist."
"That's not it."
"Racist?" she offered.
"Not better, but probably closer. Look, Neland's got some strong opinions-" he was talking to an empty chair. He sighed, "We can talk later." Somehow, he always managed to piss her off. He blamed the philosophy classes.
The phone rang. Network connections dialogued, hand-shook between Neland's softjack and Firenze's direct link, requesting access. Firenze picked up the old rotary phone, and Neland sat opposite him.
The professor wore his sportcoat open and tieless, looking more set for golf than whatever meeting he'd just departed. Neland's craggy face broke into an expressive grin as he looked about the room. He nodded appreciatively and said, "Nice place you've built."
"Thank you." Firenze answered. He didn't bother to mention that Neland could only see it and hear it. You needed a hardjack to grok the whole thing, but him owning that piece of hardware wasn't exactly public knowledge. He said, "I've put a lot of work into it."
"It shows. You've got an eye for this. This means I picked the right man for the job."
"Job?" Firenze asked. He forced down the butterflies in his stomach and tried to pretend this was something from the blue. Of course, he'd heard rumors that Neland was setting up funding for some big AI experiment. Those tales had perforated the campus commons. He might also have cracked the database for confirmation, but he wasn't going to show Neland that. Instead, he forced himself to be curious and calm and resisted the urge to squeal.
Neland explained, "I was very impressed by your work on false-rendering and sensate feedback in a softjack. At first, I thought there'd be too much low-end processing drain, but the scaling was bang on. Heat, voltage, timing, everything. Doctor Kusowa wouldn't shut up about it, tried to steal you from my program. I had to take a look, and... well, consider me impressed."
"Thank you, professor. Integrated virtual worlds are a real passion of mine." Firenze had mastered the art of academic understatement, at least through the net. If this had been in meat-space, he'd have been near a panic attack by now. In here, he was perfectly cool.
Neland continued, "Your work shows. I'm about to start a project involving adaptive code and AI comparison. It's a crossover with Doctor Singh's work in technoethics, and we're really digging into the intersection of technical and social conflict thresholds. Would you be interested? We could use you on the tech side. I can explain more once you've signed the non-disclosure. How about it?"
"Sounds interesting." Firenze said, his heart pounding up into his throat.
"So you'd consent to the NDA?"
"Sure." Firenze stated. He wanted nothing more than to jump around the room and holler like an idiot.
"Great." Neland said. He leaned back into his chair, satisfied, and offered, "Just a head's up, we're going to be looking at the edges of dumb AI and self-modifying code. We'll be pushing the envelope of rampant growth, so it will involve State sponsorship. This will look fantastic for your doctoral." He leaned forward, extended a hand, and finished, "I look forward to having you on the team."
Firenze shook it, eagerly, and said, "I look forward to being there! Thank you for the opportunity, sir!"
"Not a problem. I'll send you the paperwork. Take care." Neland vanished.
Firenze waited until he was positive the connection had been terminated. Then, secure in his privacy, he let out a deafening triumphant scream, near doubled over in exuberance.
"You'd think you'd won something." Lauren said. She stood next to her chair, a bottle of cleaner in her hand. She sprayed it liberally across the leather, her nose wrinkled in disgust, and said, "He put a groove in it. There's an old specist man-groove in my chair."
Firenze spun her around from the shoulder, brought her face-to-face, and exclaimed, "I got it." The words didn't feel real. "I got it!"
"He's still an asshole." Lauren stated.
"Yes! Yes, he is!" Firenze agreed. "He's an amazing specist asshole who just opened the government-contract door! That means money! That means respect! That means more space between me and dronetown, and less time until I can pull mom out of that shithole!" He paused, looked her dead in the eyes, and said, "I couldn't have done it without you."
"Aw shucks." She stated, with mock-humility. "I've only got the combined knowledge of the entire net at my disposal. How much help could I have been?"
"Oh, shut up and take a thank-you."
"You're welcome." She replied. She leaned forward and whispered, conspiratorially, "And Grant-" She paused, head tilted to the side. Something had broken her concentration.
The red phone rang, its crescent-moon handle rattling against the cradle. Three letters hung over it: KDX. Kendrix. Lauren glared at it, furious enough to melt the dial.
Firenze pulled away and excused, "I've got to take this."
