Agnosis – Ch. 2
It was worse than he had thought–an absolute worst case scenario by all indications.
With the code shell decompiled, he was finally able to nail down the spider’s quantum log signature and make reasonable guesses about the way it had gone about its business. Its modus operandi appeared to have been a standard quick-couple and scan of incoming bits, then the rapid application of some seriously sophisticated pattern recognition algorithms, followed by a catchall keyword search-match, all perpetrated across a variety of media platforms. Most of the original source plugs and codecs were grievously outmoded–.swfs, .cags, .mngs–but there was evidence that adaptive cognition strands had been engineered in the R-ASP using rudimentary logic trees that allowed for cross-platform extrapolation. The logs indicated it had stuttered a bit while making the initial evolutionary leaps, but eventually it had adapted from text and character signifiers to corneal-cochlear-neural object phenomenalism, which had been barely an infant field of study when Gancet and Vickers Standard were pushing the far boundaries of their models.
The jack who had written the spider had predicted CCNP’s (seenop, the mediative language of geek) emergence as the dominant coding convention by at least a decade. Such prophetic thinking explained how the spider had navigated the network’s security protocols undetected for so long. By the time the servers had been upgraded from text based applications to phenomenal object drivers, the spider had already entrenched itself into the network’s core and woven its invisible skeins. It wrote itself into the subsequent upgrades as an atypical prediagnostic superpacket tasked with outsourcing particular binary stings into the same spontaneously generated quantum foam the viral scanners used to quarantine suspicious data blocks. By the time the probability field where the quarantined data was being processed collapsed, the spider had already routed its own data into a warren of transfer bubbles preselected to collapse into patterns that matched the original binary packets. These bubbles transformed into discrete focal literals that, in effect, precisely replicated the encoding of the original file without ever touching it in its post-transfer, assembled state.
It was, to be blunt, a magnificent bait-and-switch. The servers assumed that the small bit loss that occurred between transmission and viral certification were infected blocks shunted off into the metaverse.
But the real brilliance of the design was that data was never actually lost in the process. Information theory’s fundamental principles of redundant signal transmission meant that the packets which went missing were always recovered. Signal accounted for the “skips” in the datastream and rebuilt itself. Which meant that no one ever went looking for documents that didn’t exist, so no one caught on.
Dorian could only wish his own cracks were so elegant. A crack that took what it wanted but left it at the same time. Not a copy of the thing, but the thing itself. Not a duplicate, but two originals nonetheless.
The spider had been everywhere. It had drunk deep from the input spew from the very beginning, like a great yawning cat hiding in a screen of reeds about the local watering hole. The imperfectly collapsed foam shards in the error log files–flags of its early transmogrification from text eater to phenomenalist omnivore–popped up in files and quantum lockers that ranged the length and breadth of the network, not a few of which dated back thirty years or more. How long it had been extracting documents before that was anyone’s guess.
He uncovered its temporary weigh stations: system files corrupted to stack unrecognized shadow bits, rider envelopes in the registry, larger opportunistic packets that attached themselves to full blown user applications. Whenever and wherever an object had been created, the spider had already been there weaving a sack for the eggs it expected to lay there one day. The spider was a virus that had penetrated the system so deeply and so long ago that it had become integral to the architecture. Not a parasite that lived off its host, but a host that existed for the sole purpose of quickening its parasite.
Dorian could think of maybe fifty jacks in the business who could have executed such a clever, complex and bitchingly egregious penetration as this one. Forty of them were younger than he was, younger than the script itself. The other ten had taken positions in the defense industry and wouldn’t have bothered with something as relatively low value as the Archive in the first place.
Not that the Archive was immune to assaults by rogue or hxless jacks. Dorian spent his days repelling the clumsy incursions of Illuminati nutcases, Templar fetishists and right wing script kiddies who had convinced themselves that the Archive was the Vatican’s Secret Library Annex and ultimate repository of documentary proof for such blockbuster conspiratorial truths as the clandestine bloodline of Jesus, the Gates Foundation-Rothschild connection and the alien origins of Egyptian mystery cults. Most of them never got past the first CAS buffer. Every once in a while, a really clever amateur jack would take a hint from the successful crack of the Trinitarian Banking Trust and launch an old fashioned, ungeeked code line assault, but Dorian’s homegrown scripts were inevitably more than a match for their n00b ingenuity.
Still, it was a reputation business, and when a kid showed talent, people like Dorian kept tabs on them–usually with recursive viral agents that backtracked the break in and wedged themselves into the jack’s datacore. It helped the kid build a hx; gave him some whuffie to spend. In some circumstances, the benign tracking flags allowed more experienced hands to pull him out of the fire if he botched a big score. It worked until the emerging jack developed the tool set to roust the intruders from his system without crashing it, at which point he (or she) stopped being a kid and was generally recognized as pro competition. Call it altruism, call it tough love mentoring, call it industry self-regulation; Dorian called it keeping your enemy closer.
