Her thoughts were liquid as they poured out of her skull and into the narrow band of the cable. There was no hallucinatory realm here, no virtual reality – it was knowledge, plain and simple. Cold facts. She knew the storage capacity of her skull terminal to twenty-six decimal places, knew how much memory each internal program took up as they ran in the background. There was no need for displays or graphical hallucinations; being Awake meant you were intimately aware not only of the status of your own system, but of the system surrounding you out to a radius that corresponded to the caliber of your hardware. Your body still was still reachable, of course, and at times the flesh did strange tricks when attempting to resolve stimuli; the ranks of the Awake often used drugs like phenocyclanol, also known as Cycle, to dampen that effect. Bobbi had always reckoned that this was what the Astral Plane was supposed to have been like, a plane of pure knowledge – and sitting there with eyes closed, the Lyricom collar cradling the base of her neck, she certainly looked to the observer as if she might have been reaching out with some invisible third eye into eternity.
Deep in trance of Awakening, Bobbi willed herself connected to the ghost-box. There was a moment’s lag as she negotiated her firewall and the started up its decontamination protocols, another as she executed the connection protocols. She dove into the machine, communed with its system software, and started up the diagnostic cycle. Three minutes, thirty point three two seven seconds passed before she became aware of the problem: the ghost-box had been host to a file, a rather big one. This wasn’t at all unusual, of course, but what was interesting to her was that it appeared to have a latent shell of viral code attached to it, bleeding irrational code into the system – not harmful in and of itself, but tying up the box’s memory was keeping the thing from further operation. A prank, perhaps, or something that managed to execute before it was supposed to? This sort of thing always happened with shit programmers, of which there were far too many trying to pass themselves off as pros.
Amused, Bobbi ran the firewall’s analytical software, and failing to get an ID on the virus’s profile, ran the much more advanced analytical package in her skullcomp as well. Still she found she couldn’t quite get a purchase on it; custom programming then, nothing the firewall could recognize. Abandoning these shortcuts, she stripped out a sample and picked over it herself. Alphanumerics flashed through the screen of her Awakened mind, understanding aided by the system in her head. The fabric of the code was simple enough, but then she spotted something that stopped her cold.
There, floating in her sensorium, a simple line of programming commentary flared like a blazing message from God Himself.
!–-// HELLO THERE, BRAIN MOTHER. BE SO KIND AS TO CONTACT ME AT… –-!
A network address followed. Brain Mother, her own chosen pseudonym. Her hack handle. A message meant for her. Bobbi flew through the rest of the code sample, which only confirmed what she now surmised – that the virus wasn’t a virus at all, merely a very effective method of getting her attention. She grabbed at the file, assuming now that it was meant for her as well, and what she saw there shook her out of her trance with a wall of fear and incomprehension.
It was the archive. Stadil’s archive.
Bobbi closed her eyes and drew a deep breath. “Shit,” she muttered. This wasn’t the way she wanted to start her morning at all.
She stared at the box for a minute or so, then dumped the file into a datacell from her bag before pulling the plug from the socket behind her ear. Bobbi switched off the ghost-box and got up slowly, backing away from the now unpowered unit as if it might lunge for her throat. She made the circuit back toward the bar in careful silence, keeping her expression casual, or so she hoped. Scalli peered at her as she walked past him into the back room but said nothing.
By the time she stepped through the door, the flash of panic that she so carefully hid for the trip across the club floor now threatened to rise up and drown her. Her chest tightened as she leaned against a cooler cabinet, her eyes staring blankly at the concrete floor. How in the hell had she been discovered? Had the Bureau spotted her when they were tracking Walken with satellites? Did somebody turn her in? Chin? Pierre, that damned spider of a Frenchman?
Her hands slick with sweat, Bobbi stepped past into the elevator. She should leave this. She shouldn’t bother with it. She should sell the Temple, pack up and leave town with the rest of Stadil’s money. Fuck this. Fuck all of it. That would be the single smartest thing to do, she thought as she stabbed the single button on the elevator panel.
