Agnosis – Ch. 11

<– Chapter 10 / Chapter 12 –>

It didn’t seem to matter how he tried to stretch out the work, to fend off the inevitable. The hours passed, the tasks somehow got done, and Dorian marched steadily forward with them. He still didn’t believe, and dragging out the time did nothing to change his mind. Dawn came up clear and pale through the curtained windows in the kitchen, but it brought no certainty with it. It bore no thundering epiphanies on its golden wings. Danek and Lily had finally gone to bed a few hours ago, and even Amara, for want of anything constructive to keep her occupied, had curled up with a blanket in front of the fire in the living room.

Seated at the small table in the breakfast nook near the kitchen widows, Dorian had plodded on through the long night, doing what he could with the unwieldy Korski to reconfigure his foam, enable his pool of ip masks, and alter the trace records and sig dox that uniquely identified his array on the Strand. It was dauntingly precise work, frighteningly illegal, and made that much more difficult by the fact that he had to do it as an anonymous outsider. As if the work itself was not bothersome enough, his task was rendered additionally arduous by the ghastly yellow walls and the retro bubbled polcite cabinets and appliances which surrounded him. He’d never worked well around pastels. They were the devil’s hues, his mother had always said, and Dorian had never seen any reason to disagree with her. His eyes burned from this most recent exposure as though he’d spent the night grating them with rock salt and hot peppers.

On top of that, he’d had to share what bare table space there was with Danek’s battered old Chalmers-Husk portable, which was usually attached to the ex-connex. The kitchen was small and cramped, and because of the sound-proofing, he felt isolated by silence and hemmed in by kitsch. Definitely not what he considered optimum working conditions. He’d turned on the newswire audio through Danek’s box for awhile merely to alleviate the silence and silence the demonic chatter of the pastel appliances but even the familiar and normally comforting content-free chatter caroming through the restricted space had given him a blistering headache, so he’d given it up.

Such hostile circumstances aside, he forged ahead, converting caffeine and nervous dread into something like creativity. A code parser, a coffee and thou. It was really all he needed.

Amara’s foam was easier, but not much less time consuming, because in theory, Raville had gotten a better look at her. She required a whole flotilla of special scripts to mask her ip, and in the end, he settled less on a traditional masking than on a complex shift-id process augmented by conflicting reg pointers designed to spew erroneous log data all over the Strand. To any sysops who encountered her, she’d look like a massively infected viral zombie–unintelligible, unidentifiable and therefore dangerous. But that was okay. He didn’t imagine that the quae-ha-distra port had a sysop who particularly gave a rat.

He expected all of his covert misdirections to shield them for all of ten minutes, maybe even less, before Raville’s agents unraveled them.

Which bothered him for obvious reasons. He’d already seen some of his most complex scripts swept away like dry leaves in an autumn wind. Raville had demonstrated that Dorian’s abilities didn’t present him with much challenge, which meant that his ten minute estimate might really be ten seconds, or that the assassins were already en route to Danek and Lily’s house, tipped off by Dorian’s mere thinking about ways to delay the pursuit. It had been that sort of night, filled with doubts and accusations of failure.

But at the same time, wrangling with the cruft of doubt gave him an excuse not to think about the incredible risk Amara was taking, or the equally incredible faith she was placing in him to keep her safe. Or, for that matter, the fact that they had a universe to save from the cancerous, backbiting, underdeveloped and intra-genocidal threat that was humanity.

As the sun came up around him, he couldn’t help but wonder exactly what it was he thought he was doing, and if he had ever really had any choice about doing it in the first place. It didn’t really matter. Amara had made the choice for them all. All he could do was go along.

Just make the leap.

 

Toward the middle of the morning, Danek let himself into the kitchen and began rummaging about the cupboards for a coffee cup. Dorian looked up at him briefly. Danek had bags under his eyes and the whites were shot with sort of angry red streaks one gets after sleepless nights that followed overlong and overstressful days. For the first time, Dorian noticed that there were streaks of gray in his friend’s thick, dark hair. His hands had grown wrinkled overnight, it seemed, and they trembled when he didn’t keep a firm grip on his cup.

He’s getting old, Dorian realized, and found that it disturbed him. They were all getting old. Danek had been a mature man when Dorian had shown up for the first day of TechTac school, a man of indeterminate years–not that biological or apparent age was ever a reliable standard–but like all military middle management, he had never presented himself as anything but tough as leather and spry as a malnourished crocodile. He was still an impressive physical specimen, of course, but was beginning to verge on impressive in the sense that well-preserved middle aged men were said to be so.

Danek pulled aside the curtains and peered out into the burgeoning day. There was a rime of frost on the grass in the shadow of the trees, but fat dewdrops elsewhere where the sun had melted off the ice. The yard sparkled like a field of stars. Danek grunted at nothing in particular and dragged the extra chair away from the table and across the floor. He sat down as though his joints had stiffened in the night and leaned the back against the wall with the front legs tilted up. He propped his coffee on the windowsill and lay his head back.

“How does it go?”

“I’m almost done,” Dorian said. “I’m just putting in a couple of scripts that should keep Raville’s foam from slamming the door on Amara’s geek. I don’t want her trapped in there.”

“Ayuh.”

