by Sean Platt
It almost looked like SerenityBlue was part of this. Almost, but not quite.
There was a halo around it all. Fragmentary code that carried many of the same quirks — either a programmer’s peculiar way of commenting his code or something the AI wanted to center on the same key identifier, like a Beam ID.
Bigger shards of something broken. To Leah, who still had some dust in her blood, these looked like pieces of a broken vase that someone was intent on trying to reassemble.
Leah couldn’t see the contents of what she assumed was Craig Braemon’s canvas, but she’d learned enough tricks to peek into the cycling buffers and see that one of them was vastly overloaded. There was an enormous amount of data in Braemon’s system, doing nothing but checking its own integrity, over and over again.
And there was something else, too. A file fragment that had been dragged away and was being drawn forward like driftwood toward a waterfall’s edge. A short primer sequence that someone seemed to have forgotten, sequestered in a different system. Leah had been watching that last one since she’d seen someone, somewhere, beginning to pick its lock — a hacker out there who wanted that code and was scratching at scabs, trying to free it.
Leah sat. Stood. Watched. Fretted.
She switched to Underbelly to watch the local Beam node shatter below the surface.
She looked at the map, at Shadow running toward the event he had no business attending. The event that…
“Oh, shit.”
Leah had been looking at everything but the obvious. The rest of the world only had one way to observe what Shadow was hightailing for, and Leah, whose nose had been buried in code, hadn’t thought to check.
She dragged open a new screen and tuned to Beam Headlines. The top five spots were all about the Respero fundraiser in DZ’s heart. Leah picked the top one — a video stream — then found herself watching a from-the-ground view of the event, shot by a unit that someone had dropped.
Leah saw the chaos and then something else.
Finally, she understood.
Violet watched the stage wall flash with the words:
Incoming call from:
JUST ANSWER NOW!!!
But this wasn’t her house, so whoever was calling, it wasn’t for her. Answering would be rude. And besides, Violet had other things to worry about.
The slamshots, fireballs, flashing blades, and general melee in front of her, for starters.
Her mother being dead, for another.
But as much as Violet knew how badly those things should upset her, she’d only had a few seconds of screaming terror before the moment had passed. Because this wasn’t real. If Mom was gone, she’d feel sad. But this was all too odd to be reality.
For one, no one in the chaotic room seemed to be able to touch her. Violet had been shot a few times, and a few Samaritans had tried to drag her off the stage after the well-dressed people had run away in a panic. But everything went right through her, as if she were a ghost.
And second, Violet was quite sure that she, herself, was dead. That had taken some getting used to, but part of her mind seemed elevated, as if she was looking down from below. That part of Violet (a part she didn’t remember from before her death; it seemed rather angelic) viewed things like Mom’s death as part of the natural cycle. It also didn’t have a problem with Violet being dead because that part of her had figured it out a long time ago, and made peace.
Third, she really did seem to be in two places at once. The sensation was like a dream she couldn’t shake off — but instead of falling apart in her mind like a normal dream, this one grew stronger.
She was herself, as she’d always been before she’d been wheeled into her Respero chamber and forced to say her final goodbyes. But she was someone else, too. Someone who had her own memories that Violet knew she (as Violet, anyway) had never experienced.
There was a filthy man with a beard who’d been somehow very important.
There were children. Children that the other part of Violet thought of as Violet’s children, even though she had none and was barely old enough to marry.
Strangest of all, there was the man across the room intent on killing many people. Normally, Violet didn’t like people who killed others. But she liked this man. Somehow, in a way that went deep — below the killer, perhaps.
Violet stood. Her feet obeyed the wooden stage, as if she were actually walking on it. She went where others had fled, behind the curtain and down a set of two steps, her feet obeying the steps as well. She couldn’t feel anything, but that was okay. Her higher part said it was okay, normal, this was how it would be from now on. Integrated and split, but somehow still just a part of the natural order.
