by P. R. Adams
I powered off my blade, then took the android’s and powered it down, too. I grasped them with my left hand, then I ran for the east end of the roof—pushing, pushing. The fall was jarring, sending fresh spikes of pain throughout my body as I rolled back to my feet. I stumbled, caught myself, and accelerated again, closing on the wall fast. But I didn’t clear it. My landing at the top caught someone’s attention.
The shout went up. “Someone’s on the wall!”
A few things registered at once—the size of the gash in the wall Chan had made; the searchlights focused on the woods; and the number of security guards.
So many. Too many.
Gunfire. Bullets cracking off the concrete, off the steel elbow joints holding the razor wire out, and off my legs.
I jumped. North of the guards, at the edge of the lights.
Then I was sprinting again, heading into the woods. Bullets thudded into trees, cracked off twigs. A couple hit me—in the arm, in the leg.
And then I was too far into the woods for them to see me. The shooting stopped.
“Ichi, I’m about a minute out.”
She didn’t respond.
My lower back protested as I found another gear. Trees whipped past, a green so dark it was black in my ultraviolet vision. There was no path, just gaps. I had to rely on instinct as much as vision, dodging left, then right. I strained, listening for any hint of what was going on. All I could hear was my breathing, my steps, cracking twigs, and crunching leaves.
Gunfire changed that. Two shots. Ahead of me. To the right.
A third shot.
I changed course, nearly lost my footing, continued on, arms whipping around for balance.
A fourth shot, this time a bright green muzzle flash followed by a squeal: Chan.
And then movement: Jose. Darting between trees. Toward the muzzle flash.
Once again, I adjusted course, slowed, tried to focus on silence. The van was a dark shape far off to my left. There was no sign of Ichi. I readied both knives.
Jose broke from tree cover ahead of me and ran toward a sliver of black where the muzzle flash had come from. That had to be Chan. Too close to risk trying to sneak in like I was.
I called out, “Chan, get back!”
The android skidded to a stop and turned toward me.
Rather than slow, I barreled forward, both knives humming to life.
Something arced down from the trees—humanoid but tucked in tight, tumbling. Black as night. And quiet. It hit the android square in the back, taking it down, then striking, metal scraping against bulletproof carbon weave skin. Ichi’s wakizashi.
Jose rolled over.
But Ichi had already flipped away. She flung something toward him as he got to his feet, and I stupidly watched until it was too late.
Some sort of brilliant light flashed, giving off heat and an acrid, chemical stench.
Magnesium. Phosphorous. Something. In my eyes, my sinuses.
Clever Ichi. She really had studied the androids.
I plowed into Jose, who had apparently been as unprepared as I had. We skidded forward, and I desperately tried to pin his knife hand down with my left wrist.
He scraped his blade over my knuckles. I felt the skin giving way, felt the artificial bone give. It wasn’t quite pain so much as an awareness of injury as the small raised nubs were cut away.
Not Jacinto. This was pure android, the assassin running the show.
I stabbed at the android’s back with the same rapid striking motion I’d used on Jacinto-Maribel.
Jose arched his back beneath me and bucked me off.
I rolled away, tested my left hand. I still had a grip on the knife. I flipped back to normal vision just as Jose got to his feet.
He took a step toward me, then suddenly turned on Ichi, who had been creeping up from behind. Too fast for a human body, he shifted into a charge at her.
She tossed something at him, then tumbled away.
I blinked, just to be safe. But she wasn’t using the same trick twice.
Humming, sparking, the smell of burning leather.
I glanced sideways, saw Jose go to the ground. Twitch. Sparks rolled along the damp ground.
Some sort of Taser device! And it was apparently strong enough to get through whatever shielding the android bodies had.
For a moment.
Jose’s twitching hand tore the device from his chest and crushed it. But he was still down.
I dove on him, once again working on his chest, this time with both knives.
His knife hand came up, and I rolled away just in time.
He seemed slower getting up, possibly still disrupted by the current that had rolled through his body. He took a jerky step, shivered, then took a steadier step.