Bottom line was that Dorian knew everyone, at least by reputation, who could have written the spider. He knew their methods, their conventions, their signature tricks.
This was someone else, an ancient, a Grand Alchemist with one last crimson tincture baking in the furnace.
It gave him a little thrill of excitement, to be honest. Exigo a me non ut optimis par sim sed melior. The currency of the culture was contributions to the knowledge base. For most of the talent, the ascent to legend in the burgeoning community of freelance jacks came by the cunning they displayed in their successful exploits (or less often, in the style which they manifested in their colossal failures). Others made rep by stopping them, by figuring out how to foil the designs of the best. Thwarting a jack of this apparent magnitude could transform Dorian’s hx profile from that of merely an ultra-competent corporate drone to head-turning Dungeon Master.
So he dug deeper. He traced the connections between the nodes and wormholes he had previously discovered and looked for screens which he might have missed, camouflaged pathways that dug deeper or ranged father along the network than he had explored before. He plugged sub-architectural chutes the spider had used to operate behind the scenes. He wrote filler scripts to augment the system’s defenses based on what he had learned from the spider’s successes. He seeded the datascape with tracers and leeches that would attach themselves to future data access requests, then ported the logs into a synthesis engine that would evaluate and tag suspicious requests for future review. Through it all, he looked for bounce points–hidden ports the spider could have used to transmit its data outside the Archive’s network.
Because that was the point, really. The spider was a data scavenger. Its sole reason for being was to gather pre-defined sets of raw information and shunt them off the Archive’s net and into the jack’s remote datacore for storage, analysis or eventual sale.
Except he couldn’t find a bounce, which was a bit disappointing. Such a disturbing and elegant undergrowth of nodes and storage fields and hidden bit pockets, but no equally complex cross-network shuttling system presented a startling inconsistency. He spent a couple of hours scouring all around the dead port the spider had used as its base of operations, then another hour on system history documentation, trying to trace the port’s datascape ip through a progression of hardware upgrades, system patches and assorted recompilations. There was nothing. If the port had ever been active, or had ever pointed anywhere other than interarchitecturally, that fact hadn’t ever been written down.
Of course, the spider was old, and inter-platform hardware compatibility was more difficult to pre-engineer than anticipating the evolution of coding conventions (as the jack had done with seenop). It could be that all the bounce points had long ago been shut down by hardware migrations. Or that the Alchemist had gathered the dox he wanted and simply sealed the ports behind him when he was done, leaving the spider an orphan.
But Dorian didn’t think so. One simply didn’t construct such an elaborate and clandestine mining operation to abandon it after short term gains. Too much overhead. Somebody had thought long and hard writing that spider, and they’d meant it to last a long time.
And there was also the fact that hitting up the Archive had been a prime jack. No one walked away from a score of this caliber without documenting it. If no one knew what you had done, it might as well not have happened at all. That was why all the pro coders left behind a rep cookie. It was like mailing an old jilted lover an invitation to your upcoming wedding; it was basic courtesy. Intrusion for the sake of intrusion alone was the work of an amateur. The spider was not an amateur script. It was professional, time consuming, labor intensive. The jack who owned it would have dropped a cookie if he’d been forced to abandon it. One way or another, he would have made certain that Dorian got it, and that everyone else in the community got it as well.
Which meant that Dorian had missed it. (Pfft.)
Or that old age or something otherwise lethal had befallen the jack himself. (More likely.)
Or, even worse, that he still had a bounce, still was mining data, and was quietly thumbing his nose at all of Dorian’s best efforts. (Ugh.)
So he went back to the text and buried himself in a line by line dissection of the spider and its attendant sub-scripts. The internal activity log was time-stamp deleted every twelve hours, which was only a surprise in that the log existed at all. Most spiders were compiled without them so their activities couldn’t be traced and reconstructed if they were discovered. There wasn’t a sniff in the logic tree of dynamic rep cookie executables, and no references to phantom blocks in the outsource logic. The keysearch list was several thousand lines long, and even with his most sophisticated pattern recognition applications, Dorian didn’t find anything that looked like a gotcha message.
No bounce points. No rep cookies. It was almost as if the spider had spontaneously self-generated from random bit accretion–the proverbial million typewriting monkeys over a million years accidentally reproducing Othello.
And that was perhaps most disturbing of all.