“Is she still sleeping?”

“She and Lily both. I’m going to let the old girl lay about this morning. The last couple of days have really been more excitement than she needs, but it’s been good for her, too. She’s missed your coming around of late.”

Dorian felt himself wince. “I’ll make a point of stopping by more often. If we survive this, I mean.”

Danek snorted. “I didn’t mean it that way. She likes you, John. She likes your company and your energy, but she understands that you’ve got a life. You come visit her like it’s an obligation, but it’s not something you owe her.”

“It is something I owe her.”

“No, it isn’t.” Danek frowned and pinched his fingers over a spot in the middle of his forehead, like he was soothing a headache. He looked up at Dorian, squinting. “You’ve been carrying that weight for so long, you can’t put it down. Part of that’s my fault, I understand that. Maybe I remind you of it too much. But if I do, it’s only because I can’t put it down either. We share this blame, John, but most of it is mine. I’m the one who gave you permission. But the truth is that neither of us are responsible. We did what we thought was best, what we thought was necessary. Nobody else out there could have even attempted it. I want you to know that. No one else would have even dared. The fact that it didn’t work out is beside the point. If you hadn’t been there, Lily would have died, and as hard as the years have been, they’ve been good, too. I wouldn’t trade those years for anything, and even though I’m hard on you sometimes, I know that I wouldn’t have had them without what you did for her.”

Dorian shifted uncomfortably in his seat and looked away. He had never heard Danek speak to him in this way. It was a bonding moment, and he couldn’t help but feel creeped out by it. But Danek flapped his hand at him, a dismissive wave. “Don’t listen to me. I get mushy sometimes when I haven’t slept well. That happens when you start to get some years on you.”

“You can look over my work if you want. Check it for mistakes, anything I might have missed. I’ve been careful,” Dorian said. “I mapped a big stretch of the foam she’ll need to traverse, hopefully provided some signposts that will keep her from getting lost. She shouldn’t need to be inside for long; this is really just a smash-and-grab as I see it. But as a precaution, I’ve also interjected some defensive protocols for her Strand cache that should take effect when she logs in for the first time: quick escape apps, cortical shields, that sort of thing. It’s not much, I know, but it should give her an added layer of protection. On top of that, I managed–”

“That’s not what I’m getting at here,” Danek snapped. He brought the front legs of the chair down hard on the floor. “I didn’t come in here to question your technical skill, John. You can do this. If it can be done at all, that is.” He dropped his head abruptly, and his whole body sagged. He continued to make inarticulate motions with his hands as if he’d forgotten how to use them. “Look, I’m not very good at–I’ve never had any practice, is what I’m trying to say. Nobody writes technical manuals on how to do this sort of thing.”

Dorian took his hands away from the keypad and gave Danek his full attention. “What are you trying to tell me?”

And as he looked at his old boss and mentor and friend, Dorian saw something new in his face. Behind the mask of frustration and weariness, there was fear. It was a dark thing, a heavy cloud hanging over his brows. Even when things had gone so wrong with Lily all those years ago, Dorian had never seen Danek afraid. He’d always beat off his fear with anger, but here it was, naked in the morning light.

Danek opened his mouth, but no words came out, so he closed it again. His lips trembled, just as his hands had. He gripped his knees until his knuckles bulged, and that seemed to steady him. Quietly, almost whispering, he said, “Lily is dying, John. We had a medic out here the other day to drop off supplies and give her a monthly once-over. It’s cancer. She’s riddled with tumors. He’s familiar with her, um, her condition and her history. He’s a military doc. Says it’s probably related to that viral bomb all those years ago. Sort of a gradual, time released effect, I guess. It’s the same type of attack, just her body picking up on all that bad code after so many years and replicating it because it doesn’t know any better. He said there wasn’t anything we could do for her as long as she stayed in the form she’s in. That body, well, it’s just wrecked, you know. Throwing good cells after bad, so to speak. He tells me that the only hope is to get her packaged into something new and loaded into a fresh corpse. I haven’t even brought that up with Lily, of course. You know how she feels.”

“I’m sorry, Tyrus.” He croaked the words the best he could. Someone had stolen all the air from his lungs. “I–I don’t know what else to say.”

“Don’t say anything. There’s nothing you can say that’s going to make it better, and nothing any of us can do. Lily didn’t even want me to tell you. She doesn’t want you chasing after her with your pity wagon.”

“I won’t tell her I know.”

“You certainly will not. She’d kill me. And I probably shouldn’t have told you, but I knew when you showed up at the door yesterday that I wouldn’t be able to help myself. You’ve known her as long as I have. You’ve loved her in your own way. Now with all this other stuff going on, I couldn’t let you go off without knowing.” Danek shrugged weakly. “Besides, it’s been eating me up inside. Lily doesn’t want to talk about it, and she’s the only other person in the world next to you who has any idea how much this is killing me. She’s resigned herself to it. Part of me thinks she’s even looking forward to it, after all these years of pain. I guess I can understand that. I mean, it hasn’t been easy, and her New Res friends, they’d be just about ready to have a party if they knew. They’d be all smiles and congratulations about how close she is to entering Abraham’s Bosom or whatever it is they call it. I’ll most likely murder one of them if they come over here and say it.”

