Escapology (24 page)

“Use your drive, boy.”

“Please, old Uncle, my head is pounding. If I access my drive it may explode. Consider the mess.”

Mr Yoichi makes a big deal of reaching back into his cage and fetching this ancient pocket watch he claims was passed down to him from his father, because of course men of his age can’t be expected to use a fucking accurate neuro-drive for time.

“It wants twenty minutes to ten.”

Shock takes a moment or two to process as it was supposed to be twenty to something a lot earlier. Panic hits like a faceful of concrete, sending him scrambling out of his cage and across to the bathroom.

“You overslept, you fucking idiot,” he tells his stupid face in the mirror.

It stares back at him, looking as bad as he feels and pale from sleep. Too much fucking sleep. He can’t believe it’s almost ten o’clock. Ten o’
cock-up
.

Racing out into grey skies, he wants to head straight for his Slip shop of choice, but Slipping this deep on an empty stomach is asking for trouble, so he stops off at Some Dim for a steamer of siu bao and a coffee. No, two coffees. Make that three. Frankly he needs to dive head first into the giant coffee urn behind the serving station. Syrupy sleep combined with this hideous signal tar hangs a gloopy weight from various muscle groups, and has him feeling, bizarrely, like a mixture of chewy and snappy toffee, what with the whole panic thing and no bumps to take the edge off.

“Today’s going to suck giant balls,” he says, tearing apart a bun and trying not to envisage that thick red centre as his own vitals oozing out. There are moments when he’s actually thankful for the iron cast to his stomach. Seriously, he could eat Yook Hwe in a slaughterhouse, fresh from the cow.

He takes a final coffee to go in a paper cup so enormous he’d take bets on being able to bathe in it and heads for the mono and Foon Gung’s crowded and exclusive centre. By the time he gets off, thin drizzle paints the sky slick and flimsy as old celluloid, bringing a damp chill to the air, into the bones. Feeling as miserable as the day, Shock huddles into his too-thin neoprene jacket, and dodges tight-pressed cars out for blood.

Worried Twist’s block is already near to being broken, he’s twitching like he’s necked a handful of top-notch bumps; skin breaking beats, hair on end, eyes wired, transmitting anxiety on every known frequency. Shock doesn’t get the freaks on like this, full body power-up, stage fright, Slip fright, but this job is a different beast, horned and dangerous.

Tucking his hands in his pockets to hide the tremors, he heads for the Slip shop on level twenty-two of the Gangway tower. Located bang smack on the edge of the inner city, Gangway is a shopping mall for the rich and famous and hardly anyone knows of the Slip shop in its belly. The rich have home kiosks or internal uplinks, and they rarely use this place. Yet here it stands.

Shock slopes over to the hydra-haired super-model-in-training at the kiosk.

“Take for how long?” she asks, voice flat as cardboard, and about as interesting.

“Shop limit.” he tells her, feeling like he’s got this fuck-off huge sign above his head blinking in neon: “UP TO NO GOOD”.

Cell #108 is plastic, tacky despite the wealthy ambience, but the room’s an abstract study in desertion; so empty it echoes its own sounds for company. Blinking to access his neural jack, Shock leaps in cold, no prep. Like fucking bareback, warm and slick and sexy. He feels the mesh swallowing him whole, flinging him into Puss, into Slip, into the usual early morning traffic; crammed with weekenders bugging the feed.

Puss feels different today. Distant. There’s a reluctance to cooperate and Shock has to work hard, spiralling down through teeming crowds in an impatient swirl of tentacles to hit one of the biggest veins. A gusher leading out of public domain toward Hive.

Swept away, he weaves mid-stream, still fighting his reluctant avi and hella frustration, because this is
not
the time for glitches. He runs a quick scan as he sweeps through the first block of firewalls, role-playing innocuous data. Finds nothing. Puss is simply not wanting to play ball today. What?

Fucking focus
, he snaps at it, as if a thing formed of code can talk, or even understand him.
I have no choice and I don’t need my Tech fucking my day any further.

Puss cooperates almost immediately, as if acquiescing. Its control algorithms mesh fully with his mind, opening it out, giving him full access to that part of his brain seemingly dormant IRL and helping him recall things locked behind walls of hurt and anger. Why is it that trying to forget the things that hurt can obscure so much of you it reduces you to almost nothing? It’s like in winning by forgetting, you also lose. Down here, having it all back, it’s like having a superpower. All the memory and none of the hurt. Magic. And boy does he need magic right now.

