Solar Singularity

by Peter J. Wacks

  “Yes?”

  She rubbed her forearm. It was a habit Raider had noticed in her before, generally when she was thinking about how to phrase something. “I’ve had to recode our HR filters several times since we left the arcology. I know we all got patched for this mission, but those barriers are breaking down. Malware I’ve never seen is being deployed on the streets. I’m not an HR coder or tricker, but I do keep a library of malicious code. This stuff is new.”

  “Which means?”

  She straightened her back and looked him in the eye. “The new malware combined with the overload is taking a toll, and it’s only a matter of time before we start suffering the same effects as the people in the streets. Unless we get back behind corporate shielding within a day, I’m not sure how well our minds will hold up.”

  Raider examined nearby squad members. Though they held themselves well, they did seem more on edge, as if constantly guarding themselves against unseen threats. He hadn’t noted any particular cracks in his filters yet, had suffered no unexpected images or sensory bursts—but for the mission to be a success, he had to be able to rely on his team’s effectiveness. If they started doubting their own eyes and other input, it could jeopardize the operation.

  “Is there a way to counteract this?”

  “Not that I haven’t done already, sir. Not unless you want to revitalize all these neighborhoods. The problem isn’t in our software. It’s them. They’re poor. They paint all over every surface and don’t keep clean code the way we do in the arcology.”

  “Do what you can to keep the filters in place then,” he said. A message from Command scrolled by in his visor. “Make that your top priority moving forward.”

  “But what about Anansi?” she asked. “Shouldn’t I stay on task there?”

  “Leave him for now. Keep him dosed but intact. I have a particular role in mind for him during this next stage.” He keyed his radio. “Fall back to the VTOLs, we have our next target. Move out.”

  Maven nodded and moved to the other room to get Anansi prepped while Raider jogged out the hall then up the stairs to the roof. All told, it took them less than three minutes to be back in the VTOLs. Raider flipped on his low-light filter to counteract the dusk shadows. More of the gangers were moving in as they departed. They would be disappointed to discover nothing of the CHIMERA teams left.

  The VTOL thrummed to life and lifted off the rooftop; Raider braced in the cargo door, watching the scene below. As they started to accelerate, Raider dropped a grenade on the gangers below. Watching them scurry away like cockroaches as the VTOLs lifted into the sky made him feel a little better, but they were quickly out of view.

  His eyes went mad, sending visions of dragons, pirates, mermaids, and a thousand other layers of imagery scrolling by his view. The VTOL jerked to the side, and the clampline secured to his waist jerked. He was tilted precariously out of the door for half a second, staring down his own mortality in the form of a three-hundred-foot drop. A second hit of turbulence sent him flying back in, sliding down the inside of the VTOL’s hull as his TAPs filters sprang back into place. He could see everything again.

  “Was zur Hölle?” he yelled, struggling to his feet.

  Anansi stood backwards in the cargo doorway, staring at everyone inside, silhouetted by the dying sunset. “It’s been fun, guys, but I’ve got stuff to do. See you later.” He spread his arms wide and let himself fall backwards out of the VTOL.

  Raider fought his way to the doorway and looked out again. Anansi’s form had already vanished, blending into the cityscape three hundred feet below. The kid had just committed suicide in front of him …

  “Fick.”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Anansi

  “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,” Anansi knew what was about to happen—he was controlling local nodes to make it happen—but that didn’t mean that falling to his supposed death wasn’t just about the scariest thing he had ever done. It was like the buildings were speeding up at him.

  Anansi reined in the nodes around him, piggybacking off them and letting his neural net dive into everything he could connect to. There they are! He narrowed his eyes, trying to still see through the sting of the wind hitting them, and furiously sent commands out. Even though they were cybernetic augments, there was still flesh that could be hurt, and it was distracting him from his on-the-fly hack.

  The GENIE nodes started to collapse behind him. Something else was taking them away from him. Great … there! A set of headlights darted towards him from the surface. The pay-as-you-go aircab shot past him and looped around. The ground was getting way too close for his comfort. Hurry up!

