Then she was spinning, using her arms and legs to route the oncoming air such that her body turned in a lazy barrel roll. The horizon rotated, faster and faster. Cyn screamed with delight as the airspeed readout on her visor continued to increase. Beside it, an altimeter was headed in the opposite direction. It flashed red for a second as the numbers blanked.
Cyn’s scream was cut off by something popping on her back.
Damn, she thought. Too soon.
Before she could come out of the roll, the stage one parachute had already wrapped itself around her torso. She made one last effort to right herself, but the nylon ropes found their way to her foot, circled it twice, and then began to pull as the chute caught some air. When it finally went taught, Cyn felt her body being thrown downwards, and then the earth and the sky swapped positions.
Cyn closed her eyes against the advancing enemy, recalling the relaxation exercise the simulation had drilled into her brain, training up the muscle memory so that any inkling of fear was immediately squelched by rote concentration. If she couldn’t right herself before landing, if she cut loose and died on impact, there was no sense worrying about it now. There was nothing to do except breathe the dwindling oxygen and enjoy the novelty that she was likely the only person currently hurtling to her death in such an odd fashion.
Warmth spread through her neck; the Ayudante was coming online.
The change was subtle.
At first, Cyn was only aware of the wind running its fingers over her body, starting at her helmet on the way to caressing the impermeable fibers of her dive suit, leaving off with a soft tap on the toes of her shoes. Then she could hear the soft cries of alarm coming from the Ayudante. Even though her vitals were within normal ranges, its panic spoke to observations of brain activity, of a primal part of her gray matter that was trying to fill her head with images of a body splattered on the ground, its bones having liquefied on impact, with nothing remaining to identify the flattened organic mass as human.
Her hand moved on its own, seeking out the holster on her hip, her fingernails digging at the clasp set into the leather. The needler came free and she used both hands to steady it. Hitting the ropes would have been impossible; the half-inflated canopy was a much bigger target. Cyn let the air push her aim around, making holes in the sky-blue fabric.
The pressure on her foot lessened as the wind tore at the holes, ripping the canopy apart. Cyn found the freedom to rotate and pointed herself at the glittering tip of the Perion Spire, a pinpoint around which an intricate fractal of streets extended into the surrounding desert. She could make out the larger highways and heavy duty trucks, but everything else was hidden behind the flashing text on her visor.
It was getting to be that time.
Cyn pulled the ripcord and breathed a sigh of relief as the main parachute deployed without issue. She settled into a sedate circle around the Spire.
Even with Tate’s considerable reach and Cyn’s own hacking, there was little intel on the Spire itself, save a few blueprints that had been marked up and shopped more often than Elise Portman. As far as anyone could tell, the Spire was home to offices and housing for C-level employees and managers who spent more time in meetings than checking in on their workers. As the Spire ascended beyond habitable dimensions, the space was thought to be filled with telecom equipment. Cyn could already see the flowery antennas of such equipment blooming on the scaffolding around the very tip of the Spire.
One of the sixteen schematics showed a service hatch within reach of the scaffolding, located on the west side of the building. In her tightening spiral, the compass on Cyn’s visor was useless. She instead watched the horizon, knowing she had to put the Spire between herself and the sun. The anxiety about where to land faded, replaced by the more pressing issue of whether she could land at all.
Contrary to popular rumor, there were no sentry guns on the Spire, at least, not at her altitude. The only defensive measure in place was the reflective glass and the blinding glares it created every time she caught the sun in them. After the last flash, she made a sharp turn and approached the Spire head-on.
Cyn gripped the chute cord and waited for the right moment to cut loose. Though the parachute had carried her this far, it would no doubt pull her off the Spire when she landed. In one simulation, Cyn had broken loose ten feet above the scaffolding and simply grabbed a crossbeam on the way down. It would have made a compelling stunt in a movie, but here, without an audience, there was no point in showing off.
A section of the scaffolding banged against her shin, sending the splintering pain racing up her body. As it passed through the five gates in her spine, the signal diminished, until her brain was left with only a faint echo of distress. Cyn cut herself loose as her other leg hooked around a horizontal bar. When she heard the signature click and saw the chute fall away, she reached her hands out with the augmented power of a vise, latching onto a section of metal piping and a mesh of coaxial cables spilling from the back of a satellite dish.
She took a moment to catch her breath. The numbers on her visor began to settle and shrink, allowing her to focus beyond the fuzzy text.
“There’s my bitch,” she said.
Cyn pushed and pulled her way through the scaffolding with the ease of a child at play on a jungle gym. The door was unlocked and opened with a simple turn of a handle. Inside, she waited for her eyes to adjust to the dark. She pulled the dive helmet from her face and took a deep breath of machine-heated air.
“Excuse me,” said a voice to the right.
Cyn spun around, pulling the needler from her hip. She pointed it into the darkness and waited for the speaker to come into view.
Set on a pike in the middle of the room was the upper half of what Cyn hoped was a synthetic man. Cables drenched in an oily liquid hung from his elevated torso, dripping into a grate whose mesh was thick with the congealed innards of previous caretakers. The synthetic had the appearance of a young man and in another setting, might have been mildly attractive. The look on his face was so piteous that the Ayudante chip mistook it for sincere need and amplified it.