“Don’t do them any favors,” Dorian said.

“Yeah, right. I’m sorry to drop it on you like this, John. But I’m not sure there ever is a good time, and I’m a selfish biter by nature. Sharing makes it a little better somehow.”

“It’s okay.”

But it wasn’t. It wasn’t within a million kilometers of okay, but he didn’t know what else to say.

Danek giggled, a slightly hysterical sound. “It’s crazy, isn’t it? We killed death! Our generation all but did away with the Grim Reaper completely. Took him out behind the woodshed and gave him the butt whipping of his life. My folks are running around in semi-retirement on the white sand beaches of Grenoble Tau, living it up like kids. What am I saying? They’re in the bodies of twenty year old kids! I’ve never had to grieve anyone in my life. I mean, we lost friends, you and me, during the HD, but that was different. Those deaths at least had a purpose. I’ve never known anybody who just died, John, anybody who chose to let it all go and die. I don’t even know how to think about it. How to begin to think about it. It’s just…crushing.”

And he was right. Dorian felt the edges of it, this massive, sharp-edged stone of ache that he could only perceive shallowly. It meant nothing to him. He had no scope with which to make sense out of it. They called this feeling grief, he supposed, but it was alien to him. He rolled the word around in his mind: grief. It still was obscure. It had a taste like copper in his mouth. A vague emptiness in his gut that was somehow sad and pathetic at the same time. The word alone sounded like the keening of an air raid siren in his inner ear. What did it mean?

“I don’t want to be alone,” Danek whispered at last. “But I don’t want anyone else, either. Do you think that will go away, John? Will I wake up one day and put on a new body and just decide that I’m ready to move on? Find another wife, someone else to love and slowly forget about all this, about all the things Lily and I meant to one another? Will she disappear from me like a dream I’ve awakened from? I don’t think I could bear that.”

“It’ll pass,” Dorian said, not having idea what he meant. “It has to, right? People used to deal with it all the time, so it must get better.”

“But I don’t want it to pass! I’m not old. I’m not tired of living. I always thought there was more to life than just this, just my narrow window of experiences. And I assumed, in the back of my mind, you know, that one day this chapter would be over and we’d move on to something else. Lily would grow out of this New Resurrectionist phase and we’d look forward to long, long years together, getting young and new again whenever it suited us, just like my folks.”

“You can still do that.”

“Can I? Can I go on pretending that she never existed? I don’t know. I don’t know if I want to, and that seems so weak to me. I can’t help but feel weak. Grieving is so big. It’s bigger than the whole world some days, and it never ends. But that’s comfort too, isn’t it? Because as long as it lasts, and as long as she lasts, I can’t forget about her, right? I can’t betray her in that way.”

Dorian reached out and took Danek’s hand in his own. “You won’t forget. Neither of us will.”

“Do you think that’s true?”

“It has to be.” It did have to be. What was the point in dying if people didn’t remember you, didn’t keep you fresh in their consciousness every day? Because memory was data of a sort, just like a scheme of the human pleroma. It could be catalogued, broken down, filed and indexed for ready access. He knew that people still died in some places. Religious sects did it sometimes. The poor in some places, far away from here, where population control was an issue and packaging was an expensive proposition, the playground of the wealthy and politically connected, places that were already well settled and didn’t have the constant need for laborers to keep the economy humming. He’d seen newswire stories like that, knew them as shake-your-head moments. One of those things that made no sense and no one could really help, but so distant from his experience that it didn’t touch him, so he didn’t have to give it any deep thought.

He didn’t understand death.

Danek withdrew, pulled his hand away and folded it with the other in his lap. “My grandparents died. I was little, maybe four or five. I don’t remember them. My mother says they never uploaded, not once in their whole lives. The tech was too new and they were old. They didn’t trust it, and they’d gotten to that age where their bodies were breaking down and there was lots of pain. The only immortality they could imagine was more of the same, forever and ever. I can understand that. But I don’t remember them, and when I talk to mother about them, you can see her eyes get a little distant. Sometimes she stumbles trying to remember things about them. She gets the details wrong between tellings. She’s forgotten. Not totally maybe, but what about forty years from now? Or a hundred? Will she remember then, or will it just be shadows and moonlight? Will their entire existence be nothing but tattered facts and mistaken anecdotes with no real emotion behind them?”

“I don’t know.”

“Forgetting Lily like that…that would be bad. But forgetting the guilt I feel, the guilt of even thinking about going on without her, that feels evil, plain and simple.” A single tear rolled down Danek’s cheek and he rubbed it away with the back of his hand. “You don’t tell Lily about this. Not ever.”

Dorian nodded. “I promise.”

Danek lurched to his feet. He cleared his throat, spat in the sink. He made himself suddenly gruff and hard, the only way he knew of repudiating this new feeling, this grief. “It’s getting late. If you’re going to get this done, we’d better get your lady friend up and moving. Folks are just now getting to work. Strand traffic is picking up, no doubt. Should give you a bit of a head start if Raville’s men have to sort through all that noise.”

The conversation was over, and Dorian was glad for it. He didn’t like grappling with it. “Smart thinking, Sarge.”

“That’s why they call me sergeant and you corporal.” He opened the kitchen door. “I’ll go wake your girl.”

