Oh, Lady Be Good

The tall brunette walked quickly into the room, her high-heels snapping aggressively across the corrugated plastic flooring.

“Where is it?” she said.

“The first protocol layer of internal archives.” The technician gestured towards the holoscreen brightly lit before him. Small green lines softly strobed, like dying pixels from an old tube television. “The Jackson readings have been consistent. It’s some form of entry.”

“Footprints?”

The technician shook his head. “None yet. It’s just there, hovering between the first and breach protocol layers.”

Bernice Mai stood up from her stoop over the technician. He smelled of some strong over-the-counter body wash… not bad, but stronger than she liked.

“I’m not an expert at Jackson lines,” she said. “There’s nothing there for me?”

The technician shook his head. “No. It’s just pinging the sensors. Must have missed the breach protocol, somehow.”

Bernice was silent. She could feel the secret attention of the other 5 technicians in the circular control station waiting to hear her next move. She rested her hands on her hips, tightening the stiff camel vest across her shoulders.

“Mai?” She turned as the tall, thin woman entered and walked slowly to her side, her red-lined eyes glinting tightly at the strobing Jackson lines on the technician’s readout.

“Some foreign entry, between first and breach. At the moment it’s holding, but I wouldn’t trust it. I’ve seen these punks slip through one or two protocols, and then jump too far in to be stopped before you even know they’re there.”

The woman didn’t respond, just watched the strobing lines. Her hair was black, short cut, and she wore a tight-fitting, red formal dress, cut high across her muscular thighs. Black gloves, black high heels. White, fair skin, and a thin, excising face.

“I don’t want it going any further,” she said.

Bernice turned to the technician. “Activate the Encryption portal. Make sure whatever that is hits the Chum.”

***

It was old. Very old indeed. It’s patina had eroded off long ago – if it really ever had gained one. She had traded the core chip of a Zetium 3000.2 for it, and had wondered ever since if the trade had been worth it, as far as money was concerned. Other than that, she hadn’t had any cause to complain.

The jack snapped into the port with a soft click, reverberating through the fragile wooden body in a quiet echo. The amp popped. Her fingers sat on the frets. She closed her eyes, trading her confining dorm room for the confines of her mind. The pricking sensation at the back of her neck persisted, even with her eyes closed.

The notes came roughly, slowly piecing together the shadow of a tune. Like the guitar, an old tune. She had learned it from a piece of actual sheet music she had found in the lining of the case. “Oh, Lady Be Good.” It was so similar, yet so unlike anything she had ever heard before.

Wind whipped above the field, but down amid the trees the air hung in dry, still pockets.

“Why do you play that thing?” asked Blythe.

Maxine ignored her, leaning against the rough bark of a tree.

“No, really. I don’t get it. It’s so antique. It’s wood, for goodness sake. Why don’t you get yourself a real guitar.”

“This is a real guitar. It’s an archtop. It’s a classic.”

Blythe snorted, the welding rod snapping a dirty line across the grimy circuit board, four times larger than any of the other conductive paths. “Well I think it’s weird, little sis.”

The wind pattered across the electric field above the tree-line. Maxine waited impatiently in the shifting shadows.

Blythe dropped the imprecise welder, flipped the broken helmet up, and slotted the board back into the Meischer unit sitting in the dirt beneath the trees. She closed the access door, slotted the key into the old cylinder lock.

“Got it?” Maxine asked, mildly watching the weather above her through the clear field.

“Almost.”

The unit suddenly hummed to life. A dull-green light gradually grew in intensity in the dark display.

“Finally,” said Maxine, turning and picking up the rotted, leather bag from the ground.

“Turn it down!” Maxine startled back to the present, her fingers falling from the guitar, the cacophonous chord echoing inside the dorm walls.

“Sorry!” she yelled to the room beneath her, notching the volume down to ‘3.’

A bed. A table. A chair. A Sim-Vet record shelf. An old laptop. A chest of clothes.

Sighing she looked back to the guitar.

When she and Blythe were accepted to different universities she had thought she wouldn’t be able to do it. But then, there wasn’t arguing with the facts. The RNA farm was failing and the equipment hadn’t depreciated enough to be unsaleable yet.

And there wasn’t anyone keeping them back, anymore.

The added reverb bounced off her dormitory room walls. She closed her eyes.

“MaxX.”

“I don’t like ‘MaxX.’ You’re ‘Maxine,’ or ‘little sis,’” said Blythe.

“Maxine is an old person’s name,” she said, dropping the leather bag onto the steel utility table and pulling out the contents.

Blythe rolled the welding tanks into the corner and turned, watching as Maxine put away the socket wrenches, screwdrivers, and assorted overcharge pickups and multi-colored cathodes into their separate places.

“Ok,” said Blythe, stepping forward and taking the long, electric probe-charger from the bag and putting it on the shelf, “so I’ll call you ‘MaxX,’ if you let us finally get some real equipment around here.”