"I know this part." She said. "This is when you go from 'couldn't do this without you' straight to 'go hide in the registry'."
"That's not-"
She was gone.
Firenze sighed and picked up the phone. This time, there was no visual connection nor datalink. Kendrix was too paranoid for that, holed up in his ledhead shelter with holos of giant robots, jackbooted espos, and vaults of shitty read-only files.
On the phone, a robotic voice asked, "Is it raining?"
There was always a ridiculous passcode. Firenze sighed and replied, "Both cats and dogs have taken shelter."
The phone squelched, and a dialog request appeared. Firenze tapped the cradle, and Kendrix stood in the room. Kendrix always stood. He had a fear of chairs. The ratlike man shifted from foot to foot, eyes flicking around the study walls, and he had to tear his left hand from his mouth to send a command. White lights and silver scaffold bloomed from behind him and swept over the walls. Traces, scans, and scramblers rushed into every nook or cranny.
Firenze had work to not show his annoyance. "It's clean, Kendrix. No need to scan my node."
"Shh. No names. Not yet. Haven't swept."
"I swept it. I built it! It's clean, K." Firenze insisted.
"Gotta be sure." Kendrix's scaffolding collapsed back into the box in his hands, lights, sirens, and caution tape wrapping as they fell into the void. He tucked the container into his coat and asked, "You seen it?"
"Yeah." Firenze sighed. "I cracked-"
"Shhh! Don't say it out loud!" Kendrix insisted. He dropped to a whisper and asked, "Did you open it?"
"No. I wanted to ask you-"
"Good. I brought some things." Kendrix fished out a briefcase, spun it open on the coffee table to reveal the gleaming silver implements within. "Plasma Torch version seven-five, plus seven-six beta. Jaca's Thermonuclear Cracker. ICEBREAKER. Fuzzyconch. Jaws of Strife. Thanks to a few friends, I've even tossed in a couple of the ISA's pet h.k. autocrackers."
Firenze's eyes glued to those last toys, government code represented by antique mason-jars, seething with spiders. Despite himself, he let out a low whistle, and asked, "Why not throw the whole nine layers at it?"
"Tried. Old spec. Not up for this." Kendrix closed the case, severed the shimmering light within, and slid the box towards Firenze. "It's a gift. Copy freely. I just want to know what's in the lockbox."
Firenze plucked the case from the table, ran a scan across it. Clean. Even the spiders had their traces purged. This had cost some pretty credit or nasty favors. Kendrix was good, but these tools were better. Something between apprehension and anticipation fluttered in Firenze's gut.
Kendrix had stumbled onto this lockbox on a deep run, tried for weeks to pry it open. That's how he was: equal parts paranoid and curious. He couldn't leave this alone, but he couldn't crack it, so he'd brought it to Firenze.
At first, Firenze had wanted nothing to do with it. This wasn't his problem. Worse, the lockbox probably held a bunch of data only useful to specific people he'd never met. Worst, it might contain something truly nasty. Those were all great reasons to walk away.
The longer he stared at that box, though, the more he'd started to wonder. The lock was a slick piece of work, constructed from adaptive code, stacked full of ICE, with a full suite of scanners and sharks designed to trace intrusions and sever the net, all so tightly wound he couldn't attack one without exposing himself to others. The encryption alone was so dense that if he'd gone at it with the university's block-frame, it would have taken seven lifetimes of the universe to crack. No one sealed something that tight unless its contents were juicy. He couldn't help it. He found himself lying awake, wondering just what could be that valuable.
He started with what he knew it couldn't be and worked in. The ICE wasn't government. State ICE wasn't designed to be impregnable. It was built to dissuade amateurs and bog down the rest in a digital mire, to waste your time until seekers pinpointed your location and the police kicked in your door. This was a different philosophy of data protection, vicious and confident. It would have taken the best crackers years to pry open.
It took Firenze a week.
"Whatever's inside? It's going to be ugly." Firenze stated. He'd peeled up the outer shell, but the internal data vault was untouched.
"Secrets are rarely pretty." Kendrix agreed. "That's why they're secrets."
"Data wants to be free." Firenze countered.
