Shadow of a Dead Star (The Wonderland Cycle)
Page 30
Bobbi closed her eyes and took a deep breath, counting backwards. She only needed ten seconds or so before she fell into the trance necessary to access the network; most people of her experience did. Some went as short of six, maybe seven, but those were people were screened and militarized anyway. With each backward count she felt herself slip out of the real and into an abyss that was like warm bathwater – millimeter by millimeter her consciousness turned inward, and then suddenly she was no longer constrained by the curvaceous meat that housed her in the living world. She fell from the sleep of the walking world into that of the network, and she joined the ranks of the Awake.
Her thoughts were liquid as they poured out of her skull and into the narrow band of the cable. There was no hallucinatory realm here, no virtual reality – it was knowledge, plain and simple. Cold facts. She knew the storage capacity of her skull terminal to twenty-six decimal places, knew how much memory each internal program took up as they ran in the background. There was no need for displays or graphical hallucinations; being Awake meant you were intimately aware not only of the status of your own system, but of the system surrounding you out to a radius that corresponded to the caliber of your hardware. Your body still was still reachable, of course, and at times the flesh did strange tricks when attempting to resolve stimuli; the ranks of the Awake often used drugs like phenocyclanol, also known as Cycle, to dampen that effect. Bobbi had always reckoned that this was what the Astral Plane was supposed to have been like, a plane of pure knowledge – and sitting there with eyes closed, the Lyricom collar cradling the base of her neck, she certainly looked to the observer as if she might have been reaching out with some invisible third eye into eternity.
Deep in trance of Awakening, Bobbi willed herself connected to the ghost-box. There was a moment’s lag as she negotiated her firewall and the started up its decontamination protocols, another as she executed the connection protocols. She dove into the machine, communed with its system software, and started up the diagnostic cycle. Three minutes, thirty point three two seven seconds passed before she became aware of the problem: the ghost-box had been host to a file, a rather big one. This wasn’t at all unusual, of course, but what was interesting to her was that it appeared to have a latent shell of viral code attached to it, bleeding irrational code into the system – not harmful in and of itself, but tying up the box’s memory was keeping the thing from further operation. A prank, perhaps, or something that managed to execute before it was supposed to? This sort of thing always happened with shit programmers, of which there were far too many trying to pass themselves off as pros.
Amused, Bobbi ran the firewall’s analytical software, and failing to get an ID on the virus’s profile, ran the much more advanced analytical package in her skullcomp as well. Still she found she couldn’t quite get a purchase on it; custom programming then, nothing the firewall could recognize. Abandoning these shortcuts, she stripped out a sample and picked over it herself. Alphanumerics flashed through the screen of her Awakened mind, understanding aided by the system in her head. The fabric of the code was simple enough, but then she spotted something that stopped her cold.
There, floating in her sensorium, a simple line of programming commentary flared like a blazing message from God Himself.
!–-// HELLO THERE, BRAIN MOTHER. BE SO KIND AS TO CONTACT ME AT… –-!
A network address followed. Brain Mother, her own chosen pseudonym. Her hack handle. A message meant for her. Bobbi flew through the rest of the code sample, which only confirmed what she now surmised – that the virus wasn’t a virus at all, merely a very effective method of getting her attention. She grabbed at the file, assuming now that it was meant for her as well, and what she saw there shook her out of her trance with a wall of fear and incomprehension.
It was the archive. Stadil’s archive.
Bobbi closed her eyes and drew a deep breath. “Shit,” she muttered. This wasn’t the way she wanted to start her morning at all.
She stared at the box for a minute or so, then dumped the file into a datacell from her bag before pulling the plug from the socket behind her ear. Bobbi switched off the ghost-box and got up slowly, backing away from the now unpowered unit as if it might lunge for her throat. She made the circuit back toward the bar in careful silence, keeping her expression casual, or so she hoped. Scalli peered at her as she walked past him into the back room but said nothing.
By the time she stepped through the door, the flash of panic that she so carefully hid for the trip across the club floor now threatened to rise up and drown her. Her chest tightened as she leaned against a cooler cabinet, her eyes staring blankly at the concrete floor. How in the hell had she been discovered? Had the Bureau spotted her when they were tracking Walken with satellites? Did somebody turn her in? Chin? Pierre, that damned spider of a Frenchman?
Her hands slick with sweat, Bobbi stepped past into the elevator. She should leave this. She shouldn’t bother with it. She should sell the Temple, pack up and leave town with the rest of Stadil’s money. Fuck this. Fuck all of it. That would be the single smartest thing to do, she thought as she stabbed the single button on the elevator panel.
And yet …
Even as the elevator rose, the old familiar curiosity rose with it. Wasn’t this what Bobbi had been waiting for after two years? Just like she had tagged Walken in his hour of need, was this not some other strange messenger carrying a tantalizing clue for her to work on? The puzzle, again, looming out in front of her. Inviting her. Bobbi heaved a deep sigh, cursing herself as she resigned herself to what she already knew was going to take place. Of course she was going to contact whoever this person was. Of course she was going to reopen what should for all rational sense be better off left alone.
