Ghost Black

by Matthew S. Cox

  “Wow.” The shadow-apparition’s silver eyespots doubled in size. “Really? You’d do that?”

  “I’m not going to help them sell people. I’d rather kill corporate slime.” Being hugged by a semisolid mass of cold phantasmal goo was perhaps the single strangest feeling Risa had experienced up to that point in her life. “Eek.”

  “You’re an awesome friend. Don’t worry. It’s not people. They’re shipping chemicals, weapon parts, and stolen high-end cybernetics for re-sale on Earth.”

  “Oh, that’s better.” Risa rolled her eyes. Lesser of several evils, I guess.

  Tamashī flowed to the door. “This way.”

  “We’re walking?”

  “Flying technically, but… well super-technically we’re not moving at all, but… Teleporting in the net is tricky. For whatever reason, they made it illegal. It’s like way hard.”

  “I thought you were good?” Risa winked.

  “Teleportation is still a bit iffy for me. It also stands out like a beacon if anyone tries to backtrace the infiltration. Trust me; it’s easier to hide playing by the rules.”

  After walking out of a virtual recreation of the Orbital Hotel, Tamashī the wraith glided into the sky. Risa growled under her breath for a moment until she remembered she had the body of a giant faerie, and at a thought, flew after her. The wraith’s shadowy grip encircled her right wrist, and pulled her along at a speed more akin to a military fighter craft than an anachronistic pixie. Fortunately, the wind-in-the-face effect created by cyberspace ignored real physics, so her skin didn’t peel off or burn.

  Tamashī led the way to Arcadia across a long expanse of simulated open Mars. Twenty-three virtual minutes after leaving Elysium, they plunged down past the jewel-like dome of the ‘prettiest’ city in the UCF, and flew among silvery skyscrapers, parks, and advert bots.

  “You’re kidding me,” said Risa. “They’ve got advert bots in Cyberspace too?”

  “Oh yeah.” Tamashī skimmed along the ground. “About thirteen times more since they’re free here, only program code.”

  Other living users were easy to spot: anyone who screamed and ran away from the wraith. A few minutes after arrival, Tamashī stopped in front of a glowing black archway covered in bright-blue circuit lines. Beyond it lay a courtyard where a RedEx shuttle perched on a pedestal amid an impossible fountain. Serpents of water raced around in an elaborate midair ballet, in full defiance of gravity.

  “One sec,” said Tamashī. “I’m messing with their border router so it doesn’t log our entrance.”

  Thirty seconds later, the wraith drifted into the arch, pulling Risa along. They went around the fountain and past the front door into a lobby decorated in red and white. Considering the size of RedEx, the décor seemed plain. Even in a place where extravagance cost only a net developer’s time, the company kept with its basic aesthetic.

  Tamashī headed across a hundred-meter-long room full of bench seats facing a row of window stations where forty live avatars dealt with customer service issues. A throng of other avatars waited their turn, ranging from ordinary looking people to powered armor, wizards, dragons, aliens, and bizarre creatures Risa had no name for. Her cute-creepy faerie persona seemed tame by comparison. No one reacted to their presence, allowing them to approach a door marked ‘employees only’ at the far end of the room.

  “Why aren’t they running?” asked Risa

  “We’re ghosting.” Tamashī’s ‘scraping glass’ voice made her shiver again. “None of them can see us.”

  Risa waited nearby while the wraith stuck her ethereal fingers into the wall by the access panel. Despite her corset being pixels, she found it difficult to breathe. In a few seconds, the door exploded into a cloud of silver dust, which started to coalesce together as soon as it burst. Before it became solid again, Risa darted after Tamashī.

  The space beyond it resembled an ordinary hallway in a corporate building. Grey carpet bore a repeating pattern in red: the company’s name. Contrast made the word ‘RedEx’ seem to vibrate and float away from the floor. Looking at it for more than a few seconds at a time proved dizzying. Her shadowy friend glided off past rows of empty cubicles. When they reached a ninety-degree turn in the corridor, a man with the build of an assault infantry soldier appeared out of thin air in front of them. White shirt, silver badge, black pants, and a stunrod gave him away as a security officer.