“This is working just fine.”

“No, it isn’t. That was the third time this week that Meischer’s gone down, and you don’t have the fix for it yet. I’ve jerried the stupid thing three times, Maxine. Three times. If we had Uplink software and even basic Bio-Netting, we could have done the fix from here. No walk, no rain.”

Maxine slid the leather bag from the counter, threw it into the corner, and walked away from her sister into the house. Blythe followed her.

“Maxine, if we’re going to do this, it’s the only way. Kent upgraded years ago, and now he’s got a contract with Weyland.”

“He sold out.” Maxine walked into the kitchen, pulling open the cupboard and taking out a box of reconstitutable dinner.

“No, he moved with the times.”

“He jacked in. I don’t want to do that.”

“What if you have to?”

“I never will.”

“I don’t get it. You live on a farm harvesting ribonucleic acid from artificially augmented pine-tree mitochondria, but you’re afraid of a skull-jack.”

Maxine poured the box contents into the pan of cold water and moved it to the convection plate.

“Maxine…”

“MaxX.” She turned to Blythe. “The minute you jack in, you’re just another screw-happy net-jockey in the matrix. They control you, they watch you, they know where you are and what you’re doing, and if they want to, they know why, too, because they’ve got your thoughts.”

“It’s not like that.”

“Yeah, Blythe, it is. Did you ever access your PRD?”

The water started to boil, filtering the silty reconstitute into a lumpy mass on the bottom of the pan. Blythe was silent.

“I’ll tell you what you’d see,” Maxine continued. “You’d see me, and mom, and dad. They’ve got us out in France. A vacation, when we were little. We go to the beach. They buy us ice-cream. I drink coffee for the first time.”

“I don’t remember that.”

Maxine nodded her head and smiled. “Of course you don’t. It never happened. You know when I remembered that?”

“No.”

“Four months ago.”

Blythe cocked her head. “So?”

“After dad died.”

“So?”

“So, mom and dad had never been to France. That’s something they wanted me to remember.” She turned to the macaroni-and-cheese-lined pan and pulled it from the cooking plate. She heard Blythe open a cupboard, grab two plates; a drawer and two forks.

“You know how paranoid you sound, Maxine?”

They moved to the table. Old, wood, nicked from long years of hard use at the farm.

“You ever hear dad talk about France?” Maxine asked.

Blythe forked a lump of the macaroni into her mouth.

“No.”

***

Technician #3 twisted in his chair, grabbing the attention of Bernice and the Red Woman. “They’re passing into the Chum now,” he said.

“The Encryption Portal’s activated?” asked the Red Woman.

“Activated and operational. Chum’s surging it’s baseline. A bit past normal levels, but it should be fine.”

Bernice touched his shoulder as she spoke. “Any more footprints?”

“It appears to be a single operative. But I don’t understand some of the readouts I’m getting. The actual coding seems to have a lag behind the VC. Almost like they’re operating at two different load speeds. It’s almost like it’s shedding its rig.”

“What ICE are available?” the Red Woman asked.

Technician #3 shook his head. “Not many. Most of them are partitioned to the live feed.”

“Can you pull them back?”

“Not without leaving the feed vulnerable. It’s through the Chum.”

“Activate.”

The man’s fingers reached in front of him, manipulating a virtual interface the two women couldn’t see.

Bernice looked sideways at the woman standing next to her. She had a formidable reputation among head-level sysops. The rumor was she took pleasure in it, enjoyed imagining the smell as their hair singed at the other end of the Sim-Jack linkage.

It was difficult to reconcile her savage reputation, however, with her savage beauty. Only a softly wild look in her eyes as she watched the Jackson lines strobing hinted at something deeper. Meaner.

***

Maxine’s fingers retraced the old steps across the frets, playing the old, familiar melody.

She felt normal. Her fingers felt normal. In fact so did the rest of her: slightly tired, vested in her school, emotionally interested in her music.

Only the prick at the base of her neck stung, like a mild insect bite. She wondered if she’d be able to feel it, once it spread into more cells in her body.

They were standing close on the long, curving cement steps. She looked up at Blythe, wondering if she’d cry. Blythe simply grabbed her shoulders, gripping hard. Their faces weren’t too un-alike, but Blythe had the better looks of the two. Maxine was a bit shorter, a bit waspier in the face.

“I love you, little sis.”

Maxine lowered her head, leaning into Blythe. “I love you too.”

“I’m sorry.”

Maxine shook her head. “No. You did the right thing. We had to sell. And this is the right thing too. Have fun with your… whatever it is…”

“Diagnostic Engineering.”

“Yeah. You’ll be good at it.”

Maxine pulled Blythe into a tight hug before slipping away into the crowd, milling up the steps of Levy University in one eclectic mass of bright-eyed new students.

Maxine stopped playing suddenly as a cold chill ran through her body, the last guitar chord hanging in the air, unfinished.