She would do it because she had to, even as she had to Stadil’s job in the first place. Because she liked puzzles. She needed them. Otherwise, what was life worth in the first place?
“I am gonna get myself killed,” she murmured to herself as she stared at the elevator’s illuminated ceiling. “I just know it.”
When the elevator opened again and she walked out into her office, Bobbi had already planned out a strategy for herself. By the time she’d sat down, she knew how to execute it. Ten minutes later she had not only hit up six different hack boards and come up with access codes to a battery of global telecomm nodes, but she had already plotted a skipback chain and was making one to connect. Despite the tension that flooded her, despite the pressure of the immediate need to know, Bobbi’s cowgirl cool allowed her to perform. She counted backward without difficulty and was Awake once more, sublimating into the network.
The node was an old one, laggy. Maybe even a private machine rigged into a node. Bobbi felt her commands follow her thoughts by a delay of milliseconds. She didn’t like that; if Bobbi ran into trouble here, she’d be at a disadvantage in throwing up defenses. She was using her portable terminal, whose defenses were much better than the firewall collar she’d worn – but even so, all the expensive barrier programs in the world weren’t going to help her if she wasn’t able to call them in time.
There was nothing in the system that she could determine, just the operating system and a single program running. Protected system, she saw now; the lag came from walls of intrusion barriers that she only now could see from the inside. Very stupid, Bobbi girl, she thought to herself as she brought her usual defenses online. Concurrent interlocking layers of programming snapped into being around her, rendering her into a tower of iron. Though it made her very obvious to whomever was watching the terminal, it would be foolish to enter a system naked when someone was likely waiting for her – and then, as if summoned by the appearance of these defenses, a new visitor arrived.
A few seconds’ pause from Mysteron kindled new tension in her, but soon the reply came.
It was Bobbi’s turn to pause. Whoever this was, there was no telling what they knew or at least thought they knew about her. she replied.
Another long pause from Mysteron. In the world of meat, Bobbi’s palms had begun to sweat as she constantly monitored the other presence for signs of an attack or other activity. came the reply after a while.
The words shot through Bobbi’s spine like a rod of iron. She sat up hard, tearing the plug from her skull-socket as her expression flattened into a mask of lead. “Via Fontanella,” she repeated to herself. Her mental threatboard shuddered in alarm. “I don’t know that place.” She raked her fingers through holographic panels, running searches. The Via Fontanella was an Italian place in the New City, over a hundred years old now. Fine dining. She had a couple of appropriate outfits she could wear – but on the other hand, did she really want to wear one of the clinging numbers in her closet when she was about to meet some mysterious personage who could potentially be planning to shoot her in the face?
“Fuck it,” she said out loud to herself. “I’ll have to improvise.”
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To rise above street duty in Civil Protection, you had to be an economist as much as a cop. You had to know the value of the market, and understand its dynamics as clearly as you did the workings of the criminal mind. It wasn’t enough to do the job – you had to do the job with the company in mind. Civil Protection was a corporation, after all. Profit margins were holy.
Daniel Gray sat in the driver’s seat of his duty car, a massive whale of a ’74 Daimler-Mercedes Vectra, watching the stock ticker that ran underneath his car’s information console. It had been a good quarter for the company; the Tricentennial had kicked off a month or so ago, and an inexplicable current of madness had surfaced in its wake. There were anti-corporate protests going on downtown, an uptake in violent crime, in theft – all very much manageable between the street officers and the riot brigades, and lots of billable hours. He imagined that Matic over in Pacification Services must be stuffing his portfolio with reward shares, the old bastard.
Yes, it was a good old time for everyone, except here in Homicide. A hundred years ago the art of finding killers was the crown jewel for detectives wanting to make their name in any police organization. Here in the age of privatized police, however, Homicide was very often something of a proverbial dead end. After all, the kinds of people who normally got killed off were Blanks, folks who didn’t have police coverage at all, or everyday citizens who were covered under the standard civilian safety contract brokered between the Company and the city government. Even if a victim had a personal contract, it meant you were looking at a loss of profit. For Civil Protection, Homicide was mostly a janitorial department and Gray didn’t like pushing a fucking broom.
The Vectra was parked out front of a Lucky Swan convenience store in the wilds of Service Sector 227, the east half of White Center. It was a little after ten at night, and he was letting the final hours elapse from what had proven a very boring and uncomplicated day. Two shootings, obviously gang-related, had taken place over toward the industrial fields near Alki Point. One suicide by cop in Belltown. Very cut and dried, which was good for paperwork, but nothing to make Homicide Solutions stand out. More janitorial service.
Gray tore his eyes from the ticker and fixed them on the store’s facade, plastered with the over-saturated glare of holographic advertisements over plain paper handbills. Lucky Swan’s cartoon mascot stared at him from every angle, its ridiculous beak open and its eyes lolling about. OH GOD I AM SO HAPPY TO BE BUYING TOILET PAPER, it seemed to say, awash in a paroxysm of shit-paper glee. It was absolutely ridiculous. Then again, Civil Protection had much slicker marketing, which was why he was in police services and not agog over the low low prices of a six-pack of Fontainelle Cloud-Soft.
