Miranda stepped forward to stand by Shax. “He has a support system around him. And rumor now is he has a dragon on his side.”
“I don’t care about dragons. This doesn’t concern them. This is between Tetsu and myself.” Caliban chewed on his lower lip, an affectation he’d stolen from one of the three at the base of his ladder. “We’ll need to get him alone. Isolated. Make him believe. And once he does, and delivers the switch to me—” he turned and smiled at Shax. “We will make him the new base of my ladder. We make the hand of my prophecy the new beginning of my ascension.”
Miranda smiled, but it did not reach her eyes. “Caliban…you should be cautious and not act rashly.”
“Contact him. I don’t care how. Send a note to Soldat that we have his sister and what we want in return. I’m betting the technomancer will do whatever he can to meet with us. Without his protectors.”
Chapter Sixty-Five
South China Mountain
Tir Tairngire
Kazuma lay in a field of pansies the color of the rainbow, his arms and legs spread out like da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. He watched the sky move from azure blue to pink before he closed his eyes.
They wouldn’t let him see her. Mack Schmetzer insisted it was for the best, but no matter what that rigger had done to her, nothing was as bad as what his imagination could come up with. He couldn’t remember the hours after they told him what happened. He remembered screaming, shoving his thoughts out into the datasphere and attacking everything he could hack into until a sharp pain shut it all out.
Dreams were peaceful and calm, but they weren’t reality. The Matrix wasn’t reality.
“This place is lovely,” Netcat said. She lay beside him, on her back as well, her paws in the air. At first he’d shut her out, but the girl was insistent, and Slamm-0! had sent him a message saying if he didn’t let Netcat join him, she was going to shave his head while he was in VR.
“It’s a private host somewhere in Alaska. A library, I think. They let the local artists have access to it so they can express themselves when they want.” He rested his arm over his eyes. “Silk brought me here the first time we went out.”
“You went out on a date in the Matrix?”
“Not really. We didn’t mean to. She wanted to show me something nice. So we bookmarked this place and kept our subscriptions.” He felt his throat close up, and stopped talking. He didn’t feel like talking any more.
“Kazuma—” Netcat began, and he wished she wouldn’t. He wished they would all go away. “I know you’re tired of hearing this, but Hestaby’s right. We need that switch. Caliban has to be destroyed.”
He didn’t answer.
“I know this isn’t enough time to grieve. It never is. But once the AI’s gone, we can help the technomancers that survive. I mean…aren’t you still looking for your sister—”
“Hitori’s dead.” There. He’d said it. Said what he’d been thinking all this time. Said what he feared from the start.
“Kazuma, you don’t—”
“Don’t I?” He kept his arm resting on his eyes as he spoke. “You’ve been where they were. You said it yourself—that monster is using them to build his ladder. Whatever is left of them in the Matrix is twisted and lost. If Hitori’s like that—”
“Then that’s all the more reason to find her and free her, Kazuma.” The little black cat rolled over and jumped on his chest. He made a small noise and lowered his arm. “You selfish prick! Stop thinking about yourself, and start thinking about what you can do. You’re the soldier, the one in the prophecy, the one Hestaby’s shamans talked about. You have to get the data.”
“And what if I fail? What if more people die because I’m not what people think I am?”
“Then at least get it and give it to me. I’ll try and kill that goddamn monster. I lost people too, you know.” She pounced once on his stomach, and then bounded away, her persona vanishing as she logged off.
His mind couldn’t cope right now. It needed time. Time to really evaluate what he’d been doing in the past four months. He needed to think about his choices, and see if he was really capable of helping anyone.
His AR flashed and he assumed it was Netcat, apologizing. And he needed to apologize to her.
Kazuma reached out and brushed at the datasphere as he brought up his AR. But the incoming window message wasn’t Netcat’s. He didn’t recognize it at all. No one he didn’t know had his Soldat address, so who was this?
He compiled a sprite to check the message before he opened it, in case it carried any kind of IC inside of it that might do some serious damage. But the sprite gave it the all-clear before it disappeared.
Kazuma sat up and opened the message.
Dear Mr. Tetsu,
I would like to apologize for our recent misunderstanding on the Contagion host. It seems I was unaware of the hardships you had endured since becoming a technomancer. Therefore I would like to offer my apology and make amends.
It has also come to my attention you have something I want very badly. Can you blame my desire for it? How often does one know he or she could be killed by someone else because of mischief caused by someone unrelated?
And we’re in luck, because I have something you want just as badly. I hear you’ve been searching for her since she disappeared. Would you be happy to know she’s alive and well, Mr. Tetsu? And she can be returned to you, unharmed and untouched.
All you have to do is trade me the data, Mr. Tetsu, and I can give your sister back to you whole and intact. It’s up to you. The data for your sister.
I look forward to your response.
Ferdinand Bellex>
Chapter Sixty-Six
PCC POLICE Home Office
“I’ve never seen such a botched host,” Delaney muttered as she and Renault rezzed in the office PAN and she took her seat.
