by Kai O'Connal
“Do we have a visual yet?” Elijah asked.
“Not yet,” Tango said as he moved holo-vid screens around. “Once he’s fully into the host we should notice.”
“And we’ll see what he’s sees?”
“That’s the plan.”
Eyetooth frowned. How was that possible? To see what a hacker could see inside the Matrix? Unless they planned on taking a look at the host’s sculpt. That was possible—the computer rendering a 3-D image of what Leung would see. That is, if he got in.
“We have activity on the box.” Tango moved two screens and pointed to the one on the right. “He’s hacking—”
All at once the screens disappeared.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. The device is still online. Leung is still in there, we just don’t know where.”
Elijah leaned on the station’s cabinet. “What?”
Tango faced him. “He just … disappeared.”
The lines of the host had solidified into a door, and that’s what Leung was trying to open. Hacking in was a little bit more complex than he thought it’d be. He applied a variety of maneuvers he’d learned over his career, and what finally gave him access was an ID he took from the documents he’d found in that toy store. The door opened, and he stepped through.
The host, disappointingly, was blank. A black-and-white grid stretched out in front of Leung on all sides. Either being left in the cold had damaged the sculpt used, or none had ever been applied. He immediately copied information from the device onto his deck. The icon itself wasn’t anything he recognized. He did a quick double check to make sure he had everything in place before he tapped the ARO.
At first nothing happened.
Then two field screens came up on AR. One requiring a name, the other a password.
How old school is this?
Since he logged in with the ID he’d spoofed, he typed in that name and then ran through a complex set of passwords based on the sequence that gave him entry to the commlink. He was equally surprised when the password was the same one he’d used to gain access to the device. Maybe this thing was owned by someone for a special use? Only home users or Matrix Security illiterates used the same login and passwords with more than one entry.
He had little time to think as a second doorway appeared in front of him. It looked like a regular door, but his diagnostics told him it was a link to a host. He immediately checked to see where this host was located, and felt his jaw drop.
There was no answer.
Still no response.
Every nerve in his body told him to go back right now. Take what he already had and log out. But like Elijah was obsessed with chasing knowledge, Leung was equally obsessed with the Matrix. Especially with mysteries in the Matrix.
His curiosity won out as he encoded the information and added it to the packet for Elijah. When it was finished, he stepped in front of the door and pushed it inward.
A persona in the Matrix isn’t always sure what a new environment will look like, or what the experience will be like. Hosts, like nodes, are sculpted at the owner’s whim, and can look as realistic as the creator wants, or as crazy.
This creator went for realistic.
In fact, for a second Leung thought he’d somehow logged out of the Matrix and stepped outside the shelter. The sculpt was exactly where their dig was taking place. But it wasn’t exact. There wasn’t a shelter, or a row of tents. No carrier for the drills—and there wasn’t a hole in the ice. But other than that …
As he stepped forward, symbols appeared in front of him, overlaid to match the ice formations around him. He didn’t recognize them. He made a complete three hundred and sixty-degree turn, making captures of the images as he went, and saved them to the folder. Leung stopped when a tower-like symbol appeared over the smooth ice where a hole now sat in reality.
He started in that direction and saw glyphs pop up along the symbols. If it was a language, it wasn’t one he recognized. He saw numbers displayed, but they were deeper than the eighty meters Danvers was digging.
Leung surveyed the landscape, trying to make sense of it. The only reason someone would create a host like this would be for education, maybe training, or study. And to make it, someone would have had to have visited this area of the Antarctic before they did.
But why? And who?
He knew he was going to have to hack into the host’s software, and he was pretty sure even attempting such a thing would alert security, if it hadn’t already. But his scans hadn’t detected that he’d tripped anything yet, and nothing seemed out of place.
Yeah, if I don’t count a host that looks exactly like our dig site, on a device that shouldn’t be here. I agree with Eyetooth—this is all wrong.
He decided to at least attempt to find the host’s owner, or at least ID whatever company had funded this. He went back to where he’d stepped through, and discovered it wasn’t far from the wave of ice where he and Kyrie found the device. Remembering that conversation, he was pretty sure this thing wasn’t dropped by anyone on either team, and it sure as hell didn’t belong to Aztechnology.
No … this was something new. And whoever made it was interested in the tower. They knew about it already.
Leung started moving in deeper. It was a weird place, but seemed pretty benign. As long as he didn’t trip an IC along the way, it should all work out.
Pineapple left the shelter and headed toward the hole. He’d heard the drill stop some time ago and was curious. Both Airdox were grounded nearby, their maintenance teams busy rethreading them, but the small drill was missing. Cao sat in front of the monitors, her parka hood pulled as far down as it would go. He made sure to make a lot of noise behind her so as not to frighten her.
She turned her head slightly. “You don’t have to do that. I’ve got great hearing. One of the perks of my condition.”
Pineapple didn’t answer. He knelt beside her and glanced at the holo-vids. “You guys found the tip?”
