The Bridge Chronicles Trilogy

by Gary Ballard

  “Our mutual friends,” Bridge said, indicating the technomancers.

  Freeman held a position of the highest esteem amongst the hacker community, the cyberpunk’s cyberpunk. He was a legend. Even before the days of the Sukemura Plug™ and the GlobalNet, Freeman had been cracking computer systems for fun and profit. Considered the god of hackers, his reputation was such that he could use his own name without fear of reprisals. Years before the riots, he had decided to end his freelance lifestyle, getting a job with Chronosoft, where he had become the golden boy of their IT efforts. Every computer system in the company bore his mark in some fashion. Any other hacker choosing regular corporate employment would have been shunned by the hackers, but not Freeman. It only enhanced his reputation. Every hacker with something to prove went after him through his employer, but none had managed to do significant damage.

  Bridge had known him through Angela’s contacts. As one of the few freelance information brokers he would work for after joining the company, they had been close, as close as hackers could get to other hackers. During the previous year’s election, that limey ex-footballer cum hardass bastard Paulie had kidnapped her to force Bridge to leak the video of Sunderland’s dirty laundry, and Freeman had been willing to help Bridge for no other reason than to protect Angie. Freeman had leaked the video of the mayor to every email box on the West Coast, a trivial matter for someone of his ability. The video had ensured that Soto won the election, but Bridge had requested something more elaborate from Freeman. Freeman had bombarded the vote tallying software, making it appear the counts had been falsified even though he’d actually done nothing to the tallies. The resulting specter of election fraud had caused Soto’s administration no end of grief, eroding his legitimacy. Freeman had called in the favor last November, entangling Bridge with the scientists that would become the first technomancers in Boulder, Colorado.

  “What happened to her, Bridge?”

  “She was in the crèche when the guy came looking for me. I wasn’t there, so he killed her and waited for me. He didn’t expect me to have a failsafe. Mu over there had set up a ward that blew the place sky high when I gave the word.”

  “Why didn’t Angela use the word?”

  “Because she didn’t know about it.”

  Silence.

  “You didn’t tell her?”

  Bridge stared dowman" colon the hacker, his own angry fire mixed with guilt written across his face.

  “You might as well have killed her then.”

  “Hey, I wouldn’t act so innocent and judgmental over there, buddy. There’s a reason that guy was gunning for me. He was sniffing around about… that thing last year.” Bridge raised his eyebrows, trying to indicate the incident in Boulder with the technomancers without saying it, in case Mu was listening. “And if I recall, you’re the bastard what got me in that situation in the first place. It’s as much your fault as mine.” Bridge said it, but without feeling.

  “One helluva hacker,” Freeman said. “One helluva woman.”

  “Yeah,” was all Bridge could think to say. An idea came to him at that moment, a final clicking into place of puzzle pieces.

  “How long?”

  “How long what?”

  “How long were you two doing whatever it was you two did?”

  Instead of trying to deny it, Freeman admitted it. “Off an on since before the riots. More when you weren’t around.”

  “Was it ever physical?”

  “Freeman never touched her in the flesh,” the hacker replied. Bridge blinked. He’d often heard of hackers getting so deep that they started referring to themselves in the third person. There was even a name for it, cyber identity crisis. The hacker lived in a world of shifting identities; everyone had multiple names, names for avatars, names for virtual worlds, names for casual games, backup ID’s for cracking runs, dummy emails and credentials for all sorts of money transfers, information dumps and false trails. In addition, the constant hours and days spent awake, brains constantly stimulated with reams of information from both physical body and GlobalNet feeds fatigued the thought processes. Bridge had even heard tales of multiple personalities springing from overuse of GlobalNet interface.

  “What did you say?”

  “We weren’t ever together in the meat,” Freeman responded. Bridge squinted hard, thought about pointing out Freeman’s slip of the tongue but let it drop. “That’s not how I roll.”

  “You weren’t the first. I’m guessing anyway. It ain’t like I was the world’s greatest boyfriend.”