What if it could slough off in dead skin? It could defeat the whole purpose of the experiment.

But could it?

Hypothetically… maybe. She wasn’t sure.

The clock chimed the quarter-hour in the corner of the room. She was going to be late.

Un-jacking the amp-chord from the old Kay archtop, she dropped the guitar into the corner, grabbed her synth-lined jacket, stepped into her boots, and left the room.

The air outside was cold as she walked along the Priophene-Cement walkway away from campus. Cold, but clear. She could easily make out Vega, blazing beneath the Beanstalk in the sky above New Angeles.

***

The cold engine of the Yóukè ST popped and snapped as Blythe maneuvered through the crowded lower-level streets of the city.

“Stupid jackasses, stopping up the roads,” she muttered as she shot through a gap in the oblivious masses of pedestrians wandering across the street.

She was going to be late. She couldn’t be late. She hadn’t seen Maxine in more than a year.

She clutched the break lever, sending the rear tire into a skidding fishtail, then gunned it again, sliding between the gom-lorry and the other bike into a clear stretch of road. Wrist back, the throaty growl of the Yóukè echoed off the towering building walls on either side of her.

The last engineering students left the engine bay. Blythe walked between the rows of high-charge, Neodymium-138 levi-cars and dropped to a sitting position between two low-chassis models. “I went to the PRD,” she said over the PAD connection.

“And? Did you see it?”

“Yeah. Just like you said. You remember the balloon?”

“No. But I remember the sensation of seeing it at my PRD session.”

Blythe changed the subject. “How are your classes?”

The PAD connection wavered for a moment, breaking into digital noise, then snapped back into focus. Blythe took another bite of the burrito and leaned up against the cold body of the Xian XR2J9 behind her, looking at the small face of her sister in the device in her hands.

“They’re fine. It’s not easy, using old tech.”

“You’re still not jacked in?”

“Are you?”

Blythe looked away. “No.”

“I’m glad. I like thinking of us as…”

“Paranoid idiots?”

“Pragmatists. Individuals.”

“I might have to get a finger-jack.”

Maxine sighed. “Well, it is what it is. I just don’t like it. I don’t like how they can force us to fit ourselves for a system that they control.”

“Your classes?”

“Good. I’ve been doing research about DNA storage.”

“Like what?”

“Anything. Stored in DNA. Information, data.”

“Seems like it’s been done…”

“Not this way, not in the way I’m envisioning it.”

Blythe slammed hard on the break, throwing the bike into an unstable sideways skid, stopping just in time. The angry lorry-driver yelled something behind the forta-glass shield, hooked two fingers at her, and drove off.

She could see the park now. It was just around the inlet… She’d skirt the waterfront. She still might make it.

***

“Boost the portal,” the Red Woman growled at the technician.

“It is boosted.”

“Do we have the Labyrinth on line?”

“It’s available, sir.”

“Then use it.”

“I can’t rescind the process once it’s initiated.”

“I’ll accept full responsibility,” she said softly.

Technician #3’s hands swiped into the center of the readout console, manipulating the invisible code.

“The Labyrinth?” Bernice asked.

“It’s an aggressive server process,” the Red Woman said, looking Bernice fully and frankly in the eyes. “It’ll lock them into their run.”

“Process initiated.”

“Whoever that is,” she continued, “they’re not getting out of our servers now until we want to let them out.”

“Their VC has initiated a parsing code with Lotus Field…” Technician #3’s hands started to jab the air savagely. Then he stopped and dropped them to his lap. “I can’t… It slipped in perfectly. The code’s completely connected. Like a glove. They’re through.”

“Sir!” A young female technician on the other side of the room called suddenly. Bernice Mai snapped around.

Technician #5: “I’m detecting anomalies in the underlying code for the archival servers.”

“What kind of anomalies…”

“I’m not sure… Like some kind of virus…”

***

Blythe decelerated into the park, dimly lit by the glow-globes growing from the tree limbs. Maxine had said to meet by the commemorative bench on the west side.

The Yóukè ST cruised silently along the park-access road, turning the last corner to the west section.

Maxine was kneeling in the parking lot 30 yards distant, face in her hands. The man was behind her, tall, in a long, dark overcoat, the bulky handgun pointed to the back of her head. He glanced up as Blythe skidded around the corner on the whippy Yóukè, and then pulled the trigger.

Maxine collapsed to the ground over her knees, face into the ground.

Blythe lost control of her bike, flipping over into the road. Her head hit the asphalt hard, and her vision blurred. She heard the bike as it skipped past her, though, the engine whining in the cold night air.

Fingers in the asphalt, feet biting the ground, up to her feet.

The man was walking away, gun hung low in his right hand, coat swaying from his long strides.

“Maxine!” She didn’t move. Blythe reached her, grabbing her shoulders, trying to lift her face from the asphalt. She was heavy, didn’t respond. Blythe tugged upwards, accidentally dropping her back to the ground.