“Gauntlet’s taking the small drill down. We’re within a few centimeters of the top of the thing, but now he wants to rout out the ice around it.” She stopped and her eyes unfocused.
Pineapple knew Gauntlet was talking to her, so he waited. After a few seconds she blinked and looked at him. “He says it’s damn cold down there, but it looks like he got the width right. Should be able to excavate around the tower without hitting it.”
“That’s a good idea.”
“Leung still checking out that device he found?”
“Yeah…” Pineapple glanced back at the shelter. “I don’t like it. We got enough going on as it is to be monkeyin’ around with someone’s missing commlink.”
“That what it is?”
“Sort of. But sort of not. Whatever it is, it’s nuts.”
“You’re just worried, that’s all.”
“Maybe …” he straightened. “I’m gonna go take a look around where he found it. Just to give myself some peace of mind.”
“Okay … just be careful,” she replied. “We’re going to reach the tower soon. Can’t wait to see Elijah’s face.”
Pineapple patted the top of her hear parka and lumbered away. He replaced his goggles and zipped up his giant parka before headed back toward the shelter. He wanted to check not only on Leung, but Kyrie and Elijah as well.
Eyetooth didn’t remember pacing, but the moment Elijah moved from where he’d been studying screens, she came back to herself. She watched his eyes unfocus and figured he had some kind of incoming message or communication. She wanted to know if it was from Leung, but didn’t ask. She didn’t have access to his PAN and didn’t want to bother him. He looked as worried as she was, though.
“Heart rate’s up. Whatever he’s
experiencing, he’s tense,” Tango said.
“You think he’s being chased?” Kyrie looked at Elijah. When he didn’t acknowledge her, she reached out and waved at him. “Hey.”
He blinked and refocused on her. “Yes?”
“Leung’s heart’s up. You think he’s being chased?”
“He knows to send a message out if he gets in too deep.”
But we’ve lost contact, Eyetooth thought. She didn’t say it out loud, though, because she figured it would make no difference to Elijah.
“Get out of there soon,” she whispered. “I still have to make you dinner.”
Leung approached a wave formation as his agent returned with some interesting information off the host’s activity log. Most all of the communications with it originated in Antarctica, but not from either shadow team or the Azzies.
A handful of the communiques came from outside of the Antarctic, but the agent wasn’t able to pinpoint where. Of the seven, two groups had the same ID numbers—neither of which he recognized. Usually an ID would have a variant of a sending or receiving node’s location, but these were blank. The whole thing spoke of Matrix technology years ahead of what he knew, or new tech developed by deep pockets.
This kind of detail wasn’t set up as a hobby, much less an accident. This host was here for a reason.
It was time to log out.
Nothing happened.
Leung frowned and tried the logout sequence again. The door didn’t show up. He reached, stretched, twisted, and pulled. Still nothing happened. Leung opened all channels.
Abruptly a warning appeared in large orange letters. INTRUSION COUNTERMEASURES DETECTED.
Damn!
He’d waited too long to back out and somehow tripped an alarm. He drew his katana from his back and looked around. His persona didn’t feel the cold of the sculpted Antarctic, so he wasn’t encumbered by the thick padding of a parka. He kept his perimeter icon view up and loaded to the right of his periphery, much like a HUD for combat. So far nothing moved or showed up on the view, but he kept his guard up while pulling out everything he had to try to crash the IC.
He was sure the others noticed his body reacting to panic in the waking world. So he knew they would do what they could to get him out. But Leung knew the risks. Once IC had your number, it wasn’t going to treat you nice.
He worked at a furious pace to hack deeper into the host. It was a maze suddenly, a thicket where he needed to place mark after mark to carve his way through. He felt growing pressure as he continued to look around, expecting some kind of yeti or snow monster to appear out of nowhere and take his head off.
The shivering started after he broke through the third level of encryption. He wasn’t supposed to shiver. He was in cold sim, so he shouldn’t have sensory input. But his lightly clad feet now felt like ice and when he looked down, he wasn’t standing on ice anymore—
He was calf deep in the ice.
Black ice.
Checking his health monitor, he felt his heart drop into his knees. Leung wasn’t running cold sim anymore.
He was totally and utterly fucked.
“We need to pull him out.”
Kyrie looked at Tango and Elijah. She heard the alarms on Leung’s monitors, saw the man twitch on the couch.
“He has a back door. He’ll use it if he needs it.”
“I don’t know—” Elijah said.
“Yanking him out could kill him,” Eyetooth said.
More alarms sounded.
“So could leaving him in,” Kyrie said. For a moment, everyone in the room was paralyzed by indecision, but then the monitors connected to Leung’s heart moved wildly up and down. Everyone moved, and quickly. Leung’s body jerked twice as Kyrie and Elijah held his shoulders down and Tango jammed a needle into his chest.
Leung realized he had seconds—maybe. The ice was climbing up his legs too fast and would soon reach his hips. As his programs ate away at the IC, Leung encrypted the packet of information again, and this time he slipped it into a message, duplicated it, and gave each one a different ID, all of them from those the agent found in the activity logs. If he was lucky, one of them would get through and find Elijah.
