Escapology

by Ren Warom

  In the end, Min-seo was left to deal with the problem alone. That’s where luck, that arbitrary twister of chance, came in. Blessed with ability above the top 0.5% in Tech, little Min-seo was hired at nine by Fulcrum’s Outreach Programme, a sure-fire highway, barring any Psych-Fail issues, into Corp work. Such an achievement would have earned the forgiveness of her family if she hadn’t spent her wages on a gender reassignment.

  Thing is, you learn a lot in the city; you learn that drugs can hide the worst hurts and exchanging wrong parts for right is only a matter of flim or cred. So that’s what little Min-seo did. At a mere twelve years of age, after two years of secret hormone treatment, and earlier than most surgeons would allow, Min-seo became the boy he always knew he was, re-christening himself Shock in an ironic nod to the reaction of the entire community at Hanju’s Songpa blockstreet.

  Ha-eun refused to speak to her daughter-son ever again. Shock didn’t care; like father, like mother. It made no difference, just removed an aggravating frequency of motherly white noise corrupting his head. Having the right parts, being able to bear living inside himself, was more important. Even suffering to live in Korea-town after the change was a walk in the goddamn park by comparison to the alternative, but that didn’t stop him saving to get out.

  Paid less than a tenth of the salary full-time adult employees could boast, and flat broke after the surgery, it took him another three years to escape the maze. He relocated to Sendai District, amongst the trees and towers, when he was fifteen and five months. He ended up there by sheer chance, a Slip search, but it was revelatory. Not only in the obvious ways: a room to himself, no postmaster, no beatings, no incense-triggered bad memories or accusatory silences. It was the sense of finally being at peace.

  Sendai is where Shock discovered happiness, and even though he could only afford to be there two years in total, they were the best of his life. At seventeen, too old for the programme any more, he was transferred from Outreach plus PT Tech to FT Tech. His savings kept him in Sendai for six months, but then he was forced into student digs.

  He’s been trying to get back to Sendai ever since.

  Being back in Korea-town, too close for comfort to Songpa, not only unleashes feral pain locked deep inside his bones, it makes him feel a failure. And he is, in more ways than one. Sighing, Shock speeds up. He’s a long walk from his destination and doesn’t have flim to spare for a bus.

  “Why in fuck did I have to go to that party? I fucking hate parties,” he mutters, huddling further into his jacket and pulling the tangled wreckage of his hair over his eyes, too recognizable by half. He often wanted to ask Ha-eun what the hell he’s doing with bright-blue eyes despite his oh-so-K parentage, but she’d have cried, and he’s never been able to stomach his mother’s tears.

  Naebu blockstreet is where the good Slip shops can be found, deep within the maze of housing. It’s a little cold outside, enough for Shock to be shivering after such a long walk, and he’s almost relieved to be able to step into the muggy confines of the block. Almost.

  Two seconds after pushing in through the crooked blue entrance, the shrieking objection of rusty hinges barely discernible over the varied noise of living within, and he’s suffocating, wishing he had enough flim to walk right back out, take the mono back to Henzu District and one of his usual shops. Walking into Naebu’s complicated labyrinth of corridors, staircases and home warrens is a lucid nightmare.

  He expects to see his mother gazing at him from one of these slender staircases, ripe with all her simmering recrimination, never spoken but always present. It tainted the air around her, a miasma of bitterness like sweat, souring as it dried on her skin. He shudders and hurries forward into the maze.

  Clueless as to where the Slip shops might be, he solicits the help of the first elder he encounters. An old man, too old to gauge, narrow eyes sunken into layers of deeply wrinkled fat, sat outside his door on a chair whose red plastic protests the weight of wide buttocks. Shock asks directions in Korean, the old Uncle responds in Engrish.

  “Third floor, punk. Take blue stair, go right, first left, follow arrows. Whole row of Slip shops there.”

  “Many thanks, old uncle.” Shock bows, on his manners, not wanting to invite undue attention.

  The old uncle sticks out a trembling hand.

  “Two flim for information.”

  “Everyone’s on the make,” Shock mutters as he races up the blue stairs, already missing those two flim he really can’t afford. Fuck Mim, fuck Joon and fuck his idiotic goddamn self.

