And that scared her again, because if his barriers were that easy to penetrate, he’d be completely defenceless to the Talee . . . but on the other hand, his net connections didn’t link to anything very vital. Attacking them could sever connection between his brain and the uplinks but couldn’t actually attack his brain at all. Yet. With the level of invasiveness of this uplink tech, that would come later, she was sure of it.
It looked good though. Solid. The detail in his construct was organised in ways that looked to her trained eye as though they shouldn’t work with normal tech . . . clearly something else was going on with Kiril’s tech, down on the molecular level. The tests the FSA doctors had done had suggested as much.
“How much does it connect?” Kiril asked, gazing at it. “I mean, these are the receptors here and here. . . .” he pointed to where the wireless tendrils seemed to be interacting with the construct, causing reciprocal flashes of activity. “So these are activating my VR capability? And I should be sharing all kinds of stuff with you, into that VR stuff?”
“Well . . .” It wasn’t an easy thing to explain to someone without the technical lingo. “Sure. But see, this is the problem with Neural Cluster Tech, NCT—the stuff they were using on Pyeongwha. It shared everything. There was no filter, and then every other brain responded the same way, so you had this crazy echo effect, where people’s brains were all trying to copy each other, and it changed the way their brains worked.”
“See if you can feel this,” said Kiril. And Sandy felt . . . wow. It was odd, a completely unwarranted change in her emotional state. Only it wasn’t her emotional state, it was . . . Kiril? She felt excited, but not in the more complex way an adult might . . . it was just enthusiasm, without roots. But more than enthusiasm. Awe? “That’s how I felt the first time I saw Tanusha from the air,” Kiril explained.
“I can feel that, yes,” Sandy said quietly. She didn’t know what to think. All her years of uplinked and networked experience, she’d never felt anything like it. With anyone.
“How about this?” This one she recognised immediately . . . and she had to flip them out of cyberspace into the VR room once more, because she’d started to cry, and in cyberspace an unrequited physiological reaction could cause VR collapse. He stood before her now, in the blank white room, scruffyhaired and incurably curious, gazing up at her. Looking at him, Sandy felt love, so pure and intense . . . yet not hers. “This is when I think of all of us together,” said Kiril. “You, me, Danya, and Svetlana. I mean, not all the time, but when I think of what it would be like if one of us wasn’t here? And then I think of how much I like all of us together.”
“I feel like that too,” Sandy managed to say, her hands on his shoulders.
“I know,” he said, smiling. “I can feel it.”
This degree of interactivity was dangerous. The future implications . . . but screw the future implications; she was trying to keep them alive. And this degree of interactivity might just support . . .
“Kiri, I’m going to drop us out. Are you ready?” He nodded. She flipped again, and . . .
. . . they were back in the cold water, Kiril blinking on his rock, supported by Danya’s arm around his shoulders. Cyberspace was still before her eyes, and she made a few frequency adjustments, adjusted booster power, and activated her own local tacnet. It fired up quickly, with just the booster to run on . . . and immediately she could see Kiril’s construct grab it, interact and process it . . . and suddenly icons were spreading across her view, red and ominous.
It took her several moments to figure out what she was looking at. Hostile icons. Enemy, as tacnet processed things, friends and enemies . . . and then it hit her, as she registered ranges, trajectories, even numbers. The Talee synths were broadcasting some kind of search signal, filtered by their own uplinks, and Kiril’s uplinks, being of a similar type, were picking that up and processing it while bouncing nothing back. Now tacnet gave it a framework within which to express what it saw, and these red hostile dots on her screen . . . they were the Talee synthetics hunting them. These were the enemy. And Kiril’s uplinks meant she could see them, for as long as they kept active scanning.
“Jane!” she said, meeting Jane’s eyes. “Tacnet, now!”
Jane connected her own booster, and suddenly Jane was there too, her icon reading green as tacnet failed to recognise her as friend or foe, and Sandy switched it to friendly-blue. Now Jane’s eyes widened to see that display.