Dear god … he hoped one of them would. He had to tell the mage there was another player. And this one didn’t fight fair …
“Leung!”
Eyetooth’s anguished cry pulled at Elijah’s chest as he stayed outside the range of the working team. Elijah had decided that keeping this secret wasn’t helping any more, so he sent out an alarm for medical care. A crew of Aztechnology medical personnel was now in the shelter, working to keep Leung alive. No one dared remove the cables from his jack. But Elijah already recognized the symptoms. He remembered what Leung had said the other night. If IC had been activated, he wouldn’t be able to log out. And given the first sign of trouble—Leung should have already been out of there.
But he wasn’t.
And he wouldn’t have voluntarily flipped to hot sim. The countermeasures used wherever he was were brutal, and rigged to kill whatever curious mind dared take a look.
Leung sent the last of the packets through the small hole he’d created just as the ice crushed his chest and wrapped around his throat. He gasped for air, unable to feel the rest of his body. He didn’t know if his physical self was still alive or dead, he only knew this was his last run. He cursed silently, filled his thoughts with anger and regret. He’d used everything in his arsenal against it, but he hadn’t been prepared—he’d let it get hold of his persona program at the roots and once it was in, there was no way to escape.
Leung hoped Elijah finally found whatever it was he was searching for, that Kyrie got that payout she dreamed so much about. He wished Pineapple the best, and regretted not getting to know him better. Cao he knew would carry on, and he hoped this run had instilled the confidence she needed.
As the ice moved over his face, filled his mouth and lungs and sealed him inside of it forever, his final thought was of Eyetooth, and the regret of never tasting her fried chicken.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Eyetooth stood next to Leung’s body as Pineapple helped the doc load it into the body bag. She made sure he had his commlink and deck with him, along with his things from his bag. Tears fell like tiny diamonds when she reached out and touched his cold cheeks. His eyes were closed. His face didn’t show any of the pain she was sure he suffered wherever he’d been. No one really knew what happened. No one knew what he’d seen. What he’d experienced.
The docs said it was a heart attack. That’s what IC could do to you. Wherever he’d been, something had taken him and killed him. She wondered if she ever found the place where he died, would she see him? Would his persona still be there?
When the doc pronounced him dead, she thought the professor was going to pass out. He’d grabbed the nearest chair, and Kyrie had grabbed his arm. Leung had told Eyetooth that he and Elijah went back a long ways. They had worked on a lot of jobs together. Staring down at the hacker’s beautiful face, it seemed senseless that he would die like this—killed by a strange device somehow unearthed from the Antarctic ice.
Irritation still seethed through at how Elijah had dismissed the tragedy the moment Gauntlet appeared at the door and announced they’d reached the tower. She watched Gauntlet’s face fall when he realized what must have happened and saw the dead hacker on the couch. At least her teammate had come inside with some kind of reverence, but the professor?
He’d shoved his old friend’s memory aside, grabbed up his parka and ran out of the shelter like he couldn’t wait to leave. Eyetooth watched Kyrie, who seemed less enthused about leaving Leung. Eventually she followed the professor, as did Gauntlet and Niko. Pineapple was the one that stayed behind and helped. They’d wanted to put Leung in the snow in the back and let the ice preserve his body. But Pineapple put the kibosh on that pretty damn fast. He in
sisted they put him in his tent.
Her breath caught when Pineapple pulled the zipper over Leung’s face. She put her hands to her cheeks, and was a bit surprised but grateful when the troll pulled her to him and gently held her. He didn’t say a word as she cried and eventually she felt another presence in the shelter.
Her sprite told her it was Cao. She was crying, too. Eyetooth pulled away from Pineapple and looked at the goblin. “Would … would you like to see him?”
“No,” Cao said quickly. “No. I want to remember him alive … not dead.” After she put her hand on the bag, she ran out of the shelter.
“She’ll be all right. I hope.” Pineapple wiped at his own face. “You really liked the conceited little fucker, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. I did.”
There didn’t seem to be much else to say. Pineapple turned and lifted the body bag. He didn’t just throw it over his shoulder, but held it as if he were holding something very special. “I’m gonna put him on my pallet. Elijah’s probably already down the hole, and I think Kyrie, Tango, and Niko are there as well.”
“You didn’t want to go down?”
“Nah. Only four can take the cage down at a time. And I take up three spots as it is.” He paused at the door as Eyetooth zipped up her parka, then opened the door for her. “Wanna give me a hand? Make him comfortable?”
Eyetooth nodded. She sniffed and held the door, but held up a finger before she stepped out. “Just a minute.” She wanted that damn device. She wanted to kill it herself. Take it apart piece by piece and bury it all over the Antarctic.
But when she ran out the back door to check the tent, the small device was gone.
The further down the cage traveled in that ten-meter wide shaft, the lower the temperature plunged. Elijah appreciated the thick parka, the wicking layers beneath, the pants, and the heavy boots. But most of all, he appreciated the glasses he wore because they hid his emotions.