The body rolled to it’s back. Maxine’s forehead was gone. A jagged cavity – some skin and scull-cap still attached – loomed in it’s place, blood dripping from it like saliva from the jaws of a hungry wolf.

Blythe fell to her knees, grabbing the body wildly. Her face was suddenly hot, and she realized she was crying heavy, bitter tears. She lowered herself into the shoulder of her sister. It was still warm.

An engine split the air. Blythe’s head rose from Maxine.

The man had started a car. The throaty engine whirred from the ion-exhausts of the old Tartan Malibu.

“No you don’t, you bastard,” she spat, vaulting herself from Maxine’s body towards her bike.

The Malibu’s engine revved. The tires suddenly bit and squealed as the supercharged car tore out of the park.

Ignition primer, kick the gas, fingers smacked the bio-reader. The Yóukè’s engine screamed as Blythe accelerated sharply over the parking lot curb, across the grass berm, and through the park trees in order to cut off the black-grey Malibu.

The driver saw her coming and twisted the wheel, drifting the car sideways, accelerating into a side alley. The Yóukè’s tires leapt from the grass onto the street, cutting a curving arc after the shadowy car ahead.

***

“Three distinct patterns,” Technician #5 said. “See? These here,” pointing into the jumbled wall of code free-floating in front of her, “and then this one. They’re all the same, but distinct.”

“Can you eradicate them?” Bernice asked.

“I’m trying, but nothing’s getting deep enough into the code. We’d have to re-boot the whole system.”

“That would leave the live feed unprotected,” said the Red Woman.

“What is it accomplishing?” Bernice asked, again.

“I’m not sure, but—” the jumbled wall of code suddenly flickered. “It’s different. The virus isn’t there…”

“The construct’s sensed the Tsurugi,”said Technician #3.

“It’s feeding off of the virus,” the Red Woman said softly. “The virus is siphoning the base code to the virtual construct so that it sees the weaknesses in our ICE.”

“That would require AI,” said Bernice. “Either that or a brain that’s faster than any humans…”

Technician #3 shook his head. “I’m still reading a weird lag. Like the instructions are coming faster than the construct can process. Or like there’s conflicting instructions.”

The Red Woman walked back to seat 3, looking over the man’s shoulder. “When she moves forward, make that Tsurugi hit,” she hissed.

***

The Tartan Malibu slammed into the turn, the rear tires screeching out in a vicious oversteer, narrowly missing an uneven wall of stacked shipping crates. Blythe threw the bike into the turn, leaning low over the gravelly asphalt. She felt the tires give for a few feet before gripping, launching her straight out of the turn.

The Malibu had more trouble straightening, the rear wheels fishtailing for a few moments before snapping into true. Blythe gunned the Yóukè, narrowing the gap between her and the dull-grey car ahead with alarming speed.

The Malibu turned suddenly, drifting again for a moment before shooting through a narrow alley. Blythe followed into the turn.

For a moment the wall of traffic ahead didn’t make any sense. Then the Malibu slammed through a nonexistent gap between two cars, throwing them onto the curb like children’s toys before it lost it’s line and slid over into the curb. It flipped and slammed into a cement X-line station in a cacophony of shattering plexi-shield, resting on the driver’s side, fuel pouring from the punctured reservoir along the ballast.

Blythe wrenched both brakes, but the alley was too narrow and short. The traffic had stopped when the Malibu crashed through it, and the opening it had made was still there. The bike shot through, hitting the curb, throwing Blythe clear of her seat.

She stood up.

A crowd had gathered, moving towards the Malibu.

She must have blacked out. She looked down at her dull-green utility shirt and pants. They were torn and blackened from dirt and abrasion.

“Get away from that car!” Someone yelled. “He’s mine!” She suddenly recognized the voice as hers.

She was at the shattered front windshield. She had him by the hair through the empty frame, the grip of his S&W 35 forced down his own throat. She was yelling at him. The crowd didn’t move. It just watched.

The volume suddenly crashed in, and she could hear everything.

“Who paid you!” His eyes rolled. She pulled the pistol grip from his throat and hit his nose. Hard. It didn’t bleed. “Who paid you, you tossing bastard!”

His Adam’s Apple moved.

“What?”

“—eki.”

“What?”

“Jinteki.”

She threw his head back down to the sidewalk filling the horizontal driver’s-side window.

“Why?”

“They paid my company.”

“Why?”

“They paid me to get that.” He looked towards the dash.

Blythe threw herself into the cab with the man and looked at the dash. A small, clear, rectangular box had fallen into a console tray. The corners flashed a soft red. There was something inside. Short. White. She picked it up, looked at it, and then dropped it, recoiling back from the cab.

“They just needed tissue,” he said. Blythe was silent. She couldn’t force herself to speak. “She… stole something from them. Encrypted it in her DNA.”

“No.”

“The only way to protect it was to kill her and take it back.”