That part of Violet could also sense someone beside her, even though she was alone with only the sounds of chaos for company. It was a feeling like being squeezed between two overweight passengers on a mag train.
“Who’s there?” Violet’s voice, to her own ears, sounded present. But with nobody to hear, she couldn’t know if she’d made a sound.
Keep moving, a voice inside seemed to whisper.
Violet came out from behind the curtain, now moving into struggle and bloodshed, passing through all of it like a specter, looking for the deadly man with the gray braids.
Micah finally shook Natasha away when he realized he was essentially leading a conga line: Micah in the lead, Natasha holding his hand, and Isaac holding Natasha’s other hand. Jameson Gray had vanished. Good. A three-person conga line in the middle of a massacre was plenty, and Micah still wasn’t sure Jameson hadn’t caused all of this in some way, anyhow.
Natasha looked at Micah after he pulled his hand from hers, and Micah saw her eyes soften into fear. The glance kept him from shouting at her, even though she was Jameson’s buddy. Maybe she’d been part of it, too.
“It’s blocked,” Isaac said from behind.
“I know it’s blocked,” Micah snapped.
“What do we do?”
“I don’t know, Isaac. Maybe you should fucking think for yourself for a change.”
Micah didn’t look back, not trusting himself to hold back a brimming torrent of abuse if he met his brother’s eyes. Isaac and Natasha had both become sheep the second the crisis had erupted. Oh, both had had plenty to say about the way Micah always played big in their day-to-day, but now that lives were on the line, they wanted Micah to lead them. That line about being your brother’s keeper? Oh yes, Micah knew it well. He was keeper of both his idiot brother and his bitch of a sister-in-law. Two corpses shackled to his ankles, unable to move unless Micah dragged them.
Instead of looking back at Isaac, Micah focused on the hallway gridlock ahead. He saw only tuxedos and gowns jammed behind what must be a locked door, but he could hear stomping coming from the left and right. He pushed his albatrosses back into a short hallway, nudging them out of the way like troublesome cargo, and peeked around the corner.
He saw blades. Guns. Blood.
Back into the room behind Isaac, at their small group’s rear. The doors here swung on old-fashioned hinges and looked like wood, but in a place like Craig Braemon’s, they’d have Plasteel and carbon mesh cores. If the locks were as offline as the front door seemed to be stuck online, he could always shove furniture against the door.
Inside, Micah found their party expanded to five. There were two men in workshirts already in the study, a panel removed from the wall, working as if nothing was amiss. When they didn’t turn toward Micah, Isaac, and Natasha with weapons, Micah decided to ignore them. He closed the door, which seemed to lock — but who could unlock it, Micah had no idea.
“Hey,” Micah shouted to the workmen. “Secure this door.”
“You secure it,” one of them snapped. In the exposed control panel, something flashed, and the other man swore. The first man turned back, ignoring Micah.
“Maybe you didn’t hear the shit going on out there,” Micah said.
The second workman turned. He was holding a weapon Micah
had never seen, leveled at Micah’s chest.
“Maybe you’d better stay where you are and keep your mouth shut.”
Natasha stepped back. Isaac let her settle against him, but then Natasha turned, saw Isaac, and almost slapped him.
The workman shoved the weapon into his pants then turned back to the panel. They began chattering urgently while Micah did as instructed. But of course Natasha didn’t listen. She never did.
“What are you trying to do?” she asked.
Outside, there was a blast of some sort. Micah heard splintering wood, maybe shattering glass coming from the front door.
“To get that window open.” One of them pointed at what seemed to be a rather ordinary window, looking out on the street beyond.
Isaac picked up a chair. The workman laughed.
“It’s not glass. It’s a projection.”
“Oh.”
“Something locked the place down.”
Micah said, “Something?”
“During your little stage show. There’s some sort of a glitch. I can’t even pull up the…”
The other man, looking over at his companion’s pause, asked, “Did you get it?”
