Firebreak

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  Jessa, who is pulling a fresh power cell out of inventory like a magic trick and slotting it home. The hoverbike spins up to an audible purr and holds it, running lights flaring as the skirt clears the airstrip.

  “—so much, you guys!” she’s saying. “Wow, this is a real lifesaver!”

  I realize I may have been tuning out something of import.

  is that from you know who? I ask her as we hop on.

  nah. bunch of them got together and bought it used on the marketplace. still runs though. you going to thank them or

  “Thanks!” I say, and I do mean it. Reputation notwithstanding, I don’t hate them. I just don’t know what to do with them. But this is why Jessa and I make a good team. We know how to do maintenance on each other. I watch her six when she bites off more multitasking than she can chew, and she handles the people end of things, because she knows I’d rather have my fingernails pulled out than make small talk with strangers. It’s stupid and sloppy, but it works.

  “Anytime,” somebody says. “Gonna get that thousand today, Nyx?”

  This catches me up a second. “Gonna try,” I say, recovering hopefully quickly enough to be convincing. “But we want to see who we run into on the way, y’know? See if our luck holds.”

  Jessa flashes me a look of pure gratitude. Scoots back from the controls. they wanted you to drive, she says. told you they were into that crazy shit

  I slide the controls forward, and the bike glides eastward like butter on a hot pan.

  0006

  SO HERE’S THE THING ABOUT THE GAME. Like the ancient joke about space, it’s big. Theoretically this module is supposed to be a near-exact replica of New Liberty City and its environs. Old town is there, and the hills and struggling forest and parched farmland that surround it, but either they’ve taken some serious liberties or else the actual city is bigger than I thought.

  Although, I mean, it’s called a supercity for a reason, and of a certainty it’s crowded as fuck. And like I said, the game tries hard for realism. Streets are packed, not only with players but with window-dressing NPCs, only there for flavor. Buildings number in the tens of thousands, easy. Fighting and protesting shuts off entire zones of the city at a time. In real life this means they send out alerts to cordon those zones off to civilian activity and send in a dispersal bombardment to flush out the protesters, but in-game it just means huge player-vs-player free-for-alls that usually end in widespread storefront looting and a surge of high-end in-game items on the marketplace, priced to sell.

  Finding one of a dozen free-roaming NPCs running wild in their natural habitat is going to be like finding a needle in a haystack the size of the moon. A haystack that is probably also on fire. Getting up in their face enough to try to match their features with someone from B’s list… is going to look exactly as weird as it is. Our audience’s reaction to that weirdness is a bridge we’re just going to have to burn when we get to it.

  “So what’s the plan?” Jessa yells up to me over the velvet buzzsaw whine of the hoverbike. “Where to?”

  Like I know. Like anyone knows. Twelve operatives, dozens of kids on B’s list. Or, not even kids. Those descriptions are to actual kids what a chalk outline is to a corpse. This is some Cinderella’s-slipper shit. I haven’t the first fucking clue where to start.

  Statistically, according to the forum, each SecOps NPC has a preference, but only statistically. We wouldn’t be the only assholes hoping to ambush one of them by the numbers, and by the numbers spectacularly fail. “Taking suggestions,” I shout back. “For now, just trying to get off this airfield before one of these teams recognizes us from last night and starts asking questions.” Then, as an afterthought that they really do deserve, I address our viewers: “Thanks for not giving us away, you guys. Really appreciate.”

  Still, once we’ve zoomed off the airfield and into the outskirts of the city, I swing the bike ninety degrees to cork it in between two buildings, in an alley just wide enough to hold us.

  Two hours twenty-six minutes. I get my legs under me and kneel on the seat facing backward, resting my chin on my hands on the backrest, eyeing Jessa. we can’t just drive around aimlessly burning through this power cell, I tell her. we need a plan. but it has to not look weird, they’ll notice

  relax, i got it

  “So, guys,” Jessa calls out, “curfew really screwed us last night, huh?” Over the noises of solidarity this elicits, she goes on. “Been a while since we’ve gotten decent footage of a sighting, and this three lousy seconds of 28 is like, I dunno, blood in the water. I’m thinking we go find us some more. What d’you think, Nyx?”

