Data Runner

by Sam A. Patel

  “I can make payments for thirty days. After that, I’ll have to make other arrangements.”

  Other arrangements. That’s always how they get you.

  “My back is to the wall now, isn’t it?” Martin mumbles. “There’s no other choice now, is there?”

  Martin looks to me as if for confirmation.

  “No, there isn’t,” I say. But that’s only because I fully expect him to say that he’s going to have to take the offer from Grumwell. I mean, that would be the reasonable assumption, wouldn’t it?

  “We’re going to have to run.”

  Run? “Run where?”

  “Into the squatter settlements. It’s the one place the syndicate won’t come after us.”

  My jaw hangs open. Was he kidding? “It’s the one place the syndicate won’t come after us because even they won’t mess with the settlement cartels.”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll be fine.”

  I immediately think of Dexter, who had to move into the squatter settlements when he was 5 after his family lost everything they had in the big asset crunch. The Drakes didn’t have any choice at the time. We do.

  “No. No way. We’re not moving again.” It’s not a response but an assertion. “This is our home, Martin. We’re not leaving it. What about the offer from Grumwell?”

  I can see Martin grind his teeth. “That’s not an option. There is no way I would ever work for Grumwell!”

  Even in a storm of fifty-foot waves, or in our case one giant fifty-thousand foot wave, Martin clings to his ideals like a life preserver. Ever since the takeover of Martin’s old company, Grumwell has had a standing offer for Martin loaded with benefits, perks, and a substantial signing bonus. I know this because they never let a month go by without reminding him of it. They want him, and they are willing to pay anything to get him.

  “Do you have any idea what they did to me?” he says.

  “I know, Martin. They stole your company away from you.”

  “No, Jack. If only it were that simple. Companies get swallowed all the time. That’s business. Grumwell didn’t just take Delphi away from me, they blackballed me among my own peers. Do you think it’s just bad luck that no other firm will touch me?”

  I know it isn’t because Martin and I don’t believe in luck.

  “Grumwell made it known that any other firm who hired me would suffer the same fate as Delphi.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Because that’s the way Miles Tolan operates. When he wants something bad enough, he doesn’t just take it by force. He orchestrates it so that the thing he wants comes to him. He removes all other options until Grumwell is the only one remaining, then he sits back and waits for his prize to come to him.” Martin drives his index finger into his head like he’s tapping at his brain. “This is what they want, Jack! This is what they’re after! But I will never let Miles Tolan have it. You have to take a stand for something in this world, and this is mine. I believe that knowledge is the shared intellectual property of all who seek it—not something to be owned by the few, or controlled by the one. My intellectual property is my own, for me to share with whomever I choose. It is not for sale to anyone. Especially not Miles Tolan.”

  Now I’m the one who’s grinding my teeth. “That’s great, Martin. That’s just wonderful. Every time you take a stand, I’m the one who ends up paying for it. I worked my ass off at the magnet academy so that I would be a shoe-in for every award. Then everything fell apart and you brought us out here. But did you hear me complain about it even once? No, I didn’t. I just accepted the fact that I would have to work a few years and save up the money to pay for it myself. And that’s fine, Martin. I’m willing to do that. But I am not willing to do this. I’m not leaving again.” If Martin has any kind of rebuttal, I don’t give him the chance to make it. I’m already marching out the room.

  “Thirty days, Jack.” He calls after me. “I can cover us for thirty days.”

  “A lot can happen in thirty days,” I reply.

  Upstairs, I slam my bedroom door shut. I didn’t tell Martin about Arcadian because I know he’ll never let me do it. However, that’s not really his call anymore, is it? If Martin can make rash decisions that affect our future then surely I can do the same. Martin made his decision, now it’s time for me to make mine. Martin may be all out of options, but I’m not. I can do it. I can run us out of this mess.

  I dig my thin screen out of my backpack and drop it onto the desk. Place it in hologram mode and call Dex. “Hey, Jack,” he answers. “What’s going on?”