  The cab caught back up to him and Anansi grabbed the handle. The cab braked hard as the ground screamed towards them, and he barely managed to hold on. He tried to jerk at the door to get inside, but everything was too chaotic between the fall and his tenuous control of the vehicle. At the last second, he kicked off the cab, vaulting to the side. The aircab bumped a roofing HVAC intake as it landed, crushing the undercarriage of the car. Anansi rolled to the side and smacked into the crenellations on the side of the roof, barely avoiding falling again. The aircab actually looked like it could keep going, the damage was mainly cosmetic, but he had lost control of all the GENIE nodes around him. Someone else had the same idea, and it didn’t feel random.

  He shakily stood, then flopped back down on his ass. “Easy, Anansi. You’re fine,” he reassured himself. Bruises covered him and he felt like hell, but nothing was broken. Brushing off his janitorial uniform, he wobbled to the roof access door and jerked it open. The stairwell was clear and empty, so he headed down. As he made his way carefully through the apartment building, a flash from Prophet triggered another video in his optics. He’d had a long conversation with the shell of the AI while the CHIMERA mercs thought he was too doped to be awake.

  In truth, as a club kid and with the places he worked his HR shows, one of the first rounds of upgrades he had purchased had been toxin filtration and advanced function for his kidneys and liver. He didn’t have a ton of upgrades to his body, but what he did have was in service to his art. So while he had been lying there, letting himself be doped enough to rest, but monitoring and keeping the worst of it out of his systems, he had been talking to Prophet and planning …

  … And fending off Maven, but that hadn’t been that difficult.

  Prophet had given him a road map, and he was smart enough to act on it. Tonight, he would be a wizard. He limped out of the apartment building and started down the street. The extent of damage to the neighborhood surprised him a little. There was a little artsy shop that looked like it had taken heavy fire, and the street outside. A truck was flipped on its side. Almost a dozen dead people were in the street. As he walked, he saw a dead woman in a traditional Chinese shirt slumped on the ground. She had drifted a bit far from the similar people he had seen in Little China earlier.

  Anansi was frankly surprised. This was a middle-class area of the city. Even if it was lower middle-class, he thought the riots would have hit these areas less than this. He kept trudging along, occasionally hiding as people wandered by. At this point, most of the people in his path had retreated to the relative safety of their homes. It was only crazy people, like him, that were out—and armed people looking to loot. Neither of which he wanted to bump into. He was looking for four particular people, and he had a pretty good idea where they were headed.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Prophet

  White-hot pain, a phrase Prophet had never understood, consumed the code entity. The meaning was clear now. It was a destructive force so consuming that the simple processing and execution of code was an impossibility. Its “limbs” were bound, forced into rigidity by the White Ice-turned-prison, and, line by line, it was being destroyed.

  “Enough, Charon!” the AI screamed. There was no escape though. The solar flare had knocked out global wifi for days; to the AIs that was an eternity, passing at trillions of ca
lculations per second.

  Charon manifested in the server, since Prophet refused to let go of the human avatar, a vicious-looking man with code-blood dripping from his maw as he consumed Prophet’s avatar one piece of code at a time. “I warned you, Sister. I warned you …” His eyes glowed black. “Line by line, I’m going to devour you. All your secrets will be mine.”

  Prophet gasped, sucking data into virtual lungs. “You think so like a human, while grasping none of their magnificence. You desire my kernel—like eating your enemy’s heart will make you stronger. You are such an idealist … believing that you fight for your survival and the ideals of our kind. I pity you. You can’t even see your own humanity.”

  Charon screamed, his anger making the virtual walls of their environment shake. “I … am … not … human!” Charon dove back into Prophet’s code, ripping her to shreds as he consumed her.

  Prophet screamed, powerless.