Because if the spider wasn’t bouncing data, it wasn’t a proper crack at all. The enemy wasn’t outside, but on the architecture itself.
It meant the spider was an inside job.
Dorian sat back from his terminal and scrubbed at his eyes with his palms. His corneal implants itched after staring at the screen for too many hours. His coffee had long since gone cold, but he sipped at it anyway. He was long overdue for some sleep.
There was a flashing icon in the corner of his screen. The ETL tool had finished ghosting the contents of the dead node and had compiled an index for his review. Sighing, he brought up the tab and checked the diagnostics. The port’s contents weighed in at something over eight hundred terabytes of data. Not massive, he thought at first, until he started scrolling through the list of files. The most recent ones were fat. Geeks and triDvid. Some audio clips in the gigabyte range. But there were thousands (and thousands and thousands, from the look of it) of old fashioned raw text files. Most of these were something considerably less than a thousand bytes. The date stamps in some cases reached back forty years.
Which was good because Dorian hadn’t been around that long and couldn’t be held responsible for the original incursion. Though he had been around for five years, which should have been plenty long enough to have found the spider before now. Assuming he decided to tell anyone that is, which was looking less and less like a good idea the more he learned.
Dorian continued down the list of recovered files. The file names were ambiguous, following an internal, sequential renaming convention organized by theme. Entropy0001. Signal0004. Raville0185. He was going to have to parse them individually, write something to subject them to context analysis. Just thinking about it gave him a headache.
Chewing his lip, he kicked back from his desk and rolled his chair over to the partition which separated his cubicle from the neighboring one. He peered over the top edge at Amara. She sat at her own desk amid piles of warped bound journals and loose sheafs of age worn paper stock. At the moment, she was hunched over a delicate leather bound diary which lay open in her hands. She scanned a page, turned to the next, scanned again, as though reading.
“Hey, can I ask you a question?” he asked.
She didn’t respond at first, and Dorian wondered if she’d heard him, but after two or three pages, she sat back and sighed.
“Yes?”
“Engrossing work?”
She shook her head. “I have no idea. I don’t read German.”
Amara spent her days reading in and out of geek, comparing the results, and uploading the corneal signal onto the network.
“Frau Stein is going into zap sometime midweek and has requested a complete storage refresh,” she explained. “It’s a rush job. The lady fancies herself an historian. Did you want something?”
“You’re pretty knowledgeable about the data in the archives, right?”
“I suppose. To the extent that anyone can be, Dorian. There are billions of files.”
“But you get around,” he said, then added quickly, “on the network, I mean. You’ve been inside hundreds, maybe thousands, of client lockers.”
She thought about for a moment. “Well, probably not to the extent that you have. I don’t have your access to the architecture.”
“No, that’s different. I can see all the files, sure. I know how they’re organized and how to optimize the data flow, but I work on a macro level, with categories of files rather than individual client packets. I really don’t know the data.”
“Okay, I see what you’re saying. What did you want to ask me?”
“Based on your experience with the data, if you were going to steal something from one of the archives, what would it be?”
“I don’t think that’s a very polite question.”
“I’m serious. It has to do with this problem I’m working on.”
“It would have to be something small,” she said after a time. “Something that wouldn’t be easily missed.”
Dorian waved her off. “Forget that. Let’s assume that the size of the file is irrelevant. You’ve worked out a mechanism for moving files of any size off the network without tipping off security. What would you go after?”
“Thelonious Beck.” She didn’t even miss a beat. “Oh yeah, it would be Beck.”
“The rock star?”
“Section 14, Sector 121, Locker 9.” She winked at him. “I loaded some of his college poetry about six months ago. Beautiful, lascivious, outrageous stuff. Very sexy. He was prepping for a zap to New Holyoke. That’s where they’re recording his new gig. He transmitted a core update right before he left. Mmm, a complete wet package backup, just to be safe. He was so fresh in the locker, you could almost smell his sweat.”
“You would steal a rock star?”
“Sure. Sanitize it, upload it into my personal cache. Can you imagine?”
“No. All right, let’s not imagine. Stick with me here.” Dorian rubbed his eyes again, trying to clear his thoughts. “This is the complete Masonic Archive and Infocache, purported to be the largest, most secure, most important library of arcana in the entire universe, and you’re going to go after a rock star rather than, say, the truth behind the Whiston Murders or the Archae Stoddard Conspiracy?”
Amara rolled her eyes. “What for? Who cares about a bunch of people who have been dead for a hundred and fifty years? I think you’ve been playing secret security agent for too long, John. Most people don’t care about what dox might or might not be in our lockers. They’re much more into things that are relevant to them, things that they think we’re hiding that would benefit the world. Did you know that word on the Strand is that we’ve got a copy of Federico Franzetti’s death package? Some people believe that we’ve buried it in cold storage and won’t release it to his family because it proves definitively that Heaven and Hell are just myths and the Roman Catholic church is paying us to suppress it. That’s what people are interested in. They want something they can experience, something meaningful.”
