by D L Young
“You worry about your own job, yeah?”
The hover lurched as she dodged a pile of rubble, but the kid, strapped in with shoulder harnesses and lost in concentration, didn’t react or even seem to notice. Beatrice toggled the map on the dash, checking the distance to the river, unsure if she’d reach it before her pursuers caught up with her. Behind her, the police had closed the distance. She could make out the shapes of the passengers, the bulky geometric outlines of rhino cops in full body gear. From her jacket she pulled out a dozen loaded magazines, placing them in a hanging pocket on the passenger seat. Then she wriggled out of the jacket and tossed it to the floorboard. Double holsters held the Rugers tight to her rib cage.
Then a strange calm came over her and her senses sharpened. She saw more details in the landscape zooming past, she heard the kid’s nervous breathing behind her, and she felt an unlikely surge of confidence. A crooked smile crept across her face. Her biochem mods—the ones that triggered when the body’s fight-or-flight stress reached a certain threshold—were kicking in.
Battle-ready, she pushed the hover faster. All right, fuckers, bring it on.
The thin tree-lined strip of the Passaic River passed below them, and a few klicks beyond, the Hackensack came into view. Empty bridges and causeways spanned the Hackensack’s gray waters beneath an overcast sky of low clouds. Here the ruins of another economic age stood like ancient archaeologies: enormous dockyard cranes frozen like giant steel arms, a scattering of abandoned industrial complexes, building-sized cargo vessels, rusted and listing against ghost shipyards. In the chaotic landscape of colossal steel and concrete structures, she might be able to even the odds. Beatrice brought the hover up from the ground to get a better view. She scanned ahead, made a quick decision on an entry route, then pointed the hover toward the shipyards.
Yellow tracers zipped past the vehicle and disappeared into the distance. She grunted a curse and pitched the hover’s nose down further, hugging the ground. The firing stopped. This tight to the ground, the cops couldn’t get a clean shot off over the irregular landscape. Too many houses and streetlights and low-rise buildings got in the way. But what a low-altitude run gave you in cover, you lost in getaway speed. Dodging ground obstacles slowed you down.
Giant crane arms loomed larger in the windshield, signposts marking the vast shipyards. Almost there. She throttled the motor higher, skimming over copses of shrubs and wild grass. Through the bottoms of her shoes, she felt branches scrape against the hover’s underside. She stole a quick glance at the kid. He was still oblivious, bobbing back and forth like a crash test dummy strapped to the seat, totally immersed in virtual space.
The hover topped a small rise, and another volley of tracers whizzed past. A single round struck with a loud clank before she dove back tight to the ground. Again she looked back at the kid. He sat there gesturing with his hands, entranced. She turned her attention forward. The shipyards were close now. A dozen cranes towered overhead like enormous frozen beasts of oxidized steel. A wide expanse of empty rusted-out cargo containers spread out across a flat concrete plain. Miles of narrow paths wound between the stacked piles like a giant maze. Low rise buildings and chemical treatment plants stood in various stages of decay.
She kept the hover low, the throttle wide open, barreling across a muddy bog. Green and brown blurred past the windows. As she reached an old parking lot that marked the edge of the shipyards, her pursuers again opened fire. A series of thud-thud-thuds rocked the vehicle. Until she reached cover, still a long minute away, she’d be an easy target. The hover careened back and forth as she tried to evade a constant barrage of gunfire. She winced as the vehicle took more hits. Its reinforced bullet-resistant shell would withstand a good amount of punishment, and so far it seemed to be doing just that. But there was no way of knowing what kind of armor-piercing smart ammunition the cops might have at their disposal, or when a round might take an unlucky ricochet and strike some vital part of the hover’s motor.
Finally, she reached the cover of the shipyard’s cranes and buildings and cargo containers. In the rearview cam, the police closed in, and she noted their formation, or rather their lack of one. They were clustered close together, like an excited pack of dogs chasing a rabbit.
Big mistake.
