Assuming she didn’t get herself killed or vaporized in the next few hours, of course.
They took a very different track than she had expected. Rather than going quickly upward as Bobbi had intended, Cagliostro took her in a long arc that only gradually made its way toward the upper chamber. When she asked why this was, the machine turned its ghastly head her way and simply answered, “Patience.” Bobbi wanted to probe, but Cagliostro would not answer further – and with no other option than to put her trust in the digital ghost, she did not speak again until they reached their destination.
Eventually the machine led her to yet another junction; this one, unlike the others, was a large hexagonal chamber with multiple ducts terminating along its walls. An opening in the central shaft led upward into darkness. Bobbi sat down hard in the center of the room, fatigue pulling heavily at her limbs, and surveyed the chamber without looking at the drone that crouched nearby.
“All right,” she said, “Here we are. I think?”
“Indeed.” The thing turned around and looked at her, staring at her in the dark. She stared at what was left of the little boy’s face, rendered weirdly by the visor, the flanged mechanism that bristled beneath the ruined socket that was once a nose. Again the shiver, again the anger. “At the top of this shaft is a secondary receiver node linked to the control network. I activated it before I came to find you.”
Bobbi looked upward into the dark once more. “Big climb,” she muttered. “You’re sure they haven’t discovered it?”
“It is running a test cycle,” said Cagliostro. “You will break this when you interface with it.” He gave her a long string of numbers to serve as a network address, which Bobbi was able to get down after two tries and a lot of concentration – no cutesy labels here, just hard numerical codes.
“It won’t take long for them to realize what’s up,” Bobbi murmured when she was sure that she had the address down. “All right, I’m on it. Just…watch out for me, all right? I don’t want to get sucked up into a fan somewhere while I’m doing this.”
“You can be assured security.”
“You can never assure security in a situation like this, man,” Bobbi muttered, and got herself into a lotus position there in the center of the room – she reached out into the ether, and sensed a sea of components singing together far above her, somewhere in the night at the top of the shaft. She was ready for it; after the shock of all the awakening signals of the corpses pulling their Lazarus gangbang routine back in the warehouse, the activity of the control nexus should be manageable.
Bobbi reached up, seeking the address of the receiver node, and found it at the outermost edge of the seething riot of computers and machinery. She breached the node like a needle piercing a vein, finding the flow of data easily, throwing herself into the bathwater flow of the Yathi network. In other circumstances, she might have been grateful for the sudden warmth, imaginary or not – but she had to tread quickly and carefully if they were going to beat Redeye to the vault of death below.
It was doubt that gripped her thoughts as she launched herself across the psychotronic realm that was the Yathi network, cloaking herself in layers of camouflage routines as she went. She floated high over the dizzying landscape of the system around her, beholding its complexity below. It was a vast construct, a city unto itself, filled with data nodes and regulatory matrices and more; everything had a place and a function, no trash data at all. Bobbi thought of Yathkalghn and the sprawling industrial complexes that clad the surface of that blasted world, the towers scratching the skies by the poisonous silver seas, the thick canopy of flashing mint-colored clouds that masked away the void. She saw symmetry with that vision and the network: everything evolved around her as she watched, expanded like a great silicate tumor, much as Seattle and the cities of Wonderland did, the civilizations which fueled them. Could her world truly come to look like this one?
Not on her watch. She floated at the fringes of the network, running quiet system queries. Bobbi was looking for the chute controls, but not just those. By Cagliostro’s clock, they didn’t have a lot of time until Redeye made her way down into the laboratory and blew the place up; Bobbi didn’t trust the great ghost to tell her anything straight at this point, and though it was a risk, she thought that she would see what the security systems could tell her. Bobbi scanned the virtual horizon, watching systems that were unprotected a few hours ago becoming slowly encrusted with layers of defense programming. She was rather shocked at the lack of imagination that went into it; though she could hardly probe deeply as she trawled along, it seemed as though the Yathi programmers, whoever they were, intended to simply layer on many copies of the same baseline defense programs over their systems. Layers of simple concrete.
