by James Luceno
To both sides of the broad avenue that was the Network's commercial zone rose unimaginably tall towers, some reminiscent of buildings drawn from old cartoons, and others so detailed you could swear you were back in the real world. Encased in plasmascript advertising banners, the towers were home to dating services, brokerage houses, PG and adult entertainments, role-playing realms, religious instruction, martial arts and wrestling matches, TV shows and movies, music raves, and live chats that had been going on for years.
Beyond the towers and the deep canyons that separated them spread a span of cubes, spheres, and pyramids that were corporate headquarters, storage facilities, data libraries, and outposts for syndicate neural nets. Elsewhere were cathedrals, arenas, and wooded parks.
At the far end of the Ribbon, rising from the heart of the grid, loomed the fairy-tale castle of Peerless Engineering, the multinational corporation that had wrested control of the Network from the cyberwizards who had designed it. Peerless also had been largely responsible for making the Network accessible to anyone with a cybersystem, a willingness to explore, and a tolerance for mild vertigo.
Side by side, Tech and Bios7 moved their craft onto the Ribbon. Tech took a calming breath and told himself to make his hands and feet extensions of his mind.
“You ready, hotshot?” Bios7 asked.
“I was reincarnated ready.”
Piloting a lipstick-shaped craft to a position between the Venom and the saucer, a girl named Eye-Catcher counted down from ten and the race began.
Traffic was heavy as the racers shot straight down the center of the Ribbon. Tourists tried to move out of their path, but some weren't quick enough. Tech could only guess at the number of browsers and lurkers he and Bios7 displaced or knocked off-Network in their rapid passing— though Marz could be counted on to furnish him with the exact number at some point after the race.
Navigating the avenues, alleys, overpasses, and tunnels of the Network was similar to moving about in the real world. The speeds you could attain depended on power, timing, traffic flow, and just how much you were willing or able to bend or break the rules. Anyone with a fast machine could perform the equivalent of running yellow or red lights, passing on the inside, slipping into high-occupancy lanes—even though flying solo—or taking advantage of any number of shortcuts. But if you had a really fast machine, loaded to the max with the necessary software, you could not only reach speeds impossible to attain in the real world, you could also overcome some of the protocols that governed movement inside the Network. You could not only pass laterally, but also ascend or descend to other levels, piggyback yourself to other flyers, go through buildings as opposed to around them, enter utility shafts, or drop down into the assembler-code corridors that sustained the grid itself.
Tech and Bios7 did all these things as they jinked and juked toward the Peerless Castle. In Tech's headphones the earsplitting chords of Thunder Cracker mixed with the resounding encouragement of spectators parked along the course.
Neck and neck and resolved to disable each other, they hurled commands over their audio link. Bios7 tried for a force skid while Tech was writhing through a dense cluster of frequent flyers, but Tech managed to regain control of his ripped racer and counter with a low-fuel command. The maneuver cost Bios7 precious seconds while he rushed to refresh his ruby saucer by drawing from the power cells of a surprised lurker, and Tech shot into the lead.
At the base of the Peerless Castle, the Ribbon divided into three lanes. The two outer lanes encircled the virtual construct, clock- and counter-clockwise, while the middle lane coursed over a broad moat and led directly to the castle's portcullis—its principal gate.
All three lanes were heavily patrolled by security craft, but the central one was also reinforced by antiviral and barrier programs that protected Peerless from acts of cyberterrorism. Peerless was the big kid on the block, but its authority was often being challenged by one start-up company or an other. A flyer could find him or herself in deep strife for even venturing too close to Peerless, let alone for trying to outwit the speed filters to race around the castle at top speed.
The plan called for Tech and Bios7 to take the counterclockwise lane and complete one lap around the craggy mountain from which the castle rose. The first to arrive back at the Ribbon would be declared the winner.
Taking advantage of his small lead, Tech whipped the Venom to the right. But just short of the divide, and making it appear as if he had succumbed to one of Bios7's force-head wind commands, he allowed Bios7's saucer to edge alongside him on the inside.