 

The beauty of the Strand was that it was ubiquitous. Anywhere there was foam (i.e. everywhere), it could be harnessed as a data access point through wireless public network providers transmitting synchronous replications of the complete Strand multiverse. Data access points were regulated via ex-connex routers which connected users (through their arrays) to the universal data pool. This backbone technological architecture, utilizing quantum based string theory mathematics, allowed system users to leap into any publicly encoded render cluster anywhere in human space, regardless of physical location.

This was all well and good, and truly was a marvel if one was prone to thinking of technological developments as so many alchemical or natural-philosophic mysteries, which Dorian was not. He was a troll, taught to think of the Strand not in terms of what it did and how keenly it did it, but how it might be made to do more and better things.

From a design perspective, there was a qualitative difference between geek sessions that were subject dependent (i.e. internal neural interactions with private foam) and sessions that were subject independent (i.e. public interaction and intercommunication within a network matrix). Subject independent sessions normally required seenop servers running on conditionally linked foam sectors with either public key or membership restricted access depending on the operational purpose of the data store. Coffee rooms and chat lounges generally had very loose member access filters. Banks and financial institutions had extremely restricted identity recognition protocols. Organizations like the Archive traditionally hovered somewhere in between or were careful amalgamations of public and restricted sectors, appropriately hedged. Being able to set up and maintain a reasonably secure network was an essential business practice. Dorian did it, more or less, every day of his professional life. There were rules, and the rules were pretty simple. The rules were applied through the mechanism of standard corporate software packages invoked at the server level that streamlined most of the grunt work, and enforced generally accepted standards for organization, design and coding across the system. The subject independent universe had been settled and mapped and ultimately legislatively codified for dozens of years.

Subject dependent programming was an unexplored territory by comparison. It was as individual as the human experience, endlessly rich and architecturally chaotic, because foam was (theoretically) infinite, indestructible and reprogrammable. That meant that you could play with your foam without breaking it. You could fashion it to your taste and index it according to your whim. You could do whatever you wanted to with your data storage space, and people frequently did. There was personal foam organizational system software available on the consumer market for the casual user, of course, but it came in a dozen specialized (and incompatible) flavors. On the Strand, seenop servers typically accounted for this individuation in the name of selling services to the broadest base of potential customers unless the server sysop had a particular system bias or just wanted to be a jerk about his brand loyalty.

Foam OS software, on the other hand, did not. It relied on Strand protocols to mediate data transfers between competing systems. Throw in the added dimension of specialized and highly technical users like Dorian who ran open source, heavily modified, meticulously concocted hybrid systems because they liked the additional security, tinkerability or just plain enjoyed thumbing their noses at big box consumer products in a fit of elitist snarkiness, and the result was an almost impossibly (IMPOSSIBLY) complex environment to integrate. In fact, most of the equipment designed for such a purpose was either enormously expensive, proprietary military technology or patently illegal.

What Dorian was proposing to do by sending Amara back into the orb’s appendant foam environment in such a way that she was operating independent of its inherent organizational structure was an exercise in seenop code theory. It was treating personal foam like a Strand object, trying to make it do things it wasn’t designed to do, without the mediation of server links to smooth over the incompatibilities.

He had no idea how effective it would be.

Given more time and resources, he would have wished for a nice secure network with delimited waveform buffers where he could have dumped his map of the quae-ha-distra, truncated it to essential logic clusters and set up a parallel replica datascape that he and Amara could have surfed vicariously at will. Similarly, if there had been a way to safely compile and run it in his own foam where he had the tools to subject the code to external controls, he would have preferred even to do that, but there wasn’t–not without much more time and analysis than he had at his disposal. The orb and the foam it represented was simply too vast. In the end, he had settled for doing what he could, which was excavating a rough channel between his personal foam, Amara’s and the orb in a clumsy three-way data share that made up in cumbersome inefficiency what it lacked in useful functionality. Channel was almost certainly not an accurate description. It was more akin to a string and tin can telephone.

He did not tell Amara any of this as he sat down across the table from her in Danek and Lily’s merrily pastel kitchen nook. It was dangerous, but if she was determined to go ahead with it, he was equally determined to put a positive face on it. Let her believe there really was a wizard behind the curtain instead of a posed scarecrow stuck together with bubble gum and bailing wire.

He said, “If you need anything, if you get lost, if something goes wrong, you can contact me. I’ve loaded a special p2p app that will become available to you as soon as you hit the Strand so we can talk. I’ll be monitoring your progress in my own session and feeding you relevant information as it comes up.” As well as doing his best to obfuscate their presence and deal with hostile ip traces “You’ve got some basic maps and some rendered overlays that should help you navigate the orb’s environment more efficiently than you were able to the last time. Your objective is to get in, access the artifact and get out again. It’s that simple, okay?”

She nodded nervously. “I’ll hear your voice?”

“That’s the way it’s supposed to work, yes. But that’s not an excuse to dawdle. In and out as fast as you can.”

“Because the people Raville sent after us will track my ip.”

“Right.”

“What am I supposed to do? Do I–do I just fall into the orb like I did last time?”

Dorian shook his head violently. “No. I want you to log into one of the public access points. Do you know Hermes Square in Southrange?”