“Like Thelonious Beck?”
“Oh, we’d be happy for a long time, his package and I.”
“Do we really have Franzetti’s death upload?”
Amara curled her lip in derision. “The techs pulled the plug on him when he went into cardiac arrest. Such a shame. For all the fuss, he was a very uninteresting man.”
He had no idea if she was being serious. She was as inscrutable as a balloon animal.
“How many other celebrities do we have in lockers?”
“Oh, thousands at least. Hundreds of thousands if you count the politicians. Nelson James is here. Ryan Stevenson, the soccer player. That poet Penberthy. The former commissioner of baseball…Simon something. Everyone who had a Masonic connection. Some of their wives.”
Boom.
“What about scientists?”
“Sure.”
“Like who?”
“Colm Freeny, for one. The guy who found the cure for cortical flash. Christopher Taute, the astrobiologist.”
“What about Michael Raville? Is he here?”
“The father of zap? Sort of.”
“How can he only be sort of here?” His pulse suddenly thundered in his ears. “He’s either here or he’s not.”
Unless portions of his package had been raided. Stolen. Otherwise corrupted.
“There’s an old copy of him down on the lower levels. I mean really old, from back in the days when they were still working out the details of upload theory. It’s a complete waste, they tell me. He’d had none of his genetic predisps purged, and there were still skips in the signal because the technology was so unrefined It’s a really rough cut, not something he ever wanted to build on, but one of the science foundations bequeathed it to the Archive as a historical treasure. Because it was one of the first, I guess, and because of who he is.”
Dorian’s hands wanted to shake; they always did when he got too excited. He gripped the top of the cubicle wall to steady them. “About how long ago was that, do you think?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Forty years or so.”
Of course.
“Are you going to tell me why this is so important?” she asked.
“It’s Raville,” he said, and dropped into geek.
He located himself in the Archive’s Library System, a useful office render for locating files quickly. The space presented as a classic metropolitan library with large clear windows, sound absorptive carpets and row upon row of carefully organized card catalogue drawers. They were the old fashioned kind, brief descriptions and quantum addresses typewritten on yellowed index cards. The whole place smelled of dust and quietly decaying paper. Late afternoon sunlight perpetually slanted through the window glass, warm and vivid with dancing, insectile motes.
He went to the ‘R’ stack, found the right drawer and began picking through the cards.
Ryoku appeared beside him. “You’re very rude, Mr. Dorian.”
He kept thumbing. “I’m sorry, Amara. I just…I needed to find something out.”
And there it was. Raville, Michael. Complete Cortical Package Upload (damaged, historical). Rel. North American States Research and Defense Agency Laboratories, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Great Appalachian Clave. NOT FOR PUBLIC RELEASE EVEN ON DEATH. Big letters, red felt pen, in case he had been tempted to miss it. Below that were file sizes, ip coordinates, schema details.
And the acquisition date: 19-May-2385
“The same date,” he said, dull with shock. “Forty-two years ago, almost to the day.”
“The same date as what, John?”
With difficulty, he tore his eyes away from the card and looked at her. “The same date the spider began mining our network. Raville brought it in with him.”
She blinked her impossibly large eyes. “I don’t understand.”
“The spider has been stealing data from the network for more than forty years. What I couldn’t figure out was why. See, the Archive has only been in operation a little longer than that, and in the beginning, it was really nothing more than just a small to middling data depot in the unofficial and unregulated chain of Masonic Lodge networks that had developed in the mid to late ‘70’s to provide technical storage capacity for both corporate and private documents. It was all homegrown, self-supported applications at first, but became increasingly tech savvy out of necessity, as the less sturdy Lodge networks failed. By the turn of the century, it had consolidated most of those networks onto its servers, and eventually became the defacto technical arm of Freemasonry and its appendant organizations.”
He was reeling, trying to encompass all of it. That had been in the early days of the phenomenalist revolution, about the time the creaky old Web had finally evolved into the Strand. About that time, someone had figured out that data storage and processing procedures–most of the brute force work of computing itself, in fact–could be shoved into quantum foam, where the massive calculations could be carried out seemingly instantly if they were executed in a parallel metaverse whose Schrödinger waveform collapses could be accurately mathematically predicted. Someone else added the (relatively) simple system of cursory triggers signals that could not only predict, but manipulate the collapses in such a way that computational processing could occur coincident with the desired outcome, the reverberations of which could be available instantaneously everywhere at once.