Hiding in data is playtime for a Haunt, even one only still Haunting by virtue of a block, but the next ten levels of VA would be impossible without this Slip superpower of his. Firewall mazes, controlled by ever-changing equations. They look insane, like the grids of roadways at night time stuck on fast-forward, so many colours zipping around, bright as fireflies. It hurts the eyes.

Shock allows the information streams feeding the maze calculators to flow through him and winces. Man, that’s some chewy math. Lucky Puss is back up to speed and functioning as it should, because he has no time to stop, solving these beasts on the run; every opening snapping shut on his heels with increasing hunger.

Calculations flowing in a continuous loop through his mind, like when he was a kid and first realized how fucking
easy
this stuff was for him, Shock skims through the gauntlet in seventeen minutes flat. A personal best. He’s about to hit self-congratulation in spades until he groks the fact that there’s something very wrong here on the other side. Something he hadn’t anticipated.

The info feed is mute.

Trial and error discovered all the obstacles on the way in. But the way out? No one got that far. They got here, floating in this silence like he is. Maybe wondering, like he is, whether they could make it out and unaware that they’d never have to worry about it. Will he? That’s one hell of a thought, too large for his mind right now. The weight of it beneath water drives his head inward, throbs like the beginnings of a migraine, and his three Octopus hearts, not quite under his control, pump a frantic rhythm he’s afraid will transmit back to the single heart in the chest of his sling-bound body and burst it.

He has no time to calm himself. He’s going to need every last second if there’s more of this shit to find. Gotta press on. He’ll worry later, if there is a later.

Beyond the maze lies a whole fucking field of his very favourite thing: barcodes. Most are in the top five difficulty: Gordian, Gunner, Boa, Double-Fisher and Figure 8. He scans the field, finding exactly what he’d feared: the short route comes up against a whole row of Gordians so extreme they turn cranial throbbing into pure migraine.

His best bet is to follow a convoluted pattern like the letter S. One or two fairly horrifying Gordians lurk therein, but most are in the next category and an easier target. Plotting the course so he doesn’t get lost, Shock dives in. He gives himself thirty minutes just for the challenge, does it in twenty-eight point four, and exits to the last twenty levels of VA thinking if he never has to solve an equation again it’ll be too soon.

Up next? The big Daddies. Twenty rows of all-seeing eyes, impossible to cross. This is where the scum grenades he bought from Heng come in. Scums hit, explode and cling like taffy. A touch bio, they throw out sticky tendrils like virus vine, but totally neutral. Clueless Daddies will scrape that shit off their eyes for at least a double score, not realizing they’re being punked. By the time they’ve cleared their peepers, he’ll have been in and out despite activating alarms. If he’s lucky.

Beyond the Daddies, Hive is the horizon as far as the eyes can see, both up and across. Fulcrum made Slip like the sea, deep and teeming with multifarious life; confusing in its madness, overwhelming in its vastness, so no one ever gets ideas. But Hive, that’s a whole different design: cool, logical, absolute function. Mountainous and black, it’s a digital fortress that dwarfs the Slip. No eyes, no need for them.

Hive has the Queens, and to get past them requires more guile than gung-ho.

Info moves on the surface in Hive, along speeding lines. Nowhere to hide, no gullies or troughs. Hence his drone-skin matrix. The matrix is flawless, should scan him in and out no sweat, survive to get him through the part he’s most afraid of, Core, but it’ll last a mere five mins. If he misjudges by so much as a nano-second, the Queens will be after him, and he’ll be Puss satay. Game over.

Tingling with nerves, some his, others bizarrely coming from the golden body he’s tucked inside, as if fear is transmitting between mind and shell on a loop, Shock rolls out, tentacles lashing forward to slam the scums bang on target. Taffy-thick slick leaches out over the great red eyes of the rows of Daddies and, line-by-line, they switch to clearance mode, their attention temporarily away from him, away from Hive. Moving fast he slips on further, throwing scums as he goes, covering all the eyes in his path.

