by Kai O'Connal
Leung stayed up writing programs for map searches on the first two nights. After a fitful nap on the second night, the idea came to him to tweak the algorithm a bit. Instead of searching for references to “Piri Reis” or “map,” he started looking for Atlantean keywords. He’s also added in a few scans of the Antarctic coastline.
Within the day, his AR woke him when the agent pinged back with something from a site in Argentina. Gaining access to the host in question was easy—maybe too easy. Could be bait to lure him in, then snatch him? The Grid Overwatch Division loved shit like that.
But this host felt different.
Physically, he was in Dome One, monitored by ops with their machines that kept an eye on his heart rate, brain waves, and location in the Matrix. Part of the deal was he and Eyetooth did all Matrix dives under observation. But Leung didn’t know if that was to protect the two hackers, or everyone else.
He followed the agent’s signal to the needle after stepping in, and realized he was in a replica city. His Matrix persona was a ninja, complete with black pajama costume and a katana that also acted as his connection to his deck for downloads. He didn’t look much like himself, more of a stereotype of what a ninja should look like. He still looked Asian, but it wasn’t his face.
After an hour on top of the needle with no movement below, not even another persona on the host, he slipped off the side, fell the entire way down, and landed on his feet. The agent appeared to his left and led him down a side street. He launched a defense program and moved carefully. But the host was like a ghost town. Seattle, but devoid of life.
Every now and then he walked past a spot in the road that looked a bit fuzzy or pixellated. A storefront would blur, as if the texture applied to it wasn’t loading, and Leung feared his commlink’s firmware might overload the host. Checking the agent map, he made another turn and faced a dead-end street. On the right was a liquor store with a wooden Indian outside. On the left was a toy store. Beside it was an electronic repair front, and across the street was a massage parlor.
He backed up to the toy store.
One of these things is not like the other.
One of these things … does not belong …
He checked the map again. The item was in the toy store. He couldn’t begin to guess why, but that’s where it was.
Drawing his sword, he approached the store and pushed the door open. It creaked appropriately as he stood in the entrance way, looking inside.
The interior was lit from the sun streaming through the dirty front windows. Dolls, trucks, trains, doll houses, whistles, hula-hoops—every variety and brand of toy he could remember from his childhood surrounded him on shelves lining the walls and in the large center isle. The entire shop was covered in a few centimeters worth of dust. A baby doll on the store’s counter looked as if it were wearing a grey dress, but when he brushed at the fabric, it turned pink.
Something caught his eye to the right, and he flicked the sword around and pointed it at a bin of teddy bears. They were all the same. Brown, maybe a hand span tall, with blue bow ties around their necks.
No—not all the same. One of them wasn’t as dusty, and didn’t have a—
Leung yelled out when the damn thing jumped up and ran behind the counter.
Damn it.
DAMN IT!
“Eyetooth! Get out here, now!”
The technomancer’s persona, a little Asian girl in a pink dress and bare feet, stepped out from behind the counter, holding the squirming bear by its arm. “I’m sorry, Leung. I tol’ him not to tease you.”
The frustrated hacker re-sheathed his katana and moved toward the store’s door. “Him? It’s a piece of code, not a him.”
“You don’t know nothin’ ’bout sprites, Leung. So don’t go judgin’.”
“Get out. I don’t want you around.”
“We’re supposed to work together, hun.”
“Really?” He turned and watched her come toward him. “Is that what you did that first day? You found those entries about the Atlanteans, so you took off out of that node and left me behind. What if something had happened? What if that place had IC?”
Eyetooth stopped in the middle of the isle and rolled her eyes. “I’ve been divin’ all over the Matrix for years, pretty boy. Never seen an IC I couldn’t beat.”
“Then you’ve never seen IC.” He turned toward the door.
She smiled and spread her hands out, her sprite still clutched in the right one. “Awright, sugah. Awright, Awright. That was rude of me, and I am sorry. But you can’t tell me—” She glanced to her right, where the side of the store blurred and flickered. She backed away from it. “—you can’t tell me you wouldn’t have done the exact same thing?”
He noticed her reaction to the software failure, but ignored it. “I would not have left you behind.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Now who’s slingin’ some bull? You deckers don’t care nothin’ ’bout us.” She looked at the blurred area again, and walked to the far side of the store. Her teddy bear wriggled out of her hand and climbed up to sit on her shoulder.
“I’ve got nothing against technomancers,” Leung replied. “I’ve met some good ones. But what I’ve seen with my own eyes that pertains to you is that you can’t be trusted. I haven’t followed you, or put a tracer on you—”
“I didn’t do that to you!”
“Then how the hell did you find me here?” He put his hands on his hips.
She cocked her head, as if the answer should have been obvious. “Ops told me where you were.”
A cold, thin icy line moved down Leung’s spine. “They can trace me in the Matrix?” He’d worked most of the night to make sure no one could track where he was going. And now she was telling him they could do it anyway?
She looked away. “Well, no. They knew where you were up to a point.”
He glared at her.
Eyetooth huffed. “Fine. Yeah. I put a tracer on you.”