“Just outside the arrivals desk at the Depot?”

“Exactly. There’s a bank of public data directory kiosks there, past the fountain and just up from a pub called Berman’s. Scan the directory for j0n d33 919. That’s an encrypted entry, but you shouldn’t have any problem locating it. I’ve loaded the key into your cache.” This was a popular jack method for trading exploits across public networks. The public data kiosks all over the Strand were filthy with specially encrypted and untraceable jack infoshares invisible to the casual observer. “That’s your bounce point into an environment I’ve set up inside my personal foam. It will load some passive apps into your array that will give you some protection inside the other space.”

“Those will keep me safe?” she asked.

“No. There are too many variables for us to imagine that I’ve accounted for everything. I’m working from a pre-compiled text map, and while that helps, it isn’t the same as knowing the functional architecture. That means that some of the code may not work properly. That’s why I’m encouraging you to be quick. The apps should be stable, but I can’t guarantee they’ll work as effectively as they’re supposed to.”

Amara lifted her chin. “If I get into trouble, will you be able to help me?”

“I won’t be able to come to you, not like we were meeting on a Strand network, if that’s what you mean. I’m pushing the envelope of seenop capabilities just to append our independent foam sessions together. When Raville passed you the orb, it delivered a mechanism that allowed you to access private foam and extract core environmental elements in a way that I don’t fully understand. I can’t follow you there. The comm channel that will open when you hit my foam is set up to relay real time data back to me, which my compilers will render as useful geek data. It should keep us synchronized, but if traffic on the Strand is heavy or if the orb has some sort of signal filtration buffers, I may run a couple of seconds behind you, so keep that in mind.”

“When I get there and find this artifact, what do I do with it?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. But I’m hoping that it should be obvious in context.”

“You don’t actually know?” She looked suddenly alarmed.

“So you’ll be careful.”

“John, what if I can’t get out again once I’m inside?”

“That won’t happen.” He squeezed her knee. Her skin was cool, almost cold. “You’ll have some code that will keep the doors open behind you. Special super mojo stuff I wrote last night, just for you. Just keep an eye on your map and follow the path I’ve set out for you.”

“Okay.” She took a deep breath. “I’m a little scared.”

“I’d be worried if you weren’t.”

“I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“We’ll figure it out together.”

“I don’t think you understand. I wasn’t able to get out the last time. Not only could I not find my way, part of me didn’t want to. It was like a dream. A good dream and a bad dream at the same time.” She looked away, suddenly self-conscious. “What if that happens again?”

“It won’t,” he assured her. “I’ll be right over your shoulder every step of the way. You start getting wonky on me, I’ll pull you out myself.”

Amara glanced curiously at him. “It’s funny to hear you say that. The last time, I thought I felt. . .it was like you were there with me, and you grasped my hand, and the next thing I knew I was waking up in our office back at the Archive. Just suddenly, I wasn’t alone and lost anymore. It didn’t seem like I did anything. Isn’t that strange?”

There was that feeling again, like someone had kicked him in the gut. “You’ll be fine. I’ll be right on the other end of the channel.”

“That already feels like a long way off.” She shook her head. “I know I’m being irrational. This was all my idea. Why should I be the one who’s so frightened now?”

“If it helps at all, I’m terrified almost out of my mind too. So you’re not alone.”

“It doesn’t help.”

“Sorry.” He squeezed her knee again, but he wasn’t sure if it was to comfort her or himself. “Shall we?”

“You first.”

“On three?”

“Okay.”

“One, two, thr–” Dorian took a deep breath and bounced.

 

He scrambled through the security protocols and leapt into his deep foam control room. The emergency lights had switched from pale yellow to throbbing red pulses out in the corridor, and an alarm blatted continuously at ear-piercing volume. Inside, output screens had sprung to life and were hectically scrolling lines of jagged text, warning him of impending trace locks. His passive defense scripts were tossing out great handfuls of binary chaff as trace programs from all over the Strand converged on his ip.

It wasn’t any less than he had expected. The good news was that at least there was no longer any doubt about their circumstances. Dorian knew he was being hunted.

He ran his eyes over the essential systems. All the boards were still green, which was good, even the new one he had installed via the Korski, a whole rack of fresh toggles and displays that tracked the signal coming in from Amara’s Strand signature via the comm tunnel he had built. That meant she had flipped with him. He noticed that the new rack was default black matte and wrinkled his nose. Everything else in the room was standard military gray. The new module stood out like an exotic plinth of alien design.

He’d forgotten to code the environmental integration theme. Not a big deal, not a functionality thing, but still clumsy. Clumsy was another word for careless. Dorian chewed his lower lip and throttled the urge to panic.

He flipped a switch and the blare of the alarm squawked off with a final plaintive yelp. On another rack in the back corner of the room, a pair of red idiot lights clicked on in the klaxon’s place. At least they didn’t flash. Flashing might have tipped him over the edge into full on neurosis.

They were now officially on the clock.

Dorian retrieved the headset from on top of the new display rack and slipped the earpiece into his ear, then adjusted the voice pickup so he would be speaking directly into the microphone.

“Test, test.”

A burst of static crackled in response. “–lo?”

“Amara, can you hear me?”

