by Sean Platt
“Stuck in holes,” Kimmy said. “I’ve seen a dozen or so people like that in the past hour. And that doesn’t include the ones I can’t see because the loops are in their heads.” She shrugged. “Nothing we can do. They can only call admin for assistance then try to break the pattern. If they know they’re stuck. They probably don’t even know. This area is fragmenting. Garbage code everywhere that the policing AI hasn’t cleaned yet. The damage is new, though, so I’m not surprised they can’t keep up. No idea what happened.”
“What if it happens to us?” Stephen asked. “What if we get stuck and don’t know it?”
“Maybe it already has,” Kimmy said nonchalantly. “But I don’t think it has, and I’m good at feeling things like that.”
“Should we leave this sector?” He had no idea how this worked. He could navigate code and Beam pages like the prodigy he’d once been, but he’d never had to steer through it like a car through traffic. Supposedly, Kimmy was following a trail that seemed to promise a lead on Alexa, but he had no idea if such things, down here, had to happen in a straight line.
“Nah. We’re almost through it.”
“Where are we going?” Then he corrected his question, knowing the unhelpful way she’d answer. “I mean, have you found any new trails leading toward her?”
Kimmy looked at Stephen like he was an idiot. She pointed forward, through what seemed to be some kind of windshield. Stephen saw dozens of hybrid microfragments following their progress like locusts, eager to land and give them confusing directions but little else.
“You can’t see that?” she asked.
“What?”
“It’s the same path we’ve been following. Change hierarchy with the same ID stamp as before. Whether it’s Alexa or not, I don’t know, but didn’t we agree to see where it led?”
“Sure.” Stephen hadn’t seen it at first, so it wasn’t shocking that he couldn’t see it now.
Kimmy nodded, seeming satisfied. “I did notice that our buddy left, though.”
“Our buddy?”
“That guy who was following us.”
Stephen felt his maybe-virtual heartbeat ramp up. He remembered Noah’s warning — and though Noah had said something about fleeing and eluding capture, the sensation of pursuit had been dogging Stephen since Bontauk. Someone had sent drones to the ramshackle house. Judging by Noah’s tone, even fleeing was a problem because whatever pursued was stuck like glue, and could return at any time.
“Who was following us?”
“You didn’t see him?”
“No, I didn’t see him! Why didn’t you tell me someone was behind us?”
“Well. He wasn’t really behind us. I was being figurative.”
Stephen waited. Kimmy seemed unconcerned. She had the body language of a kid chewing gum, about to blow an impish bubble. He waited for her to look back up then stared.
“What? He’s gone now. No big deal.”
“Who was it?”
“I have no idea. Figured it was someone from the forum. Like how I followed you.”
Stephen looked backward, seeing nothing.
“Why did he leave? Did you…outmaneuver him?”
A small shrug. “I guess something else got his attention. Why do you care so much? You act like you’re on the run.” She gave him a toothy smile. “Did you rob someone of their jewels or something?”
“Never mind.”
Kimmy watched him for a few seconds longer then seemed to lose interest and again focused forward, toward the path that might have been left by Alexa, into the swarm of microfragments, soaring above the newly damaged landscape pocked with holes.
Stephen’s hand had gone to his chest, willing his heart — if he was in a real body — to slow.
But when he looked down, he saw the diffuse glow streaming between his fingers, bleeding from what Kimmy had called his boson.
Dominic looked up as Leah walked in.
“Find anything?”
Leah shook her head. “The connection in here sucks. ’Bout all it seems good for is waking up Leo’s old add-ons. Which doesn’t even make sense. I never knew he had add-ons. Did you?”
Dominic didn’t respond. He seemed wound like a coil spring. Leah decided she should stick to the subject. He’d asked if she’d found anything, and it was a toss-up whether her answer was good or not.
Then Dominic repeated his question: “So did you find anything?”
“No. But again, it might be because the connection sucks.”
“Great,” Dominic muttered.