“Get. The fuck. Away. From me.” He started to the door again, but before he reached out to turn the handle, the texture blurred and pixelized. He’d seen this sort of thing over the years, but not so much in one place before.
“Don’t touch that!” Eyetooth shot over to him and grabbed his elbow. Her persona might have been small, but its Matrix ability was strong. She nearly yanked him off his feet and knocked over a shelf in her scramble to pull him away from the door.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Leung pulled his arm back, then stopped when he saw her face. She really was scared. He looked back at the door. “It’s just a glitch. This is an old host—”
“That’s not what that is.” She pointed to the door. “That’s dissonance—messed up resonance. It’ll fry you where your meat body stands.”
“Okay. Thanks. You saved me. Now you can log out and leave me alone.”
Eyetooth shook her head. “No. This host is all wrong. It’s bad. Really bad. You need to come with me.”
“Right. You leave me alone day before yesterday, but now you’re worried?”
“That host didn’t have shit growing in it. Come on. Come with me.”
He pulled back. “I can’t.”
“What’s keeping you—” her eyes widened. “You found something.”
Of all the … He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “Yeah, I found something. Now go.”
“Nope, I’m here now, so we’re going together. Unless you want to put in the effort to try and knock me off.”
Leung rolled his meat eyes while keeping his persona expressionless. “Fine. Try not to break anything.”
He glanced at the icon of the agent he’d sent to track the payload. It remained still. The object of his quest was less than ten meters away. He looked past it to a dusty counter and beyond to the low-res door Eyetooth had stepped out of. “What was back there?”
“Nothing much. Just another office—and a lot of wooden benches.”
“Did you log into the host there?”
&n
bsp; “Oh no, sugah. I came in the same way you did, and followed your trail.”
Ignoring her as best he could—because he was pretty sure she wasn’t going anywhere—he moved to the door and leaned his back against the frame as he pushed the door inward.
“I told you there was nothing in there.”
Leung’s gaze moved through the area. The intel still burned hot as a pulsing beacon in the next room, but every hair on his persona stood on end. “Eye—do you have anything you can use to deep scan this room?”
“Well yeah. But I don’t need one to tell you something’s wrong here. Why don’t you just show me where this thing is, and we’ll get it and get the hell out of here.” She glanced twice at the fuzzy door before looking back up at Leung.
His hackles were up and singing as well, so he was inclined to agree with the technomancer. He slapped on a program that let him lay the host’s original structure over what he was seeing. It didn’t fit. In fact, if he pulled the grid back and looked at the full picture— damn. He told Eyetooth to do the same thing.
She made a surprised noise. “What the hell is that?”
“I’m guessing that’s the room’s original sculpt. Someone’s changed it. I don’t know who, and I do not care.” He drew his sword slowly as he took a few hesitant steps into the room.
Eyetooth was right that it looked like a workroom. A toy-making room, to be precise. Two wooden tables jutted out from the wall on the right. Hammers, vintage sewing machines, nails, pieces of wood, dried paint cans and faded measuring tape littered the tables. The back of the room had a door with broken glass. A desk covered in books and boxes sat to the left, and in back of the desk was another door.
Checking the position of the item he was looking for, he pinpointed it in an old safe next to that back door, under one of the tables.
“You see it?”
“Yeah. Can you scan the safe?”
She narrowed her eyes at it. “No. I can’t see inside, if that’s what you mean.”
“Well…I was hoping…”
She gave him an exasperated sigh. “I can’t see through stuff like that. I’m not Super Girl.”
He smirked. “Now you admit it. When no one else can hear.” With his sword in front of him, Leung knelt in front of the safe and stared at it, observing its structure.
Eyetooth interrupted his concentration. “I can open it—”
“Just back off. I’ve been doing this a long—”
But she was already reaching out and moving the dial to the right, then the left, and then the right.
“Damn it, I said—”
A click echoed in the room and the door opened. “See?”
Unfortunately, Leung couldn’t see anything as a large doll with big, razor-sharp teeth leaped out of the safe and into his face. He yelled as he fell backward, his katana dropping to the floor. The room was bathed in flashing red light. The host was on alert—and they were being attacked by killer dolls.
“I got it!”
Leung had his hands on the thing’s chest, but it was tearing at him with bear-like claws and trying its damnedest to bite his face off with its wide shark-like mouth. He leaned into it, focusing with everything he had, and was able to pull the thing apart. Stuffing flew everywhere as he threw the body in two different directions.
But he was pretty damn sure it wasn’t over.
Leung pushed himself back up, grabbed his katana and took another look in the safe.
It was empty.
“I got it!”
Leung spun and stood to see Eyetooth by the door leading into the storefront. She held a small jewelry box up for him to see. “This was inside!”
The thing glowed red, and a small block of text in front of him pointed to it being the tracer’s target. He didn’t know just what was stored in that icon, but he damn sure was going to find out.
Two seconds after she held it up, Leung saw the host’s next attack run up behind her. At first, it looked like the biggest, ugliest bear he’d ever seen. A monster standing close to two meters tall, spraying dust everywhere. In the next half-second, he realized it wasn’t a single bear—but the mass conglomerate of every bear in the store. And it was using the glass from the broken front window as teeth. And it was about to bite Eyetooth’s head off.