  “Yeah. But she still loved you. You could tell. Nobody else mattered.” Freeman’s voice trailed off. He raised his hand and stared at it, turning it over and over in the air, his expression one of wonder, as if he had never seen the limb before and was fascinated with it. “I hear things.”

  “What things?”

  “Sounds. Distant sounds, from distant grounds. The sound of great machines moving closer, coming closer. The voices of giants in a teacup. Freeman doesn’t know what to make of them.”

  Bridge snapped his fingers loudly, waving his hands in front of the hacker’s glazed eyes. “Yo, Freeman, back here! Stay with me! That’s the second time you’ve referred to yourself in the third person. It’s really fucking irritating.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’re calling yourself Freeman, going all space cadet on me. What the hell have they got you on?”

  “Nothing I can talk about. I’m fine. I’m fine.” His expression hardened. “You’re here for something. What do you want?”

  “I need a backdoor into the LGL’s records.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Sure. I know you have about a hundred stashed all up and down Chronosoft’s systems. I only need one.”

  “You planning on hacking the big boys?”

  “Me? Hell no, my hacking days are done. That’s the other part of what I need. I need to use a crèche for about a day. Somebody is going to be hacking Chronosoft, and I need to get in touch with them via the Net. They don’t exactly take visitors.”

  “Why don’t you just have me do it?”

  “Because you’re a little too close to the target, for one. Because I’d rather not implicate you at all, for another. And finally, as good as you are, there’s only one of you. I got lots of work that needs to be done in not a lot of time, which means I need a whole army of people to do it. I don’t have time to waste, so I don’t need them to spend effort getting in, which is why I need the back door.”

  “Who are you getting to do this?”

  “The Bottle City Boys.”

  “Ooh, Kandor. You’ll love Kandor. If they let you in, that is. You better hope they don’t think you killed Angela, because they will cut you.”

  “Yeah, you let me handle that.”

  “I want something in return.”

  Bridge leaned back. “You don’t usually barter. You usually tell me yes or no and move on.”

  “You have something I want. Or rather, you can get something I am going to need.”

  “Intriguing. What do you want?”

  He pointed towards Mu. “One of those.”

  “A technomancer?”

  Freeman shook his head. “No. A mana engine.”

  “You want to become a technomancer?”

  “No. I want to make one.”

  Chapter 12

  March 10, 2029

  1:45 p.m.

  The slam of interface rush in his mind’s eye sent Bridge tumbling from austere nothingness into digital awareness, surrounded by the baroque opulence of the crèche’s foyer. Textures so sharp they hurt Bridge’s virtual eyes covered the entrance to the GlobalNet datastream, but the pristine condition of the room belied its disuse. Freeman had long since abandoned this artistic path. Rich thrones sat empty, sheer golden curtains undisturbed by even a whisper of motion. Even the AI assistant in naughty French maid’s outfit seemed uninterested in this new visitor. Bridge left the room quickly, plunging in
to the black spaces in between GlobalNet data nodes, ignoring the coordinates of thousands upon millions of data stars blinking in the perpetual night. Each star represented an entrance node on the GlobalNet, some private, hidden behind layers of encryption, passwords and user authentication. His destination was not among them, but between them.

  The Bottle City was one of an unknown number of hidden data nodes on the GlobalNet. Many hackers considered it a myth, but mostly because they weren’t clever enough to find it themselves, nor skilled enough to be invited into its secret confines. In the early days of the GlobalNet virtual scene, its original name had been Kandor, named as a direct homage to the mythology of the comic book hero Superman. In the comics, Kandor had been a city on Superman’s home planet of Krypton that had been shrunken, placed in a bottle and stolen by the rogue artificial intelligence, Brainiac. The creators of Bottle City were huge fans, and modeled their virtual home away from home after the comics from the early 50’s. The corporate copyright holders of the Superman mythos did not approve of the use of their trademarks, and after an exhaustive search by corporate lawyers and hackers, the city’s founders were served with a cease-and-desist order. Rather than take down the site, they renamed it The Bottle City and took it off the public grid. No one knew where the servers housing the site lived. The creators dropped out of physical circulation as well, though it was presumed they still physically lived in the Los Angeles area based on the interest they maintained in the LA hacker scene.