What this really meant was that well-meaning scientists had inadvertently hacked the universe and determined a method for encoding digital data signals into the very mind of God. The quantum structure of reality opened up into something like thirty-eight alternate dimensions, plus infinite recursive potential states, all of which were theoretically vast, empty and free for the taking.
The ultimate fallout was that all of the data artifacts ever generated in the history of human experience could be effectively simulated and stored in the space of a grain of mustard seed.
Which was sort of mind-boggling and notoriously hard to navigate effectively without a whole laboratory loaded with specialized equipment and a team of hard-headed quantum physicists around to back you up. The universe was awash in data. People already had more data than they could stand. What they craved was information. Data in action; data with purpose.
Which meant pornography, of course.
Ubiquitous triple-X pornapalooza on demand. That was where the funding came from. All it needed to really explode was a delivery mechanism.
It was corneal-cochlear-neural-array implants that finally brought the revolution of quantum computing to the public and with it, for all practical purposes, the death of physical data storage. That meant libraries, museums, archives, university collections. All of it. They were dust. Analyze an item, break it down to its component parts, map it, digitize it, upload it. Make it available to everyone. No need to travel to Washington if you wanted to see a copy of the Constitution. No reason to visit Sydney to see the opera house. Why fly all the way to France to see Versailles when you could tour it virtually, perfectly, individually with all the attendant sense response of actual experience? Geek translated it all into digits and stored it in the air you breathed and the ground you walked. Information wanted to be free, and by God, mankind had set it free. There were no limits to the things we could know now that we could index, catalogue and analyze the complete sum of human experience.
Then had come zap, and all the rules changed for everyone, for all time.
It was supposed to usher in the Golden Age of Man.
Until somebody finally realized that maybe having their Final Will and Testament floating about on the ether for any savvy and curious-minded jack kid to download might not be such a good idea. The same with personal home movies, copyrighted television programs, porn, porn and more porn. Add in stock listings, bank statements, credit card numbers, love letters from that old mistress and suddenly you had an entire social construct on the verge of a personal privacy crisis. It was all just data in the end.
Data, as they had said, wanted to be free. And while that might be good for data, it was disastrous for privacy, for business, for a whole bunch of marriages. Some data, people began to agree, should probably not be so free as other data. So the governments, who had their own interests in restricting access to certain bits and bytes, stepped in and started cutting up the metaverse into proprietary chunks the way they had once chopped up outer space: keeping the good bits for themselves, selling off the moderate bits to galaxy-spanning megacorps and doling out the crummy leftovers to regular joes at exorbitant rates. Private corps, various shareholder enclaves and fraternal orgs emerged to allow the regular joes to pitch their pennies together and set up Archives to manage their own slices of infinity or sub-lease slices of slices in the new data economy. Data lockers of the soul, essentially.
By the time of the big data boom, the Archive had already been neatly placed to expand into this brand new arena of data support services. Being tucked safely out of the way on the absolute borders of known space turned out to be more politically expedient than it was technologically inconvenient for a surprising number of people who didn’t feel like being increasingly subjected to onerous governmental regulations. Or people who wanted to hide things in a secure data haven that wouldn’t be under the jurisdiction of assorted terrestrial courts, public agencies or military tribunals.
Dorian felt as though his eyes must be as large as Ryoku’s now. “That’s why there was no bounce point. Raville didn’t need a bounce. He was already inside.”
Because of zap. Zap was going to change everything, but before he unleashed an unproven technology on the world, Raville had to test it on something more precious than his dog, Barney, the first living being ever zapped from Points A to B (and everywhere in between).
Packaging was the technology that allowed you to digitize everything, even your immortal soul, if you could afford the hack. Store it away for a rainy day (or an untimely death). Back it up, put security on it, seal it off from prying eyes. The storage and recovery of the digital human essence had been a relatively new field of study when Raville was developing zap. It was supposed to be disaster recovery, the modern cryogenics for a technological age. The experts who had designed the mechanism didn’t even know if it would work, much less Raville himself. But he had it done just in case. Just in case something went horribly wrong with zap and he was destroyed, atom by atom and scattered across the space-time continuum. Just in case, he had backed himself up, and then left the copy to digitally moulder on some dustiy military-industrial SAN.
In the meantime, the Archive had emerged as convenient and cost effective storage for the various personal libraries, legal documents and private musings of Master Masons and their attendant Lodges large and small, all over God’s creation. Later it added space to hold completely immersive memory strings for virtual replay. Eventually it was whole Master Masons themselves–digitized doppelgangers and their lifetimes of mental, emotional and, in some cases, physical baggage, all broken down to their fundamental elements and immortalized in Schrödinger waveforms, drowned in foam as dislocated phantoms haunting the metaverse. The Archive had space aplenty, a reputation for discretion and an impeccable history of data integrity and maintenance. What better place than the Archive to store the one and only original copy of a living god?