“Well, that’s a start,” she said. “But if you generate that wireless connection with Kiril in the open, they’ll spot it like a giant fucking beacon. And if they’ve acquired armed flyers by now, which they surely have, they’ll put a rocket on you before you can blink.”
Amirah blinked her eyes open. She was in the backseat of a groundcar. Poole was leaning over her, removing an insert cord from the back of her head. A moment ago she’d been in FSA HQ. Arguing with the Director. It seemed indistinct now, like a dream. But it had certainly been VR. Hadn’t it? VR recollections were always precise, never dreamlike.
“Where am I?” Poole was attending to someone unconscious beside her—there were four of them, she realised, crammed into the backseat of the car, Poole sitting across their laps. The car was moving erratically, unlike most car rides in Tanusha. Manual control, she realised, looking out the window. It was a regular Tanushan road, not a highway, but there were vehicles parked randomly across the verges, people standing about, talking in groups, pointing. What the hell was going on?
“Talee tried their mass-VR assault on all Tanusha,” Rhian said from the driver’s seat. She wore light combat armour, and various weapons were jammed into the gaps between seats and passengers everywhere. “Put all the FSA out, much of the CSA. Now the whole thing’s collapsing.”
She indicated out the windows, steering between stopped cars. Traffic net must be down completely, Amirah thought with incredulity. That never happened. A few of the stopped cars had been in accidents, mostly minor ones . . . but if it was like this all over Tanusha, there’d surely be worse elsewhere. Here in the front yard of a suburban house a cruiser was lying on its roof, attended by a small crowd of civilians.
“Cruiser crash,” said the GI in the front passenger seat—Leon, she remembered his name. FSA spec ops, low-40s designation. “You ever seen a cruiser crash?”
“There’s been about fifty,” said Amirah, remembering something she’d read when researching her new home. “Most of them self-inflicted by idiots messing with traffic central. About five actual accidents, in seventy years.”
They had the radio on the car’s dash, one of those antiquated functions all vehicles were required to have in case of network emergency. It came through all garbled, auto-tune flicking from one to the next on some automated function—keywords and sender addresses, Amirah guessed. But the gist of it was clear. . . .
“. . . full-scale network assault! I repeat, Tanusha has experienced a full-scale network assault, no telling yet if this is work of the League, or some other entity. . . .” “. . . recommend to everyone to put their uplinks into full autistic, or better yet disable them entirely. . . .” “. . . got net expert Shanti Singh here, says it looks like an automated VR matrix that is putting people into VR involuntarily. . . .” “. . . equivalent to a network weapon of mass destruction, make no mistake if this was some foreign entity, this thing is an act of war. . . .”
“It went nuts about an hour ago,” said Rhian, steering them carefully through some malfunctioning traffic lights, a few concerned locals waving at traffic to warn them—Rhian waved back, acknowledging. “If the Talee are doing the same shit we saw Cai do on Antibe Station out at Pantala, there’s just too many contradictions to pull that off here. We think the independents’ pirate nets started picking it first, the VR matrix went after them and started putting them and their operators under . . . and of course those guys are all so paranoid they’ve a million counter-systems to fight that shit, and so . . .”
She indicated
to the mess around them. Here ahead were a couple of police cars, lights flashing, attending to some commotion along a shopping walk. The Tanushan underground were legendary Federation-wide for being paranoid, at times criminal, ideologically libertarian-to-anarchist, and often more high-tech than the authorities charged with keeping them in line. Even Talee tech, surely, trying to suppress that many fragmented and ferociously autonomous systems, must have had a nervous breakdown trying to track all the spiralling trillions of permutations as each system fought back on its own accord.
“Well, you see this is the problem with fucking around with aliens,” said Amirah, bundling her hair back, as Poole woke the GI beside her. “They’re unpredictable. Looks like they underestimated how complicated we are.” Poole moved to the last GI on the rear seat, as the near one rubbed his eyes and looked around. “How are you doing that?”
