Koti, who succeeded Blue Bird as the leader in the preplanned chain of command, ran forward next, with Gor not far behind. They picked up Charlotte’s technique, crying “shield me” as they sprinted, and they left a staggering parade of decoys as they ran, which were rising up faster than they could be shot down. No doubt the guards were confused. Were they fighting five people or fifty? But eventually they would learn to aim for the people in front—the moving people. The confusion wouldn’t last.
Koti and Gor reached the door, and with their augmented strength, they began striking it with their fists. Between punches, they would murmur “shield me” and soon the human mass of all their decoys, even those fallen in heaps like corpses, formed a barrier high enough to shield them from view. And as they punched, the door began to break at its hinges, for even the Citadel’s security was victim to the hyper-realistic engine of physics that governed Sharebox.
Charlotte touched the tip of the arrowhead to the wall.
“Thank you,” said Diana in her ear. “That’s all I needed for now.”
The badge reader in front of Darnell glowed green.
The raiding party had made it to the Citadel walls. Damn, this might work, Darnell thought, his first feeling of confidence for the morning. This was the hardest part of security to forge, he remembered. Diana just tricked the Citadel system into believing Darnell was cleared by the underlying parallel hardwire infrastructure, simulating the approval of a virtual guard checking an access roster. The door swung open, and Darnell walked inside, now in the inner sanctum of the Citadel.
He looked upwards and found himself at the bottom of the glass tower. The entire building was essentially one circular cavernous space, a tube that stretched out of sight above him, giving the awesome impression of infinity. Darnell had never seen or heard of a building whose ceiling was so high as to be invisible from the ground floor, and the effect was humbling and disorienting. A set of glass elevators stood at the center of the tower, granting access at each of the building’s fifty-five floors, which were nothing more than glass catwalks that connected the prisoners’ cells.
This was the ultimate prison design, he realized. Most all correctional facilities are conceived around the idea of an open-floor plan—that a central guard tower can sit in one location and enjoy sweeping views of all the cells. But the Citadel took this notion to an extreme with its glass cells and catwalks and cameras posted uniformly along the central column. It was the prison of the new millennium: clean and sunny with a postmodern quiet and reverence that invoked the feeling of standing at the center of a grand church. And yet there was a subtle fragility to its design with all those thousands upon thousands of panes of glass. It was as if its architects were so confident in their genius and the integrity of their cutting-edge design that they scoffed at the crudeness of incorporating conventional materials such as steel bars.
Now Darnell had nothing to do. There were a few other souls walking about. He could hear footsteps on glass and catch shadows of people moving on levels many feet above his head, but it was a quiet place and being there in the open left him feeling exposed again.
The raiding party would need more time now. They needed to get to the master security console to identify and unlock individual cells, and even in all their rehearsals, it was unclear how long that would take. Orion and Kyle were somewhere in this vast, sterile place, but without knowing where, his only plan was ride the elevator to the middling floors, where he would be best positioned to move up or down quickly once he knew where he needed to go.
He walked confidently to the set of elevators before him, but as he approached, he caught sight of a red error message flickering on a console next to the elevator door. It read:
Threat Level Upgraded. Non-Essential Access Points On Hold
So Darnell looked upwards at the sprawling cathedral of glass floors, and he sighed. His weak leg gave a shudder at the mere thought of ascending those endless staircases. But there was nowhere else to go, and no point in complaining to himself. He turned to the master stairwell and began climbing.
Now
The guards continued to shoot into the pile of decoys, though their rate of fire was slowing. Gor and Koti were throwing all their augmented strength into their onslaught on the iron access door. Koti punched and kicked at it in a series of admirably efficient and well-honed strikes. Gor merely pounded it with his massive, square fists. And when he tired of that, he threw his shoulder into the door, which groaned underneath the weight.
Just as the rifle fire ceased, the warped door broke free of one of its hinges. Gor then grasped it in his two hands and tore it away entirely. The three remaining raiders stepped inside a vanilla hallway lit by unimaginative fluorescent lighting.
“Everyone remembers the way to the sub-basement?” Koti asked.
Gor and Charlotte nodded. She reached out her hand to offer the arrowhead to Koti, but he shook his head.
“Keep it for now.”
The three ran ahead. Straight down the first deserted hallway. Down a flight of stairs. Then another industrial-looking hallway, and a right turn. They heard the sound of footsteps coming in multiple directions before they saw anybody. Then as they rounded a corner, they nearly ran into a squad of seven guards, dressed all in black and helmeted, which Charlotte could only surmise was a design aesthetic since their digital heads couldn’t be harmed. The guards ground to a hasty halt a few yards in front of them, their eyes wide, and then someone, perhaps the guards’ captain, shouted a command to open fire.
But their rifles were long and clumsy in the crowded space, and the magic of the weapons’ scopes was designed for long-range marksmanship. Here, with only feet separating the two sides, it was much more of a fair fight.