  Turning to crime was a natural step for the Bottle City leadership, and by the time thing e riots engulfed Los Angeles, they had firmly established themselves as a force every bit as powerful as many of the other LA gangs, despite having no physical presence. After the riots had settled down, they had formed an alliance with the physical gang the Hollywood Starlets, or at least the members of the Starlets who refused to give up the life once the unrest was over. The Starlets were the muscle, the hands of a complex neural network of hackers who lived their entire lives on the GlobalNet, ostensibly in The Bottle City. Bridge had helped the technomancers set up a similar hidden network after the Boulder incident, and though the Bottle City didn’t have the technomancer magic behind it, it was almost impossible to find. Impossible, that is, unless you were Artemis Bridge on a mission.

  “You with me, Freeman?” Bridge twisted his mercurial virtual body around, searching for Freeman’s avatar in the vast blackness.

  “Of course.” The hacker’s body rezzed into sight virtual inches from Bridge. Most avatars looked like Bridge, at least in the pure data streams outside of virtual worlds, crèche foyers and textured simulations. They appeared with mercurial silver bodies, malleable into any shape the hacker’s mind could imagine, but lacking texture, color and personality. Not so with Michael Freeman; his avatar could have come from any virtual world, as it was fully skinned, textured, and colored. He floated in three gorgeous dimensions with full spectrum color, a gleaming six-armed warrior clad in sparkling armor from head to foot.

  “You’ve been working with Wong.” Wong was one of the technomancer’s fabled Council of Five, a genius level physicist, mathematician and programmer whose creations had been infused with technomancer magic. One of only two technomancers who could cast a flight spell, Wong’s brilliance barely outstripped his immaturity. Bridge had watched the wizard burn one of his colleagues to ash when provoked. “If he’s sharing his secrets with you, why do you need me to get you a mana engine?”

  “I’ve already asked him. He’s afraid if he asks the Council, they’ll yell at him.”

  “That’s Wong all right. Ok, where do we go?”

  “Nowhere.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “One doesn’t go TO the Bottle City, one finds an inhabitant of the Bottle City and stalks him home. Like so.” Freeman yanked a device from a pouch on his bejeweled belt, a device larger than the container it had come from. It looked a bit like a compass mixed with a pocket watch, with a sundial on the top. The dial spun with an audible clicking noise, sparks flying off its golden workings. The sparks floated as if in zero-g, forming into a thin rope of light that grew in one direction until it disappeared beyond the horizon. “You remember Harold, right?” Bridge nodded. He remembered Harold, the worst kind of wannabe hacker one could imagine. A sloppy programmer with a mouth that wouldn’t quit, Harold had tried to hook up with every hacker outfit this side of the Rockies. “He got better. He’s almost decent.”

  “Good enough for Bottle City?”

  “Good enough for grunt work on the city limits. When the shit started going down with Diablos and the cops got involved, the Boys pulled everyone in. They’ve got safehouses all over the city, with the Starlets standing guard over the crèches. Nobody knows about them. Except me, of course.” He pulled hard on the light rope. “Grab hold.” Bridge linked his avatar’s hand with Freeman’s and they were gone, the rope pulling them along at light speed. “Harold never could hide his trace very well.”

  The pair stopped in front of a giant data node, a gleaming cube emblazoned with corporate logos along its shiny walls, twinkling dots of light indicating the traffic into and out of the node’s GlobalNet site. Bridge recognized the logos as a hotel chain, with the address for a downtown location printed underneath. “The Bottle City boys are in a hotel?”

  “Some of them. Harold apparently.”

  “Wait, isn’t that Meat’s hotel?” Freeman nodded his head. “The Bottle City Boys are holed up in Meat Locker’s hotel? Since when did they start working for that gigantic bastard?” Meat Locker was as old school a gangster as one could get, having moved up and down the Los Angeles mob scene since before Bridge had been born. His long and storied history of violence had given him the nickname Meat Locker. No one even knew his real name anymore.

  “How do you think they pay for the City? That hardware ain’t cheap. They’ve been working angles for him since forever.”

