Escapology

by Ren Warom

  “Is this Fulcrum’s? Is it older than the Gung?”

  “Yes. And no.”

  “How do you have access?”

  “We found it. Searched for it. We knew there must be a way to it from one of these old buildings, so we kept scanning till we found the right one, and then we bought this place. Turned it into Mollie’s. Came here to hide when things started to get dodgy.”

  Amiga turns to stare at Maggie.

  “Is this the only server?”

  “No. There are dozens.”

  “Shit.”

  “Mollie and I needed to hijack a server to monitor the Queens. This one was situated perfectly.”

  “Hijack?” Amiga’s gaping now.

  Maggie’s matter of fact as if this is all cool shizz, right? As if it’s nothing. But Amiga reels, completely off balance. This is not the real world. It’s not. You don’t just hijack a Slip server and not bring down the wrath of both Fulcrum and the Hive Queens, especially if you’re spying on them. Activating their security protocols is bad business. But Maggie’s still talking, cool as anything.

  “These servers were built to be self-servicing. Left to their own devices. The only overseers they have are the Hive Queens, and they don’t concern themselves unless one stops working. We keep this working smoothly and they’ll never find us here. Invisible squatter’s rights.”

  Amiga has nothing to say. Nothing. Then she does find something to say, though she’s not sure about hearing the answer.

  “Fulcrum. Kamilla Lakatos. Was she part of it? I mean I’ve heard things. About the breaking.”

  “Ah.” Maggie smiles a little sadly. “You sure you want to know?”

  “Not really. Tell me anyway.”

  “No need.” Maggie waves her hand at the steel skin. A section slides aside to reveal a clear glass panel. A window. “Go and look.”

  Amiga goes to the window. It looks down onto a platform beside a tunnel so huge it defies visual measurement, makes the eyes feel strained and weak. And filling the tunnel beside the platform like some monstrous, incongruous metallic grub, its mouth a collection of saw-toothed, conic grinders, squats a circular device that even to her ignorant eyes can only be one thing.

  “Earth engine,” she whispers. Horrified. “It’s true then. They broke the world. They actually broke the fucking world. Why?”

  “Don’t think—Why does anyone do anything?—iNk! Sal’s Synth Salad! No vegetables here!”

  The voice comes from nowhere, everywhere, buzzing with the digital imprint of a thousand and more trips into the Slip to spread virads.

  Agen-Z. Has to be.

  Zeros normally have a short shelf life, but this one, the very first, has been going for decades. Amiga wonders how long she’s been listening. How she’s managed to silence the torrent of virad junk spilling from her mouth until now. This connection must be through Slip, with Agen-Z kept quiet by shutting off her end and listening in.

  “Conex—Expedience—A lifeline in your hand.”

  Still at the window, Maggie steps forward, raising her hand upward as if to try to stop something. Amiga turns, and sees… an angel. Floating down from the central tower on thin plastic wires filled with the bright glare of neon. Her hair is white, and glows like the moon on a cloudless night, carrying its own ghostly aura.

  Incurious yellow eyes, pale as shells, regard Amiga from within youthful, doll-like features accentuated with dots, swirls and cryptically rune-like scrawling resembling black-light tattoos, but that’s not what they are, glowing brightly even in the lights of the server room. Her naked body is covered with more the same. A rainbow of hues, re-making her a neon angel written in indecipherable code. Around the tattoos wires loop through flesh and bone in bloodless intricacy, moving slow and sinuous as sun-drunken snakes.

  “I could—Carrey’s Synth Choc—tell you everything. The why. The how,” she says to Amiga, her mouth a bright pink bow of light, hypnotic in motion. “I could change your world. But that’s done, I imagine, and,” her head tips, white hair lolling through bright wires, “—Is it the real thing?—that’s not why you’re here. Why wait on wheels?”

  Amiga’s head is spinning. Substrata servers. Earth Engines. Broken worlds. Corp conspiracies. And shining neon angels, suspended on wires.

  “EVaC, my friend. He’s sick,” she croaks out. “He… he’s not Guild, nor Affiliate, but he needs help, and only you can help him.”

  “Septo, Dirt Just—Show me—Met It’s Maker!”