“No. She didn’t steal anything. She wasn’t like that. She couldn’t. Not Maxine.”

“She did. And I killed her for it.” He smiled softly. A black streak of liquid suddenly slipped from the corner of his mouth. “I – cut off her – finger and – killed – her to – contain the DNA – record –”

“DNA record? You mean her body?”

“Yes.”

Blythe snatched the box from the ground. The red light turned suddenly to green.

She was the only customer in the shop. It was just her and the man behind the counter.

The man smiled. Looking up at her through the stringy, neck-length hair.

“Say that again?” he said.

“I want a rig. I’ll trade.”

The yellow neon-tube light stretching across the ceiling behind the counter gave a sallow look to the dingy shop. His bionic arm rasped as it entered the bag, and slowly tumbled the electronic hardware scraps onto the counter.

“This isn’t worth a rig. It’s worth crap. Actually, it’s worth synthetic crap. The stuff they use to grow the fake trees in the north. You want a rig, you gotta do better than this.”

“What you want? You want me? Want to go into the back room now? You don’t get it. I have to have a rig as soon as possible.”

He eyed her skeptically. Pants burned up to her thighs, the legs red and oozing from the injury. Hair singed partly off, arm-sleeves laying in tattered, ashen strips across her grime-crusted skin. Her eyes were clear though. Clear and hard.

“You go to Fisk. Right?”

“How you know that?”

“This hardware. It’s from the Fisk Electronic Cache… Has their BVN numbers stamped all over it.” He leaned closer across the counter, putting all the weight on his flesh-and-blood arm, the bionic fingers gripping the back edge of the counter for support. “You know what I want? I’ll take your scholarship.”

“I’m in my last year.”

He shrugged. “You’d be surprised what some imagination and the graduating year of college can do for some people.”

Don’t do it.

She snapped her head.

Don’t do it. You’re throwing yourself away.

Blythe gritted her teeth. “Fine. What I gotta do?”

Aesop leaned back, snapped his bionic arm, dropped the PAD onto the counter and smiled. It lit up suddenly, projecting the holodocx above it.

“Sign there.”

The crowd was moving closer now. They might intervene at any minute. They might pull her off the bioroid hitman. “You mean they’ve got it? It uploaded all that? Just from scanning her finger tissue? They’ve got her? In their computers?”

The thing smiled. “She’s just a bunch of data now. Like the rest of us.”

“She wasn’t anywhere near anything you remotely resemble.”

“Just wait until you see the first clone that has her eyes.”

Blythe was still. Stiller than she could remember ever being. He coughed suddenly, spewing black juice across the ground through the broken driver’s window.

She stood up and turned to the crowd. “This?” Pointing back to the man in the car. “You know what this is? This is the golem that killed my sister! Are you gonna stop me? Is that what you’re gonna do? He cut off her finger and shot her in the head!” She pulled the lighter from her jacket pocket, lit it, and raised it above her head.

“You know why?”

“Why?” A hushed collective whispered through the crowd. She could see the flashing blue-and-red lights from the NAPD Lev-Craft lowering along the towering building walls above them.

“Because Jinteki paid him to! Did you hear? You heard what he said?”

“Yes,” said the collective.

Don’t do it, said the voice in her head.

“And are you going to stop me?”

A pop exploded in the crowd. A plume of riot-gas filtered through the cars in the street.

“No,” said the collective.

Don’t do it.

The lighter dropped. For a second the flame only licked passed Blythe’s feet and disappeared along the puddle of fuel surrounding the car. Then everything erupted in a blinding white light.

She felt herself thrown from the car. For a moment she could see the riot police swinging Via Sticks into the crowd, could see balled fists, people running, shouting, before her vision blacked out.

But it was ok.

The little box with Maxine’s finger was still in her hand.

***

The memo-ticr slipped quickly across the black screen readout.

“…DLREE IF e EH@) *46 RHH EH9-08y # HHHT…”

Bernice waited while the decryption protocol slowly flashed the message in one-word intervals across the bottom of the screen.

“PROCEED – TO – SECURE – INTERESTS – OF –”

A flash of color caught her eye. She looked up across her desk, momentarily captivated by the beauty of the Lion Fish as it eluded the Scorporay Eel she had just introduced into the tank. Genetically engineered in a black-market lab from Old Zanzibar, it had cost her the equivalent of a regular corporate executive’s whole year of salaries.

The screen clicked. She glanced back.

“MUST – NOT – BE – SUCCESSFUL – MUST – NOT – SECURE – FUNDING – FROM –”

She closed the screen and leaned back.

It was ridiculous. She was sitting in a penthouse office of the RX building, deeply burrowed in NBN’s holdings in the Midway Station. And they still encrypted their stupid orders into the slow, laborious code.

They had some of the fastest servers in New Angeles, certainly on Heinlein, and definitely at Midway Station. And she still had to read the instructions she already new, one word at a time.