Ichi came closer, once again holding her blade ready for a strike.
Jose shifted, now keeping Ichi to one side, me to the other.
I moved in, blades held close and low. There were gashes in his top, and his bulletproof flesh dangled from a couple thin strips: His internals weren’t as protected now.
He turned toward me, seemed about to charge, then turned back on Ichi, who had been matching his moves.
She wasn’t surprised. She back-flipped away, ending up ten feet back, blade raised.
I closed on Jose and went into a slide when he turned on me. I caught his ankles with my heels.
He fell toward me, knife driving for my face.
I caught his wrist in a lock with the knives, then scissored them.
His eyes went wide, and he rolled away, got to his feet, clutching the stump, as if blood might spurt out.
And then Ichi dashed forward, once more planting a kick in his back and taking him down, but this time when he rolled over, she followed through by driving her blade into his eye with all of her weight and strength.
He thrashed, and she jumped back.
But it wasn’t necessary. The thrashing slowed. Stopped.
I took the blade from his severed hand and drove the tip through the damaged eye socket, just to be sure.
From behind me, Ichi grumbled, “I told you I would finish him.”
“And you would have. Great tactics. But there are guards coming after us, and they have guns.” I ran to the van. “Chan, are you ready?”
The motor came to life, and the back of the van opened. Chan waved me in with a pair of VR goggles.
Ichi climbed behind the wheel with a sharp glare at me, and the van began its slow crawl from the woods.
I slid the goggles on, noting the fine sheen of sweat on Chan’s face. “You’re ready for this?”
“Ready.” Chan’s voice was surprisingly calm.
Light pulsed, then we stood in the data center server room. Carl and the computer guy struggled against their zip ties; no one had found them yet. Data flowed across the terminal displays, one window after another popping up and sometimes closing. Avatar-Chan ran fingertips along the top of one of the displays, then pulled a chair out and dropped into it. The black T-shirt was gone, replaced by a tight, sleeveless, black shirt that hung open above the pierced bellybutton. And the black jeans were now black leather pants. The magenta hair was loose again, brushed out, shiny, revealing the tattoo-free face.
It was a nice look. Was it a lure for Jacinto?
I pulled up the chair in front of the hard-wired terminal, which was flashing screens even more rapidly than the others. “Has he detected the intrusion? Jacinto?”
Avatar-Chan smiled and nodded at the display in front of me. “Almost half the windows are his.”
“And you chose this as our meeting place to rattle him? Straight from the camera feed?”
“Maybe it works.”
I would have liked more than a maybe. “What can I do?”
“Be with me.” Avatar-Chan looked around. “When he comes.”
Avatar-Chan’s fingers danced across the terminal interface, and the display presented the familiar metaphors of the Grid, routers, and other components.
It was disorienting, presenting a sense that was too real, too recent, then opening a window into the interface I was more familiar with.
“I have to admit, it’s disorienting for me, too. Is the avatar meant to…?”
“Arouse?” Avatar-Chan straightened. “Will it work?”
“You look good to me. What does Jacinto like?”
Avatar-Chan slumped. “Pain. Humiliation.” VR goggles appeared in a shaking hand that once more waved me closer, just like at the van.
I pushed the other chairs back and took the goggles. “VR within VR?”
“Jacinto could be…?” Chan’s soft shoulders shrugged. “Inflexible. Unimaginative.”
Chan slid a pair of goggles on; I did the same.
And with a flash of light, we were inside the display that had been displaying Chan’s metaphors. The familiar darkened office took shape around us, then the desk and eggshell chairs. My chair was pressed up close to Avatar-Chan’s. We squeezed between the desk and chairs and took our seats.
Avatar-Chan sighed. Not frustrated, not scared. Resolved? “He’ll use them first. When he attacks. The others: Marlene, Amani, Valentin. It was that way before.”
“When you operated as a snowcrash?”
A nod.
I patted Avatar-Chan’s hand. “But you can deal with them? The way he’s used them to change up his attacks?”