  Amiga IMs images of EVaC in Agen-Z’s general direction, confident she’ll catch them. Sure enough she does, in an elegant move that would have Deuce writing sonnets. Agen-Z raises her yellow eyes to Maggie, who speaks for her, and Amiga realizes this is how it usually is. Agen-Z, the Mother Zero, has more control than any she’s ever met, but that control prevails only in silence.

  “She’ll help,” says Maggie. “But you have to help us first. You have to get a message to Breaker. Deliver it personally. It’s too dangerous for us to try and reach him any other way.”

  Amiga stares between them.

  “But… what if the line we have no longer goes to him? EVaC will die.”

  Maggie holds Agen-Z’s gaze. Nods.

  “She won’t let it come to that, you have her word. All Patient Zeros are her family. If he worsens, you’ll have my IM. Use it. Someone will come for him.”

  “And what about Breaker?”

  “Contact him through the IM you were given. He’ll have alerts even for lines left dormant. We’ll give you something to send. You mustn’t look at it. It has to remain sealed. Any tampering may endanger him. If he’s able, he’ll contact you. I guarantee it. She guarantees it.”

  “And I have your word she’ll still help EvaC if you’re wrong?”

  “Yes.”

  “Whatever that’s worth.” Amiga looks between the two of them, slow and measuring, and not a little threatening. “I don’t trust you yet.”

  “But you’ll do this?” Maggie asks her.

  “For EVaC. Yes.”

  This is the sealed package for Breaker. Is that Maggie or Mollie? Only now, with the voice directly in her IM, does Amiga realize how similar they sound. When he replies, he’ll have something for us in return. When you have it, IM me, and I’ll tell you where to meet me. Maggie then.

  “Now go,” Maggie says. “We’ll be closing soon.”

  “I wasn’t shielded coming in. I could be tracked.”

  Maggie turns and offers her a small, tired smile.

  “No,” she says softly. “You couldn’t. Looks to me like you need to ask some questions of those closest to you. Someone’s got you under a full signal block. That’s why I was freaked earlier. You’re invisible, hon.”

  Dead Ends and Corners

  Sat in a noodle bar on Plaza slurping the last slippery noodles from a bowl of salty miso, bitter against the bump residue coating his throat, Shock nearly drops the lot as the shriek of an IM temporarily shorts every circuit in his brainpan. Whoever’s calling has the loudest chime he’s ever heard in his life. It’s like an air-raid siren, like a million seagulls screaming blue murder over a shoal of tuna, like the thunder of earth spears rubbing together.

  Then again, Shock’s in what might be delicately referred to as a fucking state and anything louder than a delicate whisper is guaranteed to work his lobes like jackhammers on asphalt. Choking, he swills the mouthful down with a gulp of Ginger-Apple Tab and accesses.

  What the fuck and who the fuck? Nearly made me chuck my lunch on the damn floor. Nearly made me breathe my last over goddamn udon. Not cool. Not. Cool. That’s a loud-arse chime you have. Dim it.

  S’Johnny. Johnny Sez.

  Shock makes a face. Catches sight of it in the window and twists his face harder, gurning at himself. If he were any less mature he’d stick a finger down his throat and make gagging noises.

  Am I up?

  Yup.

  That was quick.

  Yeah, well, she had good intel.
Johnny sniffs. Through his IM link it sounds like a gale-force wind. Shock winces. Makes a two-finger gun at his lobes BAM as Johnny says, Now uh… this info Mim needs you t’grab, s’got a barcode lock innit, so remember to lock it back up.

  Shock gawps at himself in the window. What. The. Fuck. No way. No. Not again. He is not getting dicked again.

  Now you hear me clear, Johnny. Shock turns his finger gun into a knife, stabbing the shiny red surface of the noodle bar hard enough to hurt. People stare. He ignores them. Mim didn’t say shit about barcodes. This was supposed to be a cruise. Easy money. Fucking sleep walking! He stabs the table extra hard, nearly taking off the end of his finger. And if it’s not exactly classified, by the bye, not that I’m interested but I have to ask because what the fuck—what’s it doing barcoded?

  Hey, you know Mim, honesty isn’t exactly her forte, so if you were sucker enough to say yes then I don’ give a shit about what you did n’ didn’t agree to. Besides, I don’ think it’s top-level barcode.