“No. I was just noticing this.” He pointed at something on a screen under the removed wall panel. Apparently, the parlor, like much of Braemon’s high-end place, had real fabrics and plaster in the walls. To Micah’s mind, that made the entire apartment more quaint than useful, but Braemon probably thought it spoke of elegance.
“Dammit,” said the other man.
“What is that? What’s making it hang?”
“I don’t know. It’s drawing most of the processing power of the…shit, look at this.”
“That can’t be right.”
The door seemed to shake with impact behind them. But it must have been someone running by rather than trying to enter because a moment later there was only the same sounds of shots and breaking as before.
“Can you get the window open or not?” Micah demanded.
Ignoring Micah, the first man said, “Shit.”
“Shit is right. You want to crawl in and unplug it all then try an isolated restart?”
The other laughed, as if this all made sense but the idea was preposterous.
“So it won’t open. Because of…” He trailed off, his finger indicating something in the panel. The other man must have understood because he sighed.
The men turned back to Micah, Isaac, and Natasha. The one with the weapon — now raised again — tipped his chin toward the door.
“Back out into the hallway. You first.”
“Why? We’re safe here.”
“Because I said so.”
Isaac stepped in front of Natasha. The move was probably supposed to be gallant, protecting her from harm, but it only annoyed Natasha. She shoved him away.
Isaac said, “We’re staying. You can go.”
The man with the gun rolled his eyes. The weapon dipped a little. To Micah, it was an almost reasonable gesture, as if the man had grabbed his gun just in case, but didn’t want to use it if he could avoid it.
“You don’t understand. The canvas here is under attack. The apartment is a sealed environment and has about ten layers of louvers and filters to keep the air pure. Problem is, it’s controlled by The Beam. If we don’t get out soon, we’ll run out of air. And that’s assuming the security system doesn’t decide we’re unwanted visitors and retaliate first.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Isaac said.
The first man nodded toward the panel. “Be my guest. Pull up the roster. You tell me who’s authorized and who’s not because to me it’s all garbage. The network connection is falling apart, and the fucking processing buffer is full. Full. How is that possible, if not a malware attack?”
Micah had no idea what any of it meant. He understood “attack,” though, and that was enough. But Isaac was still posturing, hands now on his hips. Behind them, the door shook again, underscoring an important and troubling issue: They’d come in through a single point of entry. If whoever had stormed the party decided to knock, they were trapped.
“You want to go back out there, go ahead. My wife and I are staying.”
“Speak for yourself, asshole.” Natasha walked right at the workmen, practically impaling herself on the man’s weapon. But it must have been the last thing the men expected because they let her go past, to the door, to the lock. It took her a second to figure out how to open the thing, but then it turned easily and Natasha was out with her prima donna hips swinging beneath her fancy gala dress.
Too late, Micah heard something coming, full steam ahead.
Natasha screamed, backing up.
Isaac ran to grab her, but the assailant was already there at the door.
Micah moved to intercept. Between Isaac and Natasha, he had no idea where to go first. He tried for the door, to close it, to shut them back in. There wasn’t time. The newcomer raised his weapon.
A shot fired.
A body fell.
Behind Kai, the door opened and closed. Nobody had done anything to secure it in the minutes it had taken for Kate to lose her dignity. The noise made Kai flinch; the office door was concealed from the outside, so the fact that someone was entering was, in itself, troubling. But it wasn’t an intruder. It was only Kate, back already.
“Guns,” Kate panted, her back to the door, her giant breasts rising and falling.
Kai had already instructed her nanos to release endorphins to counteract the adrenaline that had been dogging her since the first incursion, since she’d used the tumult to slip Rachel the deadly cloned cells the old woman had so badly wanted. By then, the magic act was as over as it was going to be. Rachel had been laughing. Either she’d known the show wouldn’t conclude or was excellent at rolling with punches and going with the flow.