And yet …
Even as the elevator rose, the old familiar curiosity rose with it. Wasn’t this what Bobbi had been waiting for after two years? Just like she had tagged Walken in his hour of need, was this not some other strange messenger carrying a tantalizing clue for her to work on? The puzzle, again, looming out in front of her. Inviting her. Bobbi heaved a deep sigh, cursing herself as she resigned herself to what she already knew was going to take place. Of course she was going to contact whoever this person was. Of course she was going to reopen what should for all rational sense be better off left alone.
She would do it because she had to, even as she had to Stadil’s job in the first place. Because she liked puzzles. She needed them. Otherwise, what was life worth in the first place?
“I am gonna get myself killed,” she murmured to herself as she stared at the elevator’s illuminated ceiling. “I just know it.”
When the elevator opened again and she walked out into her office, Bobbi had already planned out a strategy for herself. By the time she’d sat down, she knew how to execute it. Ten minutes later she had not only hit up six different hack boards and come up with access codes to a battery of global telecomm nodes, but she had already plotted a skipback chain and was making one to connect. Despite the tension that flooded her, despite the pressure of the immediate need to know, Bobbi’s cowgirl cool allowed her to perform. She counted backward without difficulty and was Awake once more, sublimating into the network.
The node was an old one, laggy. Maybe even a private machine rigged into a node. Bobbi felt her commands follow her thoughts by a delay of milliseconds. She didn’t like that; if Bobbi ran into trouble here, she’d be at a disadvantage in throwing up defenses. She was using her portable terminal, whose defenses were much better than the firewall collar she’d worn – but even so, all the expensive barrier programs in the world weren’t going to help her if she wasn’t able to call them in time.
There was nothing in the system that she could determine, just the operating system and a single program running. Protected system, she saw now; the lag came from walls of intrusion barriers that she only now could see from the inside. Very stupid, Bobbi girl, she thought to herself as she brought her usual defenses online. Concurrent interlocking layers of programming snapped into being around her, rendering her into a tower of iron. Though it made her very obvious to whomever was watching the terminal, it would be foolish to enter a system naked when someone was likely waiting for her – and then, as if summoned by the appearance of these defenses, a new visitor arrived.
A few seconds’ pause from Mysteron kindled new tension in her, but soon the reply came.
It was Bobbi’s turn to pause. Whoever this was, there was no telling what they knew or at least thought they knew about her. she replied.
Another long pause from Mysteron. In the world of meat, Bobbi’s palms had begun to sweat as she constantly monitored the other presence for signs of an attack or other activity. came the reply after a while.
The words shot through Bobbi’s spine like a rod of iron. She sat up hard, tearing the plug from her skull-socket as her expression flattened into a mask of lead. “Via Fontanella,” she repeated to herself. Her mental threatboard shuddered in alarm. “I don’t know that place.” She raked her fingers through holographic panels, running searches. The Via Fontanella was an Italian place in the New City, over a hundred years old now. Fine dining. She had a couple of appropriate outfits she could wear – but on the other hand, did she really want to wear one of the clinging numbers in her closet when she was about to meet some mysterious personage who could potentially be planning to shoot her in the face?
“Fuck it,” she said out loud to herself. “I’ll have to improvise.”
Bobbi’s idea of improvisation meant cutting down a twelve-grand Miri Bendis she’d had hanging in her closet into something she could run in. In what would be considered a sacrilege in the courts of the fashion cult she’d taken the original dress – itself basically a shape-hugging tube made of woven straps of memory plastic – and cut it up with a thermal scalpel into something more mobile. With hip-high slits down each side of its knee-length skirt and the sleeves removed it looked like the tabard of a knight at a fetish ball. With this pulled over a gray lycra bodysuit and vents cut in the sides, she looked a little more ready to attend an underground club than to trawl the restaurant scene.