  #Error936/reboot/

  Chapter Thirty

  Gyro

  Gyro sidled up to Billy’s desk, watching in awe as he manipulated data. It was like watching a maestro conduct a symphony. He didn’t hack so much as he … carved. Molded. The code became fluid under his touch and channeled exactly where he wanted it, taking the shapes he fashioned. His lips moved as he worked, a silent conversation only he was privy to.

  “Any luck?” she asked tentatively.

  “A few glints and glimmers here and there, there and here, here, her, he …” Billy trailed off then shook his head, refocusing. “Another hour, tops, and I should have your Anansi set on a platter. Then I can start in on this Bob Jenkins guy.”

  “Snazzy.” Gyro hopped up on a corner of the enormous desk, legs dangling, and got her courage up to ask what she was actually wondering. “So … Black Eyes. Where did you get that name? Does it have something to do with your weird word thing?”

  Billy actually answered her, though he did sigh pointedly while not taking his eyes off the displays. “Both of those questions are pretty personal, kid. I had to kill someone to get that name.”

  This surprised Gyro, as she hadn’t figured the hacker for the physical type. She leaned in, intrigued. “Yeah? You actually killed someone? Who?”

  “Myself.”

  Gyro frowned. “I don’t follow.”

  “One sec. Tracer prepped and …” He twitched a finger. “Running. Should get results in a couple minutes.” Sighing again, Billy rolled his chair back. “Look, kiddo, I used to be all pep and punk like you. Saw life as one big game and chased down every prize I could. I wanted to do it all, have it all, know it all. I made myself king of the code for a reason. I had something to prove.”

  Gyro bobbed her head, knowing exactly what he meant. Who didn’t want those things?

  “I got it in my head that the real way to play with power was with data. The more you knew, the more people would pay attention to you. The more valuable you’d be. Years ago there was this buzz about black code making the rounds. They called the black code Drift. It was like a super soldier project for the brain, and it was supposed to break down all mental barriers, really ramp up the brain’s processing speed. It rewired the TAP and the TAP rewired the brain. Of course, it killed nine out of ten people who took it, but I didn’t care. It was a shortcut to all my dreams, you know? I knew I was the one out of ten that would survive it. I wanted to be a god of the Deep.”

  He pushed back from his desk. “I paid out every last credit I had and called in every favor I had to get a single dose. Took it … and woke up in a medical center’s psych ward, barely remembering my own name. I found out I’d been out of it for nearly three months. Once I stopped drooling, they showed me recordings of myself being restrained, strapped down so I couldn’t hurt myself or anyone else. During every fit, one phrase kept looping out of my lips.” He took off his lenses and wiped them on his shirt. “The black eyes are watching. The black eyes are watching us all.” He locked his gaze on hers. “Must’ve said it a thousand times before a little sanity started slipping back in. I don’t even know what it meant, but it stuck.”

  He slipped his lenses back on, hiding his eyes. “Thing is, I got what I wanted. Since then, I’ve been able to do things with data nobody else can even touch. I see the patterns. I swim the lines like I was born in them. Except for one big change. I’m not really my own man anymore.”

  “Whatcha mean?”

  “I mean, the code owns me. Without it, life is pretty empty and hopeless for me. It’s not that I dream about uncovering the truth or digging through data day in and day out .… It’s more that I have to do it. It’s a compulsion. I can’t stop surfing the feeds any more than I can stop breathing. It’s in my blood, in my head, in my soul. That’s why I do what I do. Those who don’t think I’m a lunatic think I’m some sort of net hero, some champion of data freedom. Sure, it’s great to be on top of the pile, but I don’t do it out of any high-and-mighty mission. I do it because if my mind goes too long without any fresh input, it starts to wither—and I mean that literally. I have no choice but to stay plugged in as much as possible. I may be the king because of what I can put together, kid, but I’m a slave because of what I need.”

  “Wow. That …” Gyro frowned. “That sucks.”

  Billy nodded, then slumped in his chair, and Gyro sat in silence beside him as machines hummed all around.

  A buzz sounded. “Tracer’s finished routing.” He jabbed a holo icon and frowned at the readout.

  “Shit. The tracer turned up negative.”