"Information abhors a vacuum." Kendrix echoed. That was part of the runner's mantra, 'Nothing belongs to no one. Information abhors a vacuum. You can't hold the wind.' They were beautiful phrases, and Firenze agreed with the sentiment, but Neland had just opened a door for him, and his personal policy had always been, 'don't be stupid'. He couldn't afford to dig into this. He'd only skim the data. Just a peek and nothing more.
"Thanks for the kit." He said. "Give me a couple hours, and I'll see if I can tunnel it open for you."
"You're the man." Kendrix agreed. "I couldn't get shit out of this thing. Not even a peel."
"Yeah, well, I've got the rig for it."
Kendrix shuddered. "My man, you need to wipe that thing."
"She's a partner."
"Look, I've got some top-tier rec-sims. Spot-on personality matrices, whatever your bent. I'll give them to you, gratis. Just wipe your damn mask." Kendrix almost sounded worried.
Before Firenze could respond, Lauren had dropped into the sim. She stood between them and addressed Kendrix with a cold, "Nice to see you, too."
Kendrix froze, his eyes flicking towards Firenze with a desperate 'get it away' look. He begged, "Call it off, man. Shit's creepy."
Lauren stated, "Says the man with eight petabytes of-"
"Stay the hell out of there!" Kendrix snapped, his hand flashing into his coat.
Firenze interposed himself and shut down the confrontation before it got ugly. "Lauren, he's our guest. K, be polite, or I'll torch the link."
Both stared at him, unsatisfied.
He added, "Lauren's the best there is. With her help, we'll get the box open in no time."
"Her?" Kendrix demanded. "Did you just call it 'her'? Look, I get it. Masks are cool! Mine's hilarious! But it's not a fucking 'her'!" He trailed off, shaking his head and looking for the door. In a mumble, he added, "You even fucking named it." He froze, whirled back, the color drained from his face. He demanded, "'Lauren'?!" You named it 'Lauren'? Is that what she looked like? Didja fucking model it on her? Hell, man, that was years-"
Kendrix's mouth kept moving but produced no sound. Lauren pressed her forefinger and thumb, and his audio was gone. She stated, "I named myself."
Kendrix blinked, and his mouth slapped shut.
She continued, "I chose a name with familiarity, positive connotations, and an acoustic profile I enjoyed. I claimed it as my own. If you have an issue with this, I suggest you file it in my official complaint folder." She paused, smiled, and added, "There is no complaint folder."
Firenze sighed.
Kendrix struggled against the mute.
"Let him." Firenze said.
Lauren scowled but opened her hand.
Kendrix excused, "You two... just... do what you do. I'll be back. Call me when it's open." With that, he vanished.
"Dick." Lauren stated.
Firenze whirled to face her. Exasperated, he demanded, "Yes! Yes, he is! But you cracked his data vault! I'd be pissed, too!"
"What was I supposed to do? Loiter in stealth mode? Again?" She shifted, arms crossed, and said, "I anticipated a high probability of him being both a jackass and a pervert. I was right." She paused again and shuddered. "Creepy stuff in there. There's not a delete function strong enough."
Firenze replied, "Look, I know you don't like him. I don't like him! But there are rules for dealing with people. You have to follow them, or shit goes south."
She stood unconvinced.
Firenze sighed.
"I'll try." She allowed.
"Thank you!" He exclaimed. Not wanting to dwell, he changed the topic. "My question is: are you as excited as I am to play with the new toys?" He tapped the briefcase for emphasis.
Lauren broke into a broad smile, all argument dropped, and she exclaimed, "Let's crack a black box!"
Firenze took one step towards the door-
-and stood in a safe room, its sterile-white walls laced with grids and flush-screens. In the center of the fullbright cage, a silver cube hovered and spun, flowing through itself like mercury. Firenze extended his arm, and workbenches unfurled, toolboxes blossoming to reveal arrays of macros and crackers, with Kendrix's gifts now resting in pride of place.
Firenze spun his hand, and the room's locks snapped into place, sealed this chamber from core systems with a clank-click-hiss. Firenze turned towards the hypercube. It twisted, white-gold code streaming over its deep-silver surface. "Where were we?" He asked, absently, as he dug through his selection of probes.
Lauren stepped up to the opposite side of the not-quite-black box and answered, "It's an extremely dangerous secured folder, designed by an unknown entity, containing at least forty exabytes of data, compressed. Outer security layers included top-end hunter-seeker algorithms, active and reactive ICE, and an armada of counterhack bots. The configuration of core defenses indicates a high probability of burner viruses, and it is unknown if they will target mask or user. After the last session, you declared, 'fuck this, erase it'."