“John?” The signal was faint and Dorian looked about for a knob to control the volume, but there wasn’t one. “Are you there, John? I can hardly hear you. There’s…lots…static.”

“It should clear up as you get away from the public networks,” he said. Either that, or the signal would vanish completely, but he wasn’t going to say so to her. “Where are you?”

“Hermes Sq…, like you said. I’m almost to the…” More static. It obliterated a whole string of words. “…a bunch of people here. I can’t tell if any of them are…for me. You…Ryoku, didn’t you?”

“I changed your avatar, yes,” he guessed. “You said yourself that everyone knew the old one. I didn’t want to run the chance that one of your friends might recognize you and call attention to it. This avatar is tied to the ip I’m masking yours with. Just think of it as a loaner.”

“There aren’t…arms!”

Dorian grimaced guiltily. He probably should have given her a bit to come to terms with life as a baby blue balloon animal, but it couldn’t be helped now. Conscious of the seconds they were burning, he forced himself to be patient with her. “You’ve got arms. You just have to concentrate to access them. You may have to push on things a little harder than normal because this render is a little squishier than Ryoku, I’m afraid. But you can float if you get caught up in traffic. That’s a decent tradeoff, right?”

One of the code boxes on the other side of the control room spat a buzz at him, a grouchy sound like the cycle timer on a washing machine. Dorian stepped over to the nearest keypad and executed his own ip mask jump. The red lights in the corner of the room flashed green as the trace programs lost their fix on him, but only for nine seconds before clicking back over to red. That was marginally quicker than he had expected, but not something to worry over yet. Whoever was running the trace scenario for Raville’s team didn’t appear to be a complete slouch.

Bummer for the home team.

With a few more key taps, he launched an automated script that would flash him through his whole pool of ip masks at fifteen second intervals. He’d throw some non-standard spoof algorithms at them later, when they started to get comfortable with his switch-mask pattern. He hoped that would slow them down, but he didn’t want to lose the tracers completely. He had loaded Amara into a specialized ip on login to keep the pursuit off of her and attract it to himself and his stable of elusive and/or hostile trollware. If they lost him, they’d devote their full attention to Amara, and even with all the preparations he’d made for her, he knew his hastily constructed facades wouldn’t hold up under intense scrutiny. She wouldn’t be safe until she had passed through the filtered sector of his foam where he’d set up her cache load and bounced through to the uncharted territory of the orb’s infospace. Dorian’s job in the meantime was to lead their pursuers on a merry phantom chase up and down the Strand.

At the moment, her rack still displayed five by five, green across the board, but he did not expect that to last for long.

“Progress report?”

“Scrolling. There are a lot of entries in this directory.”

“Look near the bottom. They’re indexed by timestamp.”

“…got it.”

His trace indicator lights were now flipping from green to red after three seconds: the time it took for Raville’s guns to recognize the new ip and begin parsing its identity. They were closing in. Dorian adjusted his masking interval to ten second leaps—long enough for them to keep him fixed, but not so long that they could start to dig into his fixed sub-systems–and tried a new switch protocol. The jockey riding him most definitely was not an idiot. Dorian would chew up his storage of dummy ips in no time at this rate.

“Bounce, Amara.”

“I can’t get the coordinates to display. It’s hard without fingers.”

An alarm announced a sudden jump in the mask detection pattern. Dorian consulted the display with a frown. Apparently the tech running the tracers liked the new protocol better than the old one. The trace breakpoint was now at five seconds and getting briefer. He tried to remember how many ips he had in his pool, but couldn’t imagine it was many more than a hundred. If they nailed him down to one, they could tie it to his array, and once they deciphered his reg edits, they could tie him to Danek and Lily’s ex-connex, and then the game was over.

The only good news was that the monitor in front of him was telling him that he was deeply into the Galai Jarosz subnet ips. That network was halfway across the galaxy. If they caught him there, they’d have to get special permission from the Trithemius Orbis Consul to cross network jurisdictions to peel through the ip mask and obtain his array’s sig profile. That three or four minutes could prove as useful as a lifetime when every second counted. Still, beads of sweat collected on his lip.

Calm circles, he thought. Happy circles.

“Amara,” he said stiffly.

“I’m trying!”

Without warning and with alarming speed, first one light, then another, and then a third blinked over from green to red on Amara’s panel. They’d found her, and were running her automated mask bounces through some sort of MAIM parser by the looks of it. Dorian’s stomach lurched. That was heavy duty processing and analysis equipment. Military grade stuff. In his universe, the only thing worse than trying to jack military ice was being forced to evade military icebreakers.

He experienced a sharp, consuming instinct to curl himself up into a fetal ball. It was a good thing he hadn’t counted on the full ten minutes.

“Slow down,” he said into the mouthpiece. “Just concentrate and punch the directory entry. We’re doing just fine. There’s no reason to panic.”

Four lights. Five. He’d given Amara the best masks, ones he’d never used before. Masks he’d reserved for more economic terrorism against Hometown Mart, in fact, and meticulously built from the ground up into plausible simulacra of actual Strand identities. But they were onto her now and chewing up months–in some cases, years–of steady, painstaking labor. And it was only the beginning.

“Okay. I’m in.” The relief in Amara’s voice was palpable. “I’m loading the foam coordinates key now.”