Beyond the lurid cartoon legion, however, a large man in a black overcoat stood chatting with a pretty girl behind the counter. Tall and lean, her hair was dyed alternating streaks of red, white and blue – patriotism was in fashion this year, the country being three hundred years old and all. The Spirit of ‘76 was extremely marketable. The girl was secondary, of course – the man was who he had his eye on. The vast fellow was Brutus Carter, a veteran of Homicide Solutions who’d served with the Seattle PD before it was dissolved in favor of CivPro. Lots of SPD vets were employees now, though they sometimes found themselves running under the heels of people with much less experience but with company seniority.
Carter had been such a man. A thirty-year veteran of the Department, he had been employed by the company as a Tier II, a junior Detective. He’d jumped the ranks pretty quickly and was already a Tier IV, and had been Gray’s mentor when Gray himself reached Tier II. Now Gray was Tier III, and the two often worked together. As he watched the big man’s broad back heave with laughter, he couldn’t help but feel a pang of envy stick in his chest – Carter had a stock package, company car, and retirement options. He also had an Amber Shield, the holographic stamp set in the middle of his company ID that CivPro cops used as a badge. Unlike Gray’s own Blue Shield, which merely spoke of competence, the Amber spoke of success as well as the recognition that came with it. Carter might have been an older man but that didn’t keep the girl from flirting with him as she keyed his purchases through the store’s system. It didn’t keep her from sliding a piece of paper with what was almost certainly her number on it into Carter’s grocery bag as he produced his cashcard from his wallet, either. It was true; Carter had worked to earn every dollar he made, and he deserved the prestige with which he was showered. It didn’t keep that flame of envy from kindling in Gray’s heart.
Blue Badge, shit. Gray longed for a sexy case to come along, something that the Feds weren’t going to be all over. Then he’d have a chance to make Amber for sure; a nice, media-friendly murder, something that didn’t involve Wonderland bullshit. That was what he wished for when he went to bed every night, what he was dreaming of every time he rose in the morning and stepped into his synthetic leather shoes. Something that he could use to distinguish himself.
Presently Carter disengaged himself from the flag-haired girl and emerged from the convenience store. The Swan Legion stared after him in gaping adoration as he walked to the car, one bag under his arm. Gray briefly pondered leaving Carter out there to get soaked in the starting drizzle, but he leaned over to open the passenger side door and it swung upward to admit him.
Carter packed himself into the passenger side, tucking the bag between his knees. He was, of course, much older than Gray, being in his late fifties where Gray had only just crested thirty. Women found him handsome anyway, with his rough good looks only enriched by the seams of age and his black and curly hair peppered only slightly with silver. By contrast, Gray’s lean paleness gave him a predatory look, and his blond hair was cropped close. Only his eyes, clear and blue like wet turquoise, gave him any up on his mentor. “Nice girl,” said Carter, grinning faintly as he rummaged through his bag.
“Was she?” Gray reached for the ignition, thumbing the button against the steering column and bringing the hydrogen engine online. He forced his tenor voice into
a bland tone, feigning neutrality.
“Oh yes,” said Carter with a chuckle, producing the slip of paper which he eyed briefly before tucking it into his coat. “Very nice. You wanted Vee-Plus, right?” He handed Gray a tall can emblazoned with a field of neon blue speed lines. Velocity Plus was a high-performance energy formula; it looked (and tasted) like watered-down cat piss but kept you awake for hours.
Gray took the can without a word and smacked the bottom hard against the steering wheel. Chemicals began mixing in a compartment in the can’s base; he felt the energy drink chill almost instantly in his hand, triggering a pleasant rush of sensation. He pulled the tab and drank deeply.
Carter rummaged around in the bag a bit more, selecting a red can of Coke Century which he similarly smacked into wakefulness, then shoved the bag onto the floor of the car. “Stock price is up,” he noted, filling the silence between them.
“Yeah.” Gray put his can into the cup holder on his side of the console. “But our division’s arrest quota is running short again, so that’s fucking up our percentages. There was a memo about it yesterday.”
“I don’t usually read them,” Carter replied, which irritated Gray to no end. This guy, Gray thought darkly. A Tier IV, and he doesn’t read corporate memorandums but maybe once or twice a month.
“I don’t understand why you don’t,” said Gray, who minimized the ticker feed to a narrow ribbon running along the bottom of the car’s display. The Civil Protection Nexus – the corporation’s all-encompassing dispatch system – now filled the rest of it. Gray liked to keep CPN running as they drove so he could monitor the progress of the other Homicide teams. He was always watching for opportunity.
At this Carter let out a bark of a laugh. “Because I’ve got you for that, Dan,” he replied. “You’re so ready to sniff out a promotion that you’re practically glued to the CPN. You don’t think I know you put on that ticker when you’re parked? Shit. I’m surprised you haven’t tried to sell me out for a better share.”