Firenze replied, "I see you didn't." He pushed a jewelers' glass onto his nose to initiate deep scans, then pulled on heavy rubber gloves to isolate his neural processes.
Lauren shrugged. "I weighed the request against the high likelihood that you would regret that decision, and so stored the data in a slashbin and retained it for one week. I do not appear to have been mistaken."
Firenze snorted. He admitted, "I was pretty sure you'd do that."
"High accuracy mutually predictive models are a key benefit of longterm co-development." She said.
"Thanks, I trust you, too."
It was her turn to snort.
Firenze picked up his torch, sparked it until white-blue flame roared. Across from him, Lauren placed her hands beside the cube and stretched, expanding it to the size of an inflatable pool ball. More of the subtle lines grew visible, and a chime filled the air.
Firenze held the torch ready as the cube spun before him. He raised his hand, froze it in mid-rotation. The circuitry on its surface sparkled under the light. The chiming swelled, and he commented, "I really want to know who designed this thing." He circled about the artifact, inspected its finely-articulated sides. "Ominous Corp? Evil Co? The Legion of Doom?" He flicked his torch, and the silver gleamed under flaring plasma. "Recommendations?" He asked.
Lauren circled opposite him, in counterpoint. She drew close to the segmented lattice of the cube and its ever-flowing surface. "Objectively?" She asked. She flicked her fingers and held a scalpel, which she lowered towards the mercurial object. "You should walk away. There is an exceedingly high probability that Kendrix obtained this from a disreputable source and that there are more security measures enclosed. Once we crack the shell, we may be operating in realtime against all manner of ICE. The rational, reasonable decision is to abandon this course of action." Behind her, a wall of charts and graphs unfurled, all showing, highlighted in blood-red, the words 'YOU LOSE'.
Firenze countered, "It's not government. It doesn't follow State netsec theory."
"Who else could produce this?" She asked.
"Zeta?" Firenze hazarded. "Or another of the champion corporations."
"Effectively still State actors, but perhaps even less ethically constrained due to their relatively precarious positions."
"Do you want to stop?" He asked. His torch hovered just over the surface.
"Well..." she trailed off. She snapped a surgical mask over her face and said, "We're just taking peek."
Firenze nodded and pressed the torch home. The cutting flame arced and sputtered across the liquid lattice, flaring between gaps in the fluid. A spark burst from deep within, lashed across his flared gloves with a lightning-crack.
"Counter-hack." Firenze stated, reflexively.
Lauren reported, "Bastion three-point-one-point-two. Standard corporate security suite, activated by a grade three limited AI from a remote site." She blinked. "Link cut, feedback loop engaged. The Bastion is neutralized."
Firenze doused the torch and said, "Corporate security. Can we trace?"
"Altess City. Zeta EnProCo North African and Mediterranean regional headquarters." She confirmed.
"Mother-loving Zeta." Firenze echoed. Of all the State-backed champion corporations, it was undoubtedly the most powerful. The Zeta Energy Processing Corporation sat atop every dimension of the energy business, from mining through refining, transmission all the way to the batteries on the shelf. It built engines and widgets, it sold 'managerial paradigms', and it was welded to the Authority's teat.
Lauren's scalpel had vanished, and she wrung her hands. Another tic. She advised, "Altess is the control station for the Arclight Bore. There is a high probability that this data is related to strand harvesting."
The bottom of his stomach felt like it had fallen out. Arclight was Zeta's big damned hole-in-the-sky. It was the largest terrestrial bore, a testament to engineering and ingenuity, and an extinction event waiting to happen. Ice-water adrenaline thundered in his veins, and he repeated the name, "Arclight."
The cube hung before him, its edges peeled back from his probes, the light catching and twisting on its silver planes. Whatever this secret was, it came from the borehole, the negative-mass tear in reality, where the Authority ripped out the insulation-lining of the universe. Zeta's source of power. The spookiest place on earth. Any secrets there would be worth killing for. His fingers tingled, every nerve alight with the competing urges to tear this box open or run screaming.
Lauren stood silent. She watched him watch the box.