  Is it really that easy?

  “Yeah,” I say, chill as chill. “Sure.” Then, in a flash of sudden uncharacteristic people-skills inspiration: “Taking requests.” And about fifty people start shouting out the numbers of their favorites.

  I guess it is.

  Jessa gives them a moment to shut up. They don’t. “Wow, okay, guys, your enthusiasm is amazing, but I think we need a more official vote. Let me real quick throw up a poll for you.”

  She does, and we spend a few seconds watching it fill. 06 is the runaway clear winner, followed (unsurprisingly) by 28 and, more distantly, 33. Not that we have any real way to find any of them in particular beyond consulting some fan-made algorithm that might tell us who has a marginally greater chance of showing up where.

  I’ve tried that before, on my own time and without Jessa. A lot. It doesn’t work.

  “All right,” she’s saying. “We’ll see what we can do. So. Looks like whoever had 21 just lost her, so she’s up for grabs somewhere.”

  I nod. B seemed to want to prioritize IDing the living operatives, but there are only three of those, and we’re going to have to work with what we can. “Who got taken instead?”

  “Let me double-check, but it looks liiiike…”

  “22,” supplies someone from the audience.

  Jessa gives me a look. I refuse to react. It’s bad enough that I felt myself startle a little, like every goddamn time 22 gets brought up in conversation. If there’s any justice in this world, nobody noticed.

  Fine. So he’s out of the picture right now. Probably being made to do some behind-closed-doors shit with some player who’s going to make bank off that stream. Just fucking whatever. That still leaves eleven. Not that we have any idea where any of those eleven are. Already my enthusiasm has tapered drastically, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t know why.

  I’ve seen 22 three times before. All briefly, almost all from a distance. It’s always faintly depressing in a way I can’t begin to quantify. The fact he’s off the table today is disappointing and relieving in equal measure, because I am a sadsack asshole who can’t leave a side project alone.

  Not for the first time I wish the operatives behaved like NPCs in most games, just hanging around in a given location until someone rolls up on them looking for a side quest. Except then some tens of thousands of streamers would be straight up out of jobs. Not for the first time I wonder if this whole offshoot subculture of spying on the operatives, trying to piece together what the inner lives of honest-to-shit superheroes must be like, was intended when they made the game, or whether it just kind of sprang up around it after the fact. Jessa and I have only really dabbled in this corner of the fandom, getting what footage we can get but not making a serious go of it. But here we are now, turned virtual paparazzi with the rest of them.

  Except the in-game NPC versions of the operatives aren’t real people to be spied on, no matter how much they may look and act like the real people on whom they’re so closely modeled. They’re information. And unless we’re swallowing B’s whole story now, which I for one am not, the real ones aren’t people exactly anyway. They’re property. They were made in the Stellaxis labs, and they are Stellaxis assets. They just also happen to have a massive fan base that drinks up the barest scraps of information like water on a double-ration holiday.

  And it’s not like Jessa and
I exactly have a burgeoning job market to select from. At least we’re not out working the desalination plants or the plastic digesters. At least we’re going to have enough water to drink this week. I can swallow a whole raft of skepticism if it keeps my kidneys functioning, turns out.

  “All right,” I say. “Let’s check the map.”

  I pull up an overlay of the in-game city. Jessa and I are both running crowdsourced variants that filter for past locations of given operatives. A lot of streamers swear by this method for finding given targets, but as far as I can tell, it’s about as reliable as flipping a coin.

  On a normal day I would be busy chipping away at my thousand right now, and any SecOps footage I happen to come upon would be icing on the cake. But I can’t fall back on usual routine today for the same reason I can’t flip that coin now. Even if we end up finding nothing for B, I want to at least make it look like we’re giving it all we’ve got, while also keeping it interesting for the audience. Pay is pay, whoever it comes from. Company credit from regular, everyday footage-hungry fans is going to keep us out of the rehydration clinics just as effectively as water from some well-meaning conspiracy theorist with high misguided notions of avenging the dead.

