by Sean Platt
“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.”
Chapter Four
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.”
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 mind 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.
“My name is Sam Dial, and I’m stuck in a hole,” he said.
But instead of calling for support help, the screen blipped back to the same information he’d been staring at for…well, it might have been days.
“Shit. Shit shit shit!” Sam blurted.
“I’m sorry,” the console replied, “I didn’t catch that.”
The animated paperclip on Sam’s screen said, Looks like you’re fucked. Can I help?
Chapter Five
Leo couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong.
He looked around the room full of Organas, feeling out of time. He’d seen something like this before, a long time ago. Most of the people in the room didn’t even know Gaia’s Hammer had ever existed, but right now they were all doing a fantastic impression of the troupe Leo had led into the Appalachian Mountains all those years ago without realizing it.
The prison, being a prison, hadn’t boasted a lot of old hardware designed to let people read academic journals faster or appreciate art more fully. Leah had told him about wetchips intended to enhance creativity — but even though there was a large, lumbering, and apparently functional Autodoc in the small prison hospital capable of removing and implanting all sorts of things, confiscated creativity wetchips hadn’t been among the options.
No. Instead, the contraband they’d managed to scavenge was more on the spectrum of carbon-fiber warriors’ fists. They’d found spotters capable of hijacking a Fi signal, accessing the local Internet of Things, and plotting the exact locations of people in the vicinity. They’d found bone reinforcements, private communication chips, heat-sensitive HUD corneal layers, guns, and improvised projectile weapons. There’d even been an add-on that Leo back in the day would have very much wanted to try. It was based on a comic book and movie Leo remembered seeing: a fist that shot long blades through the knuckles, like a cat’s claws. Nanobots would repair the blades’ damage, over and over again.
The Organas around Leo had become neutered versions of the militants who’d come to prison loaded and hit their cells as ordinary humans. Anything with a Fi chip would help soothe the vacancy left by Lunis, so Leo and the Autodoc, overseen by Leah and Dominic in shifts, had installed whatever they could while removing the sharp edges. Toys like the claw fist had no use and were left in inventory, but even many of the bone reinforcements had Fi capability that could, with Leah’s help, be converted to provide something Leah called “Beam white noise.” Most add-ons were designed to communicate with The Beam even if only to let it know they were there — another way of adding to the information-hungry network’s dataset. Leah configured those chips to do little more than feed the Organas a never-ending stream of connectivity candy, while de-weaponizing all that was dangerous.
The Organas, once suited up, received constant updates on all the other Organas in the room with them — where so-and-so was, if anyone nearby had entered any new statuses into their feeds, paths to all sorts of social pages that none of the Organas had claimed or filled with personal info. They received news bulletins. They saw public status updates from just about everyone within a five-block radius.
To Leo, Leah’s configurations sounded awful — exactly what Organa stood against, and the opposite of the quiet Leo had gone into the mountains to find once his more pressing needs to lie low on NPS orders had been fulfilled. The constant noise flowing through his brain now felt like an intrusion. Why did anyone need to know all of this trivial information about everyone else? Why did a person need constant access to mail, and to know the second a new message came in? Why would anyone want to open channels to everyone they’d ever connected to on any network whatsoever…so their old college roommate’s sister’s brother’s band member could break in without notice to ask where you got the fabulous socks that your personal inventory told him you were wearing?
But once Leah turned that white noise on for all of them, Leo had to admit it felt very, very good. It was as if the longing, empty feeling of moondust withdrawal had left millions of tiny cracks inside them — and the stream of voices in all their heads was like liquid cement, percolating into all those cracks to heal them.
Within seconds of hooking back up to the network, Leo felt better than normal.
The same seemed true for the others. Once the add-ons were installed and the Fi chips were opened for business, the group could have been the old Organas again. Some of them had cybertronic eyes now, sure. Others had unloaded and permanently safetied weapons on their arms. Thanks to nanobot enhancements, others were now extraordinarily powerful, remarkably fast, or able to do things like climb walls with only tiny fingertip indentations for grip — if, again, Leah hadn’t installed safeties. They could all hear each other in their heads, and they were all as hopelessly wired into The Beam as the people they’d always scorned and pitied.
But seeing them now, Leo couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off. Maybe the problem was that his abstainers had become addicts of a different kind, or perhaps what bothered him was a feeling of failure. Maybe it was a conviction that however necessary this plan had been, it made his life’s work useless — and proved that nobody could truly fight The Man, and decide for himself.
But no, he thought, the uneasy feeling ran even deeper than that.
Leo didn’t like being underground. He didn’t like not being able to head out into the city and finding…well, whatever was out there awaiting discovery.
The drive to leave the flat was almost a compulsion. A feeling that if he didn’t get out into the world and down to business, he’d go crazy.
And maybe that’s what ultimately made his failure complete. Leo wasn’t merely okay with being wired and connected. He was finding he rather enjoyed it. They were all part of the city now, and Organa, as an idealistic concept, was only a memory.
Dominic entered the room, looking around as if wary. Leo could sense his hesitation.
“What is it, Dom?”
“This isn’t the Organa I know.”
“It’s not the Organa I intended, either.” Still watching Dominic’s eyes, he added, “What?”
“I don’t like them being jacked into all this criminal hardware, Leo.”
“It’s neutered. Every bit of it.”
“But Scooter is strong. I saw him break a brick earlier.” Dominic’s eyes flicked toward the gentle giant. “By crushing it in his fist.”
“He was playing around. You know Scooter.”
“I don’t know Scooter with ten cc’s of illegal nanobots in his system.”
“He’s still just Scooter.”
“Last time I saw Scooter awake, he about killed us.”
Dominic’s eyes flicked over Leo’s body. Leo hadn’t added anything to himself because it wasn’t necessary. Some old program had coughed to life when he’d still been on his way into the city in the back of Agent Smith’s hover then lit like fire once they’d come under the flat’s Fi signal. Leo could hear the noise without adding new enhancements, though curiously the same wasn’t true for the group’s other old Gaias.
“And the last time you saw me awake, I about killed you, too,” Leo said, speaking the words Dominic seemed unwilling to repeat.
“Right.”
“Actually, the last time you saw me awake, I was in a cell listening to you tell me that I’d tried to kill you. So we’ve already been through this.” Leo tried to smile, but it only came halfway onto his lips. Dominic wasn’t a child. He deserved a real answer, not a joke.