As guards attempted to raise their optics to their eyes, Koti and Gor leapt forward to close the distance. Gor reached the captain and kicked him with an enormous boot that would have broken bones in real life but instead sent the avatar flying backwards down the hall, his rifle clattering impotently to the ground. The augmented strength of the raiding party couldn’t debilitate the guards, not permanently, but it sure could fend them off.
Koti dashed to another pair of men, and with his quick hands, he sent them sprawling both abruptly and unceremoniously to the ground. He grabbed one of their rifles and tried to fire it, but squeezing the trigger had no effect.
“Rifles only operate for the guard they are assigned to,” Diana said into their ears.
Koti muttered more curses, and taking the rifle in his hands, he bent the barrel.
Three other men lunged on top of Gor, who used his large arms to slam them into the walls of the hallway. Their bodies left holes so large in the drywall that a blue light of unrendered Sharebox space shone through. The color was universal to all places on the platform where a building or landscape architect had omitted additional layers of lifelike texturing to their virtual creation. It was common to find the interactive-less color under dirt or behind walls. Users jokingly referred to it as the “blue texture of death.”
Gor’s bodily handling of the three men would have certainly killed a mortal human being, but the guards simply slid to the floor and then got right back up as if nothing happened. The visual effect was eerie and inhuman.
The last man went for Charlotte, and she hesitated despite her superior strength. He lunged out with the stock of his rifle in an effort to knock her to the ground.
“They will try to force you to the floor,” Diana’s warning rang in her in ears. “That makes it easier for them to reach under your chin.”
Charlotte fell backwards, and the guard lost his center of balance and tripped and landed on top of her. Having no boxing or wrestling experience, she fought at him with the only techniques that occurred to her. She began hammering her fists with all their augmented strength into the man’s head, then she grabbed his arm and tried to twist it behind his back. Bu
t these actions had no practical effect. The avatar’s face merely grinned, emotionless, his face and body unblemished by the assault. The guards didn’t have high-quality facial recognition rigs, so all their facial features were permanently plastered on.
When Charlotte briefly halted her attack out of exasperation, the guard snapped his hand upwards to her face, to the spot just under her chin. It was by pure reflex that she seized his fingers mere inches from her neck. She looked around the room for help and saw that Gor was still shaking off three guards while Koti struggled on the floor beneath two men working together to pin him down by his arms.
“Just try to get away and go!” Koti screamed at her.
One of the men holding Gor released him to join the attack on Koti. As two guards restrained his arms and shoulders, the third man bent over Koti’s face and reached for his chin.
“Two more hallways to get down to the vault!” shouted Koti, his face red with exertion.
Charlotte watched the scene unfold helplessly. Log out, she thought at him. Please just log out.
Then the third guard touched just under Koti’s chin, a small chime sounded, and Koti vanished into the air like pixelated dust. In his place stood a small message written in the air:
Name: Jeffrey Wang
Username: Koti1233
IP Address: 54.59384.42
Physical location: 15 Na-Takesi Square, Seoul, South Korea
For a moment, Gor and his attackers looked up and paused their struggle to acknowledge Koti’s destruction.
Goddamnit, thought Charlotte. Then she grabbed both arms of the guard reaching toward her own face and hurled him against the three men who had deleted Koti. And she stood there looking at his address in a state of shock and despair.
“Run, children,” said Gabriel in her ear, no doubt following the debacle of their raid somewhere in the real world. “Koti knew the risks. Now run!”
She shouted at Gor to follow her, but she did not wait for him. The small arrowhead in her hand, she ran forward down the hallway past the pile of guards. There were footsteps behind her, but she did not dare to turn around. Their shouts were echoing mere yards behind her. She leapt down a final flight of stairs to reach a dull hallway that terminated in a big steel door, much like a bank vault.
Reaching forward with a hopeless desperation, she touched the arrowhead to the metal surface.
“I’m sorry,” said Diana in her ear, and she truly did sound sorry. “This is not close enough. The master security console is behind this vault. It’s in the dead zone in there. I did not know this barrier would be here.”
From behind Charlotte, Gor roared and charged past her towards the metal door. He pounded at it with his ham-shaped fists, as had proved successful on the last security door, but this one was impossibly thicker. When he stopped to take a moment to breathe, he and Charlotte exchanged glances, both of them looking terrified and exasperated.
Footsteps were on the stairs just behind them. Charlotte’s mind was racing. They had come so far, they had gotten so close.
“Let’s see if we can pull it open,” she said to Gor, beckoning to the massive, round wheel on the center of the steel door.
Gor obeyed wordlessly. He laid his sausage-sized fingers on the vault handle and started heaving with his entire body. Charlotte grabbed the wheel with her far daintier, though still powerful, avatar hands and pulled as well. For an excruciating two seconds, nothing happened.
Then there was a grinding sound, the screeching of metal on metal, and the door began to move.
“I’ll hold it open,” grunted Gor. “Once there is a gap big enough, you squeeze through.”
“And you log off,” said Charlotte.
They might have been able to slip into the vault if they had another minute. Their avatars strained at the wheel until a sliver of clear, blue light spilled out from behind the door. All the while, the metal screeched and resisted them as its lock began to warp out of shape. Slowly they were making progress. The gap was several inches and growing.