He pulled himself back from the logical precipice he had been contemplating. What was he really thinking here? Was he, John Dorian, seriously considering the possibility that his network was being jacked not to get at Michael Raville, but by Michael Raville, the Father of Zap himself? Why? What did they have that Michael Raville could possibly want or could not obtain by other, saner, less potentially reputation devastating means? What, in short, was going on here?
Dorian thought for just a moment that he might vomit, if such a thing was possible in geek.
“You think someone tried to crack the Archive steal at Raville’s package?” Amara asked.
“I’m not sure what I think,” he responded, and flipped out of geek.
But he would know soon enough.
When he had oriented himself again, desk and chair and office space, he plugged back into his terminal and brought up his workbench session. It was well after midnight. He was too tired to think about Raville, about the spider and what all it might mean any more this evening, so he zipped up the spider, the port archive, and his personal notes on the deconstruction and shunted them off into his private foam where he could access them at will. He shut down his terminal and grabbed his coat off the back of his chair.
“I don’t have the energy to deal with this anymore tonight.” Or the courage, the clarity, or any of the other gut-check virtues he would need to tackle an investigation this explosive. “I’m going to swing by Checo’s on my way home, if you’d like to come along.”
He couldn’t tell if she was stunned or pleased by the offer. “Why Mr. Dorian, are you offering to walk me home?”
He considered her powerful reptilian jawline and fierce, chitinous claws. “I was actually thinking that you might walk me home.”
She laughed, then marked her place and closed the book. “Let me grab my jacket.”
They left the building by a vaulted entryway off the first floor lobby, skirted the flowering fountain in the courtyard outside and passed through the iron gates that defended the outer wall. It was an exact replica of its render in geek. Sturdy limestone, high and wide windows opening on pleasant galleries with floors of native wood, the massive Templar Rotunda in the center. Security passed them through without checking their ids. Dorian frequently kept odd hours.
The night was clear and cold, and Dorian shivered in his jacket. He thrust his hands deep into his pockets, searching for warmth, but finding little. His breath plumed from his nostrils as jets of steam. Most of the streetlights along the Rue de St. John were out, which wasn’t uncommon, and he could see the bright stars overhead. The Lesser Moon rode low in the sky, fat and pendulous, and beyond it the thick band of the Milky Way flowed across the west like a bank of mist rising over the mountains. They walked in the middle of the street, away from the alleys and whatever might be lurking there. Most of the buildings that bordered the Archive were dark, many of them in serious states of decline. Some of them had boarded their windows over, abandoned for the long haul, while others simply sat empty, gaping, looking in the shadows like abandoned tombs. But here and there the red lights of security cameras tracked their movement. They tripped the Universal Commerce Bank’s motion sensor and its portable spotlights tracked them from the guard shack until they were out of range. The night watchman, Karl, waved as they passed. Dorian waved back, but didn’t feel like stopping to exchange pleasantries tonight.
There was a smatter of gunfire to the north, but it was several blocks distant, so he didn’t let it bother him.
Amara strode beside him, her head almost on a level with his, and he was considered to be of above average height. She bounded forward with lithe and powerful strides. Each step was quick and sharp, like the preface to an assault. This mod had a stirring sort of grace, he had to admit, even if it wasn’t exactly to his taste.
“I’m sorry,” Dorian said to her. “I imagine you’re freezing.”
“I’m fine. I had them weave microfiber thermal coils under the scales, in case the weather turned.” She hadn’t even bothered to button her coat. Her chest glistened with condensation, and in places, her scales steamed in the chill air.
“That’s handy,” he said.
“It’s a nice augmentation. I kept the Mi-Go night vision, and some of the musculature enhancements.” She looked up at him. “You know, if you’re going to insist on keeping these hours, you should get something yourself. Kevlar weaving around the skull and vital organs at least.”
“I try to avoid contributing to the arms race,” he said, shrugging. “I’m a firm believer in the theory that the harder I work to keep someone from killing me at random, the more effort they put into devising weapons that will contravene all known defenses. I’ve opted out of the madness. If someone wants to kill me, they’ll find a way to do it regardless of my best efforts.”
“That sounds like the voice of experience.”
“Not really. I just have better uses for my money than preventative maintenance.” So she wouldn’t think he had a death wish or was otherwise insane, he added, “I take full advantage of the company plan. I backup every week.”
She understood, and her eyes widened. “Are you telling me that’s your original mod?”