Tech watched his visor displays, waiting for his opponent to accelerate; then, when the two ships were almost even, Tech slipped into the saucer's data drag. At the same time, he nudged Bios7 into the center lane, and shouted, “Force steering lock!”
For a moment, it seemed as if Bios7 had been caught off guard and would have no choice but to shoot across the castle's drawbridge and wrestle with the security patrols stationed there. But at the last instant, the saucer slewed effortlessly back into the right lane and again pulled alongside Tech.
“Nice try, kid,” he said, “but you've used that trick once too often.”
With a staggering surge of power, the saucer cut diagonally across the blunt nose of the Venom to recapture the lead. Flat out, the two ships tore into the banked curve.
Behind the turreted castle, the grid all but disappeared into a featureless black abyss.
The Escarpment, as it was called, was equivalent to a ten-thousand-foot sheer drop into nothingness. It had been engineered by a group of renegade hackers who had been Peerless's competitors in giving form to the Virtual Network. Peerless had tried on numerous occasions to delete, move, or bridge the abyss, but the company's cybertechnicians had been unable to break the code the hackers had used in creating it.
Had Peerless been successful, the Network would have been able to expand into the Wilds, which lay to the south, far below the castle. But as it was, the Wilds remained a fringe outlaw zone with sites seldom visited by the tourists and shoppers who patronized the Ribbon.
A few daredevil flyers had tried to bridge the abyss in their own fashion by soaring over the edge at top speed. But none were known to have accomplished the jump. While getting nailed by a syscop or a security patrol could not only knock you off-Network but also leave you with a boiled brain and a toasted cybersystem, a plunge into the abyss could render you unconscious or worse.
A third of the way around the embankment, Bios7 began to power down and hug the inside of the curve. It was the safe and sensible thing to do— the only sane way to circumnavigate the castle— and Tech knew that he should follow suit. But he just couldn't bring himself to fall in behind the saucer. In a race like this, you lived or died by tak ing risks. Instead, he increased his speed, hoping to take Bios7 on the outside.
“Ease up, Tech,” Marz warned suddenly. “You can't hold the curve at that speed.”
Gritting his teeth, Tech tightened his grip on the joystick but didn't lift his foot from the accelerator. “I can do this, bro. I can do this.”
Racing on the grid required deep-immersion techniques, and therefore was universally condemned by the watchdogs of the Network. It had turned the younger generation into Net addicts. It tampered with reality by blurring the distinction between the real and the virtual. And then there were the actual physical dangers associated with the cybersport. Racing threw a flyer's nervous and circulatory systems into overdrive. It stressed the kidneys and adrenal glands, battered the eardrums, and bombarded the optic nerves with images. It tricked the body into activating all sorts of fightor-flight loops.
And yet Tech ate it up—all of it.
“You sure know how to put on a show, I'll give you that much,” Bios7 said as the two ships raced at top speed toward the high point of the embankment.
“Save it,” Tech barked, fighting to keep control of his ship. “You can give up now if you want.”
The motion-capture vest, which
both monitored a flyer's vital signs and enabled a navigator to keep tabs on his pilot, made Tech feel as if he were being crushed against the right side of his cockpit, and the wireless joystick shuddered in sympathy.
“Okay, kid,” Bios7 said soberly. “Let me know where you land, if you land.”
The saucer had just dropped back when the Venom began to spin through a dizzying succession of counterclockwise circles. Tech's hands slipped from the control stick, and he thought he was going to throw up. The castle became a smear in the visor. He tried valiantly to steady himself and his ship, but his best efforts weren't good enough.
The Venom rocketed over the brink of the Escarpment with nowhere to go but down.
“Be seeing you,” Bios7 said as Tech plunged into darkness. “In the end you're just another flamer. All show, no go.”
Chapter 3
Tech fell in gloom. The joystick felt lifeless in his hand, and the power chords of Thunder Cracker sounded as if they were coming from underwater. He wondered whether he'd simply crash and burn or wake up in a hospital bed, laid low by a case of cyberstupor.