Seven, eight masks down. He’d given her ten. “Bounce.”

“On it.”

The ninth light flickered red.

He should have just published the scripts in the directory. Should have, but he’d told himself that was public space, and scripts that heavy left an indelible print on the network for any watchful sysop to find. They would have been purged long before Amara was there to find them. Reconfiguring a sector of his own foam had really been the only choice. Right?

The whole panel went dead. Dorian bit his lip, afraid to breathe.

And with a snap of virtual electrodes, the panel immediately above Amara’s on the rack sprang to life and began to chatter to itself as new systems came on-line. Dorian blew out an explosive breath. Amara was inside his foam. With any luck, the quick lockdown scripts attached to the ip mask panel had dropped a small planet’s worth of viral agents on the trace jockey and his confounded MAIM parser. It would take even a genius jack a couple of days to extricate himself from that barrage of malware. Theoretically, of course.

Amara spoke in his ear, frightened. “John? Where am I?”

Dorian switched to a terminal nearer the rack where he could more closely monitor her progress and pulled up a chair. “Hold on. I’m loading your data now. Stay out of your cache files.”

“I don’t even know where my cache files are.” He could hear the ire in her voice. At least the signal was clearing up. “It’s dark in here.”

Dorian rattled off a series of commands, hauling chunks of code out of the recesses of his foam and shunting them off toward Amara’s sector. “Sorry. I didn’t have time to flesh out that environment. It’s probably a mess.”

“What are you doing?”

“Loading scripts. Can you see them?”

Silence. Then, “Ooh, shiny things.”

Behind him, a new alarm went off. Dorian typed faster. This would be the one telling him that he’d hit the bottom ten percent of his ip mask pool.

“What’s that sound in the background?” Amara asked.

“It’s nothing. Do you see the scripts?”

“The shiny things?”

“Yes. Pick them up and put them in your pocket.”

“I don’t have any pockets.”

He’d forgotten there were no lights. “You’re in my foam, not on a public Strand network, so you should be back in your default avatar. You should have pockets. And arms.”

A few seconds passed. Dorian listened to himself breathe and tried to keep his hands from shaking. “I’ve got them. What now?”

Fresh alarms. These were impossible to ignore, as arresting as air raid sirens. “Bounce. Into the Raville’s foam. Now.”

“Where will you be?”

“I’ll be right behind you. Give me a few seconds.”

Dorian spun in his chair in time to see the entire rack of Amara’s panels go blank. She was out of his foam, completely off the known Strand as far as he could tell. Around him, all the remaining panels were blinking in garish carnival hues and screaming with proximity alerts. Warning lights and peril sensors he’d forgotten existed glared at him with hard red eyes from all directions. It was time to go.

Dorian leapt up and dashed for the door. As he wrenched it open, he imagined he heard the pounding of jackboots down the corridor outside. That was crazy, of course. Not that it altered his perception. He still heard them, even if it was just the panicked thump of his virtual blood in his fake ears.

On the floor beside the door sat a tamper proof case marked with large stenciled letters that read: DO NOT TOUCH. EVER. SERIOUSLY, NOT EVER. Dorian bent, opened it and withdrew the render of an EMP grenade. Electromagnetic pulse weapon (or the code manifestation thereof). The script behind it was a massively evil core wipe and decompile troll. The coder’s equivalent of a secret agent’s suicide capsule.

He spared one last look at his lovely control room, lit up like Christmas, howling like the Foundation Day parade, then pulled the pin the EMP bomb. He rolled it across the floor and sealed the door behind him.

Dorian didn’t even hear the low, rumbling whump that shattered the heart and soul of his personal foam environment. He had already bounced…

 

…into a new space. An old space, one he hadn’t touched in years. It was a dead man’s foam. It felt like it, too. The corridors were pale, faintly luminescent, and chilly as autumn gravestones. They wove in inefficient, but artful helixes through soft-textured spaces that felt springy underfoot and led through randomly placed alcoves giddy with light and high, vaulted ceilings like the naves of vestal cathedrals. Ever onward, ever downward.

Ray Morrical, the dead man, had always been about style rather than substance. Form instead of function. He was the wizard who fashioned dreams out of starshine and moonbeam and left the mechanical work of animating zombies and technographing monsters to trollish drones like Dorian. Amara would have liked him. He was always becoming something, but never actually getting anywhere.

The Marines had detected young Ray’s graphical talent early on and shunted him off into coding school with Dorian, where he learned to build the sorts of environments Dorian’s team was trained to destroy. If he’d been any good at it, they probably would have never hit it off. The problem with Ray Morrical was that he had a brilliant, ponderous and detailed imagination. He thought in chunks of data, fully formed blocks of spiraling integrals that he treated as sui generis ideal proto-forms. He couldn’t break them down into the sort of rough ashlars that could actually be used to construct things. Of course, even if he’d been able to, he had coded with all the grace of a man whose hands were made of concrete.