But now a squad of guards was upon them. Gor had no choice but to turn and face their attackers or risk being shot down by their rifles. He sprinted into the melee, bellowing like a great ape, and flung the nearest two guards back into the crowd, causing several more to stumble backwards over themselves. Charlotte pulled on the vault handle alone but was unable to make any progress without Gor. She slid towards the gap, catching a glimpse of the clear blue light on the other side. The divide was wide enough to fit her leg and shoulder, so she worked to jam her body in and began pushing against the door with her legs.
It shuddered and moved a half inch more.
Then something happened no one expected. Charlotte found herself being pulled by an invisible force away from the divide.
She was falling. Falling upwards.
Her body slammed into the ceiling and stuck there. The guards and Gor had all suffered a similar fate, and they had collapsed into a heap of indignant shouts and surprised groans in the center of the hallway.
Gravity. The Citadel architects were improvising by messing with the gravity of the entire building. Though Sharebox mostly conformed to a realistic physics engine, architects were allowed to manipulate the gravity of their creations to maximize space. Now the Citadel technical team was using it to keep Charlotte away from the vault.
The opening in the steel door she needed to slip into was on the floor now, which was effectively the new ceiling.
But Charlotte had a plan. She had been on the cheerleading squad for her freshman and sophomore years in high school. She wasn’t proud of it, but her mother insisted. She remembered that human bodies could be ladders.
“Shield me. Shield me me. Shield me. Shield me. Shield me,” she repeated breathlessly. A parade of Charlotte Boones materialized, and the real Charlotte knocked them on top of each other to form a stack of bodies that would be tall enough to reach the gap.
Gor had found his feet and was swinging a rifle stock around him like a baseball bat. He also began using decoys to avoid being shot by the guards, but it was only a matter of time before his luck ran out.
Charlotte climbed over decoys—stepping on her own face, her chest, her back. She was nearing the door opening atop the pile of auburn-haired decoys, she could almost get her hands on the divide to pull herself up. Then the room began moving again. It was rotating slowly this time, like a hamster wheel. Charlotte’s stack of useful corpses began sliding grudgingly to the side of the room, along with everyone else.
Manipulating gravity, Charlotte was appreciating, was a powerful defense because avatars simply weren’t equipped to handle the change in orientation. All gravity changes in public Sharebox spaces were designed to gently grade from one orientation to the other so avatars could walk between them seamlessly. But since Charlotte’s real-life body was stuck in a conventional physics-bound world, she couldn’t react to the abrupt shifting and felt helpless watching her avatar stumble from wall to wall.
Just then several new guards entered the hallway running without hindrance on the rotating surface. They appeared completely unaffected by the gravity changes.
Bots.
They ran fast, their arms pumping in rapid succession, and their faces mechanically locked on Charlotte as they closed the distance to her.
She had only just found her feet in time to kick the nearest one in the leg, sending him stumbling backwards. The next two bot guards grabbed her arms and attempted to pin her wrists to a wall. Another bot with a dull, motionless face appeared in front of her and extended his fingers towards her face.
She screamed, not an expression of terror or defeat but a war cry, and she loosed the two bots from her shoulders and punched the one in front of her in his chest. Then she leapt upwards towards the blue-lit gap in the door, and her avatar fingers found a hold on the vault’s frame. Straining at her feeble grip, sh
e began heaving her body into the divide.
Gor was still alive, miraculously. A pile of guards, no less than four of them, had holds on his arms and legs. He shouted at Charlotte to squeeze through. But it was no use, the gap was still too small, and she was trapped dangling awkwardly, suspended from what-was-now the side of the room, and unable to open it. Gor stomped towards the vault handle, now rotated within reach of his hands, and laid his fingers on it again.
With one great heave, the door opened another half inch. The action left Gor vulnerable to the guards clambering for his face, however. Within a matter of seconds, two of them had clawed their hands within range of his chin. Gor continued shouting and pulling, and one of the guards’ fingertips grazed him. A chime sounded.
Then Gor was gone, replaced by his profile details floating in the air where he stood.
Name: Sergei Witochski
Username: Gor
IP Address: 51.85742.21
Physical location: 35 Winston Court, Spring Valley, Florida
The room started spinning fast, and the bot guards who could tolerate the motion were within inches of Charlotte. She shoved and screamed and pushed until her head slid through the gap. Gor may have gotten it open just enough.
The changing gravity nearly outdid her; the sensation of falling in all directions threw off her perspective of where she was going. The bots grabbed a hold of her foot left exposed in the hallway, but their cause was lost. She whispered one last “shield me,” and slipped away from their grips. The bots and guards found themselves clinging to a decoy.
Then Charlotte squeezed through into the blue light, and the sounds of the hallway died away into a perfect silence.
Now
Darnell reached the twenty-third floor with much labored breathing and exertion. This was close enough, he figured. Climbing the stairs of the Citadel was the most intense activity he had committed to in some time.
The Echo Chamber Page 22