  “Kill it!” yelled Tamashī. “It’s not a real guy.”

  “Unauthorized entry detected.” The man stepped out of himself, becoming two exact copies of the same person. Both converged on Tamashī, who had been closer.

  “Riiiisa!” yelled the wraith. “If it surrounds me, I’m dead.”

  Tamashī leapt at the left one, sending tendrils of wispy smoke around the guard’s throat. Risa extended her laser claws and lunged at the other copy. This isn’t complicated. Think of it like a video game. Her instinctual desire to activate speedware didn’t do anything, leaving her yelping as the second security construct took a swing at her with its stunrod. She managed a clumsy but effective block that kept the glowing blue weapon away from her, but knocked her into the wall.

  The first security construct writhed in place as smoky tendrils invaded its eyes, nose and mouth, while others held it still. Risa’s opponent swiveled to ambush Tamashī from behind. Risa lunged again, taking advantage of the ridiculous length of her virtual claws to attack in a wild series of haphazard slashes.

  Two of nine swipes connected, leaving smoking gouges across the perfect white shirt. The construct spun and thrust its baton at her. She resisted the urge to use speedware that didn’t exist here and reacted with a spinning block that forced its weapon to the side and brought her in close. She swiped at the head, but it fell flat to the floor in the blink of an eye―an impossible move too fast for any human.

  Before she could recover from the swing, it reappeared on its feet behind her and jabbed the stunrod into her back. For three-quarters of a second that felt closer to twenty minutes, Risa screamed like her blood had been drained and replaced with boiling battery acid.

  Pain receded before the construct could smash her over the head, and she more fell out of the way than dodged, whimpering. The guard loomed over her, baton raised, and disappeared. Risa flipped over on to all fours. Tamashī’s tendrils crushed the first construct, wispy fingers leaving behind a suspension of shattered pieces, as though a painted glass statue of a man exploded in their grasp. Fragments rained to the ground amid delicate twinkling.

  “Perfect,” said Tamashī. “This is going to be easy now.”

  Risa hugged herself, shaking from the memory of that agony. A good piece of her wanted to whimper and cry for Daddy.

  “Hey, you okay?” Tamashī glided closer. “Oh, it got you with a Mindwank soft.”

  Teeth chattering, Risa lifted her head to look at her friend. “What? That doesn’t sound good.”

  “It’s like being hit with a stun gun. Makes the deck shock you in the brain. Non-lethal, but it hurts a bit.”

  “Y-y-ya think?”

  “The deck should’ve intercepted the signal. Hang on.” Tamashī put a spectral hand on Risa’s shoulder. “Yeah, your deck killed the stun a few microseconds after it started.”

  That was a microsecond? “Ow.”

  “Those constructs are nasty. There’s no way for a single person to fight one alone.” Tamashī pulled her upright. “Come on. We have to hurry. Every second we spend in here is another chance of being spotted or another one of those spawning in on us.”

  Risa decided to run instead of rely on the unfamiliar feeling of having wings. They hurried down the corridor to a four-way intersection, where Tamashī went left, heading for a red elevator door. When it opened, another security man stepped out.

  “Dammit, we already killed him.”

  “It’s a new one.” Tamashī’s fingers grew out to tendrils again. “They all look the same.”

  Risa, anticipating the split this time, charg
ed. The guard slid sideways, another impossible maneuver, and her laser claws ripped up the wall. She recovered in time to avoid the stun baton, ducking a sword-like swing before leaping at it. Expecting the floor drop, she feigned high with her left hand while striking at the ground with her right. The construct flopped with the same maneuver the previous one had used, and she impaled it through the chest with five scintillating energy blades.

  It tried to sit up, roaring. White light streamed from its eyes, and a second later welled up within its mouth. Crimson glowed beneath the surface of its face, making the skin appear more like plastic. A second later, the body exploded in a cloud of iridescent particles that hung in the air like slow motion snow.

  Tamashī’s copy disappeared in a quiet instant.

  The wraith twisted to face her. “Nice move.”

  “Kill one they both die?” Risa stood. The melt holes her claws left in the floor sealed. “Figured if it’s a program, it was going to run the same routine as the last one.”