“What exactly would you do if I said, ‘Hey, Dom, I found the shell of this guy I’ve never met and know nothing about out there on The Beam’? Would you…I don’t know…launch a manhunt? Especially seeing as any York I found would by definition be a fake, so there’d be no man to hunt?”
“I just get this feeling. It bothers me, not knowing if I’m right.”
“You’re just tired.”
“Really,” Dominic said. “Is that what it is?”
His face was angry, but Leah knew she was right. Of course Dominic was tired. She was tired, and pretty much every moment she’d spent trying and failing to sleep in this underground place had been next to Dominic stirring.
Maybe Leo and the others had managed to sleep, but Leah doubted it. They’d been knocked out for transport and had woken up hungry for drugs. Like a parent shoving a bottle into a crying baby’s mouth, Leo, with Leah and Dominic’s help, had answered that Lunis hangover by plugging the Organas in and equipping them with all the tech they could find. If Leah knew anything about coming off withdrawal, the former Luddites had settled in, accepting the connections they’d so long dismissed because it felt so much better than jonesing. They’d probably spent all night surfing The Beam, feeling the new add-ons worming tendrils into their minds and bodies. They didn’t have the luxury of ideals and morals anymore. Today, every one of Leo’s people were as hooked on The Beam and nanobots as any other District Zero citizen, and their only thought — for a week, at least — would be to want more, and more, and more.
Leah and Dominic were stressed, adrenaline-sore, and exhausted. Leo and the others were high on their new drug — strung up and literally wired. They were two zombie soldiers leading a pack of enthusiastic kids with big toys as pacifiers. Nothing good could come of this — Dominic’s man Omar Jones and a paranoid Stephen York shell notwithstanding.
“Look, Dom, I’m sorry. I can’t just find something out there that may not exist without knowing what the hell it is or where to find it. Using a shitty and forgotten flat connection, at that.”
Dominic sighed. “Maybe it’s nothing.”
“Maybe. And you’ll be there anyway, right?”
“Where?”
“At this thing you’re so worried about. With your Omar guy.”
“Yes.”
“And you’ll be in charge. You’re running the whole thing.”
“Not running it. I’m just providing police protection.”
“So if you wanted, you could just arrest this guy Omar.”
“I’m not worried about Omar himself so much as this whole shell thing I told you about.”
“Which is a guess.”
“Sure, of course,” Dominic admitted.
“So it’s all academic. What if it works out the way you explained to me earlier? Like Omar said it would?”
“You don’t know Omar,” Dominic said.
“I know Occam’s razor.”
“Whose razor?”
“It’s a principle that says that the simplest answer is usually right. Therefore, I say that Omar might be out to squeeze Craig Braemon into an upper-tier ticket. End of story.”
“Except that you don’t know Omar,” Dominic repeated.
Leah rolled her eyes. “Okay. Good. Worry if you want. But I’m going to focus on getting Leo and the others out of here. We can’t stay down here forever. The vents are all shitted up, and the air in this place is terrible.”
After a long second, Dominic shifted position and said, “Fine.” He touched one of the old, dusty screens. It came to life, and Leah watched him check the time. “It’s not like we have long before I need to move on. Assuming you covered our tracks yesterday like you think you did, I suppose I can just walk back into the station and get back to work. Like I didn’t do anything wrong?”
Leah smiled. “Oh, Dom. You never do anything wrong. Yesterday or ever.”
“I’ll try not to worry.” Then, to Leah’s surprise, the grizzled police captain tried on a tired, uncomfortable smile.
“That’s right,” Leah replied, “because there’s nothing to worry about.”
Sam sat up tall in his chair, cracked his knuckles, and adjusted his console screen.
Then he yawned, wondering why he was so tired. Maybe it was the moondust. There was no reason, really, that he should be so fatigued this quickly. He hadn’t entered the network without all of his anonymizers and rerouters and protections, but screwing without protection wasn’t any less exhausting than screwing with it. Navigating the Beam bareback after all this time hiding shouldn’t be any harder than what he’d always done.