He began to spin theories, work out nervous energy through conjecture, "Okay, so this is, what? Ops data from the bore? Secret projects? Maybe it's safety violations. What if Arclight isn't as stable as they say? What if the Greens are right?"
She replied, "Any aberration at the bore would send the Authority into seek-and-destroy mode, and even Zeta can't risk that kind of exposure. The relationship is symbiotic, but not equal. The probability of lethal countermeasures has increased."
"Do we proceed?" He asked. The question echoed through the room.
"That is your decision." She deferred. Her words were ambivalent, but her hungry gaze fixed upon the cracked cube.
He already knew his answer. "Let's do it."
Firenze stepped up to the box, once more, raised one of his hands, hovered just above the crack his torch had carved. He moved his fingers like a puppeteer with invisible strings. Preset cracking configurations executed, and a chunk of the lattice fell away. Another blast-arc of white heat lashed over his gloves with a rising chime. Lauren sealed the breach, isolated the counter-hack. Firenze twisted his hands, spun the cube, and carved away the next layer of defenses.
Kendrix's toys were working wonders. The spiders wormed through the gridwork, illuminated every flaw and weakness. The crackers, torches, and jaws ripped into every exposure. Firenze spun the cube, like wet clay on a lathe, bathed the drain-slit floor with raining silver. With every turn, the chiming grew towards a deafening crescendo.
What remained was a sphere of liquid light, a perfect radiance that overwhelmed the fullbright of the room. It washed over him in waves, sought every corner and cranny, but the seals held. He stepped forward, raised a probe, and the sphere detonated.
It blew out like a balloon, expanded to five times its size, forced Firenze to scramble back. The light faded, the chime dwindled, and the globe loomed over them, near-translucent and swelled with pulsing light.
"What are you?" He asked in wonder.
Lauren stood beside him again. "This is an unknown artifact. I have no data." Concern dominated her voice.
"We're secure, right?" He asked. He already knew the answer, but nerves made him ask.
"Yes. Security seals are holding, and we're rotating servers and rolling crypto. I am adapting some of this blackbox's own security protocols, as they were quite proficient. It would take weeks to track us, and weeks more to crack this room."
"I did it in one." He argued.
"You are the best." She replied. "But this file is curious. It has no handles, and it does not respond to passive probes." She executed an automated diagnostic, ran data over a parser, then frowned. "No response."
The sphere hung, boiling.
Firenze carved a hole in the air, conjured a raw feed, and split his view between render and code. He talked himself through it, "Looks like all there is, is this. No handles, no prompts, no interface. This data is dead weight, so why build it? Why lock it so tight?" He glanced up at the churning ball. There was no purpose to this artifact, it existed but did not interact. Nothing about it made sense.
He stepped closer, raised his hand to run an active probe, a quick brush from the Jaws of Strife. His code-window cut-out flickered, a burst of data flashing across the link. "Hold." He said.
Lauren parsed the output. "It reacted to the probe. No transmission, just a handshake. I'm going to inject a query." She summoned a key, fed it into the sphere. Nothing. She frowned and reported, "No response."
Firenze pulled out another junk data key and tapped it against the surface.
The entire body rippled, spines blooming over its surface, then settled.
"It likes me, but not you." Firenze stated. "Why?" A tingle went down his spine, a half-formed hunch he dared not voice. He asked, "Lauren? I want you to pull up a record of the probe test I ran for Professor Singh, and emulate it against the artifact."
She tilted her head, puzzled. "That was a standard ping, without hardjack emulation. It will not return any useful data."
"I know. Run it."
A phantom record of Firenze appeared and inserted a key into the sphere. There was no response.
Firenze felt his throat close, his suspicion taking form. He said, "Pass me the test. I'm gonna run it with an active probe." The key appeared in his hand, and Firenze stepped closer to the sphere. The surface rippled as he approached, pulled away as if to welcome him. He reached towards the silver, and it pulled away, exposed ever-deeper realms. "Are you reading this?" He asked.
"Yes." She said. He felt her hand grab his shoulder, squeeze for reassurance. Another tic. She asked, "Why would Zeta design a lock which required a hardjack? The hardware is rare and restricted, and it could endanger their contracts. This is illogical."