“Move!” he shouted as he ran at the giant bear, jumping off the closest workbench.
Eyetooth turned, yelled, and did exactly what he told her to.
The bear monster roared.
Leung roared back as he whipped the katana from the right to left, slashing the blade across the thing’s neck. He landed in front of it and took a good hit to his chest seconds before the head came off. It rolled behind the bear as Leung flew back into the bench he’d jumped off. Ow…
“Come on!” Eyetooth was at his side, her own little bear taking the jewelry box from her. Martin and she exchanged looks before the sprite disappeared, taking the box with it. “We’ve got to get out of here. Martin says there’s more on the way!”
The bear’s swat had knocked the wind out of him, but the threat of more IC pulled him to his feet. He followed her out the back. A glance behind him as he stumbled and gasped for air revealed the damn thing was re-assembling as the bears jumped on top of one another to form another head.
Leung lost sight of it all as he jacked out.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Elijah watched and worried as Leung’s and Eyetooth’s heart rates increased. The two docs in charge of overseeing the dive assured him that they were fine with a glance.
“Sir—” one of the ops techs called to Sgt. Danvers. “We got a package.”
Mr. Lucas, standing beside the sergeant, strode to the tech immediately and gestured for him to show this package.
A minute later Eyetooth sat straight up. She scrambled off her couch and immediately ran to Leung’s. His body jumped once, and she put a hand on his chest. “Get out … get out now!”
“What the hell’s happening?” Elijah said with a frayed edge to his voice. He didn’t want to lose Leung any more than he ever wanted to consider life without Kyrie.
Eyetooth ignored him just as Leung’s eyes flew open and he gasped for breath. His arms flailed wildly as he tried to grab for something, and the doc and an assistant pushed him back down on the couch. The doc placed an oxygen mask on his face while the assistant readied an IV.
“He’s got a collapsed lung,” the doc said when Elijah stepped forward. “Everything else looks fine. Just let us work on him.”
Pineapple ran in, followed by Tango and Cake. They stopped just outside the couch area, all staring at Leung and then Eyetooth.
“What’s going on?” Pineapple asked. The others crowded around as Tango headed over to answer Lucas’ summons.
Elijah watched her, and felt torn between hearing Eyetooth’s story and learning what Lucas was looking at.
The technomancer put a hand on his arm. “Go take a look. Martin delivered what Leung found.”
“Martin?”
“Her sprite.” Cake said, hands on her hips, weapons fully visible.
“What happened to Leung?” he asked.
“He saved me. I—I wasn’t payin’ attention. I didn’t think the host was that dangerous—I mean, it had dissonance all over it, and looked abandoned—”
“Take a deep breath.” Pineapple gestured for her to breathe. “So, you two were attacked?”
“Yeah … one of ’em came at him right outta the safe. The other one snuck up behind me …” She put her hands to her face. “He coulda been killed ’cause of me.”
Elijah put a hand on her shoulder. “He’s fine. The doc said he’ll be all right. I know he looks like a playboy most of the time, but he’s tougher than that. Maybe you need to get some rest?”
“I’ll take her back to her room.” Cake stepped in and placed an arm around Eyetooth’s shoulders. The tall street samurai glanced back at him and nodded. “Thank you.”
Pineapple scratched his chin
. “Leung okay?”
As Cake and Eyetooth exited the Dome, Kyrie ran in. She paused at the entrance, looked at Tango with Lucas, then the docs hovering around Leung, and bee-lined for Elijah. “What’s going on?”
The mage looked from Pineapple to Kyrie. “How’d you know to come here? Who told you something had happened?”
“I got a message on my AR. I was monitoring the channels. There was a general call for medical personnel.” she replied.
“I was just following Tango. She got a similar message.” Pineapple shrugged. “Leung’s okay?”
“Yes. But I’d like his account of what happened. Eyetooth’s too upset.” He excused himself and walked fast to where Tango and Danvers were talking.
“Professor,” the Aztechnology liaison smiled. “Sorry about your man—”
“He’s all right.” Elijah turned to Tango. “What did they find?”
“Coordinates with a few hand-drawn maps and more references to the Piri Reis map.” Tango smiled. Excitement lit her face. “Danvers is decrypting the other documents, but it looks like they found a nice payload. I’m not surprised they hit serious security.”
“Yes, but where was this thing?”
Danvers shook his head from where he stood by a holo-vid. “The host they were on went offline, and hasn’t booted back up yet. And there’s always the possibility it won’t. Sometimes security will just take everything offline if it believes it’s been compromised. We’ll have to get the full story from them. I’ll call you the second we have everything ready.” He nodded to each of them and left with Mr. Lucas.
Elijah looked back at Leung. He was still on the couch, the mask covering half his face, and his shirt was open with wires attached to his chest. What could have gone wrong? Leung was usually too careful to run into this kind of danger. Unless Eyetooth had been a distraction. From what little she’d said, that might have been the case. And if it was, he was going to request that if Leung was up to diving again, he do it alone.
“That’s a very serious look.”
He jerked his head back to Tango. He forgot she was there. “Sorry. Worried about Leung.”