Whipping the hover around a ten-story office building, she braked hard. The seat restraints tightened painfully, digging into her shoulders. Then she jerked back against the seat as the vehicle came to an abrupt stop and landed roughly against the ground in the building’s shadow. She looked back at the kid. The deck was still strapped to his lap. Amazingly, his eyes were still closed, and he gestured as if nothing had happened.
Beatrice lowered the window and removed both pistols from their holsters. All six police hovers, still clustered tightly together, shot past a few meters overhead, the scream of their motors deafening, the powerful air wash from the turbofans rocking Beatrice’s vehicle. She leaned out and fired with both barrels, aiming for the middlemost hover. All four shots found their target. The hover lurched sideways, its driver reflexively taking evasive action, only without any space to do so. The autosafeties couldn’t react in time to prevent the collision, and the hover collided against two others, sending all three spinning to the ground. They slammed against the concrete surface, tumbling end over end and breaking apart. Bodies flew out of the vehicles like catapulted rag dolls.
Beatrice holstered her pistols and raised the window.
Three down, three to go.
“What the hell was that?” the kid cried, cowering down into the seat. “What are you shooting at?” His eyes were still squeezed shut, as if he were afraid to open them.
“Don’t unplug,” she told him. “Keep doing your job. We’re fine.”
The three remaining hovers were already making wide, arcing turns. Beatrice gunned the motor and made a straight line for the cargo containers. Behind her the cops gave chase, but now with large gaps between each vehicle, apparently learning from their mistake.
“Shit, here they come,” the kid blurted.
“I told you not to open your—”
“No, I mean in here, with me. The ISes. They’re coming after me.” He began gesturing wildly, bobbing up and down in his seat. “Holy shit! They’re fast! They’re too fast!” His voice surged with panic. “I gotta unplug!” He reached up for the trodeband.
“No, not yet,” Beatrice barked, reaching back and slapping his hand away. “You run like hell for as long as you can.”
The hover zoomed across a flat expanse of crumbling concrete. Again the cops opened fire. Rounds hammered the hover. Both taillights exploded into shards. Struck by one of the rounds, the rearview cam’s feed went dark on the dash.
Beatrice focused her attention forward, where the familiar jagged profile of the Pile rose quickly before them. A vast maze of stacked cargo containers, heaped ten high in places, the Pile had miles of narrow tunnels she’d raced through hundreds of times as a kid. She knew every twist, every turn, every dead end. A piecemeal canopy of corrugated aluminum covered most of the Pile, a roof improvised by squatters who’d long since abandoned the place. Once she was inside, she’d be hidden from above, and the cops wouldn’t be able to potshot her from on high.
They’d have to follow her inside.
She pointed the hover to a familiar section near the Pile’s easternmost edge, hoping the narrow opening was still there. She also hoped the layout inside hadn’t changed, that her favorite routes through the darkened tunnels were still unblocked and intact.
She spotted the opening. Had it always been that small? As they hurtled toward it, doubts flashed across her mind as to whether or not the hover would fit through.
But it was too late for second guesses. Too late to brake. They’d be on top of her in seconds if she slowed down now.
Beatrice clenched her teeth as the hover zoomed toward the small, darkened opening. A warning flashed madly on the dash in large red letters.
IMMINEN
T COLLISION.
22 - Cobra Bite
Back before he’d learned his trade, Maddox had briefly run with a neighborhood gang called the A.V. Boyz. A.V. for Always Violent. Three months after his beat-in initiation, he’d taken up datajacking and bailed on the Boyz, staying in a spare room at Rooney’s place some twenty blocks south of his East Harlem hiverise. He returned to his old turf not long after, for reasons he couldn’t remember. An errand of some sort for Rooney, probably. But what he did remember—what he couldn’t forget, actually—was the heavy dread that overcame him as he crossed Ninety-Second Street, penetrating the invisible border of his old turf not as a welcome former resident but as a deserter who’d committed the ultimate act of betrayal, abandoning his turfies without a single word. As he made his way through the hiverise’s vast labyrinth of corridors, he felt like every pair of eyes stared at him with hatred and suspicion. He was certain at any moment he’d get jumped and beaten to death.
