by Don Allmon
Buzz looked over his shoulder at the orc. “So Jason’s got debt problems. Who doesn’t?”
“That’s my point, ain’t it? No one’s an angel. Everyone’s in debt. So the summary on that report I got, it says here’s a kid who was so goddamn average no one would look at him twice. A kid who cheated when it was easy, and toed the line when it wasn’t, just like every other kid ever did.”
“So why’d you invest?”
“I had a hunch. That was two years ago, and me and Comet here, we’ve spent a lot of time with Jason, and we’ve grown close, I like to think. And here’s the Jason I know: He’s a genius. He understands engines and metals and plastics like nobody does. And he’s driven. He’s driven like no twentysomething I’ve ever seen except maybe Comet. Everyday twentysomethings don’t start their own businesses. They don’t chase after defense contracts. Jason Taylor isn’t second-string anything.”
Duke let go of him. Buzz’s arm went pins and needles when the blood started pumping back into it. Duke lounged back in his seat, shrewd eyes narrow. “So all that background I dug up? I don’t believe one bit of it. That background was forged by you, wasn’t it? Who is Jason Taylor, really?”
Buzz Howdy wasn’t much of a liar. All of his lies were told with code and data and he’d never had to learn how to do it, real-life, face-to-face. It was why he didn’t try to cover his own identity. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Jason’s just Jason.” And maybe that was a lie, but he didn’t care if Duke believed him or not.
Duke held Buzz’s gaze for a good ten seconds, until Buzz couldn’t take it anymore and looked away. Anyone would have.
Duke said, “Comet, if this guy crosses you . . .” and then he only shrugged as if the rest was obvious.
This was a party neighborhood: bars, restaurants, smoke, and coffee houses; piercing, tattoo, and scarring parlors; sex shops and sim dens; and even on a weekday the streets were crowded. The traffic was unmanaged the way freestate towns tended to be—windshield-scroll slogans read DRIVING = FREEDOM and MY CAR’S NOT YOUR DRONE—so there was the stop and go flares of brake lights and piercing horns. Add to that noise the unending chatter of adverts flowing over shop windows, every piece of glass flickering (and none of those models or actors were orcs, except for the beer and the PacArmy commercials, go figure).
Buzz caught up with Comet, who kept a fast pace. People on the street nodded at him as he passed. Everyone seemed to know who he was. “Where we going?”
“To find someplace where people ain’t gonna get hurt.”
Buzz felt a bit bad for not having thought of that. He took out a joint and lit it. Comet gave him a disapproving look. “We’re going into a combat situation.”
“I’m nervous, okay?”
“Then maybe you should have stayed behind.”
Buzz crushed it out. Comet threaded the crowd fast, and Buzz had to jog a step or two to keep up.
“You want me to send the message now?” The message was simple. Buzz would use the Rainbow Protocol to access the darknets. There were boards in the Ultraviolet network carrying news that people like Valentine would continually scan via virtual intelligences, news of the illegal sort. He’d make a simple post there: GPS coordinates and two words: Blue Unicorn. And then they’d wait for someone—likely Valentine—to take the bait.
“Not until we’re in position,” Comet said.
They stopped at a crosswalk and waited for the signal. It seemed a silly thing to do—the two of them waiting at a crosswalk—all things considered.
Behind them came screams and the shrieking of wheels on pavement. Buzz spun.
Cars stopped, drivers gawked, and the crowd parted to make way for the thing that had dropped from a rooftop onto the sidewalk.
It was mantis-like. One arm was a Swiss Army knife of blades; the other, a gun. Hydraulic tubing glowed red through the seams of armored plating like they were arteries pulsing with irradiated blood. It was the same kind of drone they’d found dead and brainless in the lot of JT’s compound. Targeting lasers spun and danced from it like it was a disco ball.
People reacted stupidly. Initial scare over, they laughed because this was Greentown and this kind of thing didn’t happen here. It must be some kind of prank, especially because painted in tempera across the robot mantis’s chest was the word COWBOY.
“I told you not to send the message yet!”