  The map overlays look like the kind of thing conservationists use when they track the migratory patterns of butterflies or whales or whatever. Colored lines—some curvy, some squiggly, some as perfectly straight as if they’ve been drawn with laser guidance, some tacking back and forth like a switchback mountain road—litter the streets and parks and ruins around the edges of the city. You can set the filter for time: last hour, last twenty-four hours, last week, last thirty days. Obviously it’s not comprehensive. There are gaps of minutes, hours, days, even weeks, when nobody has any goddamn idea where a given operative NPC is. Hence the fifty-odd guys out there scouring the airstrip right now. Like I said, 28 is a massive pain in the ass to find.

  For ease of use, each operative’s line is a different color, and you can filter for whichever ones you want to reference. 28’s, for instance, is red. The entirety of it for the better part of the past month consists wholly of the line between the airstrip warehouses and the field beyond, where I caught sight of her last night. You have to zoom way in on the map to even make out that it’s a line. From the default distance it’s a dot, small enough to make you assume 28’s filter is bugged.

  “This is kind of a lot,” Jessa says, with the thousand-yard stare that says she’s laboring to parse an overlay.

  I nod in agreement. I don’t pull this map up often enough to know what to make of it. It’s like someone unraveled twelve balls of yarn the size of roller mechs across a five-hundred-square-mile spread.

  Except for 28’s, of course. And 22’s, equally to be expected. His filter is a hot mess. His dark gray line just pops up randomly and then vanishes for long stretches at a time. I can’t shake the sudden idea that he goes back to the Stellaxis building when nobody’s using him and sits on the edge of his cot or whatever—perfect posture, sword across knees, staring at the floor—until a player summons him again.

  There’s no pattern to what any of them are doing, at least not one I can figure out. Most of them have these meandering, touristy walking habits, like they’ve woken up to find themselves in a new place that they’re bound and determined to explore, thoroughly if utterly randomly. Which, I suppose, they pretty much are. Their intelligences are artificial, decanted or distilled from the real thing, but all machine intelligences can learn. Medbots and teachers and even Stellaxis’s old surveyor probes wouldn’t have gotten very far if that wasn’t the case.

  And some of them seem to have developed definite preferences as to where they spend their infinite supply of time.

  “Looks like 17’s still hanging out a lot at the park lately,” Jessa says, characteristically reaching the same conclusion as me around the same time, just from a different direction. “And 11 really likes the Monument for some reason.” She shakes her head. “They’re all over the place. I mean, look at 06: she’s taken up, I don’t know, hiking or something—”

  I swap to 06’s filter. There she is, an unmistakably orange line doing what looks like laps around the city limits, out in the woods and deserted farmland and whatever else is out there.

  Two hours nineteen minutes, and it has not remotely escaped my notice that my daily thousand count is still sitting solidly at one while we burn time here in our alley as red blips of enemies respawn out in the street, full of points and loot that somebody-not-me is going to add to their score and inventory. On top of that, we’re absolutely going to start losing subscribers if we just stay here with our thumb up our ass all session. If I know Jessa, and I do, she’ll overanalyze all the data she can get her hands on, right up until power curfew drops us. As for me, I’m not confident that the map is even the answer. High-probability sighting spots just mean overcamped crowdedness, and some of these are PvP zones that will get our faces murdered off on sight. We’re probably more likely to snag footage by accident, like I did with 28 last night. But that would fly for shit with our viewers, not to mention with B.

  I’m this close to just flipping a coin for real when I remember something B said.

  Maybe one of them is on this list. Maybe one of them has somebody out there somewhere….

  Well, that narrows it down.

  Out of the twelve real SecOps operatives, only three—06, 08, and 22—are still among the living. The other nine—05, 28, 02, 33, 38, 11, 21, 42, and 17—are dead. We lost 11 and 21 late last year: 11 just after Valued Customer Appreciation Day and 21 just before Halloween. And we could probably have eliminated 05 from our list in general because there’s probably not much we’re likely to learn about her that B doesn’t already know, or think she knows.