  “See? You’re not a noob after all.” The wraith winked. “And it’s not really both. It’s still one program.”

  The elevator changed floors in an instant. Two minutes, and another security construct later, Tamashī defeated the lock on what appeared to be an armored vault door leading to a room that stretched too far into the distance to see the opposing wall. Virtual storage cabinets, ten-foot-tall monoliths of shiny silicon lined with horizontal bands of glowing cyan, stood in eight rows. Thousands of data nodes.

  Risa whistled.

  “Hey, you two,” yelled a woman’s voice. Another white-shirted security officer entered the virtual representation of a massive neural memory cluster, though instead of a stunrod, she carried a boxy assault rifle. “You will submit to a traceback and arrest, or I will end you right here and now.”

  Tamashī whirled around, raised her spectral hands, and let out a keening, polyphonic wail from the bowels of Hell. The wraith form grew and darkened, tatters billowing.

  The security woman leapt back, screamed, and lapsed into a brief series of convulsions before she shifted to a crude blue wireframe human shape, and disappeared.

  “Did you kill her?”

  A childlike giggle came from the spirit. “No, but I probably killed her pants.”

  Tamashī brought her hands in front of herself, sinking wraithlike talons into her insubstantial chest, and pulling it open like a cloak. From within an even blacker void inside her, round, head-sized ghosts spat out. In stark contrast to their mistress, they looked cartoony and cute. After the twentieth bubble went flying, she closed her chest. White orbs zigzagged everywhere, flying in and out of data cabinets.

  By the time two pronounced clusters had formed, identifying the memory locations containing the records Tamashī needed to alter, six more security constructs had attacked. Fortunately, every last one of them evaded with the same preprogrammed floor drop, making them easy to kill by repeating the same feint. Risa draped herself against one of the nodes while Tamashī stuck her hands into the nearer of the two the seeker sprites had selected.

  “Why am I out of breath? This isn’t real.” Risa wheezed.

  “Your body can’t tell the difference. It’s reacting like you are really getting into fights. Be glad you took off your armor. We’re both working up a sweat in meatspace.”

  “Ugh. Are you almost done? I’m worn out.”

  “Yep. Just a little longer here and one more set of files.” Tamashī focused on the cabinet in front of her for another six seconds and withdrew her shadowy hands. After gliding two rows to the left and about twenty cabinets down, she thrust her claws into another. “Almost done. The good news is we don’t have to walk back. We can just log out.”

  The spirit withdrew from the second data construct twelve seconds later, and headed for another.

  “I thought you said you were done?” Risa grumbled.

  Tamashī giggled. The sight of such a creature covering its ‘mouth’ with a shadow-taloned hand unsettled her almost as much as the fear program had. “We are. Since we got noticed, I’m making a few clumsy changes in other files so they don’t figure out why we really came in. Give them a crappy attempt to insert some free shipping records to think they fixed, and they might not look deep enough to find the real change.”

  “Oh.” Risa searched for more energy, having the strangest feeling they weren’t done fighting yet.

  A squeak came from the entry door, followed by a seemingly endless onrush of security men.

  “Oh, fuck.” Risa slapped Tamashī on the shoulder and pointed. “We got incoming.”

  “How many?”

  “Couple hundred.”

  The wraiths’ head twisted to the left. Mirrored eyespots tripled in size to dinner plates. “Wow. Guess we pissed them off. Hosting that many simultaneous constructs is taking cycles away from their order processing CPU. They want our asses bad enough to lose money.”

  “They think we’re stealing?” Risa extended her claws.

  “No. They just have this whole pride thing. They think they’re the Silver or something.”

  “What does that mean?” Risa glanced at her for a second.

  “I’ll explain later.”

  A crashing wave of men in white shirts washed over the near end of the room, so many they seemed a contiguous mass of white and black.

  “This is gonna hurt.”

  “Log out!” yelled Tamashī. “We’re good.”

  The wraith vanished.

  Risa sent the mental command for log out, but nothing happened. As the thought to scream some foul word formed at the tip of her brain, a hand closed around hers and pulled her into a rectangle of searing white light that had opened like a door behind her.