And so it was that Bobbi appeared in the saloon bar at the Via Fontanella, with her hair piled into a teased mane and her eyes swallowed with airbrushed red, and exactly opposite of the crowd’s fashion paradigm – which was also how she liked it. She was a species of neon banshee among the somber suits as she headed into the bar, wading through the packed foyer and into its richly-paneled chamber. Stark white walls gave way to dark wood and polished brass, a study in pub fashion long since passed into history. Dark-suited grayfaces drank Mexican beer poured from ancient, ivory-handled taps. A pair of what she took to be Slavic hookers, thin creatures perched on stools like disaffected gazelles, stared at her as she stood there rocking on the heels of her calf-high boots. And then, without even the slightest sliver of doubt crystallizing in her brain, she proceeded across the floor toward a table in the corner.
“Hey,” Bobbi said to the woman sitting there. “This seat taken?”
The woman looked up. Red hair, cut into a rough shag, surrounded her pale face like a halo of fresh blood. Gray shimmer on her eyelids, vivid blue eyes rimmed with purple liner. Red lips quirked into a smile as she saw Bobbi standing there. It must have been a surgical job; Bobbi could see where the bone structure had been shifted, perhaps to give it a hint of masculinity there. Tough girl.
“Brain Mother,” she said in a soft, breathless voice, wielding Bobbi’s hack handle.
“You got me at a disadvantage, honey,” Bobbi said as she dropped into her seat, lips quirking as she did so; she sat slightly sprawled, both to affect a confident pose and to give her access to the nerve-crusher that she’d strapped to the inside of her thigh with a Velcro band. It was a homemade device, battery and emitter jammed into a small square box affixed to the grips of an antique revolver, but Bobbi was no slouch when it came to bootleg machines. She smiled across the table at the woman, the crusher’s weight buoying her bravado. “You got a name, too?”
Where Bobbi was playing gangsterette, the woman opposite her wore something far more fitting the establishment’s fashion code – an elegant suit, heather-gray jacket with exaggerated shoulders over a simple silk blouse. A simple golden brooch of interlocking hexagons shone at her lapel. “My name’s Frieda,” she said with a wide smile, and she leaned forward a bit to prop her chin upon the back of a broad, long-fingered hand. “Frieda Kelley. And you’re Roberta January, also known as Brain Mother.”
A flash of irritation shot up Bobbi’s back. “Bobbi’ll do. Roberta’s just a name on a birth certificate. So what’s this all about? You didn’t call me down here with a spook-letter for a date, I’m sure.”
“No.” Freida’s smile took on a smirking edge; her eyes wrinkled, glittering with amusement. “You’re pretty hard-nosed, aren’t you, Bobbi?” She shook her head and laughed. “I can see why you two got along.”
Another flash of irritation, coupled with impatience. “Uh-huh,” Bobbi grunted. “Who we talking about here?” The name ‘Kelley’ ticked the vaguest familiarity in her head, along with a sudden, inexplicable spike of paranoia.
“Tom,” said Kelley, putting a name to Bobbi’s sudden fear. “Tom Walken. He and I used to work together at the Bureau.” She must have read the look in her eyes as Bobbi’s hand slid under her skirt, clenching the crusher’s grip in anticipation of ambush, because she lifted her manicured hands in a mollifying gesture. “Relax,” Freida said, her voice matching her hands for tone. “There’s no trouble here. It’s the opposite in fact.”
“Uh-huh,” Bobbi repeated, letting the sound cover the faint crackle of Velcro as she pulled the crusher free. “Well let’s hear it, then. I don’t have patience for mysteries, and you sure as Hell don’t have a lot of time to spill before I march my pretty ass outta here.” Or make salad out of her CNS, Bobbi thought as she fingered the trigger on the grip of the crusher. Whatever worked.
Freida’s face fell a little, and she hunched a bit in her jacket’s wide shoulders. “I’m sorry,” she said, looking down at her broad hands. “I’m not a field agent. I’m not exactly good at the cloak-and-dagger.” She looked up, her blue eyes reflecting the apology. “It took me a long time to figure out who you were, you see. I had to do a lot of digging to figure out that he’d been hiding out with you the whole time.”