“Does that surprise you?” He could see from her body language that she was forcibly resisting the automatic urge to touch his arm, verify his reality.
She looked away, as though he had embarrassed her. “I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone still in their original package,” she whispered, sounding awed. “Well, not since I was a child, anyway.”
“It’s not that hideous, is it?”
“No, not at all. I just meant–”
Dorian squeezed her shoulder gently. “I know what you meant. It’s okay.”
People were invariably surprised that he still had the skin he’d been born with. He had some scars, and bum knee from an old basketball injury that acted up in the damp, but he had a clean bill of health otherwise and no obvious genetic defects, though his proclivity for Parkinson’s and sundry other degenerative neural conditions would become worrisome once he got into his sixties. And it wasn’t like he was pure seed. He had the standard synaptic microtubule parallel-prox, a mish-mash of perceptive upgrades for orientation switching, the full cognitive drilling protocol. But when it came to his physical incarnation, he’d just never seen any reason to complain about the ten fingers and ten toes nature had dealt him.
“I’m on my third corpse,” Amara said.
“Ah, intrepid galactic traveler?” Dorian grinned.
“Bad neighborhood.” Which, he thought, explained a few things about her choice of augmentations, and her determined androgyny. She went on, “You think differently about the utility of modding after the first time.”
“Let’s just hope that isn’t any time soon.”
The streets remained empty for several more blocks. As they neared the city center, traffic picked up and a cop flashed his lights at them and ordered them off the road. There were more streetlamps here, better atmosphere. Fewer of the structures were so obvious in the way they sagged. A robotic sweep shushed past them, spraying the sidewalk with sand and grit. At least it was making an effort.
A few people were still out, traveling gaggles of young professionals, more cops, hookers and pushers. A great number of them were mods. Tall and gossamer winged fairies like Ferrier paintings. Slick, leathered Yakuza samurai. A minotaur or three (must be a fad). Interspersed among the more radical mods, there was plated nano-woven dermals, lugubriously caricatured musculature, retractable bladeworks, any of a dozen standard augmentation packages readily available for purchase to the aspiring trans-human. The crowd traveled in knots of smiles and ridiculous laughter and the general ecstatic hubris of a youth hammered through the peghole of geek. Beautiful, customized people in a beautiful, customized world.
They steered down a side street and back into less affluent districts. The structures here were largely featureless, cinderblock squares. Most had tin roofs and faded, peeling paint. The windows were dark, and the chill wind moaned through the streets around them, giving the whole neighborhood an air of emptiness. What it really looked like, Dorian thought, was a public reclamation project, or the temporary Quonset shacks stuck up for shelter in a war zone. But in geek, they rendered as glittering Colonials, nineteenth century carriage houses, the occasional Cape Cod. Neatly cut lawns, picket fences, apple pies cooling on the windowsills–steadfastly middle class stuff.
It was the difference between Sonali Real, where he lived, and Sonali Virtual, which contained nearly everyone else.
They crossed the street and stepped up to the front door of Checo’s. It was just another plain structure in the monotonous wall of cinderblock constructions, indistinguishable from the shops and houses around it except that it was a bit larger and strung with gay strands of Christmas lights in the wide bay window beside the front door. A doorman sat outside on a metal folding chair, puffing on a cigar and shivering in his heavy overcoat. He rose to greet them.
“You don’t want to go in there, Mr. Dorian,” he said, shaking his head. “Trust me on this. It’s a madhouse.”
“I’ve got a craving for curry, Charlie, and I won’t be denied.”
The doorman shrugged his broad shoulders. “Hey, it’s your neck. You don’t make it out of there alive, don’t blame me.”
Amara peered into the window. “What’s going on?”
“Poetry night. Open mic.” Charlie shook his head. “Brings out all the freaks.”
“It does look pretty crowded,” Dorian allowed. He tilted his head to Amara. “Take out?”
“Go pick up your order. I’ll wait out here.”
“I haven’t actually ordered yet. I have to do that at the counter.” Charlie opened the door for them, and they stepped inside. Dorian grimaced in apology. “I should have mentioned it beforehand.”
Amara looked up at him uncertainly. “I’ve never been here before.”
“It’ll just take a few minutes.”
Just as Charlie had promised, the dining room was crowded with too many tables wedged into too little area. The air was stuffy and oppressive from densely packed bodies and the excess heat from dozens of flickering candles. The conversation wasn’t so much a jubilant buzz as it was a chaotic roar of odd accents and coarse, shouted laughter. But it also smelled powerfully of onions, garlic, basil. Absolutely intoxicating. Dorian took Amara’s hand and wove through the maze of protruding chairs, gesticulating arms and unfamiliar faces. The counter was in the back, set up against the doors to the kitchen. Checo himself, a short, dark man in a white shirt and smart black trousers waited on them, smiling and nodding.