“I didn’t!”
“Then why’s that thing here?”
All COWBOY’s dancing targeting lasers gathered on Buzz.
Buzz and COWBOY stood across from one another just like that: like two gunfighters facing off across the dark oil-in-water-gleaming street of Greentown. The whole street got real quiet like they were supposed to do right before the clock struck high noon.
From a speaker somewhere within the thing came a woman’s voice, “I found you, Buzz.”
“Run,” Comet said.
Buzz couldn’t run. He just stood there staring at it, frozen in place as if pinned by all those lasers. The drone didn’t shoot him. It charged.
“I said run!” Comet shoved him so hard he nearly fell. But he finally ran.
Comet tried to intercept the drone, but COWBOY flung one arm out and knocked him to the street as it raced past. Comet was everywhere near as fast and agile as the drone. He leapt after it and tackled it by its rear legs, and they both tumbled across blacktop—the drone leaving telltale gouges behind it—and slammed up into the fender of a stopped car, crushing it. The driver bailed from the other side.
Comet untangled himself from the drone. Around him: bedlam. People who’d oohed and ahhed at first, finally realized this wasn’t a joke. Some people ran. More drew weapons. They were orcs, after all, and their fight-or-flight instincts were seriously broken. Comet told them, “Stop, stop, stop!” but they wouldn’t listen. They opened fire on COWBOY.
And then a swerving car clipped him, and Comet flew five meters into the crowd, fall broken by bystanders. He struggled to standing, and shook his head clear, superman body bruised but not broken.
Buzz was long gone. COWBOY too.
Comet cursed himself for not injecting the guy right away with a tracker or setting up a local network between them. He took one-two-three great leaps up windows and fire escapes. He ran rooftop to rooftop, following the damage the drone had left behind, hoping he wasn’t too late.
Buzz tore out of there. He bulldozed through orcs. He ran into the street. A car’s wheels screeched, a horn blew, and a driver bellowed at him. Behind him: screaming and gunshots. Buzz kept running, not wanting to see the massacre, hoping to God he was wrong and all that screaming was just nerves and not people dying because of him.
BangBang had been right. Buzz shouldn’t be here. He ran and blasted BangBang’s name all over the local net, hoping he was listening.
He switched from PedX to Rainbow Protocol and accessed the darknets—Black & Blue, Indigo, and Ultraviolet networks—and spent several thousand cryptix on dubious backdoors, vulnerabilities, and exploits for an 036 just in case he had the opportunity to use them.
He leapt trash bins, tripped over others because what was he, some kind of athlete? He jumped for a fire escape ladder, but it was raised and he was short. They made the goddamn things for giants and called it safety. He sprawled flat on the pavement, and just where his head would have been had he not fallen, bolos cracked into prefab. Livewires snapped taut around nothing. COWBOY had found him and wasn’t trying to kill him; it was trying to catch him. And being caught by this thing—that scared Buzz shitless.
On your feet again. Ignore the pain in your knees and your palms from falling. Ignore the pain in your side from running and being so damn out of shape. Ignore you can’t breathe. Not breathing is better than what that thing’ll do. Down one alley, across another. Fuck it, fuck it if somebody sees, and he called the Marid, sent coordinates and vector. If he brought 3djinn’s spaceship down in the middle of Greentown, then that’s what he did, and he’d de
al with their pissed-off-ness alive instead of dead.
No reply.
He’d taken his ship. BangBang had taken his ship. Buzz flooded the network with an all-nodes string of profanity tagged with BangBang’s name.
A second mantis stepped into the alley ahead of him. It had BANDIT painted on its chest. The N was backward. COWBOY and BANDIT. It might have been funny.
He juked right. The streets were deserted here, a bad place for walking at night and about to get worse. COWBOY stepped out, spun up its gun, and sprayed bullets down the street in front of Buzz, throwing asphalt everywhere. Buzz skidded to a stop, scrambled away, ducked behind parked cars, lamp posts, a mailbox, anything he could find. Bullets pinged and cracked and whined around him. And then BANDIT appeared in front of him.