Bobbi’s eyes narrowed a bit more, silently watching the woman across the table. She said nothing.
Freida shifted a little bit in her seat. “Okay,” she continued, “it’s like this. I’m assuming that you were the one who sent in what was supposed to be the archive that your boss, Stadil, sent to Annika Hunt.”
“Not supposed to be,” Bobbi said flatly. “Was.” Her finger stroked the firing stud, and she stared holes through the redhead’s pretty face. Something clicked in the back of her head and a bulb somewhere in her memory lit up. “You said your name was Kelley, right?”
“Yes,” she replied.
Bobbi leaned in then, reaching under the table – and met her gaze just as the blunt body of the crusher passed the hem of Freida’s skirt and met the side of her knee. “Tom said Kelley was a man,” she said, and her eyes flashed with her own sudden anger. “So don’t you fuck with me.”
The pressure of the crusher’s business end against her skin froze Freida in her tracks. She licked her lips nervously as she met Bobbi’s gaze, and after a long moment’s silence drew a nervous breath as a faint blush rose to her cheeks. “That’s because when he knew me, I was.”
Bobbi was angry. Bad enough that she got dragged out to a Mysterious Meeting, even worse now that she began to fear that the Bureau might be lying in wait for her. And yet, Kelley’s admission caused Bobbi to hesitate in calculating a sudden escape. Her eyes flickered over the other woman’s body, such as she could see it. The large hands, the vaguely mannish bone structure – it could be possible. “Explain,” she commanded, and pressed the crusher harder into the other woman’s knee.
“Genetic reassignment surgery,” Freida replied, and her eyes dipped to fix upon the table. “There was a girl, you see, and she…”
“Didn’t like boys, huh?” Bobbi’s expression still did not waver – she did
n’t know if she quite believed Freida yet, but the nagging spark of sympathy that had summoned itself up at least gave her hope.
“I guess he told, you, huh.” Freida sat up, then swept her hand across the table in front of her in a flippant gesture. “Yeah, well. Doctor at the office, someone I worked with. Didn’t want to be with me as I was, of course, but she’d let slip to Tom that if I ever got a gene-job put on me … ” She shrugged. “It turns out she liked me just fine as a girl – more than I ever could have hoped for. But I just wasn’t myself anymore. And you can’t go back.”
Bobbi wrinkled her nose. “I figure it’s you if you say it is,” she replied. “Lots of people make alterations all the time.” She thought of her own body, the often drastic changes she’d had done to it over the years. The mousy, scrawny thing she’d been. “But I get it. Gotta make the change for yourself instead of for somebody else, right?”
“Yeah.” Freida pursed her lips, then, and leaned forward also. “Look,” she said, “you can put that thing away. The Bureau doesn’t know I’m here, and I can’t talk to you with a gun under my hood. I’m here to talk with you about what happened to him.”
Bobbi stared at her for a hard moment before pulling the crusher back. It wasn’t that she believed the other woman entirely – Freida could be some sneaky bitch that was just a little mannish around the edges – but she felt that, perhaps, she wasn’t going to get put down by a paramilitary squad the moment she drew back to her own side of the table.
“All right,” Bobbi said, keeping the crusher under the table and pointed at Freida’s middle. “So let’s hear it, then.”
Freida paused, slowly reaching up to brush a few strands of red out of her face. She leaned back a bit in her chair, palms on the table, and took a deep breath. “All right,” she said, “Tom didn’t have – friends, I guess. I mean he had people as good as friends, or maybe could have been, but I don’t know that he ever saw any of us as buddies.” When Bobbi said nothing she continued, saying, “But I always liked him. He looked out for me, and he respected my abilities. He took me seriously, and that goes a long way with me. Longer than you might guess.”
Redeye (The Wonderland Cycle Book 2) Page 2