  I don’t say anything, and he sees it almost immediately.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Dex, I need you to tell me everything I need to know about running the sneakernet.”

  Dexter stares at me with surprise. “Hermes?”

  I shake my head and hold up the card for him to see. “Arcadian.”

  Dexter’s surprise turns to disbelief. “How the hell…”

  “They tapped me in the tunnel this afternoon. And then just now I found out about this thing between Martin at the syndicate … I have no choice, Dex. I’m going for it.”

  Dexter sighs. I know he’s not jealous of me, but I also know what it’s like to watch someone else get the thing you want more than anything, even if that someone is your best friend. Dexter always thought he’d be the one running for Arcadian one day. We all thought that.

  “Are you absolutely sure you want to do this?” he asks.

  “Yes.”

  “I mean it, Jack. Tracing the sneakernet is nothing to play at. It’s all or nothing. You either get into it with everything you’ve got, or you don’t get into it at all. That goes double for Arcadian. All of their transports are high value.”

  I look down at the card. When security is the only option. Then back to Dex. “I know that,” I say. “I know that, and I’m in.”

  When Security is the Only Option

  5

  The beige sedan is so nondescript that I don’t even notice it until it pulls up alongside me. Bigsby is behind the wheel. I guess it’s implied that he’s there to pick me up. The front door is locked. I release the handle and wait for him to unlock it, but he flicks his thumb at the back seat instead. I get in.

  The beginning of the ride is strained. Bigsby doesn’t respond to the simplest of platitudes. Whether it’s by orders or by choice, his lips are sealed. Even when I ask him about the work. “So how long have you been running for Arcadian?”

  No answer.

  “You don’t have to go into details, I just want to know what to expect.”

  Hands two and ten on the wheel, eyes on the road.

  “Come on, Bigs. Don’t be like that. We’re on the same team here.”

  Bigs eyes me in the rearview mirror, his way of saying he doesn’t like that one bit. That’s when I let it go. I don’t know what his problem is, but it’s of no concern to me. We ride in silence for a few minutes until Bigsby turns on the Free City news stream. More discussion about the Blackburn scandal. More about the company’s finances. More about how broke they really are. And much more speculation about how badly this whole thing could compromise the security of the Alliance.

  Blah, blah, blah.

  The thing is, even if Blackburn has done business with the Caliphate, just what does the Alliance Senate think they’re going to do? Blackburn, Ltd. isn’t just the biggest standing army in the world, it’s our standing army. Blackburn is the Complex. Sure, there are other defense contractors out there, but none that could even come close to handling the full military needs of the North American Alliance. If Blackburn really is too big to fail, as they used to say back in the Old-50, then those other companies are all too small to succeed. So my guess is, after all is said and done, and the people responsible are given their slaps on the wrist, Blackburn won’t be going anywhere.

  But still they continue belaboring the discussion. Like any debate, it
goes on and on and nothing is said that hasn’t been said a thousand times before, so I pull out my thin screen and enjoy the ride into the Free City of Tri-Insula, or what used to be the old City of New York. That’s when it hits me, right as my thin screen flashes alive, whoever came up with that trigger code for Cyril’s business card had to be Morlock. I mean, to pipe across the aggrenet completely undetected like that, it had to be piping through the Morlock layer.

  That’s right, the Morlock layer, otherwise known as the undernet.

  That invisible layer of packet switching that lies beneath the aggrenet, the one most people have never heard of, and the few who have simply dismiss as urban legend, it’s real. It is very, very real. Martin is Morlock, officially. And though I’m technically still waiting for my work to be tagged, I consider myself Morlock as well. I can’t tell you how many of us there are. That’s kind of the point. We all use the same handle; not just for anonymity, it hides our numbers as well. For all anyone knows, there could be five or five thousand of us behind that tag. Only one person knows for sure—the only Morlock with a unique identifier is the leader, Moreau. But if you think that tracking a single individual would be much easier than tracking an entire collective, you’re wrong. If you know where and how to look, you can always find traces of Morlock, but over the years Moreau has proven to be completely untraceable. Believe me, I’ve tried. I’ve scoured the furthest regions of the undernet looking for him, only to come up empty every time. To say that Moreau is very good at covering his tracks is an understatement. Lots of people are very good at covering their tracks. I’m very good at covering my tracks. But there are those people in the world—you know the kind—who are so good at avoiding detection that they never leave tracks in the first place. Moreau is one of those people.