  “Huh. How did I miss that?”

  “They do a good job of keeping any ties to him hidden, so people won’t do exactly what we’re doing here.” Freeman tugged on the rope of light again. Bridge’s eye followed the sparkling trail, which disappeared into a black hole in the hotel’s node wall. He peered more closely at the hole, noting that it was as if one had taken the light nodes that indicated all the other traffic into and out of the hotel, and made the complete opposite, a black data hole that absorbed all data in the surrounding area. As dark as it was, the black hole was almost invisible unless being directly examined. Once Bridge had spotted it, he saw six other such data entry points sprinkled around the wall.

  “Which one of those goes to the City?”

  “All of them, I’d imagine. Here.” Freeman tossed the compass contraption over to Bridge, who cradled it in his silvery hands. “Pick one and point that at it. Follow the trail that appears. It’ll take you right to the front gates.”

  “Then I guess I talk my ass off, huh?”

  “You do what you do. I’ll go back and get your backdoor prepared. Don’t forget to talk to the Council. I’m serious about that mana engine. Freeman’s going to need it.”

  Bridge ignored the use of the third person again, though it brought an unsettling nervousness to his stomach. “I’ll get you what you need, Freeman.”

  “Good luck,” Freeman said, his body dissolving in seconds.

  “Here goes nothing,” Bridge said to no one, pointing the compass contraption at the nearest black spot.

  The sensation felt like being dragged behind a very large, very fast-moving jet airplane through a windless vacuum. The rope light sparkles fed through the compass contraption like a bicycle chain, twisting and flitting around and behind Bridge as he drew closer to his destination. That destination appeared ahead before he could grasp its existence, a yawning black maw like the hidden data nodes he’d seen on the hotel’s wall, only so large it obscured the stars behind it. The rope light disappeared into the black hole. As Bridge slammed headfirst into the
gaping emptiness, he couldn’t help closing his virtual eyes. A memory bubbled to the surface of his thoughts, the memory of walking through the dome in Boulder to his first meeting with the technomancers.

  Opening his eyes, he was greeted by an empty room, a flat hologram of interface floating in front of him. The interface required him to create an avatar. Virtual worlds like this one did not allow avatars to run around like mercury droplets; they required “skinning.” Bridge would have to choose physical characteristics and clothing, all based around the virtual world’s theme and physical rules. Some were more open than others. This being a world with a very specific theme, Bridge would have to dress like a Kandorian. As Bridge cycled through the options, he decided that meant looking like a complete tosser. He finally settled on a butch male with light skin tone, roughly six feet tall and beefy, clean-shaven with dark, close-cropped hair and a cleft chin. His clothes were appalling to someone as conscious of appearance as Bridge. A garish red headband sat on his forehead. A skin-tight green shirt with three completely useless white circles lined horizontally across his chest and white fins for shoulder pads made him cringe, especially when paired with the red trunks and green leggings he chose. Red boots completed the crazy quilt ensemble. He had hoped to find a jetpack among the clothing options, but no such luck. If he was going to look like an idiot, he’d hoped to at least be able to fly in style.

  His avatar complete, he entered the tourist quarters of the Bottle City. These areas were usually severely limited, a free trial area for prospective joiners. The administrator’s security forces would police the area heavily, swiftly removing any potential griefers before they could trouble the City’s inhabitants. The time of day found the area sparsely inhabited. Bridge found himself on a wide thoroughfare, a few pedestrians walking around in the same type of garish outfits and marveling at the sites of the alien world.

  The city was a fantastic creation, a true artistic vision given life. Towering skyscrapers shaped in smooth, rounded forms dominated the skyline, everything splashed with the brightest primary colors. Saturn-like rings decorated almost every structure, an architectural motif that looked even sillier in virtual reality than Bridge had thought it could. Bridge grinned at the overly phallic shape of most of the buildits complengs out there, street after street of looming dildos. Past the buildings, the sky cast the most curious sheen. Wispy clouds drifted in front of what must be the outer shape of the bottle, the light muted by the curved horizon of bottle surrounding the world. It reminded him uncomfortably of his time under the dome in Boulder.