Except that it was mentally harder. That might be the problem. Once upon a time, he didn’t have to worry. He did worry, but he didn’t have to. Maybe that was the difference. And now, tired as he was, he kept thinking that maybe he should have grabbed a damned hovercab to chase after Nicolai to deliver Integer7’s warning rather than trying to connect through The Beam.
But those were his options: connect from deep down or find the man on foot. He couldn’t just call; even Lunis-lubricated Sam Dial was cautious enough to know that was a terrible idea. If someone powerful was sending Nicolai on false errands, they’d surely be snooping his calls. If Sam stayed deep, he could at least see what might be coming. There was a fair chance that even powerful snoopers might not be sure Sam was trying to contact Nicolai beneath the UI layer of one of his implants, but they’d see him placing a call for sure. Might as well play the odds.
Sam sat up tall in his chair, cracked his knuckles, and adjusted his console screen.
Then he yawned, wondering why he was so tired.
Sam pinched and scrolled on his screen, sometimes entering commands into the airboard he’d rigged the canvas to project. He’d seen Nicolai’s trail not long ago. He could still follow him using Stefan’s tracker. Nicolai was blessedly visible again…but now harder to see, because it was as if his ID had been obscured by someone else’s.
Which didn’t make any sense.
An AI agent appeared on Sam’s screen. He’d been waving the thing away for the ten minutes or so he’d been trying to track Nicolai down to warn him. He had better software than even the AI native to this sector because the AI didn’t spend all its time tracking Nicolai Costa, and Sam’s patch did. But the cascades, as Nicolai moved across Manhattan, were becoming increasingly noisy. The network was usually clean once Sam established a proxy away from his home base, but not today. Today, everything seemed to be falling apart.
It was Shift coming, maybe. Too much noise on The Beam.
Sam sat up tall in his chair, cracked his knuckles, and adjusted his console screen. Then he yawned, wondering why he was so tired. Maybe it was the moondust. It did something to you. It had certainly made Sam feel better. Ever since Sam had pried himself away from the network in ’91 and ’92, he’d been jittery, his focus scattered. Now he seemed able to focus again. Intrepid reporter Sam Dial, back on the case. And allowing himself to touch naked connectivity again? That was delicious. Dangerous, too, but did that really matter? Whoever was after Nicolai carried a big stick. And where was Nicolai headed tomorrow? To Craig Braemon’s party, where bigger sticks might be held. Maybe Braemon himself was after Nicolai, trying to somehow mislead him. This would certainly be bad. But Sam had had plenty of time to warn Nicolai, especially now that he’d found his trail out in the open. He felt confident again. He wasn’t just Shadow, with his bravado restored. He was Original Sam Dial.
He sent a data ping under the surface to one of distant Nicolai’s add-ons to catch his attention and finally let the AI open a comm channel. Then Sam sat up tall in his chair, cracked his knuckles, and adjusted his console screen.
Sam saw the AI’s words, duly translated, appear in a small bubble.
Looks like you’re trying to contact Nicolai Costa. Can I help?
Sam should have ignored the thing from the start. He swiped it away.
But the AI stuck around. Whatever interpreter he’d stumbled into had given the AI a cartoon face. It seemed to be an old bit of programming, and not (from what Sam could see) complete. It wasn’t even all-directional. Some of it was a machine language translation subroutine, about ten layers deeper than it should be up here where Sam was, offering assistance.
The thing looked like a paperclip with eyes. The bubble reappeared and said, Looks like Nicolai Costa doesn’t want to talk to you. Can I help?
Sam sat up tall in his chair, cracked his knuckles, and felt a flash of panic.
It hadn’t registered for Sam the first time, but the new messages proved the AI knew exactly what Sam was up to and whom he was looking for. Despite Nicolai not even looking much like himself. He was piggybacking a second ID that looked like it had even more dongles and high-security modifiers, and yet the AI knew who Nicolai was and what Sam was after.
The AI said, You should stop trying. Moondust isn’t good for you.
The AI said, Looks like you’re deluding yourself again. Can I help?
Aloud, Sam said, “Shit.”