  Shock laughs. No such thing as levels in barcode. Depends on what types of bar they’re using. As neither Mim nor you would know one bar-type from another, I’m going to make a wild guess that she has no idea whether or not the damn thing she wants is classified or no. And thus my answer is as follows: get it yourself or get fucked.

  There’s another wind down his IM. More like a hurricane this time. Shock grinds his teeth. When does a lowlife like Sez get to sigh at him?

  Man, dude, bro. Look, I’m gonna do ya a favour. I got some visitors the other day. Uninvited you might say. Go by the names Li n’ Ho. You might know ’em? Upshot is they’re after knowing who Mim was working with, n’ I might’ve given them your name. Johnny actually sounds sorry, the shitty little coward. You might need this flim to get out of dodge, because they’re after killing you n’ they don’ mess around. This may be the last job you c’n take someone won’t immediately rat you out on.

  Cardinal rule, Sez, you never give names! Especially not to the fucking Harmonys! And I call bullshit. They’ve wanted me for ages and haven’t looked that hard. What’s changed?

  Reckon our Mim’s neck deep in somethin’ as per, cos them crazy Harmonys were all over getting’ info about who was cracking this job. Your name made for an interestin’ response. Just sayin’.

  Hit by the overwhelming desire to lob his noodle bowl through the window, Shock has to sit there breathing it out for a while. This is typical Mim, one hundred percent proof pure malice. He wouldn’t be surprised if she’d schemed this whole scenario trying to get him to do a barcode on the cheap, because she sure as hell hasn’t paid enough for that. Fifty/fifty his arse. Eight K is probably less than twenty percent. Dicked on flim and Li Harmony back on his tail. What a fucking bargain. Mim’s such a bitch she’ll get animus poisoning and die one of these days. Can’t come too soon.

  Shock surveys his options. They make flim rates for the bottom ten percent look generous. He could run now, but the flim he has won’t last long enough, and living on nothing is scientifically impossible. You can breathe air for sure, but you can’t eat it. That crap is not nourishing. All he can do is take his piss-ant pay with gritted teeth and be a good Haunt; get this done quick, clean and quiet as possible and then get the hell gone.

  Fine. Fine. I’ll do it. But I better have my flim pronto.

  It’s a done deal. I’m sendin’ you the info n’ addy for delivery now. Only use that. It’s a P.O. but don’t peek for ownership history or you’ll be.

  Don’t threaten me, Sez. Next to Li you’re not exactly scary, dig?

  Sez sniffs, wounded. IM me back on this line when you’re done n’ I’ll arrange delivery of the flim. Mim said no e-T.

  Nope. I want my flim physical.

  It will be.

  And he’s gone, leaving an eerie echo down Shock’s connection, disruptive as static down a radio-link. He grimaces and slams it shut. Li’s definitely not above hacking Sez’s IM and listening in. There’s a pool of miso at the bottom of his bowl, sitting there looking all delicious, but Shock’s appetite’s flatlined. Matter of fact, his whole day’s dive-bombed. Nothing for it but to get his sorry self to a Slip shop.

  “Sooner you work, sooner you get your flim,” he reminds himself, as if he ever needed reminding about the vital correlations between work and money. Hand to mouth is a swift tutor. Imminent murder even more so.

  Closest Slip shop is four doors away. Fancy joint called Slip-matic. Slip-matic is a chainstore brand, like the Kendo Noodle House where he’s left the dregs of his lunch, and where everything is always a combo of shiny red and puke yellow. In Slip-matic the pods are uniform black; the attendants wear uniforms, and are generally uninformed pretty faces, too dumb for office work. Makes these places the perfect base for a bit of snatch and grab hackage.

  Shock pays for nine standards. He’s got a barcode to wrestle of unknown classification, which is dandy if you’re in the mood for a challenge and a pisser if you’re not, and not anything any hack could achieve in under eight standards even if it’s lower level. There’s no manual interface here, thank fuck, he just jumps in his pod and jacks in, sliding direct into the Slip as Octopus.