Why the hell would they do that? Any hack artist worth their salt – which Bobbi certainly was – could smash through that stuff in no time. As she continued to search, however, she realized that as simple as they were the layers of defense code were beginning to alter the system IDs of every attached node; the distinctive, carefully organized nomenclature of the network was melting into a homogenized, sequential nightmare. She could determine the function of various nodes from their system IDs and their placement in the network hierarchy, after all, but it was hard to tell what number twenty-three was from number two. Panic began to shoot through her and she abandoned the idea of the security grid; she’d have to find the hatch controls and be satisfied with that.
The task took several minutes, which at the eyeblink pace of the network was a grueling span. When she finally found the factory distribution node it was already well-plated with layers of that virtual concrete, its number long since changed; she managed to find the node by tracing down a few still-unprotected nodes connected to it. All hail the magic of hierarchy, Bobbi thought as she locked down its address and began preparing an intrusion program. She could not be subtle when she hit the node, much to her regret – when she hit the node it would have to be like a meteor, and she would have to hit so hard that she could open the hatches and trash the node before anyone could stop her.
It took several minutes for Bobbi to assemble the program she wanted to use, a task that on her own would have instead taken hours. The templates of Yathi virus programs – the most useful of these she’d taken to calling ‘punch’, ‘kick’ and ‘big fucking gun’ in her head to denote their scale of effectiveness – were able to be adroitly woven together to produce a larger whole thanks to the inbuilt protocols and her own imaginative instinct for programming; the data structures were different, but the remnants of the Cagliostro-ghost inside her head gave her sufficient context to assemble them. It was becoming easier and easier to do it, such that by the time she had finished Frankensteining the breaker program together she was doing it almost on automatic. There was no time to process the way that both empowered and disturbed her, nor how it gave her greater understanding of the network around her. There was only time for the missile she’d built to fall out of the sky.
She took a mental breath, collecting her focus, and then let fly.
The program took only a fraction of a second to execute and land on the primary distribution node, and when it hit, it hit like the fist of an angry god. Bobbi had assumed that it would punch through the Yathi defenses, but to her dawning horror it did more than that – like a bunker-buster that bored through its target into a heavily compromised mountain complex, the Yathi breaker prog didn’t just penetrate the layers of defense laid atop the network node, it absolutely obliterated them. Milliseconds passed as Bobbi stared in open awe while the counterprogs vanished from her perceptions and the node read open for access, but then her danger senses kicked in and she realized that she had only moments to act before Yathi operators would react. She dove into the node, connecting and forcing her way through the node’s control library, searching for the necessary commands to open the hatches by Violet and Scalli.
And yet there was no room for a surgical operation, for a full three sec
onds had passed before she felt the cold blowing in. The presences of Yathi minds, three of them, began to register on her mental threatboard like chunks of ice dropped into the warm water with her. Immediately, the meat of her began to revolt in their presence, and she felt with surprising clarity a phantom chill wrack her bones and her skin prickling. They were moving very fast, very fast indeed, and Bobbi found herself hitting any switch she could as the trio of white sharks closed on her position. All around her, reports began coming in – of distribution lines starting up, hatches opening throughout the complex, the whole factory beginning to come to life as its primary method of transport was awakened.
It was like running her hands across a control console, hitting every button at once – and, Bobbi hoped, it would stay the attention of her attackers as everything started into chaos. As milliseconds passed and she angled herself for an exit, however, she felt the first stings of attack virii peeling back her camouflage programs. They had found her, and they were drilling through the meager protection the mimetic code provided as though it were only paper. Alarms were going off in her head, part software and part sheer animal instinct screaming for her to get out, to get away. She had to do something fast, else she would be dead – or worse – in seconds.
So she did the only thing she could. She dropped another virus bomb.
Calling it a “bomb,” of course, was facetious; it was a rapidly-expanding viral complex that attacked multiple layers of defensive software in sequence as it was found. The Yathi minds were well-sheathed in such armor, far better than the node, but they could not help but pause as their skillfully-designed defenses were being blown to ash around them. As powerful as it was, however, it was very likely to damage everything around it as well – which meant the operating software of the network node itself, if the Yathi idea of a computer was anything at all like what humanity used. Having raised merry hell in the moment, Bobbi had the opening she needed, and she took it.