They’d found the physical location of this host in one of the other properties, a tattoo business owned by Prospero, Inc., along with several used, empty autodocs. Contracts with top inkers maintained the appearance of a steady business, with no one ever suspecting what was going on inside.
As of twelve hours ago, the place had been shut down, the employees hauled in for questioning, and PCC techs were going over every inch of the physical location with top-of-the-line instruments. The two officers were coordinating with freelance coders to break down the host from their AR, neither of them wanting to spend the downtime in VR.
“Now we know why they kept shutting down that area in blackouts. That grid was never meant to house that number of users at one time. So when the game maxed out its capacity…” He looked at Delaney.
“Then everything went kerplooey.” She sighed. “But we still have to find the host Netcat was held on.”
“You really think the others she mentioned are still alive?”
“I’d be willing to bet the originals are alive. I don’t know about the others. And if we can find their personas, we could use a trace to find them physically.”
They worked in silence for a while, each meticulously looking over their grid of the game sim.
Eventually, Delaney glanced at her partner. “You think Tetsu’s going to use the switch?”
Renault shook his head. “How can he? A kill switch is usually set up in the base code of a host or a construct. We don’t know if Tolen made it so the switch can be tripped remotely, or if he has to feed the thing directly into its core.”
“I would assume he’d make it easy, given Caliban’s dangerous side.”
“I think Tolen was more worried about Powell. And he would have made it difficult for Powell to figure out. And without access to Tolen or his work, how are we going to figure out how to use it?”
“Unless he put directions with it?”
Renault smiled. “That’s some positive—” his AR console flashed, and he touched a few panels. “There it is again.”
“There’s what?”
“This weird pattern I noticed a few hours ag
o. It’s nothing special in the host’s code—nothing in the base writing. But it keeps reoccurring in the overwrite.”
“The what?”
Renault turned in his chair. “The original coders for this game were Tolen and Huerta. They built the base code while Baron wrote the story—or that’s what I’ve put together. When Powell introduced Caliban into that host’s system, he had to tweak the code a bit. Rewrite it, which left what I call coding artifacts.”
“Come again?”
“Think of it like a stray comma, or double word in a note, or even an extra parenthetical. Just something that got left behind. When Tolen went back in to create the switch, it looks like he did a bit of coding in the Contagion host itself—and he used the artifacts. They keep showing up in a pattern.”
“Can you show me?”
He turned and passed his hand over his console, and a weird set of symbols showed up in the air between them:
// TS AR (“ *{^ @) >#~ miranda”)
Delaney blinked. “What is that?”
“I have no idea. But it keeps randomly showing up, always the same way. I’m beginning to think it’s all over the host.”
“Is it a message?”
“If it is, it’s not anything I recognize.” He frowned. “Why?”
“Mind if I copy this over to a hacker?”
“You mean Slamm-0!? Be my guest.”
Delaney copied the code and paraphrased what Renault had said in a short message, encrypted it, and sent it off to Slamm-0! “Maybe he can figure it out.”
Chapter Sixty-Seven
South China Mountain
Tir Tairngire
Netcat stretched the length of their bed in the guest room of China Mountain’s lodge. A lodge still being built, as the hammering and sawing of workers woke her up. She rolled over and rested a hand over Slamm-0!. But when her hand and arm hit cold pillow and sheets, she opened her eyes.
He wasn’t there.
With a frustrated sigh, she sat up and ran fingers through her bed-head hair. He wasn’t anywhere in the room. Her AR beeped, and she had a message from Turbo Bunny. She let out a deeper sigh as she let the datasphere of the lodge wrap around her and brought the message up.
She missed their son, and couldn’t wait to get back to him. Netcat wrote a quick response with no estimated arrival back, encrypted it, and sent it. Then she bounced out of bed and put a hand to her forehead. She still felt a bit woozy after her adventure in the mystery host, and the more she thought about their situation, the more she felt bad for Kazuma.
Netcat could understand his frustrations, his loss, and his confusion. She’d been through the same litany, though not in the same way or for the same reasons. Personal loss like that—first his sister, and now his lover—could take their toll. And she agreed with Slamm-0! and Shayla: they needed to keep an eye on him, as well as convince him to retrieve the data and use it.
The door opened and Slamm-0! walked in, his face pensive. He turned on the lights and held his hands out to her. “Where would Kazuma go?”
“Go?” She frowned.
Slamm-0!’s hair was spikier than usual, and she wondered if that was due to bed head or him running his fingers through it. He still wore the soft pants from earlier, with no shoes and no shirt. His commlink nestled on his ear. “Yeah, if he were to leave here, where would he go?”
Now she was really awake. “Kazuma left?”
“Yeah. We’re not sure when, but he’s gone. We can’t find him anywhere in the lodge, and Hestaby’s people are checking the rest of the mountain.”
Drek! Netcat grabbed a pair of loungers and a T-shirt. “Has anyone tried contacting him?”
“Hell, yeah, we all have. But he’s not responding.”