  Shock finds the arrows as promised. Gaudy neon, they point to a row of Slip shops lit so bright he has to fumble out his shades to look at them. He chooses the shop whose name amuses him most: Na-ho’s Slip-porium.

  “Help you?” Comes from a skinny little Gothster at the desk, chewing on a strand of green liquorice and maintaining the most outrageously complete air of disinterested cool.

  “Need a cell.”

  “Huh, obv. How long?”

  “Five standards.”

  “That’ll be eighteen eff.” Dangerously cool Gothster holds out a slim hand, fingers jointed in steel, the mesh under the skin of his palm clear in the strip lighting of the shop. Slip-gamer. Not a Master, his gear is nothing special, but Shock’s less interested in that than what Gothster just said. He’s not sure his ears are quite working.

  “Eighteen? You’re shitting me, right?”

  Cool Gothster stares.

  “Where you been, down a hole or something? Fulcrum upped the price again the other week.”

  “Ah.”

  The other week Shock was still in a sling with tubes in every orifice. Might explain why this is news to him, and why his flim packet was so much slimmer than he’d thought. Fuck Fulcrum. Always and forever. Kamilla Lakatos created Fulcrum after the world broke, amidst the chaos of a vast population split between hubs, land ships and this last miserable piece of dry land.

  With the old Internet gone, its servers drowned, its satellite connections lost, she saw an opportunity to make something new. What she came up with was the Slip, immersive and inclusive, an ocean of information with avatars to swim through it. Seems good right? Wrong. Within two decades, Fulcrum’s control of Slip gave it a monopoly, handing Kamilla control of Foon Gung and she made this hell hole everything it is.

  Five months ago she corpsed at the grand old age of 235, allowing her son Josef to finally inherit after about a hundred years of waiting around. It was his bright idea to monetize the Slip, crippling everyone who needs to hustle money from Slipping: Games Masters, Pirateers, Patient Zeros, Archaeologists, Imps, Code Jockeys—and Haunts.

  He keeps raising premiums like this, he’s going to price Fails right out of the market, which to be fair is probably his ultimate aim. His mother created Fails, now he’s going to destroy them.

  Suppressing a groan, Shock peels off two tens, almost all the ready flim he’s got left. He better find what he’s looking for first time, or he’ll be digging in trashcans for his supper. Gothster assigns him cell #26. It’s grubby and stinks of BO but the link-up is clean, the hardware near enough brand new. Whatever happens in the next five standards it won’t be his lobes frying up, and for that Shock is immeasurably grateful.

  Settling in as comfy as he can on thin, cheap-looking mem-foam long since gone senile and locking himself in, he raises the jack to his nape and sighs as the nano-wires snake inside. There’s the usual bright spark of pain followed by a low vibration in the brainpan, so good it’s almost sexual. Fuck it, it is sex. Brain sex.

  He falls into unconsciousness with a smile on his face as the wires throw his signal at breakneck speed, plunging his consciousness into a warm avi-pod, the virtual twin of cell #26, filled with what feels like warm, heavy, slightly glutinous water. Odd to think there’s no water, yet he feels it anyway. Body and mind are totally fooled in here, makes him wonder sometimes how dangerous that could be.

  Liquid pins and needles flood his senses next, unbearable. It bu
ilds to a crescendo he always imagines his unconscious self gritting teeth against and begins to spin his information into golden form. Eight fluid limbs uncoil into the virtual waters, just as he knew they would. He has to be Octopus today; it’s an Octopus sort of job. As ever, Puss welcomes him in with a swirl of movement that definitely is not his doing. Weird.

  Puss is no more than a skin, an elaborate wetsuit he wears in order to work down here. Sometimes though, he swears it has a mind of its own, that it communicates with him; leading him out of danger, down swifter paths, and warning him of trouble he’d have no way of sensing. Probably it’s just some connection matrix it has with Slip, acting as a sort of precog, but it doesn’t feel that way, and it taps into his smarts in ways he never does IRL. Allows him full use of a brain fried by too many bumps and the forgetfulness of trauma.