  She threw an arm over her eyes and cried out. Cold smoothness met her bare feet. She lowered her arm, risking a hesitant peek. The data room had become a pure white floor with a high gloss finish, empty to the horizon in all directions, where snow-capped mountains and blue sky glowed. Her dark faerie outfit was gone, replaced by a garment composed of a wide strip of white cloth wound around her body, making her feel like some ancient goddess from an old painting. She still had wings, though they had become white and feathery.

  Raziel stepped out of a cloud of silvery fog in front of her, his face hidden by a voluminous hood. He kept his hands tucked inside opposing sleeves of a heavy white robe with gold trim marked with ancient runic symbols. A trace of cobalt light reflected on the inside of his hood and his chin from the three wing-shaped bars adorning his face below each eye.

  Risa pressed a hand over her chest, trying to calm her heart. The security constructs had gotten too close for comfort. The sudden shift from chaos to perfect silence left her speechless.

  “Hello, Risa.”

  She bowed her head in greeting. “Raziel.”

  “I have been somewhat busy as of late, focusing on Earth.”

  Risa examined the outfit, grateful for the corset’s absence. “At least I can breathe in this.”

  “The open back frees your wings.” He took a step closer. “I would like you to reconsider your role in the liberation of Mars.”

  “You know what happened in Bliss.” She turned away, head down. Her wings closed tighter. The oddity of it happening on its own in response to her frightened mood stalled her thoughts.

  “I do. If it did not affect you, you would not be human. I do not have the ability to empathize with how a biological mind copes with stressful situations. I can understand on a theoretical level that you are suffering recurring nocturnal hallucinatory experiences.”

  “They’re called nightmares, Raziel.” She glanced over her shoulder at him. “I haven’t had one yet, but I’m waiting for it. I can’t stop thinking about how close I came to dying. Do you have any idea what the odds were of me surviving that?”

  Raziel spoke with zero emotional inflection. “Nine-hundred-sixty-two-thousand-five-hundred-and-forty to one… had I not provided assistance.”

&nbs
p; She sighed.

  “You are not taking into account my adjustment of the position of the aircraft.”

  “What?” She stared at him.

  Raziel lifted his head enough to reveal a subdued smile. “At the instant you leapt, I overrode the flight control system and moved the craft into your path.”

  Her gut churned. “So I would’ve been dead if…”

  “I told you I would not let you come to harm. Perhaps someday you will believe me.”

  She paced for a moment. “I can’t do it anymore. Angel, AI, synth, whatever you are… I’m the one who has to live with myself for the things I’ve done. I’m never going to feel happy again no matter how long I live. There’ll always be that guilt hanging over me, wondering how many innocent lives my bombs shattered.” Her gaze fell to the floor. “It doesn’t matter how wonderful Pavo is to me or how hard I work to try to do the right thing from now on… Every time I have a moment of quiet, I’m going to think about being a killer.”

  “There are casualties in war. Change of this magnitude requires it. You have been far more cautious than most. Your conscience should be clean.”

  “Don’t give me platitudes about war. You can try to take the high road, but I’m not buying it anymore. The whole time you led me along, you made me think you were an angel. All dustblow. You had me believing there was a Heaven… there was a God up there somewhere, and he chose me.” She covered her mouth, close to tears, but anger won. “Don’t you dare lecture me about a clean conscience. I was a vulnerable kid and you took advantage of me. You probably knew Garrison was my real father the whole time, didn’t you?”

  Her voice seemed to echo to the horizon and back.

  Raziel bowed his head. “My knowledge is limited to that which is recorded or can be predicted. The odds of his parental relation to you were―”

  “Fuck your odds.” She whirled in a circle; the white-floored world appeared identical in all directions. “Where’s the damn exit? Why can’t I log off?”

  “The people of Mars―”

  “Don’t even want us,” Risa shouted, feathers ruffled. “You see the NewsNet. You know what they think of us. Everyone I see wants the MLF in prison or executed for killing babies. We’re not going to win a goddamned war like that. You’re so full of yourself with throwing out the odds… run a simulation of that. What are the odds the MLF can win a bullet-flinging war against two superpowers while living inside territory controlled by one of them? Play that out a million times and tell me what happens. I bet we die every time.”