Pinned between them, Buzz took his only way out—a narrow alley—knowing this was a trap. They were herding him, but what choice did he have?
He entered the alley hesitantly, skittered around, clung to the cool cinderblock walls, danced one way and then the other, unable to choose between the killer robots or the threat waiting down the dark alley. His pulse raced. His breathing had gone so fast and shallow, he saw spots and thought he’d pass out.
COWBOY and BANDIT came down the alley behind him. Side by side with the blue fade of LED streetlamps behind them, red limning their multi-jointed legs, they looked more insectile than ever, more like something from a B horror sci-fi. The other end of the alley was open, but that was a lie. A trap. Overwhelmed with fear of the drones, he ran anyway.
He made it ten feet.
Framed in the alleyway, the woman who blocked his path was tall and skeletally thin. She was wearing a wide-brimmed bush hat and a brown duster that spread broad like there was a wind. She had one artificial eye big and round as a golf ball, Sith red. She smiled with pointed titanium teeth. She was cybernetic evil like you couldn’t buy off the shelf. Valentine.
Buzz took a step back.
A step back into the arms of COWBOY. All six of them snapped closed around him. Neck, chest, waist, thighs, knees, and ankles. No legs to stand on, all of them around Buzz, the drone plopped onto the pavement, taking Buzz with it. Buzz tried to squirm away. Valentine said, “COWBOY can grind you into hamburger. No, finer than hamburger. Spreadable. Braunschweiger.” And, as promised, the arms tightened painfully. Every breath hurt.
The cyborg knelt in front of Buzz. “Your friend got hit by a car back there. I doubt he’ll be moving anytime soon.”
She’s lying, he thought. That can’t be true. He’s coming.
She took a patch cable from her coat.
“What’s that for?” His voice was a tight hiss, and he’d started to see spots.
“My employer, Firelight, wants you dead. He wants everyone who came in contact with the Blue Unicorn dead. Even that girl, Dante. But Firelight’s a wizard, and wizards don’t have a very good grasp of what’s valuable and what isn’t.”
She flipped back long curly hair that belonged on a runway model, not on a nightmare, and snapped the cable into a jack behind her ear. She ruffled her hand through Buzz’s shaggy hair. Buzz tried to turn his head away, but he could barely move, and the articulated leg around his throat tightened.
“I saw you at JT’s place—you can hide cameras on flies these days—and I know who you are. And when it comes right down to it, the mind of a 3djinn hacker is worth more than any contract Firelight could imagine.”
The cyborg found Buzz’s jack—these days only a backup connection for when wi-fi wasn’t functioning—and went to snap in the cord.
“I’m locked down; you can’t get anything.”
“You’re going to let me in.”
“No, I’m not.”
Somewhere behind her metal teeth she’d installed LEDs so the red bled through her smile. The corner of her one real eye crinkled up with laugh lines.
“You know who I am. Imagine the things I know, what plots and secrets. Secrets 3djinn could leverage if you’re good enough to pry them from my mind. Open up, Buzz. Best hacker wins.”
And this was what he’d wanted, wasn’t it? Well, not quite this. He’d imagined hacking a half-dead Atari in the safety of a garage somewhere, not this. But it was a solution, wasn’t it? And Comet was coming, wasn’t he? The idea of being saved by that fucker, of having to listen to his bloated ego, well, that rankled a bit, but he’d suck it up if he had to.
He closed his eyes so the cyborg didn’t distract him, and he started building.
BangBang’s presence brushed against him. Thank God. Finally. He undid his blocks and let him in.
—Help me.
—We warned you. BangBang ran a quick scan of Buzz. —What are you doing? Because Buzz’s head was a snowstorm of code flying everywhere, accreting and twisting into spires and loops.
—Building defenses. I’m going to let her in.
—Are you nuts?
—She knows what’s going on. She knows what happened to JT and Dante because she’s the one who did it. If it’s data she wants, I’ll give her data. If she’s downloading, she’s open.
—You’re going to duel her? You’ve never dueled anyone. You’ll lose!