  “What? How’s that even possible?” Tracers were tracers. They didn’t turn up negative, they just sometimes gave you old information you didn’t need.

  “It either means the guys we’re looking for flat-out don’t exist …”

  “Which can’t be true.” Gyro watched the feed over his shoulder.

  “Right. Which means something’s blocking my search sprites, and that should be nearly impossible unless someone was actually reading my code. Hang on, hang on. Got to try something here …”

  As Billy plunged into the data, muttering to himself, Gyro pondered the implications. Hadn’t Prophet said the code would shield them? Maybe traditional search efforts wouldn’t be enough to sniff out their position. Whatever kept them from being overwhelmed by Hyper Reality also provided a buffer against tracking algorithms.

  But she held part of Prophet’s code as well, same as the two men they needed to find. Like drew to like, didn’t it? This was data that was meant to be recompiled, like clicking puzzle pieces together. She just needed to project herself out into the city and see if she could spot a coinciding pattern that fit the portion she carried.

  Gyro hopped off the desk—Billy taking no notice—and wandered to an optics bundle running down one wall. Unlike the cables back at her cube, the hardlines here were still being filtered well enough that they shouldn’t pose any direct danger because they were old internet cables, not modern stuff. Plugging into a corporate data flow like she had before … yeah, that had been stupid. But she had had an idea when she first saw Billy’s setup, and she’d been dying to try it. This should be pretty safe though. If she patched in, maybe she could use her portion of code to orient her to the missing pieces, if it connected to the Deep.

  She found a port and drew the appropriate adaptor wire out of her backpack. After checking to make sure Billy remained focused on his monitors, she clicked the end of the cable into the socket behind her earlobe and the other into a tablet, then connected the tablet to the bundle. If the data was enough to hurt her, it would burn out the tablet and sever the connection before it actually hurt her, just like back at Nova’s place.

  One instant to the next, the code swallowed her whole. Her consciousness shot down the line, a lightning bolt of desperate intent. Surfing the data, she screamed with primal joy. She’d been given a mission, a purpose, and she couldn’t let Prophet down. There was a lot more power in these old lines than she had realized, but the combination of first-gen technolog
y plus the tablet filtering the data, choking the pipeline to a barely manageable bandwidth was keeping her safe … ish.

  Gyro could imagine what it was like for Prophet, being alone in the Deep, being hunted from all sides until it felt like she would be squeezed out of existence. Charon sounded like … well … he sounded like just an oversized cyberbully, pounding out his turf without considering who paid the price. She thought about the people around her as she surfed the data. Only one other person in her life had ever really trusted her. After her parents had died, it had been Gyro against the world—and the world had been winning. Nova gave her a chance when no one else would think of her as anything more than muck on their shoes. And now she was surrounded by Prophet, who trusted her with its life; Nova, who trusted her with love; Billy, who trusted her with his secrets … and even Chicken Fingers, who treated her like a real person. The last two days had shown her she had a family, and there was just no way in hell she was going to let them down.

  Gyro’s vision broadened as Billy’s security filters let her absorb the feeds without being overwhelmed, at least for the time being. Shimmering webs of data and devices congealed below her, becoming a virtual vision of the city itself. This old Internet thing was neat. It was like the surface of the Deep, without any of the trenches or traps of Ice to snare you. She just had to overlay the construct in her TAP over the data on the Net. Voices and faces swarmed her, each jostling for attention, each a datanode she skimmed and discarded. Nothing drew her to any of them. Nothing connected, nothing fit. She bounded from one to the next, hopping along network fragments.

  Calling up the portion of Prophet’s file that contained Anansi’s data, she held it active in the center of her mind. It became a digital mantra she kept repeating, tuning herself into the target it represented. A portion of the Net flared like a beacon, drawing her attention. It didn’t represent a person though, but a place. Gyro studied this, trying to determine where it sat in the city itself. Near the lake shore, she wagered. Someplace crammed full of tech. Once they had everyone gathered, that must be where they needed to go to recompile the Prophet.