He felt much the same way now, floating his approach toward the dense, glowing geometry of Latour-Fisher Biotech’s datasphere. Only a handful of days ago this had been nothing more than his everyday workplace, the familiar environs where he’d spend countless hours tweaking security tech and testing countermeasures. He’d been as comfortable within the company’s virtual infrastructure as he had inside the cozy warmth of his condo. But how things had changed. Cloaked and moving with deliberate caution, he felt his stomach, far away in the rented room, tighten in nervous anticipation.
He stopped a short distance from the company’s nearest structure, a luminous building-like partition representing the human resources department. He was close enough to see the rivers of information flowing through its opaque facade, pulsing like cobalt neon blood through some giant circulatory system. On the structure’s outer surface were half a dozen intelligent sentries. They resembled large multilegged insects, streetlight red in color, and they roamed across the face of the HR partition like patrolling packs of wolves.
Beyond HR, the five R&D towers loomed tall and brilliant white. He spotted more ISes moving along their surfaces as well. Cloaked and hovering at a safe, undetectable distance, Maddox felt a stab of worry. The kid obviously hadn’t grabbed their attention yet. And if he wasn’t able to, it would be game over before it even got started. There were simply too many of them between Maddox and where he needed to go. Even with a good cloak, which he had, it would be an impossible task. Like walking through an airport wearing a bomb vest and hoping no one noticed you.
He watched and waited, aware of a cold sweat under his arms back in the room. He wanted to call Beatrice and find out what was happening on her end, but he couldn’t. Out of caution he’d disabled all comms, wary of being discovered by the Latour-Fisher AI, who surely had an army of bots and algorithms scouring VS for any trace of him. But now, hovering uselessly and unable to move forward, he second-guessed the decision to go incommunicado. Maybe he should have risked it. He wondered what Rooney would have done.
Minutes passed and nothing changed. Maddox knew the kid wasn’t ready for what he’d been asked to do, but they hadn’t had the luxury of time nor options.
Then it happened. The ISes attached to the HR and R&D structures stopped moving, as if they’d suddenly become aware of something. In the next moment the packs of wolves became flocks of birds, disengaging themselves from their assignments and zooming away at frantic speed. He watched them disappear into the black distance. Then he pivoted back to the HR partition, seeing only a single group of four ISes left on guard duty. Back in the room his mouth creased into a half smile.
Nice job, Tommy Park.
He sped forward, reaching the HR partition in seconds, stopping just outside its cloudy outer shell that always reminded him of animated frosted glass. R&D was his destination, and the stealthiest way to get there was through HR, a side-door route that avoided the datasphere’s dense, security-heavy central cluster.
Beyond HR’s wall, information bustled up and down and back and forth, a nonstop pyrotechnic show of digital information. He’d made it to the doorstep. Now to break into the house. Once he was inside HR, he’d cut his way into R&D, where he’d then be close enough—or at least he hoped he’d be close enough—to the AI’s vital components to set off the poison pill.
Around him, he could already sense the cloaking algorithm melting away under the company’s passive countermeasures. In moments he’d be detectable enough for a nearby IS to pick up on him. He worked quickly, gesturing up a modified version of the splitter executable he’d used to open up the stolen archive. A small cloud of green smoke appeared in front of him, attaching itself to the partition’s exterior wall. Slowly, the frosted glass faded and then disappeared entirely, leaving a sizable porthole. Maddox hurried through. As he pushed inside, light and movement assaulted him with dizzying suddenness. He notched down his brightness setting and gathered himself.
Wasting no time, he shot upward through a flowing river of luminous data, hoping it was still there. The week before, during a routine upgrade, a coworker—former coworker, he reminded himself—named Ahmed had placed a kill switch inside the partition during a lengthy multi-app upgrade. When you worked inside a partition for more than a few minutes—as you would during any upgrade—you typically turned off the countermeasures; otherwise they had a tendency to set off alarms, thinking you were an intruder. New versions were especially twitchy, like a nervous security guard on their first day on the job. To avoid the hassle of constant alarms, a simple kill switch, coded to the company’s security protocols, could toggle the countermeasures on and off as needed. Ahmed, a company security analyst who was famously forgetful and tended to be sloppy, often forgot about his kill switches, leaving them sitting inside the partitions until a coworker spotted them and removed them. Later in the break room they’d give the analyst stick for leaving his messes lying around.