—Then help me!
—I’m not compromising our network security to help your stupid friends!
Buzz opened his eyes and fixed on hers. He’s right, this is a stupid idea. Aloud, he said, “You win, I’m open.”
She snapped the cable into place. The sound of its click was a dull vibration traversing bone rather than air, then the cyborg invaded his mind.
The brain made a slow computer. All its power was in its architecture. Neural implants, heavily based on DNA and peptide computing, were, on a fundamental level, data represented as structure, translated into sensation. Cyberspace wars were geographical, topographical, architectural, like Escherian artists trying to outdraw one another.
Buzz’s data stores were palaces of marble, crazed and unhinged, brilliantly out of balance and impossible to navigate by anyone but him. He sank into it, folded hallways and galleries around him, submerged himself beneath the sea of his own consciousness. There was a recursive logic that said you couldn’t do that. The THC in his blood made this easier. Other drugs would have made it easier yet, but he’d always been afraid of the side effects. He didn’t think Valentine would share those fears. She’d have every edge in this fight.
The cyborg cut loose with a virus Buzz’s user interface represented as wisteria. The vines erupted everywhere. They were third-generation meningitis, meant to burn him down, meant to distract him from the real attack by the sheer horror of what they could do to him if left alone. Buzz didn’t leave them alone. His honeypots—beautiful Möbius rings of gold—folded around them, trapped them in an infinite fractal space, finitely bounded, and deleted them harmlessly.
In response, he mapped the cyborg’s network, building crystalline patterns charting data transfers, which seemed a tepid move by comparison. He mapped the network to COWBOY and BANDIT, analyzed their control paths. Valentine thought he wanted what she knew: details of her assassinations over the years, who paid for them, her contacts. He didn’t give a fuck about any of that. The drones had the information he wanted.
He released an army of virtual intelligences, viral bots, to make havoc, knowing the cyborg would squash them flat. What she should have done was let them run.
She was flashy. She wasted bandwidth and processing inserting an image of herself into Buzz’s mind: flames jetting from her fingers, Sith eye shooting lasers. It looked badass; it was all bullshit smoke and mirrors, all logic and math constructions, and Buzz reduced all of it down to quadratics and tensor transformations and undid them.
The space in which they fought was like a funhouse hall of mirrors. Real data in its twisting cyclopean spires were hidden behind illusions and then multiplied, bent, and warped so that attacks found nothing. She was impressed. She cackled gleefully. “Now this is what I’m talking about!” and spewed lightning from her f
ingertips to shatter stained glass windows in Buzz’s mind. They fought over the falling shards to build from them chutes and ladders.
Buzz gave ground before her attacks. He played to her vanity (and she was a fuck-ton of vain), so he had to let her burn through data. She burned fast, melting and shattering his virtual mirrors, exposing real data. Buzz couldn’t create fictions fast enough. She was relentless and he never had time for a counterstrike.
He started to wonder if he was over his head.
Critter chattered away like some particularly hateful sportscaster calling a football game from another room, all tone and no words. BangBang sent, —Buzz you need to stop. There’s critical data in those structures!
Buzz’s mind contained passwords to databases planetwide. It contained hundreds of thousands of bank accounts, SIN accounts, credit reports, corporate balance sheets, and more. It contained detailed analyses of political money trails, investments, and communications. It contained the intelligence data equivalent to a small country and had access to more.
One structure cracked and folded in a non-Euclidean eye-bending way, breaking before the cyborg’s attack and reforming again, damaged and burning. Buzz “forgot” ten thousand IRA accounts just like that.
Critter’s complaining didn’t stop.
Buzz didn’t stop either. JT’s, Austin’s, and Dante’s names hung there in his consciousness, reminders of who he was fighting for. “He wants everyone who came in contact with the Blue Unicorn dead,” she’d said.
BangBang sent, —Your body is our network’s greatest vulnerability. You should have lain safe here with us in High Castle, sleeping where no one could touch you. I’m sorry, Buzz. I didn’t want to do this. I’m going to shut you down.