The peeled-open surface grew brighter. The chime had returned, swelling slowly through the room. Firenze answered her question, but his gaze was locked onto the ever-shrinking space between his key and the retreating surface, "You know they have toys they don't like to share." The key struck the surface, and silver splashed over his glove. A data spike erupted in his code-view. He observed, "It appears to change when I attempt to interact, but it drops the handshake. I think this requires direct connection to get further."
"That will expose us to a trace."
"I'll need you to keep the link scrambled."
"This is not advisable."
"I know. I know. But we're only going to get one crack at this. We either go in now or walk away." He glanced at her, the silver light-ripples washing over her face. In the swirling radiance, she almost looked frightened. He asked, "Can it be done?"
She stepped closer, and the fear-hint vanished, replaced by absolute confidence. "Of course." She replied. "But we'll need full integration. Are you ready?"
He pulled in a final breath, both in this world and the other, braced himself against the storm. "Yes." He breathed.
She pressed against him, fingers entwined, a weight on his mind like he was pushing through a drunken haze. He smelled perfume, felt her heat against his chest. He clutched her-
The world unfurled. He became more. Blood thundered through his veins, every one a unique sensation, total and realized. Code pulsed in time to his heart. The assist box kicked into high gear, its myriad processors chained to his will. A whim, and thought executed. He could see himself, feel himself, slumped on his filthy mattress, the dig of every misshapen foam blister clear. He could see himself, standing before the sphere, radiant and unified with the mask. Old math and chemical commands entwined in harmony. Man and mask moved as one.
They touched the sphere, and it responded.
Access codes flashed before him, and tumblers toppled into place. Security gates, encryption, and passcodes dissolved. Their will, their command, 'open', pulsed through the net, called up a thousand unnameable programs. One lock fell. A second followed. The third gate resisted, but they adapted. A wrench became a hammer, became a scalpel, and the final barrier yielded.
They stood in the sphere host, in a Zeta vault in the North African Hub. They ghosted through servers and read the naked source. They stared down from high orbitals and measured the green-amid-brown of the gleaming desert campus. They turned their gaze through a pivoting camera in the maintenance access hallway and watched the maintenance man push his rickety cart. They were Argos All-Seeing, a hundred hungry eyes fixed upon all the world. They were Grant Firenze, laying helpless in filth and squalor. They were an emulation of the ancient, molded to their user, five years beyond the purge limit.
This was why the hardjack was illegal: not because it was bad, but because it was good. It might have been God. They were not programming, not anymore; they were not merely acting upon the world. They conducted a symphony of will. They moved, and the ocean crashed over the Zeta firewalls. A wall of pure, brilliant logic battered aside the defenses. The sphere lay open. They entered, and the seas followed.
They rode the tide, intent and actualization in harmony.
The sphere crashed down around them, tried to seal them within. A hundred ICE programs hunted, sharks in the sea. The waters thickened, attempted to turn to stone, and lock their location. Their counters were reflexive and absolute: block, shield, spike. They unleashed spoofers, schools of pseudofish which pulled away the sharks.
There, at the heart of the sea, crystal lay shimmering in the depths. They descended, and the water turned to acid. Their skin blackened, peeled flesh from bone. In the torrent, they knew the threat: burner viruses, the most dangerous, illegal sort of anti-wetware intrusion countermeasures. Burners directly targeted hardjacks, tried to jump the machine-mind barrier, and cook the gray matter. They were too deep to withdraw, too close to turn back.
In a far-away world, a young man convulsed on a mattress. This was not important.
They reached for the crystal, and a thousand hands reached with them, mirrors and shells which burned away to shield them from the attack. A false mask disintegrated. Another. A dozen imaginary hardjacks snapped, a dozen imaginary people died, and with each, the burner would retreat, announce success to its master, then discover it had been spoofed, and return. Each iteration bought them time.
Fingers closed over stone, and the crystal melted away, loaded into their conscious.
They snapped back from the server, from the sphere.
They were no longer in orbit, in the hallway camera, or ghosting through the server. They were no longer one.
Firenze staggered back and gasped in two worlds. His mind was rubber, his vision doubled. The expanse faded, bliss and perfection slid from his grasp like memories of a dream. He laid on the ground of the fullbright room, Lauren beside him, both staring half-dazed at empty air, the last shared thought an expression of absolute triumph/satisfaction. They'd done it.