Maddox hoped last week’s upgrade hadn’t been one of those rare instances of Ahmed cleaning up after himself. He arrived at the vector, relieved to find a small bluish-gray rectangle nearly obscured by the brilliant data streams. A kill switch. God bless the lazy slobs of the world, he thought. Without them, a datajacker’s job would be far more difficult.
He subvocalized, activating the kill switch. The flood of glowing data around him flickered almost imperceptibly as the countermeasures cut out. The cloaking algorithm, now no longer suppressed, reasserted itself, once more gaining substance around him.
Maddox moved horizontally until he hit a departmental interface, a digital intersection connecting the HR and R&D partitions. Again he gestured up the splitter and watched as the green smoke attached itself to the R&D’s partition wall. He waited, but nothing happened. No porthole entryway appeared. The smoke dissipated, then disappeared, having had no effect. He tried again, but the splitter failed a second time.
Not good.
His ex-colleagues must have finished R&D’s security upgrade. His splitter couldn’t make a dent in the partition’s wall. He pulled up another tool: a sledgehammer executable. It appeared, visualizing in front of him as a brick-sized obsidian block. He hesitated for a moment, debating with himself whether or not to use it, knowing as soon as he did, all hell would break loose. A sledge executable, like its real-world counterpart, was as effective as it was loud and messy. About as subtle as throwing a brick through a window, the sledge was sure to trigger every security alert in the system. Then he’d have only a handful of seconds before the ISes or the native countermeasures froze him.
Peering into R&D, he searched for signs of the AI: abnormally dense data clusters or unusually complex information flows. Any visual hint that might give away its presence. The Latour-Fisher AI was known to keep a sizable presence inside R&D, both as an overseer and an active participant in multiple research projects. Maddox hoped the portion of the AI inside R&D would be a large enough allocation for the poison pill to destroy the entire entity, but there was no way to be sure. Earlier he’d explained it to Beatric
e as something akin to a cobra bite. If you got nipped in the fingertip, you could avoid dying by cutting off your hand or arm before a lethal dose of venom slipped into your bloodstream. A human being, of course, wouldn’t be capable of doing this, but an AI could slice away a poisoned extremity in milliseconds if doing so saved the whole from being destroyed. But if a large enough portion of the entity was poisoned by a powerful enough venom, then it might not be able to save itself.
Maddox searched through the chaotic glowing churn of R&D data. At the far end of the partition, he spied a dense, knotty data cluster. It rotated slowly, absorbing and ejecting streams of massive data flows. That had to be it. Only an AI, and a powerful one at that, could grind through so much data so quickly.
He placed the sledge executable against the barrier separating him from R&D, then gestured. A BANG pierced his ears and he instinctively backed away as the wall blew apart, light scattering like exploding shards of glass. A moment later it was quiet again and he hovered, still inside HR, staring at a jagged, gaping hole. He quickly pushed through it, feeling a chill as he penetrated the R&D partition. Whether it was nerves or the countermeasures already onto him, he wasn’t sure.
Red flashed all around him. Klaxons wailed alarms. He had to hurry.
He subvocalized, calling up the poison pill. If he hadn’t been so stressed, so focused on his task, he might have been amused by the pill’s cartoonish visualization: an obsidian disk stamped with a white skull and crossbones.
An icy cold grabbed hold of him that definitely wasn’t nerves. R&D’s countermeasures were on him, and he was instantly stuck in what felt like freezing mud.
Groaning with the effort, he slung the poison pill toward the data cluster he hoped was the AI. It seemed to float in slow motion, tumbling end over end like a poorly thrown football through the luminous rainstorm of data, finally striking the intended target dead center. The pill sat there for a moment, stuck like chewed gum thrown against a wall, then black tendrils began to expand outward from its center. Toxic roots shooting out from a deadly tree. He watched as the blackness spread, enveloping the cluster, which had stopped rotating and began to tremble erratically.