  Nevertheless, finding him has become a personal mission. I can’t even say why, really; I just want to be the one who does. It’s not him I’m after per se, it’s the challenge of finding him. And on that subject, I do have a theory. The way I figure it, his base of operations has to be somewhere out in the squatter settlements. That makes the most sense. With so many people creating so much transmission in such close proximity, you can’t pinpoint anything in all that noise. Not unless you were to sneakernet in and do it in person. But that would open up a whole other can of worms. Like any refugee camp, shantytown, or favela, the squatter settlements has its own laws, its own system of justice, and its own set of rules. The first rule being—if you’re not from the settlements then you are an outsider, and they hate outsiders.

  We take the bridge into the Free City.

  Now my nerves take over. Scanning the card was the easy part, but the closer we get to those massive buildings whose secrets I will shortly be tasked with carrying, the more it becomes real. As we pass over the river, I try to take my mind off it by staring out the window, but all I see is the famous Grumwell building towering more than a kilometer into the sky. The largest building in the world, it is a monolith of black marble and mirrored glass that gleams in the sun like a modern-day Great Pyramid. But what else would you expect from the biggest corporation in the world? So enormous is the Grumwell building that looking at it from the moving car seems to make the entire world go by in slow motion.

  But that slowness ends the moment we take the off-ramp. Bigsby tosses me around the back of the car as we make our way through the Free City traffic until he takes a sudden turn into an underground garage. That makes me wonder; why would a firm who goes to such great lengths to remain hidden just give up their location like that? I mean, I have no intention of revealing their location, but you’d think they would have taken some precaution. Put a blindfold on me at the very least.

  But everything makes more sense when Bigsby delivers me to the eighteenth floor suite that is little more than a gutted space. Scattered all around the room are silver cases lined with foam cutouts. Each shape corresponds to some piece of gear that has already been set up in the room. In the middle of the room sits a medical chair under a blast of sterile lights. Next to that is a rack of surgical equipment. But the most interesting thing of all is the link. These guys aren’t porting into the aggrenet through the building’s infrastructure; they have their own rifle antenna pointed out the window.

  The first person I see is the big bald guy who looks like a prison thug working the hardware. He has tattoos all up his neck and even on his scalp, but the tattoo I notice most is on his enormous forearm. That one depicts a large eagle with a snake dangling from its beak.

  I don’t even see Cyril approach from the side. “It’s good to have you on board, Jack.”

  “Thanks.”

  He checks his watch. “We’ve got a lot to get through today, so what do you say we—”

  “—get down to brass tacks?” I offer.

  Cyril smirks in that nearly imperceptible way of his. “Smart kid.”

  6

  The bald guy’s name is Snake, which I soon learn refers not to the slithering reptile but to a type of eagle that feeds on it. The Snake Eagle, as it is known, is exactly what is tattooed on his arm. Snake was once the best runner Arcadian had, until his age finally caught up with him and he developed chronic tendonitis in his knees. Now he’s their head technician. Apparently it helps for new runners to be ushered in by someone who’s actually been in their shoes. I can see why. Snake isn’t what you would call personable, in fact he’s not very friendly at all—surly if anything—but he is not unsympathetic. As hard as I try not to let my nervousness show, Snake can smell it all over me. He doesn’t say anything at first, not until Cyril steps aside for a moment to make sure all the paperwork is in order. Then he leans in close.

  “You’re a little scared,” he says.

  I nod.

  “You should be.”

  I—what? If this is supposed to be a pep talk then his technique could use some work.