Ignoring the pointless feed she looked out the window, watching the Pillars floating slowly passed her window, down the Beanstalk towards Kaguya docks. Their large, dark hulls obscured the stars in the far distance, leaving only an empty, black silhouette against the space-shine.

Her eyes dropped to the V Feed strongly glowing next to the office window. They were smug, the three of them. And they were dramatic, with their sharks and expensive suits, their terse judgement calls. But, between them, they had enough money to fund any plethora of experiental meta-data tests NBN had on their drawing board. Long, multi-year, high-risk experiments that the corporation had little recourse or design to pay for on their own.

And they would be watching the Jinteki university feed that she would be producing in 2 hours, she on loan from the company, a sign of good faith and across-platform generosity. They would be watching, and would then be contacted by the brightest and best at Jinteki for a deal.

She sighed and stood up, grabbing her travel case from the couch as she stepped out of her office.

Sadly, corporate sabotage was a thing she knew something about.

***

“It’s approaching Tsuguri, sir,” Technician #3 said to Bernice.

“Footprints?”

“Definitely a virus rig,” said Technician #2, from #3’s left-hand side. “Old. Slow. That’s why it’s taking so long to get through.”

“Viruses are splitting,” Technician #5 said from across the room.

“It’s moving, sir. What about the Tsurugi?” Technician #3.

“Hit it,” said the Red Woman.

“But…” said Bernice. The small, quick head snapped into her face, cold, red-lined eyes hardening.

“But what?” she said.

“The cost.”

“I’m responsible. Do it.”

Technician #3’s fingers snapped through the unseen feedboard, command-prompting the Tsurugi processes.

“My company’s found that manual ICE manipulation isn’t as effective as allowing the automatic command codes to –”

“Well I’ve found that I prefer flatlining runners myself over watching my machines doing it on their own.” The Red Woman looked at Bernice and smiled.

***

She felt the pain suddenly as the jack pierced the raw, puffy port entrance at the base of her neck. Her vision cracked, ears hummed. And then it slipped in.

Everything went silent.

She was aware of a heated throbbing down her spine, spraying into electric filaments between her pelvic bones, at the caudal plexus. Then it disappeared and it was only her and the net.

Now how did it work? He had said just think about the rig and it would—

An electric frenzy suddenly enveloped her. It was like she was in a room. All around her, surrounding her in a sphere, were the feedouts of her applications, flickering in multi-colored intensities.

“Take it easy the first time… if you pull up too much, you might exceed your MU. Something’ll blow, and you’ll have to go thru hoops to get it back online in the middle of a run. You might even damage it. Once you get your rig set, don’t over-stack. You charge too much, it’ll blow out before you can use it. Go slow.”

“Slow,” she thought. Suddenly a screen leapt from the spherical wall of data towards her.

Hand out.

Slapped across.

Install.

Hit.

Matrix juddering. Solid.

Initiated.

Another program.

Parsing…

Grey-tower, slipping text, wall.

DDoS.

Installed, blown.

In a sucking motion she felt herself thrown through the wall of shimming characters. Black hands gripped the sides of the sphere, slapping the text.

Him. In front of her. No soul. Just a blank face.

Hit actuate.

Three programs exploded.

The sphere sucked to the right.

Dimmed.

Flickered.

The bladed leaves flashed past the sphere, glistening in the electronic shimmer of the net.

A screen flew beside the soulless man in front of her.

Hit.

Installed.

The sphere sputtered, lights snapping brighter.

Running again.

The man smiled. Green haze slipped from the sphere out into the net. The floating lotuses disappeared.

She was in. She could feel it. Inside Jinteki… A heatless sun blazed down across the arid desert surrounding the blue-print walls all around her…

Hokusai Station…

***

“Look, I can put in the jack, and I can as fast as you want, but you get it fast, I don’t remunerate. You fry, that’s on you.”

“I need it.”

“Look, sign here or I’m not doin’ othing’. This sap-saw ain’t drilling othing’, ‘cept this.” The little, bug-eyed man shoved the PAD into her face. She smashed the fingers of her right hand onto the screen. It blipped. Then turned bright green. He took it away.

“Put your head there,” he said, putting on a dirty black apron, pointing to what looked like an old-fashioned massage chair from the old black-and-white films that they still showed at the University Film Institute on occasion.

Blythe sat on the chair and looked at the headrest.

Don’t do it. Please… Don’t.

She put her face into the holder. A heavy hand slapped onto her shoulder. There wasn’t any hair to brush away; it was mostly all burnt off.

“Now,” he said as she heard the low, guttural drill start to burp and cough very near her head, “what you might experience can be as goes a couple different ways… Maybe you can’t see out o’ your right eye. Or you only see in RGB…”

“What?”

“If this goes wrong… Or hyper-acceleration. Or hyper-deceleration. Nausea. Permanent cramping, like you’re always having your period. Permanent oral bleeding, actually, too. Inexplicable halitosis…”

***

The heatless sun dimmed.