  The path to Paraderm is quiet but Shock doesn’t find it reassuring, there’s no paranoid like a hack. Freaked out, he wants to use the nodes but Puss does that thing again, acting autonomous. This time actively leading him astray and squeezing acrobatic coils into Paraderm proper, showing him there’s nothing to be nervous of. All is well. Okay then, smartass.

  Company grids resemble tube mazes built for smart rodents, or smarter cephalopods, re-imagined in ever more bewildering complication and glowing in various eye-watering hues. Back in control and amazed he lost it to an avi of all things, Shock slinks through with liquid haste, hunting for the storage server in Mim’s info packet. She was right about one thing—the server’s not classified.

  He gets in easy as walking. It’s some kind of janitorial server with no connections to the main servers and therefore no need for further VA. Here’s a mystery then, because no server of this unclassified nature ever held, nor holds, a classified data packet. So why does this one? He’s beginning to suspect the chasing of wild geese here. An amusing skit at the expense of one Shock Pao, idiot supreme. Maybe the beginning of Li’s cat-and-mouse game, or some such unpleasantry. Then he sees the barcode, nestling in a small nook halfway up the server, and rage stops him in his tracks.

  What in the hell?

  Barcodes take their name from the fact they’re reminiscent of codes once used on products, with each section of a twelve-digit-long security code represented by four bands of black and white, two of each colour, varying in widths from one to four units to a total of seven. But that’s where the resemblance ends. These bars are virtual, and alive. They come in different forms, each with its own challenges, some less so than others. The most complex is the Gordian. Which is what he has here. So far from good it’s on another goddamn planet.

  The black and white lines coil up and around one another in a nausea-inducing pattern of repetitive movement, like a nest of snakes—and these suckers have venom all right. All manner of nasty surprises lurk in those hallucinatory, shifting coils. If you lack skills, you best not approach this sucker. Death in the Slip is never pretty.

  As history would suggest, Gordians have to be cut at exactly the right point, and there’s an algorithm in the code that translates to an equation for that location. Which means you have to figure out the code first, and as it works back to front but reads front to back, that’s no mean feat. Crack it, reverse it, extract the algorithm, extrapolate the equation and snip.

  Now he gets what this information is. Company secrets. An inside job. Hidden here in plain sight to keep out curious eyes, with the expense of a Gordian shackled over it to prevent accidental stumblers from being able to access its contents. And Mim is undercutting. This job is worth thousands more than he’s getting. His eight K just shrank from under twenty percent to under five. He
’s worth so much more, fifty/fifty for reals even in his current condition and with all the trouble at his back—if only he had the pride and wherewithal to tell her where to shove it.

  Shock stretches his tentacles, the Octopus equivalent of cracking tension out of a neck. However much he wants to throw the world’s biggest hissy fit at Mim, or walk away, preferably both, he’s stuck with doing his job, getting his insulting payment of flim and forgetting all about it. That’s his life skill, and a good life skill is incapable of being over-utilized.

  Shoulda bought fifty units, he mutters to himself, and gets to work, thanking all the quirks of a random system that he ended up in an avi with eight fully malleable limbs and a habit of augmenting his ability to think, so he didn’t have to drop unnecessary flim on upgrades. Talk about serendipity.

  Still, it takes nearly an hour of playing shuffle with the knot, working fast enough to blur tentacles, to get the code. Somewhere up there, IRL, his body is slicked with sweat, the greasy kind you get in the Slip from nerves, feels like you just bathed in luke-warm stir-fry oil. Shock grimaces, his beak tucking in.

  Waking’s gonna be a bitch.

  With the code worked out, the rest is simple, but only because he aced advanced mathematics and somehow remembers all of it when he’s Puss down here. If that wasn’t the case… well… Gordians have time restrictions on top of their other tricks, and they tend to count down to explosion. From Slip to IRL the damage from such an explosion is all cerebral. He might get out of Slip, considering this shop has rudimentary safety precautions, but he wouldn’t wake up. They’d have to carry him, drooling, to the nearest ICU. Probability of waking there? Maybe three to one, which is not so bad. Probability of waking with his faculties intact? Those are odds he never wants to calculate.

  Ten mins later he’s got the cut point and the data-packet. Shock regards it with disgust through Puss’s square pupils.

  Just so we’re clear, he snaps at it. I should be getting paid way more for plucking you out, you bastard.