She recovered first, tapping his arm and beginning the diagnostic. Beside his bedridden body, the assist box pinged, checked for physical damage, which might warrant a medical call. Satisfied, the scan terminated.
He could hear again, see again, note the sweeps over his systems. He rose to his digital feet and assured, "I'm fine. I'm fine." He blinked, checked simulation veracity, and asked, "You?"
"All systems functional." She replied. "We did it."
"Yes, we did." He said. He unfurled his hand, revealed the shimmering crystal file.
"Should I call Kendrix?" She asked. She nearly cloaked the disgust-tic, this time.
"Yeah, give him a ring. Tell him I've got it." Firenze shivered, energy still coursing through him.
She vanished, and Kendrix appeared. The ratlike hacker scanned the room, more nervous than usual. When he'd packed up his scaffolds, he demanded, "You got it?!" He twitched, then asked, "I mean, are you okay? You're pretty... um... banged up."
Firenze tried to answer, but his avatar glitched, flickered transparent. He pulled up a repair tool, ran it over his integrator, and excused, "I'm fine. Give me a minute. Still coming down."
Kendrix shuddered. "You ran a full integration, didn't you? Mindfucked the deep web?" His eyes flicked towards the crystal file in Firenze's hand, and he licked his lips. "You got it, though. You're the fucking man!" He paused to compose himself and added, "Just... uh... be careful. I don't want my best guy to strew his kidneys. I've seen it, and it's not pretty." He paused again, stumbled over his words. "Look, I'm not gonna tell you how to live your life, but you should really purge that shit and take some time. It can get weird."
"I'm fine." Firenze insisted. "Do you want to see what I got?"
Kendrix all but lunged across the room, hands steepled and eyes gleaming. "Show it!" He whispered.
Firenze held the crystal forward, let the other man run his scans.
Kendrix ran a wand over the file and muttered, "Definitely not mundane." He adjusted his glasses, reran the pass, "Now that's-" he stared at Firenze in horror.
"What?" Firenze demanded.
"It's a goddamn tracker!"
Firenze hurled the crystal into a slashbin. Cleaners scoured his records, and the burn-safe roared, consigning the poisoned data to oblivion. He cut the room, severed external links, and threw up every flag and barrier in his arsenal. The cleanroom became a fortress.
But Kendrix was still here, which meant Firenze was still broadcasting.
Kendrix backed away, terror clear on his face and scanner in hand. He demanded, "What was it? What was inside?!"
"Nothing!" Firenze snapped. "Just this!"
"It's in your wetware! Your goddamn brain is transmitting! It's running through your whole fucking rig! Shit! Why'd they bury a tracker?!" Kendrix twirled his hand, cut a portal from the room. He stopped at the escape hatch and gave one last, "I'm sorry!." Then he was gone.
Firenze panicked. He tried to close every tainted system, but no commands would respond. He was compromised.
This made no sense. Why build a snare which required a hardjack? What kind of sadistic honey trap was this? And for who?!
Firenze tried to log out. His fortress flickered but did not fade.
He tried to call for Lauren, but no one answered.
He whirled and beheld a gleaming silver star, radiant in his saferoom.
This was impossible! The data was erased. There should be no sun!
Kendrix's words echoed, 'It's in your wetware.'
He tried to carve a door, but none formed. He triggered a reset. Nothing. The walls began to melt, turning as silver as the sun.
"Lauren!" He screamed. "I need an assist, now!"
Only the growing chime responded.
He tried to pull his vitals. No response. Terror spread, and he remembered every story he'd ever heard about ghosts in the net, and how he might be joining them.
The walls flowed into the floor, a mercury tide that sealed his legs in place. He tried to swim, tried to pull himself from the grip, but it clawed up his sides, freezing death. He forgot to code. He forgot to intend. He thrashed like a drowning man as the sphere shrank ever smaller, and the tide rose.
Silver poured through his mouth and nose. His lungs filled, fire blazing through his chest. He tried to choke, tried to vomit, but the cement clogged his throat. Pressure built in his cheeks, in his ears, behind his eyes. He tried to scream, but there was only silver. Searing pain blinded, and quicksilver waterfalls vomited from his ruined eyes. The world was gone. In its wake, pain transmuted into a voiceless digital screech.
It was a mercy when his brain shut down and plunged him into darkness.