Another nod, a half-formed smile.
“Well, I’ll—” I swallowed.
Avatar-Chan’s virtual world shifted—color, overall appearance, the icons. The grid turned cyan; the icons became wireframes skinned with flat cyan.
Avatar-Chan winced. “Valentin. Liked things plain.” No sound of panic. No fear.
The grid pulsed, and simplistic, bug-like animations sped toward us on spindly legs.
Avatar-Chan shrugged. “Data bombs. Weak.”
Violet globes rolled out from the office and down the grid, trailing electrical tendrils that whipped and twisted around, blasting current in all directions. The bugs—data bombs—headed straight to the first globe. When the first bug hit, lightning arced throughout the grid, destroying everything around it.
The second globe continued on, growing in size, whipping out more tendrils, flinging out more electrical bolts. More data bombs began assembling in its path, but they were quickly torn apart by the current being blasted in all directions.
A third globe dropped from the second and sank off the grid, diving.
I leaned forward, watching it until it disappeared. “What are you doing?”
“Probing. This test. What you see. All translations of what we see—scripts launching, dying; resources being overwhelmed, going offline; ports being probed, shut down, restarted. It’s a contest. Like a race. Who can get the most resources first—processing, memory. But denying resources is almost as good. If I have eight petaflops of processing and you have five, and there’s three more available, me getting that three gives me eleven petaflops. You getting that three evens up resources. Me eliminating that three guarantees the advantage. Better to eliminate than risk.”
“So you’re looking for unused resources and taking them offline?”
“Unprotected, yeah.”
“And you have the advantage right now?”
That quirky smile quivered along Avatar-Chan’s black-painted lips. “Maybe.”
“Just so you know, I hate that word.”
The smile spread, full-on. “The advantage for now.”
Once more, the appearance of the grid changed, now taking on a rose gold, almost pink glow.
The smile faded, and Avatar-Chan said, “Marlene.”
The icons resolved into intricate shapes—Japanese candles, Russian dolls, Chinese dragons. Everything was colorful, vibrant, realistic. And slower.
Avatar-Chan’s fingers flew across the interface faster than before. “She likes traps, complex scripts. Very smart. Skilled.”
“It’s just a simulacrum. Marlene’s dead.”
Avatar-Chan froze, nodded, then went back to typing, licking above the black-painted lips, as if searching for sweat that couldn’t be there. “Secret with any of this: Stay ahead. Like chess. Think deep instead of fast.”
This seemed like chess played across multiple dimensions. What would limit the number of moves, the number and types of pieces?
Something dark took shape over the grid—blocky, dark blue, with low-hanging wings. Yellow energy pulsed from a slightly more angular nose, along the length of it, to a small tail that bristled with quills.
“Amani,” Avatar-Chan said, head shaking. “Trying two at once. Typical Jacinto.”
The fear of the chimera was gone. Drugs? A realization that the advantage really did belong to us?
The dark shape launched, following along the grid, sweeping ahead of itself with yellow searchlights. The violet globe sped back toward us, lashing at Marlene’s dolls and candles with blinding bolts.
The dark shape slowed and reshaped, with the tail now toward us, the nose looking away.
Avatar-Chan tapped a key three times, and more globes formed. “Amani likes to punch, overpower. Big payload. Brute force. Denial of service. Good to tie up resources.”
The globes launched, quickly growing, taking on power. Electricity boiled and spat along the surfaces, warping the grid as if through superheating. Chan’s familiar colors and designs reappeared in the globes’ wake, and everywhere the electricity touched, Marlene’s designs crumbled, until only the dark shape remained. Then it began to fall apart.
It seemed too easy. “Is this all just testing you?”
“Probably meant to be.”
“But?”
“They’re out of resources.”
“Out of—”
Avatar-Chan leaned back in the chair. “No ambush this time. Time to plan. Listened to what you said.”
Lightning flashed far below the grid, like a storm in the deep.
And everything winked out, even Chan’s grid. Only the office remained.