She disengaged from the control node while the Yathi operators were still trying to shore up their defenses and tried to execute a hard drop of out the system, pulling the plug very literally, and found with new horror that the wireless link would not sever. What the hell was that? She tried hard to keep panic back as she scrambled to check her headware. Dropping a hard line connection would be dangerous, but she should be able to force the implant in her skull to kill the link. Meanwhile, she sensed new cold – the operators were emerging from the distribution network. Bobbi began spinning up new walls of defense, combat software, as much as her headware would allow while she searched frantically for somewhere else that she could hide while she tried to find another way to disconnect. Try as she might, however, there was no respite; everywhere there were only fortifying nodes, sequentially ordered and heavily shielded.
Anything she hit would give her away, she knew…or would it? Bobbi lurched forward through the network, attacking nodes at random, watching the walls of bland digital concrete splinter and fall away from machines whose purpose she could not know. Alarms began picking up across the system as the breached nodes cried out – Bobbi soared along, a purple-haired supersonic bomber, carpeting everything with as much virtual explosive as she could throw in her wake. She dared the three Yathi operators to track her down in the chaos. When all else fails, break shit, she thought with triumph as the cold vanished and there was only the electric buzzing of the breached systems mushrooming up around her. Break all the shit that you can.
With the smoldering ruins of code layers behind her and chaos spreading through the system, Bobbi took a moment to try and figure out just what the hell was keeping her in the system. The command to disconnect the system went out to the network and back again; it made sense that something would be keeping her from doing it smoothly. But a hard drop was on her end, entirely in her own hardware – risky, yes, but it should have already happened. Her hard requests, however, were going absolutely nowhere. Bobbi started to feel real panic that she would not be able to disconnect, that she had vastly underestimated the power the Yathi system would have over her; was it somehow able to suspend her own internal functions, keeping her connected so that she could be hunted down? Bobbi continued to turtle up, layers of protection building around her digital presence as she tried to figure out just what the hell was going on.
Then she took the hit.
Alarms went off in her head as the layers of her defenses began to evaporate. Bobbi’s heart leapt into her throat as she found herself under attack from unknown quarters, no cold or otherwise to indicate another mind was present. For a few key milliseconds, confusion reigned as Bobbi attempted to keep herself together; whatever program had hit her, it was enough to shred through the majority of her defenses upon activation. There had been no warning. Bobbi braced for another hit, but none came.
What came instead was a cold such as Bobbi had never felt before, cold enough to freeze her in place as her mind struggled to grasp it. The individual Yathi minds that she had felt had been freezing, but self-contained; easier to manage than the Chorus, which had been a vast black sea into which she had been directly plugged. That which came now, however, dwarfed them all. Though she was not surrounded by it, as she had been with the Chorus, Bobbi could not deny the overwhelming vastness of what rose to meet her now; it was the world, blotting out the system around it, or perhaps wresting away all of her implant’s ability to perceive the world around it. Or, her mind whispered to her, perhaps it was the system. Perhaps another Chorus of far greater scope than she had imagined. Bobbi found herself floating in the face of a great black star, and she was but a mote before its power.
Presently, it spoke. Bobbi was startled to hear that it had a real voice in her head – a beautiful voice, human, female. She knew it from television, though as her mind began to slow in the presence of the monstrous thing she could not pin it down.
Bobbi grasped for a reply. What could she do? What could she say? She had to get away, to escape – it was if her brain was starting to fragment before, like a data drive on its last legs.
Bobbi’s mind whirled; dulled as it was becoming, she wasn’t nearly stupid enough not to try and get away. No way in hell could she attack it. It would be like throwing a pebble at a wall. So what could she do? There had to be a way. There had to be.
At this, Bobbi felt distant muscles tighten. If she was hit again, that would be it; her defenses were weak, and she was too busy trying to develop the new package on the fly to rebuild them. Had to keep her – it – talking.
The surface of the great being vibrated again.
Redeye (The Wonderland Cycle Book 2) Page 41