Clock’s ticking now. Eyes in a line unable to see will alert Hive to trouble real soon, less than a minute. Sirens will go off when that happens and that’s when his clock starts ticking down quick smart. They’ll send out Seekers, viral nukes, and this shit will get real. And here it is, shining like fucking Mecca: the Hive. No time to waste, Shock activates his drone matrix and fast foots over to a speeding golden pathway, diving into a duckling trail of drones heading back to their Queens.

Scans roll over his skin as he passes inside, clocking him as Hive-registered. He tries not to whoop it up. Knowing his skill and practicing it are two different beasts, not always simpatico, and seconds are ticking down too damned fast for comfort. In fact he’s only just whizzed past the final checkpoints inside when alert sirens begin howling through the fortress.

They fire him up like napalm. Somewhere out there his flesh suit is sweating fit to drown him. Frantic, Shock seeks out Core, uncertain what to look for as no one’s
seen
it before, and finds a shimmering column at the centre of the mountainous fortress, the shadows of towers within. Seeing it triggers a deep swell of nausea, and the signal from the P.O. rises in his drive, loud as Hive sirens, sweeping thought and coherence away.

Dimly he feels the drones around him lift him up, carry him away to another, faster, line. The sensation of impossible speed is like drunkenness, like standing on the roof of a mono, the world spinning away far below. Core looms through it like sunrise, bright and overwhelming, and a sensation like ropes twangs deep inside, as if trying to tear him inside out. He’s aware of pain that isn’t his, Puss’s beak gaping wide like it’s screaming, and then the signal dulls to a sound like tinnitus.

When Shock comes to seconds later, he’s marching in a line of drones toward vast pillars like the close-grown trunks of a petrified forest, glowing with intense black light.

Core.

No one knows what’s kept in here, besides Emblem. He’ll be the first to know outside of the Lakatos family, and maybe one or two of their top Corps and Techs. In any other circumstances, that’d be such a fucking rush. He checks the time. He’s lost forty seconds.

Stuffing panic down where it can’t frag his processes, Shock sends out his secret weapon, his bio-wires, the reason he’s so damned good at this Haunting shit. Unlike nano-wires, they’re intelligent, adaptive, and have to be carried in, because they can’t be made in Slip. These will work alone to find anything he tells them to, hopefully including a thing he’s never seen. Everyone knows what Emblem does, what it is, but there’s no telling what it looks like. And he’s got three minutes to locate it, crack it, and get the hell out.

These bio-wires are his last. He won’t be able to afford to make them again. Armed with Emblem’s code-designation, the numeric representation of its design name, engraved into their search algorithms they sift the info-towers swift as thinking. What they find confounds him.

Avis. Only avis. Billions of them. Every avi there is. Finding Emblem amongst them should be easy, considering it’s the only thing different, instead it takes one min thirty-two of unbearable tension.

Turns out Emblem is tiny, a red packet-node stamped with the Slip sign, a stylized fish, hidden under layers and layers of crypt. Shock bites down a wild flare of despair. He needs nano-wires now. Lots of them. It’s not safe in this environment to have so many, in case the Queens notice, but he makes them anyway—what choice does he have?—and instructs them to decode. Hundreds of thousands of wires working at full speed take a damn near endless forty-three seconds to crack the crypt.

Once done, they separate to two units. One unit unpacks Emblem and brings it to his drive for storage, the other half creates an inert copy giving off the correct signal and recodes every last layer of crypt to hide it.

And that’s it, Emblem’s secured.

But the relief of having it is short-lived. Dropping into his drive like a deep-sea mine, it’s a spiky package several dozen levels more hideous than the Core drone signal. He wants to vomit it up like a belly-load of bad liquor. The pain is unreal, makes him feel woozy, discombobulated.

Bio,
he mutters, not sure if the sickness is terror or Emblem.
It’s fucking
bio.

Emblem should
not
be in a drive. It’s going to kill him. How the hell is he going to do this? He’d waste time on serious worry, but he’s seconds left before his skin-matrix fails. Gotta crank him some serious skedaddle.

He tacks his arse onto the tail end of a team of drones heading out of Core toward the border of Hive, trying not to look suspect. No easy task. Around their orderly line, speeding along, all hell has broken loose. Alerts are full volume, Seekers out in force. The Hive is alive and searching for a breach.