by Ari Bach
“Was it you?”
Violet tried to think. She could say yes, and he’d find Mishka. She could say no, and he’d simply believe her and leave it at that, and do as they asked. But the way he looked at her, directly at her, the thief herself: he might have known already. It might be a mere test to see if she’d offer the truth or deceive him. She didn’t have Alopex hiding her face, only an avatar this time, and who knew what programs Yoshi had to detect lies. She should lie to him either way and let the project fail if it must. But then Vibeke would never forgive her. Not for losing the last hope they had of finding Mishka. And what exactly would be lost if she told the truth? One man who sold—sold not gave away, not acted upon information—would know that the black avatars stole the thing. He’d sell it to Skunkworks of course, but what could they do about it? They’d already seen T team, and everyone knew the Obsidian Order online were a dangerous gang. But then again—
“Yes,” said Varg. And it was done. Yoshi smiled and laughed. He linked something to a faraway user, then closed his notation window.
“Don’t worry, I won’t tell the skunks. They don’t pay well enough!” He turned to Violet. “Hand me your cock. I’ll scour the mountain for your friend Mishka.” V team was stunned. Through their avatars he must have sensed it. He went on, “I deal in information, kids! Mishka told me who the Obsidian Order were in exchange for a tip on Birlacorp.”
He jumped out of his kiosk with a dexterity that mismatched his avatar. He took the blue rooster icon from Violet and integrated it into his net partitions. Then the back of his head popped open to reveal ocular hookup protocols. He let them see what he saw as he jumped down toward the next ring. The project was on course.
Looking through Yoshi’s eyes, they could get a hint of the programs he was using. Beside the new blue Gullinkambi program, there were about fifty icons for net security. Some they recognized, others they didn’t. It was rude to look around at the man’s brain, but Violet couldn’t resist peeking at some of the program specs he had running. One was an illegal log deletion protocol, another was an avatar speed alteration buffer so he could trick sites into letting him move at illegal paces to surprise or escape an enemy. One was a false contact barrier so he could pretend to let people in without doing so. He sensed her looking at it.
“That one doesn’t work on the Crag, dearie. Nothing works on the Crag.”
Yoshi left the sack and hopped down to the airspace of ring nine, the lowest of the low, the anus of the entire net. Violet had never seen the place before from the common net. It was, in theory, a visual micro-weblog conglomeration. But she could make out no images. The ring cycled so fast she couldn’t focus on any single thing. It was like a whirlpool over which Yoshi floated calmly toward the center. She could see how the board acted like a meat grinder, some of the avatars had programming to view the board, but at the cost of their sanity. It would have their brains functioning at impossible speed, doing severe nerve damage. It was a sort of drug for net users who had exhausted the rest of infinity and now needed the most extreme just to feel anything at all. The ring, it was rumored, contained as much information as the rest of the net combined, but it was all a waste. Whoever looked into the abyss would be devoured by it—the promise of all the knowledge in the world at the cost of the inability to use it. An eternity of heightened awareness as your body rotted away in a comatorium or died at home. A living death.
Yoshi came to the void, surest access point to the Black Crag. One could log on to the Crag itself, though they’d be killed instantly by whatever might be waiting for them. One could enter the void of the net from any access point and try to find the Crag, but the Nikkei Undernet point was situated directly over it. The Crag didn’t respond to calls like common planetoid sites above, where one could simply state the address and the place would appear. It was a site that worked on its own terms, ones not understood by its own users. Nobody understood how it let people bypass contact barriers. In theory, no part of the net should have allowed it. The one inviolable rule of electronic communication was that nothing could be forced on you. Even in the void between sites, that rule was in force. But once a person set foot on the Crag, everything changed.
Yoshi set down, and they could see the netscape from his eyes. There were only a couple hundred users, visible ones at least. He put out a heavy array of feelers and detection routines so that if anyone approached, he’d know. The appearance was indeed that of a black rocky mountain, riddled with grottos and cells along a single spiral road climbing up the steep cliffs. The few avatars were like a line of parasites roaming across it. Yoshi was about to start up the Gullinkambi program when a large gargoyle avatar approached him. He kept his distance, as did the gargoyle. A standard assurance on the Crag. The gargoyle spoke in a high, weak voice.
“Would you like to buy some fresh baked cookies?”
“No, thank you, I’m just heading to the financial sector,” he replied. The gargoyle moved on, and Yoshi thought back to his watchers, “I assume you didn’t want any local value pairs? They make fine souvenirs, but who knows what else he baked into them?”
V team didn’t respond. Yoshi headed as promised to the financial sector, a short ways up the Crag. He glanced down at the rock, nothing like the colorful plastic and glowing cartoon labels of the rest of the net. It was meaty, flaking like dead skin. Its resolution was grainy but not low. The place wasn’t cheap, cheap as in the Undernet just looked like a lack of textures and poorly assembled polygons. The Crag looked like it had been meticulously designed to feel gritty. More than that, it felt not so much like a mountain as a giant animal horn, owing to the swaying deformation of the road and the sinewy layout between the ingrown caves.