Empathy enveloped Cyn, enough to lower the needler a full inch.
“You are not authorized to be in here,” said the synthetic. “I will have to alert—”
The needler hummed as the synthetic’s lips shattered and exited through the back of his head.
14
“Two minutes on-site and you’ve already popped one off?”
“Who are you, my narrator?”
Tate’s laughed buzzed in Cyn’s ear; the whisperer was holding up well despite the electronic interference coming off the tightly packed telecom equipment. Dusty metal blades with frenetic lights covered every surface of the glorified broom closet. A semi-circle of user-serviceable devices surrounded the pike on which the now lifeless synthetic—if it had even been alive to begin with—sat impaled with no legs and no head and no dignity. Even before Cyn had happened upon him, the synthetic had been indentured into the life of a remote terminal server, a set of hands in the inhospitable attic of the Spire where the dust and dirt swirled in the super-heated air.
When the line didn’t cut out, Cyn asked, “Are you gonna babysit me the entire time?”
“Are you going to keep pushing your tach into the red?”
“Goddamn chute opened early. When I get back, I’m going to have some words with that ape at Maine Prairie.”
There was a sporadic throbbing in Cyn’s leg; the Ayudante was letting the pain through every couple of minutes to remind her of the injury.
“I’m fine, Lincoln. I don’t need someone looking over my shoulder.”
“It’s not a problem,” said Tate. “I dropped a tab on the way back so I am jacked, baby. So long as you make it back before this wears off, we should be good.”
“We’ll see.”
Cyn looked around for a door, remembered where she was, and began examining the floor. A square section of the raised grate was marked with black and yel
low paint. In the center, a looped handle sat in a recessed half-moon.
“Yes, we will,” said Tate. “I gotta get this SatIndex up before we start losing subbers.”
Cyn had the hatch open, but paused to let her feet dangle into the dark room below. She pulled her phone from the zippered pocket on her chest and snapped a photo of the synthetic. “I’m sending you something. Just give me an hour before you feed it.”
There was silence as the picture transferred.
“This is why I had to pop one off,” she added.
“The fuck,” said Tate. “Damn, girl. Alright, counter starts now.”
Cyn rubbed the material on her shins, activating the luminescent fibers. The room below was slightly larger and similarly wallpapered in electronics.
“Same goes for anything else I send you. If Perion sees it, I want them an hour behind me.”
“Little girl telling me how to feed like it’s my first day and shit.”
The needler was still warm, but Cyn didn’t bother holstering it, not with the possibility of another synthetic in the room below. She pushed her chute rig and helmet into the corner, knowing she would never see them again. Gripping the needler in one hand, she used the other to lower herself to the next level.
No one, synthetic or otherwise, challenged her. Again, she searched the floor for a hatch, again she lowered herself down. The lower she got, the bigger the rooms became, the more the claustrophobia receded.
The banks of electronics gradually disappeared, leaving her with empty rooms of rough evercrete to crawl down through. Finally, she reached a room with massive generators set in two lines of three. She snapped a picture and sent it to Tate.
“What do you make of these?”
“Magnetic inductors,” he replied. “Looks like they’re using mag-lev for their elevator system.”
“And just how would you know that?” Cyn walked around one of the generators, but its smooth sides gave no clues about the tech contained within.
“The executive entrance at Umbra Terminus takes you under the train’s mag tracks. They’ve got similar designs, but yours looks more specialized.”
“Are they about the same size?”
“It’s hard to tell, but I’d say probably. Why?”
“How far can one of those inductors drive the mag-lev?”
“Give me a minute.”
There was static on the line as Tate had a conversation with someone else. He wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty with the data mining, but years spent as a producer had left him slower than the boys in the back, his quasi-ciphers whose nimble fingers banged out like pistons, pumping ones and zeros into the ether like a needler firing at full automatic.
Cyn began to whistle, but thought the better of it.
“Maximum track run is twenty-five hundred feet. On average, between Umbra and Sacramento, inductors are set every two thousand feet.”
“And how tall is the Perion Spire?”
“It depends on which schematic you trust. This one says ninety or so habitable floors, another forty for equipment, and the rest is just decoration. This other one says it has a toe to teeth distance of sixteen hundred feet.”
“And these are just pushing elevator cars, not whole trains.”
Cyn pulled back a maintenance hatch near an inductor and stared into the black abyss below. In the distance, she could hear the smooth whooshing of air as an elevator car ascended.
“What are you thinking, Cynthia?”
“Not really thinking,” she replied, pulling a glow stick from her belt. It was small, about the size of a tube of lipstick, but it gave off light like a strip of magnesium. She depressed the plunger on the end and tightened her fist around it. “Ten bucks says it bounces right off the top of the car.”
“What bounces?” asked Tate. “What the hell are you up to?”
“Well,” she replied, using her own voice as a distraction from the scenario building in her head, “it’s simple. The inductors drive less weight a further distance than required by the Spire. So that means there must be more of this thing underground, and that makes perfect sense. Why keep anything of value in the fifth largest building in the world? You’re just asking Kaili Zabora to fly a plane into it.”