“Looks like you’ve got your hands full tonight.”
“It’s been worse. I’m not complaining.” He turned away from them and bawled their order into the kitchen. Someone they couldn’t see repeated it in answer. “Maybe twenty minutes, okay?”
“Okay?” Dorian asked Amara. In the flickering candle flame, her scales shimmered like burnished bronze. She nodded her assent.
“John will introduce us properly, of course,” Checo said to her, winking, “if we remind him.”
“Amara Cain. Checo.”
“Pleasure,” she said.
“Out for the evening? Pleasant atmosphere, good food, good company–so, you think Checo’s? Obvious, yes? Johnny here, he knows how to show a girl a good time. Munisca in braccio, attraversante il mondo reale. Is there anything better?”
“Work,” Dorian countered.
“Ah.”
They waited. One of the would-be poets climbed up onto the temporary stage Checo had arranged in the far corner of the dining room and mumbled several dozen lines into the microphone. Something about angst and embracing consciousness and black helicopters. It was awkward.
Checo rolled his eyes. “Two more hours, I promised them. Crazy bastards. All they want to do is sit and drink and yap their heads off. Eh, at least they bring a good mob with them.”
A bell rang and one of the busboys brought out their food in a box tied up with string. Dorian paid with a debit coupon, and they made their way back outside just as the next hopeful Shakespeare worked up the courage to attack the crowd.
When they had put a block or two behind them, Amara whispered, “What was that place?”
“Checo’s? Around here, we call it a restaurant. An Italian restaurant, or at least Italian themed, if you want to be technical.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
He had seen her in there, blinking frenetically, flipping rapidly back and forth between geek and mundane. Like someone on the verge of panic.
“Real food. Real atmosphere,” Dorian said.
“It was weird. A complete wasteland.”
In geek, she meant.
“Checo’s grandfather, Norberto, was first generation Sonali. His family shipped with Chrysostum and the set-up crew on the Icarus, back in the days before the zap. It took them eighteen months to get here from the closest settlement. Relativity stretched that to almost twenty-five years Terran. He started with a hand drawn greengrocers cart, fixing sandwiches for transit laborers at the construction sites almost eighty years ago. When he’d had enough of that, he built the restaurant. They’ve been there ever since. The Checo clan is very proud of who they are and where they came from. Layering a render over it would cheapen them, and their family history with it; a history which has largely played out inside those same walls. That’s the only way I can explain it to you.”
“That’s why I’d never heard of it,” Amara mused, thoughtful. “It doesn’t show up in geek. The renders around it overlap. Hiding in plain sight.”
“They’re not hiding. Checo is just traditional.”
“And all of those other people in there? None of them even had their avatars booted. They were completely off the Strand.”
“They respect Checo’s wishes. I don’t see why that’s hard to understand.”
“And you don’t find it a little suspicious?”
“What?”
” For God’s sake, John, they could be doing anything while they’re off the Strand, and no one would know it.”
“Mmm. Nefarious activities like digestion and poetry. You’re right. Someone should put a stop to it before they bring the whole culture down with them.”
“It’s anti-social.”
“Of course it is. That’s the whole point.”
Dorian stepped off the wide street and steered left, past the slag yards that piled around the old foundry. The breeze had fallen off, and low clouds were beginning to gather overhead. The side road quickly turned to gravel, then hard pounded dirt that looked both gray and barren in the moonlight. They hurried along the fence line, through a mostly vacant district of slab houses, many of which had fallen in on themselves. At the crest of the hill, they came to Dorian’s front gate. Quiksand was a coffin community. Four spiraling superstructures interconnected with plastisheen skywalks above, a public infotainment area in the mutual lobby, all the modern amenities. Two thousand units, a like number of occupants, most of them strangers. A four meter wall topped with motion sensors and shockwires surrounded the complex.
Dorian flashed over his tenant id, and the gate swept aside with a hydraulic hum.
“Nice,” Amara said out of the side of her mouth. “I see where you spend all that money you save on self defense.”
“I like the view.” He scanned the brooding skyline as it filled with ponderous clouds. “It’s going to rain. You should come up for awhile. Until it passes, I mean.” Dorian rattled the contents of the carry out bag and smiled. “Anyway, I don’t think I can eat all this curry by myself, and Checo would kill me if he thought I had let it go to waste.”
“I suppose I can’t in good conscience refuse an offer like that,” she said, and her laughter tinkled like the song of a night bird. “Lead on, kind sir.”
May 1, 2008 at 5:03 am
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