“Something Cai gave us,” said Poole. “You’ve just been upgraded to Talee tech. Or something that interacts with it. Blocks them out, he says—makes you invisible on their matrix.”
“Cai’s with us?”
“Yep. Killed a couple of his own to do it.”
“Really.”
Poole glanced at her. “What?”
“Talee,” said Amirah, making a face. “Speaking of unpredictable aliens. Wonder what’s actually going on with them. Just because they wiped themselves out several times, doesn’t mean they’re all peaceful with each other now.”
“Sandy always said this ‘First Contact’ romanticism was shit,” said Rhian from the front seat. “’Cause you don’t know what strategic balance the aliens have amongst themselves. Like if the Talee had first talked to the League during the war, they’d have made enemies of the Federation, and vice versa. We make friends with Cai, who’s to say we haven’t immediately pissed off all his enemies back home?”
“Cai made friends with us,” said Poole. “That’s different.”
“Not to his enemies it isn’t.”
“So where are we going?” Amirah asked. They passed a turnoff to a major business hub. Down the road Amirah could see blocked streets, crowds of people milling, talking, gesticulating. As though the entire city had stopped work and come out onto the streets. Network “weapon of mass destruction” indeed. People were wondering if they were awake or not.
“Somewhere to fight back. Cai says he can upgrade GIs enough that we can’t get hacked again, or not easily. Then we use big, powerful servers to attack their matrix with Cai’s matrix, force them to come after us at the source. Where we kill them.”
Amirah nodded. “Sounds like a plan. So it’s just GIs?”
“That’s right,” said Poole. “Saving the Federation’s ass again. But still they won’t support emancipation.”
“Now you sound like Kiet,” said Rhian.
“Maybe it’s time we all did,” Poole retorted. “’Cause you might have noticed—the more crises we get into, the more we end up running the place anyway.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Raylee roared her car up the access road to Sadar Institute of Technology, dodging through malfunctioning road signals, then crashed the feeble access barrier, wincing at the damage it did to the bodywork. The car was a gift from Ari, the only truly expensive thing he’d ever bought her. He knew she didn’t like being “his girl” in that way, the pretty thing the wealthy former-underground player kept happy by buying nice things for. But she loved to drive, and loved it still even after last year’s crash that cost her an arm. Her driving up to that point was now legend in some circles, amongst FSA and CSA guys who knew what she’d been trying to do, and Ari had thought it fitting she had a car to match her ability. With traffic central down, it had certainly gotten them here faster.
She glanced again at Ari as she raced into the complex. He lay slumped in the passenger seat, eyelids twitching, mouth open. She wanted to check his vitals again, but the network wouldn’t allow it. Last time she’d uplinked to anything, she’d awoken twenty minutes later face-down on the floor of Ari’s apartment. Even as she thought it, another burst of nausea hit her, and her vision flickered like a display screen on the blink. She slowed past the sides of gleaming, high-glass building atriums and a green-grass campus with gardens and walking paths—she’d never been here before, but SIT was one of numerous Tanushan legends, one of the institutes that had helped make Tanusha the technology powerhouse it was today. All empty today; the crisis seemed to be keeping everyone at home.
She took a turnoff into the underground carpark beneath the major central building, headlights coming on to illuminate the space before her . . . and screeched to a halt, confronted by a man and a woman in combat armour, rifles levelled at her head with precision that just screamed “GI.”
She popped the door and climbed out, hands raised. “Hey! I’m Detective Raylee Sinta, that’s Agent Ari Ruben in the car, he’s having a bad reaction to this fucking net virus or whatever it is. . . .”
But the GIs were already moving, one rushing to the passenger door to pull Ari out and dumping him over her shoulder. The woman led them on, talking on what Raylee guessed was a radio link, “Rhian? Yeah, Sinta and Ruben just turned up, he’s having a bad reaction to the invader matrix. . . .”