“You’re going to jump, aren’t you? Damn it, girl.”
Cyn released her grip and waited a few seconds before peering down after the glow stick. The bright speck receded to a pinpoint, casting a green-white glow on the walls of the elevator shaft, highlighting a series of descending platforms and the connecting ladders. When the glow stick finally stopped, a tinny smack echoed up the shaft.
“Got it in one,” said Cyn.
“I’m not sure this is one of your better ideas.”
“You want the real story, don’t you? Or should I just pick up a brochure in the lobby? One picture of that synthetic amputee isn’t going to make Banks shit himself.” She took a deep breath; the car was too far down to risk a jump. “Ask the boys in the back if they know anything about the mag-lev system. Is there a way to call the car to the top?”
“Oh sure,” said Tate. “I’ll just have them pull up the PDF.” His sarcasm tapered to a long silence.
Cyn waited, wondering idly how much a pair of Koertig enhanced eyes would cost. Low-light vision, non-visible spectrum dithering, telescoping irises: anything to help her see the bottom of the elevator shaft.
“No luck hacking the planet.” Tate huffed.
“Screw it. I’ve got enough spider silk to get me halfway down.”
“And if the car is any lower?”
“Who thinks that far ahead?”
Cyn tugged at one of the hidden pockets running down the length of her leg and retrieved a titanium snare. Looping it into the spider silk took time; though both were rated for loads ten times her weight, she knew the weak point would be where the two joined. If she fell, it would be because of her own shoddy workmanship. After a few minutes, she had the snare and the silk wrapped around one of the anchor bolts holding the magnetic inductors to the evercrete floor.
“You’re really going to do this?” asked Tate.
Leaning over the lip of the hatch, Cyn raised her sliver to her mouth. “Yes!” she barked.
Then she was falling at a clip that evoked a whine from the silk feeder on her belt. In the distance, the glow stick approached. As Cyn got closer, she realized the elevator car was descending, dropping just a little slower than she was falling. She did her best to match the speeds, but the impact was still more than she was expecting and louder than she would have liked. Cyn made a grab for the loose cables on the outer circuitry of the car to keep from falling off.
She could hear alarm in the muffled voices inside the car; hopefully they would pass her landing off as mechanical noise.
Cyn unhooked the feeder from her belt and hit the retract button. It sped up into the darkness.
“Sounded like that hurt,” said Tate.
“You try it next time.” She groaned dramatically, playing up the sympathy.
“Tell me what you’re seeing.”
The car continued its controlled fall as Cyn whispered to herself and Tate.
“We’re going down, just passing the forty-seventh floor. There are chalk markings on the walls calling out each level. Doors, piston-driven, I think. Opposite side has ventilation shafts, maybe exhaust from the floors. I get a blast of warm air each time I pass one. Every fifth floor has a landing going from one side of the shaft to the other. Ladders alternate between each—”
“Ladders? You could have climbed down?”
“Yes,” said Cyn, rolling her eyes. “And three years later I would have made it to the bottom. At least when this thing stops, I’ll be able to climb off. Could probably make the jump now if I wanted to, but since I’m already…”
The car slowed to a stop on the nineteenth floor, paused, and started to climb again. Cyn jumped to the landing on the twentieth floor with a graceful leap.
“I shouldn’t hav
e said anything.”
“What happened now?” asked Tate.
“Now, I have to climb.” She tried to inject some enthusiasm into her voice, but the stiffness in her legs told her it would be a punishing descent.
Tate tried to distract her with stories of the continuing silence coming from Perion Synthetics. Meanwhile, day-old content tagged with Cameron Gray’s name was just now hitting the feeds. He was painting a picture of a synthetic utopia where man and machine lived together in a harmony not known since the days of Adam and God. It was all bullshit, Tate was quick to point out.
“Lobby,” said Cyn, between breaths. “Still going.”
“I’m going to feed the picture now.”
“It’s your donkey show, boss.”
Cyn continued on until she passed a marking indicating level B15. The shaft extended further into the earth, obscured by shadows. Using the platform for leverage, Cyn pried the metal grate from a ventilation shaft and set it beside the opening. The interior was shiny and slick, allowing her suit to slide over it with ease. She used the grips on the palms of her gloves to pull herself along, until finally the shaft broke out over a false ceiling. Light from the room below peeked in between the seams of the drop tiles.
“Where—”
“Hush,” said Cyn, covering her ear. There were sounds coming from below, muffled as if behind glass.
Cyn lifted one of the tiles and poked her head through. The room was empty, sterile, and white. Along one edge of the room were five bassinets set apart with deliberate precision. But instead of looking cozy and warm as bassinets should, these were also sterile and lined with cold, gray cloth.
Cyn dropped down from the ceiling, felt the pressure in her legs as her augments absorbed most of the impact.
“I’m in,” she whispered.
The lights in the ceiling left no part of the room untouched, and for a moment, Cyn felt completely exposed. The fear, however, wasn’t strong enough to overcome her curiosity. She approached the middle bassinet with cautious steps. Something beneath the blankets stirred.
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