“Well, think about it logically. He’s just lost his lover, his grannie’s house is more or less destroyed because he had to crash the host, he probably can’t go back to his place because I’m sure they’ve got his name on several technomancer lists by now, so what other places—” She snapped her fingers. “His sister’s. Does he still have access to it?”
Slamm-0! shook his head. “We sort of trashed it when we had to run from one of Clock’s drones.”
“No, then it was compromised.” She tried to remember everything Silk had ever told her about him, about his life and his sister. Then she thought about the host she’d followed him to earlier and stepped back through her own bookmarks, hoping she’d saved that subscriber.
But would he actually go there physically?
No… she couldn’t think of a single reason why he would leave the mountain. And if he wasn’t answering, then—
Wait…
Netcat sat on the bed and crossed her legs as she submerged herself in her AR. She flipped through her files, going back through her system archives to where she kept her tagging files. Moving Powell’s out of the way, she retrieved the one for Kazuma.
“What is it?”
“I tagged Kazuma few days ago. While we were running from the dwarf. In case I needed to find him.”
“Trace or tag?”
“Tag.” She moved fast, spreading out his Matrix history, zipping past and through the last few days to Sunday, when he was resting and Silk died. There weren’t many other places or downloads within his AR, only a lot of condolences from those on GiTm0 and one from—
“Oh, drek!”
“What?”
She shared her AR view with him as she pulled up the list of receivables and highlighted one among the GiTm0 messages.
“He got a condolence from Ferdinand Bellex?” Slamm-0! rubbed his stubbled chin. “Time stamps from a few hours ago. We can’t see what it says?”
“No. It only lets me see where he goes and who he contacts, not what he accesses.”
“Is it still working?”
Netcat moved down the lists, through more condolence messages to several hits on searches for Cup O’ Sin in the triplex near— “Slamm, that’s where he got into that shoot-out. It was in the papers. He got his promotion a week later.”
“Is there a host there?”
“Yeah.” She did her own search of the place and came up with media feeds on the incident. She moved through images of Kazuma and one of an older man with graying hair, dressed in a trench coat. “It says the coffee shop’s host had a back door into Horizon’s mainframe, and he stopped a group of hackers from using it to access financial records.”
“You don’t think he built himself his own back door into that host, do you?”
Netcat gave him a half smile. “I think it’s more than that. Come on…we gotta get there.”
“He stole one of the Messerschmitt Grashüpfers. So if he’s heading back to Los Angeles, he might already be there by now.”
“Then we need to make sure Shayla gets us there fast. Tell Mack.”
“I just did—” Slamm-0! stepped back and moved his hands in the air. “It’s a message from Delaney. She and Renault found some odd repetitive code in the Contagion host. Says it’s old, and they have no idea what it means.”
“Save it for later!” She grabbed his arm. “Let’s go!”
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Cup O’ Sin
Triplex
Midnight, and the Cup O’ Sin was bustling with customers.
No one noticed Kazuma as he slipped into the back alley with no bag or briefcase, no accoutrements like the wageslaves inside, other than a commlink in plain view on his wrist. He gave the area a quick glance, off-handedly wished he had Netcat’s e-sense, then placed his hand on the back door. The security was less than a joke—but why would anyone want to break into an empty office?
He couldn’t remember what business was next door. Three years had passed since he met Dirk Montgomery there, and accidentally thwarted a security breach.
And he had made a point of never returning to this place.
Until today.
Ponsu hovered in his peripheral vision, and he entered the moment the door popped open as his sprite made herself useful in the complex’s host.
Not much has changed. There’s a host for the building, and the coffee shop is the only storefront with the highest security rating.
“Yeah…I know.”
The ground floor had the look of a forgotten showroom. Light streamed in through tears in the paper covering the front windows. Mannequins with missing limbs stood in silhouette against the shadows of people walking by outside. The furniture was long gone, but the shelves and counter remained. He saw the outline in dust where the register had sat, and found a few old, copper pennies on the grimy floor. The place held the faint smell of cigarette smoke and clove, and he spotted an old lighter tucked under one of the wooden shelves.
Found the access. You can hide behind the counter.
Kazuma kicked some of the paper sale flyers out of the way, then thought maybe it was better to lay down on them instead of the tile itself. He was dressed in his usual dark suit, sans his old KE pin. That was a life he would never return to.
A few old magazines made for an uncomfortable pillow as he relaxed back and closed his eyes. He slipped into his AR first with Ponsu. He kept his usual persona, but added a mask that covered everything but his eyes. The red hair was gone.
The building’s host presented itself as a replica of the outer building, and like the real building, it had a back door—one he left hidden but intact years ago, just in case he ever needed a place to store something valuable.
Once through the door, he and Ponsu headed to the back of the coffee shop, where he’d hidden the data in the closet. There he opened the old access panel, removed the faux front of blinking lights and circuits, and retrieved the briefcase. In truth he’d forgotten about this host, pushed it from his memory. It was Ponsu that thought it would make a good hiding place once Myddrin’s host was compromised.
Shadowrun: Dark Resonance Page 28