Well, maybe she had been excellent at it. Because Rachel had slumped like an empty sack under Kai’s fingernail barb just as she had in the immersion back at Alpha Place. This time, it was real. Rachel Ryan, rest in peace.
Kai didn’t respond to Kate. Nicolai was still at the console, still trying to figure out something he’d more or less assumed would be straightforward: transferring the Stephen York shell to Craig Braemon’s canvas. But the Fi jack rig hadn’t worked, and Nicolai didn’t exactly have a data port in his head. Maybe there was a way to immerse and download York the way they’d uploaded him, but doing so while a war churned outside felt both indulgent and dangerous even if their hideout seemed like a suitably hidden one — if there had been an apparent way to do so, which there wasn’t.
“Lots of guns out there,” Kate repeated, facing away from the door. Then she seemed to realize that her back was exposed to all of those guns should they somehow discover and then shoot through the security doors and stepped away. She reached out, locking the thing using a clever manual-looking offline lock. Instead of the screen turning red, it oscillated between red and green in a spastic blink, looking like Christmas lights.
“We heard you the first time,” Nicolai said.
“You got that shit uploaded yet?”
“Thought you were against my uploading it…Kate.”
Kate stepped forward like a man full of testosterone. Kai stood in her way, chest to chest. Kate looked down, Doc’s familiar lecherous smile spreading onto Kate’s soft features.
“Stop it, both of you,” Kai said. She looked over her shoulder at Nicolai. “Maybe we should bail. Maybe we just run out of here and forget about this part.”
“Good luck running.” Kate looked toward the door and jerked her thumb. “Party’s still raging out there. Nobody went home. It’s like the doors are locked.”
Nicolai shook his head, exhaled, tapped the screen, then took a moment to read it. “I see that. Yes, the doors are locked.”
“Open them,” said Kate.
Nicolai’s head snapped toward Kate, his patience with the tall blonde finally gone. “You’re so helpful. Why don’t you unlock them?”<
br />
“How the fuck’m I supposed to unlock this place?”
Nicolai began to cross the room. “You were going to hack Braemon’s canvas with that scary shit in your head. What a great idea. Having any second thoughts there, Doc?”
Kate shoved Nicolai in the chest. For a minute, it looked like they might come to blows — something that made sense when Kate had been Doc but seemed downright surreal now that Kate was Kate. Kai couldn’t remember how many enhancements the Kate/Doc refurb had included. Was Kate stronger than she looked? It hardly mattered because she was bigger than Nicolai and seemed plenty strong even without artificial help.
“Knock it off!” Kai stepped between them. “We’re stuck here, okay? Nothing changes that. You couldn’t get in, and you can’t get in either. If you ask me, you’re both idiots for buying into this. Braemon is Beau Monde, and we’re not. The way you said Omar talks, he’s something even bigger than Beau Monde. So whose brilliant idea was it to send this chucklehead in to fuck it out of him?”
“That wasn’t the whole plan,” Kate said, defensive.
“Right. Because you had Doc in your head. And we all know how well things worked out for Doc. We all know the crazy levels of above-Beau-Monde privilege Doc had, don’t we?” Kai drolled, her voice dripping sarcasm. “No, it totally makes sense. Doc had all sorts of access to people’s shit. That’s why he almost got killed by my boss, almost got pinched as a smuggler, and got his fucking dick cut off!” She slapped Kate’s adequately padded chest and stomped away, furious.
“It’s not that I can’t get in,” Nicolai said after a moment. “It’s that the Fi is all gummed up, like the firewall broke and everything is streaming in. Just a few minutes ago there was — ”
“I’m pissed at you, too!” Kai blurted, glaring at Nicolai.
“Why?”
“Because you listened to this stupid asshole! Because Micah sent you here, and you were dumb enough to believe him!”
“Micah sent you too.”
Kai stabbed her finger toward the door hard enough to break through the wood if she’d been closer. “I did my job, Nicolai!”