Dorian, on the other hand, had been the Whipping Boy, what the grunts called the Technical Lead Private, which was, in turn, what the Marines called the reward for demonstrating leadership potential. What it meant was that it was Dorian’s sworn duty to make certain that every soldier in his Program Stack qualified in their assigned job category, even if they had been grossly misassigned. Ray Morrical had indeed been grossly misassigned. He should have been running a complex intel mod or designing patriotic banners or even swabbing potato decks, frankly. Coding was the last thing they should have dumped on him, especially coding that tried to wed his skilled architectural vision with block by block system design.

The result was that Dorian had spent thousands of hours bailing Ray out of trouble, and Ray had spent those same thousands of hours keeping him company while he did it. They had nothing in common except the requirement that Ray passed his exams and that Dorian made sure it happened. Somehow, that had been enough. By the time Dorian was plowing his way through the uppermost tier of TechTac curriculum and beginning to experiment with extra-curricular social disruption jacks, Ray had been looking over his shoulder long enough to become a firm philosophical convert to crypto-anarchism. He had no skills to implement his faith, but he believed in the principles. He started building environmental simulacra riddled with subterranean catacombs, hollow Trojan temples of indefinite and exploitable space for others to fill in behind him. One of those others (wink, nod) was supposed to have been Dorian.

As with most acolyte crypto-terrorists, extremist pacifism and a general distrust of corporate social systems followed, and the Marines being the Marines, they responded to Ray’s philosophical balking by transferring him to the front lines just as the HD exploded. He was dead inside two weeks, though Dorian had never heard how it happened. The military tagged his package as Unrecoverable From Backup. Stone dead, in other words. It might even have been true.

The bottom line was that all of Dorian’s work with Ray Morrical had not been entirely in vain. Somehow, Ray had in his last days acquired a frighteningly illicit wavehaven rip protocol designed to anonymously reconfigure the definition core of a quantum foam block. These little apps were popular with politicians and other public figures who were under frequent assault from fanspam, wannabe jacks and organized crime cyber-muscle, and even more popular with crypto-terrorists and government stealth incursion agents who had a need to vanish from the public consciousness. Better than being anonymous, they made you non-existent on the Strand. Bodiless wanderers.

What he had intended for this rip, Dorian didn’t know, but at what he could only guess was the moment of Ray Morrical’s death, his array had transmitted an encrypted Strand data beam to Dorian’s p2p interface that consisted mostly of stream after stream of Vorman-perl key logic.

What text there was, was brief and read simply: Fight the Power!

And Dorian had found himself in possession of an unassigned, unlisted, untraceable foam block.

Until now, he’d never used it for anything but emergency backup and critical systems storage. He had a legitimate job, made a decent living, had no interest in spending the duration of his life (natural and un) in federal prison. He didn’t need it, after all. He didn’t even want it. One couldn’t build much of a jack rep from anonymous foam.

But he’d also never thrown it away, either. Just in case.

He needed it now. He’d known he would from the moment Amara had determined to go after the quae-ha-distra again. And now, as then, he tried not to think about the consequences of this plan, of destroying his life.

Instead, Dorian ran, plunging with each virtual step ever deeper into the alien foam.

The primary control chamber Ray had designed for his foam was as aggressively sleek and spartanly styled as the ceremonial bridge of a flagship. There was nothing utilitarian about it. The object access panels were all quietly recessed beneath elegant univisual panels, invisible unless you stood directly above them. The data displays were voice activated, the threat sirens aurally pleasant pings. There were no keypads, no manual interfaces. It was all about the architecture. There were sloping columns of slender white marble and wandering Escher stairwells that led nowhere except to increasingly sublime vantage points. It was ludicrous. Dorian had always suspected that if he followed some occult pattern of stair and vista, he would understand a great cosmic mystery that Ray Morrical had captured in the moments before his death and hewn into indelible binary stone here. But he’d never found the time. He wasn’t interested in cosmic mysteries.

He was much more interested in finding a seat from which he could use the control chamber’s space efficiently. The only chair Ray had designed was a sprawling leather monstrosity in the center of the room, an austere depression carved into the hump of a functionless ivory rib that poked out of the floor like the back of a great, white whale.

It would have been appalling for a troll like Dorian, this nightmarish architectural form that was impossible to navigate usefully, if he had come upon it cold. But he had added his own touches over the years. He had plugged begrimed and vaguely fungal banks of simulated server racks in one corner, like a patch of midnight mushrooms, to synchronize data uploads between his personal foam and Ray’s. Extra chairs had been rolled against the walls at various advantageous points. He had posted signs to remind him where some of the core maintenance panels were hidden. Now there was a new freestanding monolithic rack planted in front of the Captain’s Chair (as Dorian thought of the ivory hump), the functional replica of the one he had built to monitor Amara in his old foam.

He was relieved to see that the new addition was up and running. Dorian fell back into the chair and stared at it for a moment, letting anxiety wash out of him. The comm script simulating his headset had been left behind when he bounced, so he retrieved a new one from the rack and fitted it into his ear.

Green lights across the board informed him that the session append had transferred as well.

He hoped.

Dorian swallowed hard. He had no idea what he would find here, on the other side of the world, where everything he had ever known about the Strand and code and simulated environments might not help them. He aimed at a vocal pattern somewhere in the vicinity of calm, and spoke into his headset. “Are you still with me, Amara?”

The only sound that reached his ears was the wail of a mighty, rushing wind.

<– Chapter 10 / Chapter 12 –>