Green clouds. Swirling in spirals towards Blythe in the net.

Screen up.

Swiped over.

Initiate.

The soulless man sifted through the darkened net towards the silver construct glittering in the mist.

The sphere suddenly flared.

Blythe arched her back. The pain was unbearable. Deep pain, bursting from behind her eyes.

Then it hit. The sword blade piercing through the sphere, slamming into her forehead.

She screamed.

The blade sliced into her head. She could feel it running through the neurons in her brain.

Her whole body twitched. The sphere imploded. Applications strobed in the sphere readout, then shattering into thousands of pieces, dusting the virtual atmosphere around Blythe.

Then it was gone.

Sucked back out from her brain.

Blythe was left breathing heavily. She moved a hand to her head. But she couldn’t feel the sensation of touch – she was still in the net.

***

“It just hit?” Bernice said in amazement, looking at the suddenly twisting lines of the Jackson feed strobing before Technician #3.

“Yeah,” the Red Woman said. “This runner’s an idiot. Looks like he didn’t juice his rig enough before he started… he’s running out of fuel. He’ll try and pull out; that almost flatlined him.”

--

Blythe gritted her teeth, opened her eyes.

The sphere was still there.

Crypsis was still there. He smiled. Slowly.

--

“Do we have Inazuma online?” The Red Woman asked.

“Inazuma is online and active.”

“Prepare the initiate sequence… I’ll have his head.”

--

Blythe’s mind suddenly cleared.

Fast.

Resource.

Hit.

Initiated. Installed.

She felt the heat as other applications charged, blew out, throwing themselves from the sphere.

Her mind was going too fast.

Hyper-accelerating.

Pull out. Don’t do it… You’ll die too…

“Shut up, Maxine!”

Forward.

Acquisition locked. Crypsis engaged.

“Get it!” She yelled. Her voice carried in a hollow, digital peal through the cyber-reality.

--

“Activate Inazuma.”

Technician #3 raised one hand and pushed one invisible button. “Activated.”

“Tori,” said Bernice.

“Shut up.”

--

The construct was pale.

Sad.

It stood, lone in the swirling digital-purple, reaching out to her.

“Crypsis…”

The face waited for an order…

The constructed opened it’s mouth. The wail spoke to her soul. It looked like her.

It was her. She was out there… in the net.

She leaned towards it. The sphere moved forwards.

The electricity hit fast. In a flash all she could see was white.

And then the construct was gone.

Crypsis wasn’t smiling.

Something was wrong. Blythe moved back, but with a jerk the sphere slowly continued to move forward. She wasn’t controlling it.

In a panic she started strobing through her remaining applications…

It was all dark around the sphere. Purple again.

App up.

Enter.

Install.

She could feel the mishandled programs flying passed her consciousness, overcharging, flinging themselves from the net, jettisoned from her rig. She couldn’t control it. It was like her mind was in overdrive, and she couldn’t stop it.

She tapped the screen.

The dimness lit back up. She could sense it.

The energy reserves were back.

“Doesn’t matter,” the Red Woman said, watching the feed. “Swordsman’ll get his Crypsis construct, and if we’re lucky, it’ll kill him too.”

The reserves didn’t work. The sphere shuddered every time she executed a command prompt, screens flickering and surging.

Only Crypsis obeyed the orders. He moved slowly into the cloud, obscured by the purple darkness. Blythe strained to see him.

Then a light streaked out of the shadow. Crypsis jumped back, but too late. The nebulous-green of his naked body suddenly slipped into a dust of pixels and he was gone.

The figure stepped out from the purple cloud, tall, heavily armored. He had a sword.

In a fluid motion he started to walk through the matrix towards Blythe.

The Red Woman watched the feed without breathing; Bernice watched her.

“Damn his eyes!” The Red Woman hissed, suddenly. Bernice looked back to the Jackson readout. It was meaningless to her.

“What happened.”

“He made it. He’s in our servers…”

Blythe felt strangely pale. Apathetic.

She was in. She knew it… All she could see were the digital prints from files, stretching up and away from her, behind her, below her.

“When you get there, this is the process,” Reilly had told her in his dorm room at Fisk. “Just plug it in… It’s calibrated to the box, and it’ll source the upload code.”

“What’s that mean.”

“It’ll give you the files you’re looking for.”

Blythe filtered through her remaining applications… Had it blown? She didn’t feel like it was gone. But she couldn’t find it.

The screens started flapping past as she slowly filtered through the wall of files.

“GET OUT.”

Blythe startled. The words had suddenly appeared on the walls of the sphere.

“GET OUT NOW.”

Technician #3 turned to the Red Woman. “Anything else?”

“Just wait,” she said.

Blythe opened her mouth to speak. The process flitted past her face. Lunging forward, she traced it passed her, catching it before it flew from the sphere into the dark-grey plexi-verse surrounding her.