  Definitely not for the first time I wish Stellaxis had bothered to stick some name tags on the SecOps’s growth tanks. I’d settle for pet names. Hell, consecutive numbers. Something.

  Except if B is right, they do have names. Or did.

  I push that aside. Like Jessa said about the map, it’s kind of a lot.

  pick one of the living ones, I message Jessa privately. i don’t care which one as long as they’re not dead

  She doesn’t bother messaging me back, just sings it out like it was her idea. “Let’s go take a look for 06 in the outskirts. Won’t be too far if we don’t have to sidetrack around a raid. I have a side quest to wrap up out there anyway.”

  Your side quest but not my thousand? I stop myself from saying. It’s as good a place as any, really. I wouldn’t take the odds on finding 06 out there, any more than here in this alley or back at the airfield or anywhere else. It looks good, though. It looks like effort. It looks like we have some idea of what the hell we’re doing. And the fields outside the city are usually crawling with stuff to kill—not only mobs but players, too—so at the very least we can put on a decent show for our subscribers.

  I gun the bike north.

  * * *

  WE TAKE THE big roads where we can. They’re choked with the traffic of other players—on hoverbikes, on foot, in transport trucks, even a few high-level guys clomping around in mid- to high-range mechs—but it’s more efficient than navigating back-alley barricades. Anyway, this crowd moves fast. Upwards of ninety-five percent of this server’s population has a power curfew that’s going to kick in sooner or later, and everyone has somewhere to be.

  This section of our route isn’t flagged as PvP-designated right now, so nobody starts shit with us, but I keep my blaster drawn, and I know Jessa has her guns out too. Not being shot off our bike by player characters does not for one second mean we won’t get painted and pasted by an orbital laser or peppered by some drone’s fléchettes, or round a corner straight into some mech fight’s crossfire or a resonance bombardment. Not a lot my blaster and Jessa’s plasma guns are going to do against an orbital weapon, of course, or citykiller mechs for that matter, but it helps keep up appearances.

  “Something big going on
over there,” Jessa says, throwing down coordinates for me to check. Maybe half a mile south-southeast, pretty much the opposite of where we’re headed. I turn my head as much as I’m able while also leaning on the accelerator and trying not to eat it on the personnel transport in front of me, but all I see is buildings. I slow down fractionally, squint down the next alley. More buildings. Skyscrapers laid out in their rows and columns like a bed of nails, each glassy surface reflecting off the others. An infinite mirror.

  Whatever’s going down behind those buildings, it’s blanketing my minimap with the pale blips of player characters in neutral territory. If those blips were red, I’d think raid and steer clear. This is something else.

  Then I see it. Reflecting off the buildings’ glass exoskeletons, too high up to be some kind of weird light-show effect from a player’s outfit. Barely visible in the low-contrast daylight, wavery like I’m looking at it underwater, but just there enough to catch. Even so, at first I think I’m seeing things, but that mass of blips on my minimap tells no lies.

  Jessa sees it at the same time I do, messaging me so as not to draw the crowd’s attention, shaking my shoulder furiously to make sure she’s drawn mine.

  nyx that’s a— but I don’t even need to read the rest of it, I already know, I’m already kicking the bike in a hard hundred-twenty-degree arc back toward the side street we’ve just passed.

  It’s a beacon. Fainter than 28’s was last night, but that golden upstabbing of light is unmistakable.

  I wrangle us across the paths of half a dozen other players while Jessa yells apologies on my behalf and the power cell chirps its outrage, and slew us into the side street at such a sloppy angle that I clip the decorative railing of the shallow front steps of some bank or something on my way.

  Behind me, Jessa has taken about one nanosecond to ramp up to full presenter mode. Effortless, as always. Like she’s flipping some switch I wasn’t built with.

  “Okay, guys, sliiiight detour real real quick here. Check this out. Nyx is on fire this week, two sightings in two days, you can’t make this shit up. Wow, what a mess over there. There’s gotta be two, three hundred people between us and whoever’s throwing that beacon.”