  Out of literally billions of people who access the Slip, Shock is one of a tiny percentage who can boast dual avatars. That percentage consists of the stinking rich and the rich in Tech-talent. He is, naturally, the latter. You’d think the latter would be numerous with all the Techs dropped from the Cads after Pysch-Fails, but not so. Avi-creation is dangerous and complex, requiring more than mere Tech knowledge. Octopus is from when he was Min-seo, obtained when her hard drive, thus her connection to the Slip, was installed.

  Everyone gets a hard drive and therefore an avi as a toddler, free of charge from Fulcrum. His other avi he designed for the stuff he had to do for his less than salubrious contractors. It’s a shark—a Great White. A vicious, predatory son of a bitch. He’s not fond of it: it’s a tool, a means to an end, and that pre-cog he feels with Puss is missing, as is the ability to access his whole brain. Maybe it’s because he built it after all the damage, or maybe it’s because he’s not as hotshot with avis as he is with everything else. Either way, he sees Shark as imperfect work and it frustrates him.

  Shock stretches each tentacle, testing reaction times and data-access speeds. Perfect. Could it be this Slip shop hides some seriously state-of-the-art servers behind its cheesy neon glow? Shock pulses his tentacles and exits the avi-pod into the seething waters of the Slip. Noisy and balls-out insane as the Risi party district, the ocean of the Slip is fathomless as the horizon and filled with golden avis; great whales, eels, little swarms of fish, sea lions, dugongs… If you can name a fish or some form of sea-creature you’ll find its golden likeness swimming here amongst these sea-life submarine consciousnesses, hunting and sharing information at the millions of skyscraper-like corals riddling the waters.

  Each coral rises from profound depths to dizzying heights, where fake sunbeams lay veils of diffused light within which the golden bodies of countless avi glide with balletic grace. Gaudy as Plaza on a Friday night, these intricately constructed conjunctions of network link-ups and nexuses bristle with avis at all times of the day, as though no citizen in the Gung, sea or sky were ever away for more than a second at a time.

  Wearing Octopus, Shock spins fathoms deep, to the bottom of the Slip, to where no one but Haunts and system avi-bots ever go, the hidden data troughs and gullies. There are billions of them, a circulatory arrangement of sub-superhighways for all that information the system needs to keep moving from place to place.

  Some, like this, are almost empty. Others are like water slides—raging torrents of information, commands and communications, rife with avi-bots. Riding the gushers is an out and out buzz, full-on tripping, drowning and weaving in data. He lives for those moments as much as he lives for the moment the nugget of data, or morsel of code he’s after, is locked tight in his flash and being slunk out of the cells right under system’s eyes.

  Hidden in the sub-network, he heads for the business nodes, another place only avi-bots come, because beyond the nodes, behind layers of VA only a select few could crack, lies the central nervous system of Slip: Hive. Home of the Queens, massive AIs who oversee all info. The Queens are dangerous and clever, and the only thing between them and the Slip is Emblem, a code-lock kept in the Core at the centre of Hive which the Queens cannot see or enter, although they probably know it’s there. And for good reason. Emblem is the key to everything virtual.

  Though Emblem’s a lock and a good one at that, the Queens are past masters at picking the Queen-targeted VA it places between Hive and Slip and escaping for short periods of time. Fulcrum hides their escapes and the devastation they frequently wreak from the Passes, the WAMOS, but Fails see everything. Working in the nodes, this close to Hive, is about as dumb as it gets, but Shock doesn’t care. If the Queens escape whilst he’s here, there are plenty of nodes to hide in.

  Reaching the nodes reserved for Olbax, he makes nano-wires and sends them spiralling out to connect. The node is like all representational objects in the Slip, a slightly hallucinogenic take on reality. Looks like an aquatic puffball mushroom studded with connection inlets. He has enough nano-wires for each, can have as many as he wants down here, it’s all a matter of extracting data from around him and reshaping it.

  It’s not magic, though some of what he does down here feels magical. This whole place is code, and only various applications of Virtual Armament can keep any of that code hidden from him or locked to his use. A newcomer to Tech is always shocked by the level of VA in the system, but old hands like Shock know why it’s there. If it weren’t, he’d be a god down here. Fucking Superman.