He could almost taste the bitter pill Bios7 had made him swallow.
Then, against all expectation, the Network began to flicker back to life in Tech's visor, and the music returned to normal volume.
Marz's voice cut in. “Are you all right?”
“I think so,” Tech said.
“Good. Then I feel okay about calling you a total jackout.”
Tech accepted the rebuke. “Stupid, stupid move… I had him.” He took a long, puzzled look at the featureless spheres and cubes that surrounded him. “Hello, where am I?”
“You're in the Metroplex Enforcement District,” Marz said angrily. “I managed to deploy a safety chute just as you were going over the edge.”
Tech shook his head in disbelief. “Man, I must have caught a data current. But at least I didn't drop out of the grid, right?”
“Bios7 set a new record for a Ribbon run,” Marz took clear pleasure in saying. “He told me to tell you, ‘Better luck next time.’ ”
“Next time I'll go with the Mirage,” Tech fired back. “At least that one won't skid out from under me.”
Marz bristled and started to reply, but thought better of it.
“Hey, Marz…”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks, bro.”
“Hey, who else is going to keep you in line?”
Marz couldn't help but smile. He ran a hand over his curly brown hair and studied the on-screen map. “You can make a graceful exit back to the Ribbon at the next vertical intersection.”
Graceful exits were more for the sake of the flyer than the system. A cyberjockey could always get out of a tight spot by raising his or her headset visor, but such graceless exits were potentially dangerous for deep-immersion flyers like Tech to whom the Network was everything. There were dozens of documented cases of temporary blindness and/or psychosis resulting from “pulling the plug.”
“Once you hit the Ribbon, I'll give you a new course heading,” Marz continued. “I've got a clearer echo of the electrician's telephone file. The file's hung up in one of AmTel's relay stations. Shouldn't be too difficult to grab. Fact, if we hurry, we can retrieve the thing before Felix gets to the office…”
He let his words trail off when he sensed that Tech wasn't listening, then said, “Tech, what are you doing? Why aren't you exiting?”
Tech said nothing.
“Tech,” Marz repeated.
“What's the green construct off to my left?” Tech asked.
“Environmental Protection Agency.”
“Great! What d'you say we test-drive Subterfuge?”
“In the EPA?” Marz said in disbelief. In a warming world, short on energy resources, the EPA had become an agency of wide-ranging authority. “Excessive Punishment Assured, Tech. Their agents don't need warrants, and they don't believe in courts. We'd be safer test-driving Subterfuge in the FBI—”
“Come on, you want to see the soft in action as much as I do, and the EPA's the perfect place to try it out. Agency bloodhounds couldn't nab a bug if it bit 'em on the nose.”
“And we're going to bite them how?”
“By deleting some of Felix's violations. He's gotta have a few backed up. Besides, that'll make up for the work we're not getting done.”
“Dude, wouldn't it be easier just to get the work done?”
“Easier, but not nearly as much fun.”
“Tech, I don't even know if I installed Subterfuge right.”
“Am I talking to the right Marz Vega?”
Marz turned to the dentist's chair to glare at his gangly, visored brother. “Haven't we had enough close calls for one session?”
“Don't confuse the issue. This has nothing to do with thrills.”
“Nothing to do with thrills, huh?”
“Open the garage again,” Tech said, taking the Venom through a rapid turn. “We're going to need something a little less obvious than a racer.”
The headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency was a large, multiwindowed mushroom occupying an entire virtual block. Stacked at nearly every entry port were the myriad craft of telecommuting employees. Access to the construct, and indeed to most of the Network's vast cityscape of data domains, was typically restricted to staffers or privileged users with official clearance. But Tech and Marz's work for Felix McTurk had made them experts at cutting through security blankets.
Piloting an ancient biplane they'd nicknamed the Baron, Tech aimed himself for the least crowded entrance, the cyberflyer's virtual red scarf unfurling in the data breeze from the open cockpit.