  “Fear is a survival instinct. Maybe the best survival instinct we have. You will need it out there.” We lock eyes. Snake’s are dark and narrow, but I can see at once he’s trying to help. “I’ve seen over a hundred Aves come and go. Take my word for it, it’s always the cocky ones who are the first to get clipped. A little bit of fear is a good thing. Fear will make you hypervigilant, and hypervigilance will keep you alive. Just don’t let it take you over. Remember, a paralyzed runner is a dead runner.”

  Cyril returns holding a titanium box with a laser-etched serial number. A hiss of escaping air fills the room as he opens it and shows me the injection cartridge inside. He holds it closer for me to examine. Inside the cartridge is a small translucent blob with hanging tentacles suspended in a clear aqueous solution. It is about the size of a dime and looks exactly like a jellyfish.

  “This is the bioidentical cortex chip that will be implanted subcutaneously on the inside of your forearm. It is a proprietary biocircuit developed in our labs specifically for this purpose, and it is unlike any other in the world.” Cyril picks up a UV light and runs it over the box, making the chip inside glow an iridescent purple as it reveals the vast network of micro-optical fibers running through it. “Right now it’s inert, but once it enters your body, it will hardwire itself into your neural axons to form a synaptic link with your central nervous system.”

  Snake snaps on a pair of latex gloves and takes the chip from Cyril. He places it in the injector gun.

  “You are the power source, Jack. The chip draws it power electrochemically from your body. That means there are certain precautions that you will now have to take. We’ll go over those in a minute.”

  Snake aggressively rubs an alcohol swab over the meaty part of my forearm.

  “I won’t lie to you, Jack…” The hairs on my forearm stand straight up as the cold steel tip of the implant gun touches my skin. “This is going to hurt.”

  Before I even register Cyril’s warning, Snake braces my arm and fires the gun.

  “Ow!”

  Imagine the biggest wasp you’ve
ever seen. Now imagine five of them. Five stingers digging into you all at once, all on the same square inch of flesh. Like five serrated claws clamping down on a single patch of skin. The bite is so great it makes my arm twitch, which only makes the pain worse. This lasts for what feels like minutes but is probably no longer than ten seconds. It lasts until I can feel the lump. Just under my skin at first, but soon it sinks deeper. I feel what can only be the cortex chip’s tentacles piercing through the tendons beneath as the wasp stingers sink deeper into my arm.

  Until I feel the jolt—like an electric shock running down the entire length of my arm. Then my arm is on fire. Burning deep inside my skin like every pore has been filled with piping hot acid that is now dissolving its way through my flesh.

  I lurch ten inches out of the chair, but Snake shoves me back down and holds me there.

  “Something’s wrong!” I scream.

  “No, that’s normal,” says Snake. “Nerve pain is the worst kind there is.”

  It feels like my arm is blistering red bubbles of oozing flesh from my wrist to my elbow. Only it isn’t. The only physical mark on my arm is the small red ring at the injection site. The rest is all nerves.

  “You just have to wait it out.”

  I close my eyes and focus. Deal with it as best I can. It takes a mountain of effort just to endure it—more that I have to spare—but just as I reach my breaking point, it begins to dissipate. Slowly at first, then all at once, it goes as quickly as it came. I check my arm. Other than the injection mark, there’s no real damage, even if it does feel like it’s just been dipped into a 12-molar bath of hydrochloric acid.

  “There now, that wasn’t too bad, was it?” says Cyril.

  Snake flashes me a private look as he releases my arm. Right, like he would know.

  Cyril continues. “Every other firm out there is still implanting its runners with decades-old silicon chips. That’s why so many of them get dismembered. It’s simply easier to grab the entire limb and dig the chip out later.” Cyril runs the UV light over my arm until it finds the glowing purple spot just beneath the skin. Considering how deep the pain was, I’m surprised how close to the surface it is. Snake circles it with a surgical marker. “This chip is now part of your biology. Hacking off your arm will do no good. That will only destroy both chip and cargo.”