  Working at the hub it takes sixteen sweat-soaked minutes to get past mid-level VA to office personnel files. Not exactly a personal record, but not too shabby either, considering the gently over-toasted wreckage he’s been of late. Now to find a suitable candidate. Her shadow for years, he can quote Mim’s vital stats chapter and verse; all he has to do is cook up a fit from these office fauna non-entities.

  That takes another thirty-three minutes exactly, by which time he’s a gibbering wreck. Considering he took four minutes to get here in the first place he’s got exactly seven minutes before the plug’s pulled whether he’s ready or not. Suppressing an odd pang in his stomach, he DL’s the details to his flash, retracts his nano-wires, and pulses back to the gully.

  He gets out with two minutes to spare and, weaving between the cells, exits the shop with a jaunty wave at the Gothster who, quite rightly, blanks him flat. Foot to street takes half the time street to Slip shop took now he knows the way, and he’s shivering at the mono station before long, feeling unusually dirty.

  He’s done this a dozen and more times before, even for a job of this extent where Mim is essentially going to become this poor, hapless office drone for several days, thereby replacing her, this… who is it again? Realizing he didn’t have time to clock her name, he accesses the stats he stole. Unity Jo-Charbonneau. Interesting name.

  There’s that pang again. Is it guilt? Shock pushes trembling hands into his gut, feeling the slippery material of his jacket slide away under questing fingers.

  “Hungry,” he decides. Because guilt is too scary by half.

  A bowl of noodles later, the pang remains, sat uncomfortable as gas behind a full belly, and the name Unity Jo-Charbonneau spins in his head like a fairground ride, fast and nausea-inducing. He tells himself she’ll only feel invisible for a few days, only a few days of wondering what the hell’s happened to her life and who that stranger everyone thinks is her might be. Then she’ll have it all back. Office mediocrity, small apartment somewhere cheap, all the bland trappings she’s thus far taken for granted. And all she’ll feel, whoever she is, is relief that everyone once again knows she’s herself, and whoever was pretending to be her is long gone and won’t be back.

  Or she won’t. Because she won’t make three days. Maybe she’ll drown herself at Port, or swan-dive from a mono platform to become a small, spread-out stain on the ground below. Or run into Streeks and end up a crumpled rag of skin in an alley or a dumpster, nothing left to identify the person she isn’t any more. But he can’t think about that.

  Can’t think either about the possibility that she’s brighter than office material an
d crowbarred into a less than interesting life through the whim of her Pyschs. Can’t entertain anything like that, even if he knows it could be true. Shock survives like this: focus on Sendai; forget everything else.

  If he tries hard enough, he can make anything fade to background noise.

  Amiga and the Shit Mountain

  Temper held in a death grip, Amiga pounds stairs three at a time, cursing out of order shoot shafts, the heady apex of a vertigo-inducing shit mountain of a day. Normally she’d plant a flag and own that shit, but her stress-management skills have gone AWOL, sending her from bad to worse, to turning an important Cleaning job into a major clusterfuck, provoking an unnerving response.

  Amiga dislikes herself today more than she does most days, and she’s holding her bag away from her body as if it smells rotten. In a couple of hours it probably will, but she’ll be rid of the contents by then. Getting rid of the sneaking self-doubt and bone-deep dislike won’t be anywhere near as easy.

  Rounding the corner at high speed, she attacks the next flight with equal ferocity, aware that time has no intention of waiting for her. Three flights more and she’s out onto the roof of the ’rise, one of about fifty cluttering up the block. Breath coming in hard gusts, she powers across to the edge and crouches out of sight, checking her watch, counting the seconds and her blessings with them. Four minutes. Perfect.

  She accesses her flash, cracking onto the secure frequency cooked up for this little shindig.

  Here.

  Flesh flashes to her right. Deuce, hiding just a little higher on the next ’rise.

  About time, Amiga. What in hell kept you?

  None of your damn business.

  Faux-hurt ripples down the feed back at her—that’s new, clever bastard.