“Tori,” Bernice said suddenly.

“What?”

“If that runner’s hacked into the Hokusai archives, what happens when the live feed accesses them for the P & L history?”

The Red Woman looked at Bernice blankly for a moment before the realization spread across her face.

“Get her out,” she hissed at the technician.

“I can’t. There’s nothing I can do now!”

“Initiate Hokusai net damage, and switch it over to Code 1. I want that punk-hacker’s brain to fry!”

“That requires executive authorization. It’s a funds transfer…”

“Do it! I foot the responsibility! Start the transfer now!”

Blythe tapped the screen. The files suddenly shuddered, growing dim and fuzzy.

Snap.

Still.

One file in front of her.

She reached out. Grabbed it. Took it into the sphere with her.

“GET OUT NOW” The words flashed across the screen again.

--

Bernice turned to the Red Woman, a secret smile on her lips. “If you keep prodding for an answer, that hacker might give you one.”

The control room suddenly flickered, the holoscreens dimming.

“What’s happening?” the Red Woman growled. “Stop it.”

Letters started to snap onto the screens, one by one.

“Is that showing on the live feed? Get rid of it. Now!”

“I can’t,” Technician #3 howled.

“F—”

The Red Woman grabbed the technician by the neck and threw him from the chair, jumping into the seat herself.

“Brain damage initiating,” Technician #5 said from across the room.

“U—”

“Stop it!”

“Look, we can’t!

“Then censor it! Anything! The investors can see all of this!”

--

The screens flashed. The man turned and looked at the two companions at his right-hand side and shrugged.

“I don’t get it,” the woman said.

“It’s a bug,” the man said. The shadow of the shark swimming in the wall-length tank behind them suddenly twisted across the table.

“No wait, here it is.”

For a moment they sat in silence. The woman leaned in closer to the feed.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said, shaking her head.

“**** YOU, MOTHER******”

The screen went dead.

--

Blythe was suddenly sucked back.

Exit.

The blueprint borders of Hokusai slipped past, text filtering through the sphere, the purple mists rushing past like nighttime on a time-lapse film.

In seconds she reached the outermost limit of the Hokusai infrastructure. The black-grey hands were reaching for her to carry her across the last countermeasure, back to reality, groping towards the sphere.

A long, thin, stream of color suddenly shot out from deep within the infrastructure. She saw it coming. It almost looked pink. It looked pleasant. Not necessarily threatening.

But it was moving straight towards her, thin as a needle.

“Back! Back, back, back!” She yelled.

The hands grabbed her, broke through the sphere. They tore at her shoulders, arms, sucking her through the last countermeasure towards real life.

The jetting pink ribbon hit her between the eyes, singing into the deepest corners of her thoughts.

In a shower of sparks she fell back from the console. She felt the jack forcefully pull from the inflamed port, snapping her head around in the process as she fell to the ground.

She lay there for a moment, breathing heavily.

She had a migraine. A deep, heavy migraine, burning so bad she could feel it in her shoulders.

Slowly she rose to her knees, slipping a hand across the back of her neck. It had blood on it. She prodded the sore bio-port, wincing the moment she touched it. It was hot.

It all seemed like a dream. She staggered unevenly to the flickering holoscreen projected from the console. She swiped through the grainy guis to internal files.

XZ7995998-hR22.t/q%q/p-N.

It was there. It was real. She had done it.

She had the file, and she would make them rue the day they so much as heard of her sister.

***

The door to the small Ibbit Bar swung open, hitting the wall with a hollow clang.

The Ibbit players didn’t notice, too absolved in the virtual realities swirling in the REM mists behind their closed eyelids. They lay as though dead on cots all along the walls and cluttering the room’s floor, the removable microsoft projecting from behind the Ibbit-port’s in their ears like fungal growths.

She walked through the room, breaking the swirling smoke, and slammed the bag down on the table, scattering cards and poker chips. The three men looked up at her.

Reilly smiled.

The fat man on the left stood up. “What? You want trouble?”

“Yeah” she said.

He cracked his knuckles, leering approvingly at the slim fitness of her body; long, muscular legs and tight, short shorts; the tattoos on her arm; the letters “F—I—R—E— ” branded in the fingers of her right hand.

“What’s your name, honey?”

“MaxX.”

“Stupid name for a girl.”

Don’t do it.

Her palm hit the corpulent face hard, carrying the head back into the wall with surprising force. The senseless body fell to the ground with a soft thud. The man on the right jumped up.

“Stop,” said Reilly. The man froze, inches from MaxX’s face. She hadn’t moved at all, but stood waiting for the fight. “What you want, MaxX?”

The hard, intelligent eyes shifted towards his.

“I want to make the world burn.”

“But are you any fun?”

She leaned onto the table, elbows together, palms under her chin, and pouted at him.

“Oh, Baby, you know I’m a riot.”