True to its low-impact philosophy, there was nothing fancy about the EPA, either in decor or layout. Levels were color-coded according to the various departments to which they belonged, with narrow aisles wending between rows of file drawers. Once inside a drawer, you could move through the contents, open files, scan, edit, or download contents. If you had the appropriate codes, you could even delete items, in part or entirely.
You accomplished all this by using your joystick to click on whatever menu selections, option keys, or free-floating icons a site displayed, or by entering executable commands into your virtual keyboard.
Tech opened another song cache and began to familiarize himself with the construct's layout while Marz ran a search for Felix McTurk's file. Navigating bureaucratic quagmires like the EPA was exactly what Tech was paid to do, since Felix, despite his chosen profession, had little fondness for flying and a case of adult-onset claustrophobia when it came to negotiating bureaucratic corridors.
“I found Felix,” Marz announced. “Level three, drawer 8504. That level's reserved for repeat offenders, so security's going to be thick.”
“I'm on my way,” Tech said, tweaking the joy-stick and depressing the accelerator pedal. The biplane banked to the right and sped off down a long green corridor.
Level three was even more heavily policed than he had expected it to be. But Tech managed to reach drawer 8504 without incident. Confident that Subterfuge would allow him to outsmart the EPA's watchdogs and trackers, he made a sharp turn into the drawer.
Even if the new software failed to do its job and a couple of security bloodhounds did pick up his scent, all would not be lost. To guard against just such an eventuality—though not necessarily occurring at the EPA—Marz had patched Felix's cybersystem into the neural network computer that ran the multinational insurance company in the office next door to Data Discoveries. Any location trace would stop at the insurance company's system.
With luck.
“Jeez! You should see this thing,” Tech said when he reached Felix's file. “Big as a cinder block and pasted with overdue notices. Felix has been a very bad boy.”
“Play it safe,” Marz cautioned. “Don't try to delete too much.”
“I want to give the hounds good reason to come after me. Give the soft a real trial by fire.”
Tech had just begun
highlighting and deleting some of Felix's more flagrant violations—the ones resulting from energy misuse and failing to recycle—when Marz's voice boomed through the headset earpieces.
“Heads up! The EPA has issued an intrusion alert. Security programs are searching all levels for undocumented arrivals.”
Tech stopped what he was doing. “It's cool. I already deleted the worst of the violations. I'm heading out the drawer.”
“Don't go out the way you came in. You've got pit bulls and bloodhounds zeroing in on your position.”
“Then it's time to bring out the big guns, bro. Unzip Subterfuge.”
Marz typed a flurry of commands on the key board. “Subterfuge is open,” he said, crossing his fingers.
Tech glanced in the visor's rearview window in time to see a pack of shimmering, razor-toothed mastiffs come skittering around a turn in the corridor and race after him. His fingers danced over the joystick's control pad.
“Deploying ghosts.”
Instantly, multiple images of the Baron took shape to all sides of him and began to veer off in different directions. All but one of the slavering mastiffs chased after the ghosts, and that one angled into the drawer Tech had just exited.
He hooted with joy.
“Subterfuge is awesome! No way those trackers will be able to pick out the real me!”
“Get yourself off level three just in case,” Marz urged. “You're closest exit to the Ribbon is through the south gate on level one.”
Tech rammed the joystick forward. The biplane veered and shot for the end of the corridor. But Tech wasn't halfway there when, out of nowhere, a program gremlin popped into existence and perched itself like a gargoyle on the Baron's upper-right wing tip. The product of free-floating data fragments, program gremlins were a fairly common sight in the Network. But this one was bright blue, from pointed ears to splayed feet and had a short tail, big black saucer-shaped eyes, and a yellow button nose.
“What the heck,” Tech said. “This thing must have escaped from some gaming site.”
Marz was already running diagnostic programs. “I'm not sure where it came from. It's made of some code I've never seen before. If I didn't know better, I'd swear it launched from Subterfuge.”