“Ray?” Raylee could hear Rhian’s voice on the GI’s headphones . . . and now suddenly louder as the GI flipped them onto her speakers as they strode to the carpark elevator. “Ray, I don’t think this is the safest place to bring him. . . .”
“Rhian, his heart’s nearly stopped twice.” She couldn’t keep the quaver of panic from her voice, as they reached the elevator, and the other GI propped Ari against a wall to examine him, taking his pulse. “Ari said you’d be coming here, he woke up briefly, said he could help you, but you had to get him here. . . .”
“Yeah . . . I don’t know if we can stabilise straights against this matrix, Ray, you might notice we’re all GIs here . . . wait, how are you still awake? You’re close to Ari, they should have knocked you out first.”
“I think it’s because I got high-level uplinks late. It’s . . . it had me for a while, but when I came to it’s left me pretty much alone since. . . .”
The elevator opened, but Ari was beginning to convulse once more. “Rhian!” Raylee yelled, trying to grab him, as the GI tried to lift him once more. “No! No, you can’t move him like this, he’s going to need CPR again!”
And immediately footsteps were running, as Ari was laid on the floor before the elevator doors, Raylee turning him onto his side in case of an airways blockage. A Chinese-featured man skidded on the polished hallway floor on his knees and put an insert cord into the back of Ari’s head. . . .
“Are you Cai?” Raylee demanded. “Cai, right?”
Cai paid her no attention, eyes momentarily closed. Ari stopped convulsing. Cai looked up. “Now you.”
“Me? Oh no . . . what are you . . . hey!” As one of the GIs grabbed and twisted her arm, forcing her forward, where her hair was pulled aside to reveal the little insert that she still hated to use. . . . “No!”
And she awoke in a teacher’s chair in an institute classroom, with a view across the wide sweep of river. No disorientation, no dizziness and looking around to wonder where she was. Somehow she just knew this was classroom H15 in E Block. She even knew the SIT layout now, an arc of buildings along the inner bank of a loop in the river, each one facing onto a central, inner building, connected with walkways and separated by gardens. This building was at the very tip of the arc, the center of the five riverside structures.
And here in the middle of the room, using the holographics, was Ari. He stood with Rhian, hands flying across the hovering icons, pointing things out to her.
“Hi, Ray,” he said without looking at her. How did he know she was awake? “How do you feel?”
“I’m . . .” She got slowly to her feet, careful of moving too suddenly. But she felt fine. Except that . . . “Wow.” She could see cyberspace overlaid on her vision. That was usually hard for her and would
bring on a bout of nausea. Now, nothing. Her head seemed to be buzzing with awareness. “I can see stuff. Lots of stuff . . . is this the institute schematics?”
“Schematics, networks, mainframes, everything.” He turned, looking at icons, and she could seem him grinning. “We’ve been upgraded. Talee tech. Fucking amazing.”
They left the stream with five hundred meters to go to the river branch that Sandy’s internal-memory map told her was up ahead. The stream joined with the river farther along, but only after a wide bend that took it very close to where tacnet was now telling them a ground party of four was approaching. The flyer had come down that way fifteen minutes ago and hovered above the trees, while tacnet showed single figures jumping from the back. Farther upriver, more Talee-GIs were down, another four with tacnet uncertain of two more behind. The tactic was obvious—squash them up against the riverbank and force them to cross.
Sandy pushed low through the undergrowth now at the bank, ankle-deep in mud. The river here was only fifty meters wide, and bendy, overgrown by thick forest on all sides. Infrared showed her little coloured dots of animals and birds in places, but a concealed GI would give a similar signature. There was movement everywhere, wind brushing the leaves, insects buzzing, small animals leaping from branch to branch. She had to consciously dial down her visual sensitivity—GIs were urban combat specialists, and out here, data became cluttered. But the GIs hunting them would have similar trouble.
Danya pushed up behind, more like knee-deep, holding a mangrove branch aside so it wouldn’t snap back in his face. He was sweaty, tired, and muddy, but seemed to be holding up. Behind him, Svetlana helped Kiril, both exhausted.
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