Avatar-Chan stood, and backed away from the chair, spinning, searching. “He knows.”
I got up. “Jacinto? Knows what?”
“This trap. Figured it out.”
“Okay, that’s great, Chan, but I haven’t figured it out. What’s—”
The walls to the office became pale gray, then transformed into rusty iron bars. Some of the walls turned into rough stone, with manacles dangling down. Sweat, excrement, piss, moldy hay—the stench that said we were inside Jacinto’s little torture dungeon.
And then the master torturer appeared in his ridiculous torture fetish get-up: unzipped black leather jacket and pants covered with metal studs, with matching suspenders beneath. His head was still oversized, his black hair thinning, his chest bony, his flesh gold-brown.
I waved for Chan to get behind me. “Jacinto, in case you missed it, I’ve been handing you your ass lately, so you might—”
His laughter bounced off the walls. A dark metal stick appeared in his hand, and he twirled the thing over knuckles and between fingers with inhuman skill, adjusting effortlessly as the stick became a staff. “I don’t face the limits of the physical world inside this construct, Stefan. And I don’t face the limits Chan does with all the metaphor nonsense.”
Avatar-Chan edged over to me, drawing Jacinto’s attention. The outfit apparently worked as intended.
He licked his lips. “Swim the rivers with us, Chan. You’ll love it in here.”
“No.” Avatar-Chan’s fingernails dug into my back and whispered, “You can hurt him now. Part of the trap.”
Jacinto stepped toward me, staff still spinning. “It’s painless, Chan. You become immortal. Like vampires used to promise in the movies, remember? You liked watching those silly things, didn’t you?”
“No.”
Jacinto closed his eyes. “Dim the hills. Run the night. Swim the rivers of data. It used to mean something to you.”
“Not anymore.”
Jacinto brought the st
aff to a rest, then he came at me, swinging down with a two-handed blow. I caught the first strike with my hands, but the impact instantly numbed them. The second strike snapped my left arm at the elbow.
I collapsed to my knees, unable to block out the pain. “Chan!” It was a weak whimper instead of a warning.
Jacinto spun, and the staff cracked my hip. Loud. Firing pain through my body.
I fell onto my back. There was no hurting him. How? How could he be so much better? Where was my training, my experience?
He stepped over me, poking Avatar-Chan in the chest hard enough with the staff to force a step back, until there was nowhere else to fall back to. “You dressed nice for me. You didn’t have to do that. You know what I like. Think of all the fun we can have in here. Those videos reminded me of how much I enjoyed you. It can be like that again. No worries you might die here.”
I tried to get up. Failed. I couldn’t let him do what he’d done before. Couldn’t.
He used the staff to pin Avatar-Chan against the wall with one hand, then reached for the black top that now seemed so ill-advised. What had Chan been thinking?
Avatar-Chan’s hand shot out, grabbed Jacinto’s wrist. And snapped it. “No!”
Jacinto groaned. The staff drifted down between Avatar-Chan’s breasts and away.
Avatar-Chan grabbed the end of the staff, planted both feet wide, then slammed Jacinto into the rough stone wall. He slid down, head shaking groggily.
Then the staff was in Avatar-Chan’s hands completely, striking down, pulping Jacinto’s head, spraying brains and blood on the stones, tearing away flesh and leaving chunks of bone in the gore.
He fell onto his side, good hand searching. “Chan!” Agonized. Surprised.
Avatar-Chan dropped the bloody staff to the ground with a wet clattering, then strode over to me. “Sorry.”
“You…that easy?”
“Needed him fully committed.” Avatar-Chan leaned in, lips close to mine, then whispered, “Needed him in this place. Forever.”
This place? Where?
The VR goggles slipped away, and Chan—Avatar-Chan—smiled at me. We were in the data center. The VR data center. My hip ached, my arm felt…wrong. “What’s going on?”
“Wrapping up.” Avatar-Chan’s voice was dreamy, soft. A fountain pen poked up from the closest pants pocket. Real? Virtual?