And the console replied, “I’m sorry. I didn’t catch that.”
Stupid jury-rigged console, meant to hack his way across the city hub. Stupid xenophobia. Stupid years and years of paranoia and isolation. Of course traversing this broken, unstable old network underbelly had been a bad idea. Sam wasn’t a hacker. He was a pretend hacker, standing atop the shoulders of hackers. That’s why he hadn’t tried to traverse all this broken, unstable old network underbelly after realizing he needed to find and warn Nicolai. That’s the exact reason he’d stood up, walked out of his apartment, and taken a rental hoverskipper to Starbucks, hoping to use one of their higher-fidelity connections. You couldn’t try something like this from an under-the-line apartment, unprotected, on a low-end connection. That was begging to get stuck in a hole.
That’s why, now that the loop grew transparent inside Sam’s mind, he was sure he hadn’t opened his apartment console.
That’s why he hadn’t sat down behind his crappy little table at all.
That’s why he felt utterly certain that he was at Starbucks right now, with the tab running for West knew how long.
“Canvas,” Sam said aloud, aware now of how pointless this all might be, “what’s the time?”
“Four sixteen p.m.,” the console replied.
But he’d begun looking for Nicolai at exactly 4:16 p.m. Sam remembered that for sure because when the Starbucks clerk logged his time, Sam had etched the clock’s digits into his mind. He had enough credits to sit in a private parlor for a while, but if he sat for too long, he wouldn’t be able to pay his rent. He could spend an hour looking for Nicolai, no more. If he couldn’t establish a soft ping to one of the man’s peripherals in that time, he’d need to do this the hard way: in person. He didn’t want to come within twenty blocks of Craig Braemon but couldn’t afford Starbucks prices.
“Canvas. Repeat system time.”
“Four-sixteen p.m.”
Sam looked around what appeared to be his apartment, knowing somewhere inside his mind that this was all some sort of simulation — and that he was, in fact, still at Starbucks. It seemed real, but it would seem real if a troublesome microfragment had breached his old mental firewall and looped Sam’s spatial and temporal acuity settings. If what he now thought had happened had indeed happened, this wasn’t just a superrealistic simulation. It was something closer to being out of his half-organic, half-machine min
d in a very specific way.
And if he’d really managed to get himself stuck, it meant he might have been repeating the same short loop for West knew how long. He’d almost certainly been here longer than the hour he’d come in being able to afford. Starbucks would come in and kick his corpse out, not minding the hippocampus damage that came from instant disconnect, when his balance hit zero.
Thinking of his balance, Sam did a quick calculation. He didn’t know how long his loop had been repeating, but it couldn’t have been longer than a week because he’d be out of money before then. But it could have been days. Although after a few days, he’d probably be dehydrated enough to die, and he hadn’t opted for deep immersion hydration because this was supposed to be quick.
So, two days max. Any more than that, and he’d know, based on the fact that the real Sam’s body was a sack of meat in need of tending.
But a day or two was plenty.
Braemon’s party might be over by now, and whatever danger Nicolai was in (danger that could implicate Sam, possibly making Nicolai’s problems Sam’s problems all over again) might already have exacted its toll. Nicolai, by now, might be dead.
“Canvas,” Sam said, “give me the main Starbucks menu.”
Instead of seeing the menu, Sam sat up tall in his chair, cracked his knuckles, and adjusted his console screen.
“Customer service!” he shouted. “I need assistance in private parlor 61-B!”
But instead of seeing a ping to Starbucks customer service, Sam’s eyes continued to see his own apartment, his own console, his own chipped table. He wondered why he was so tired. Maybe it was the moondust. But more likely, it was because he’d been at this for hours and hours without having a clue.
“Canvas, give me central Beam support!” Sam said, feeling an edge of panic.
An admin screen popped up, but it still wasn’t Starbucks admin. It belonged to his console, native to the apartment he wasn’t actually in. He shouted to the Beam overseers anyway, and when the emergency inquiry screen appeared, Sam kept his voice calm.