All the avatars kept their distance. Everyone on the Crag was cautious in the extreme to let others know they would do no harm, and wanted no harm done to them. Some were blanks, others were beasts. One avatar was a perfect likeness of Abraham Lincoln, another was just a mess of legs and eyes. But all were whisper quiet. It was oddly like the atmosphere of a library site. Though library sites lacked the glimpses Violet could see as Yoshi passed various grottos. One held a pharmaceutical meeting, clearly labeled as the KVH drug company meeting with members of the Janjuweed. Another held what looked like a classroom. All the student avatars were joining hands with a tentacled being, repeating a mantra, preparing for some unspeakable ineffable something.
The financial sector made more sense. There were mercenary ads. Any of them could be Mishka. They were as simple as “Have microwave, will travel” and complex as a total readout of available militaries and off-planet resources. Conventionally, one would have to reply to each ad to learn the identity of the poster. There appeared to be under fifty mercs so it was a possibility, but one to be avoided if they could find Mishka’s ad, buy her services, and lure her into a trap. Or better yet, simply trace the origin and find her unannounced.
Yoshi produced the Gullinkambi and set it on the pathway so it would recognize the site to be hacked. Once activated he would be able to see names and providers behind each page. Yoshi would only need to log the results, return to safety, and V could handle the rest. He prepared to activate the little blue rooster.
Suddenly a bright flash illuminated the Crag. There was a disturbance on the road nearby. A small avatar of a little green man with a giant wrinkly brain was destroying a larger troll avatar with something that manifested as lightning. Dozens of avatars looked on as the very lifecode of the troll was spewed onto the Crag for all to see. It wasn’t like the scattered programming in a disarming protocol—it was brain code getting deleted. Incomprehensible strands of information that made up the user’s consciousness and thoughts getting ripped to shreds. The troll avatar remained on the cliffs like a corpse, hollow now and transparent but lingering, sickly. Violet could almost smell it. The little green man wandered away, and the denizens of the Crag returned silently to their business. Yoshi activated the Gullinkambi.
It didn’t work. T
he Crag stayed opaque and black. The ads were all highlighted, but whatever part of them was inside the site coding wasn’t revealed. Yoshi tried again with the same results. Avatars around him could see what he was doing. One laughed. He linked back to V team.
“I saw the code for the ads. It’s not a problem with your rooster. It’s the Crag. It’s invulnerable.”
Vibeke replied, “Go ahead and start clicking the ad links. Just log their contacts one by one and come back. We can handle it from there.”
“No, let me try one more thing first. Your rooster is only set for noninvasive penetration of the site’s code. I have an intramarkup hack. If I apply it to the Gullinkambi, it should be able to see through the Crag. It’ll damage the permissions a little, but it’s a website. It won’t feel anything.”
Violet watched as he applied the new coding, a rather brilliant modification. She felt some trepidation at his last words. If any site could feel, it would be this abomination. She reminded herself the rock walls were just site code. He activated the modified Gullinkambi, and they could see inside the Crag.
They saw eyes. There was a grotesque crablike face inside the rock. Yoshi staggered back. They could see more. Inside the spiral rock crag was a gigantic face with several mandibles, feelers, and eye stalks—and it was looking at them. Not only at Yoshi but right through his visual link to V team. The Gullinkambi cut out. The stone went black again.
“Okay, guys,” Yoshi stuttered, panicked, “I’m coming up topside. You can keep your program.”
Yoshi began to skip across the cliff toward the portal to the common net. As he did the Crag began to shake. It was the first time Violet had seen an earthquake online. Avatars began to tumble down the sides.
“What the hell is happening?” asked Veikko.
“The Crag is moving,” said Vibeke plainly. She spoke as normal, but Violet could hear something in her voice. She had never seen anything like it either. The Crag continued to shift. As Yoshi fought the local gravity settings and ran for the portal the mountain began to turn onto its side. That helped Yoshi for a moment, with the Crag turning he was almost to the edge, almost to the portal. He leaped for the junction and looked in the clear when a gigantic black claw appeared from under the mountain’s edge and grabbed him. Its chelae squeezed down on the old man, and he vanished in a gruesome puff of pixelation. The visual link cut out with a sickening yank, as if their eyes had been pulled out with it.
V team stood on the eighth ring staring at the hole. Violet tried to understand what they’d just seen, some sort of advanced site AI or a defensive mechanism? No other sites had anything like it. She had never imagined anything like the face she’d spotted within the Crag—the Crab. A crab’s face within a mountain-sized shell, a face that would be haunting her dreams. Its eyes were….
Still looking at her from the pit. The crab’s face had emerged from its mountain shell. It saw them from the void, even after Yoshi’s link went dead, the Crag was watching them from below. Four of its eyes breached the portal on their long stalks and stared. As they stared, the black avatars began to crumble. Violet couldn’t tell what it was at first. It was a hack completely unlike Alopex’s but every bit as powerful. Their avatars fell away and revealed their residual self-images. At horrible resolution, with no added trackability, they suddenly looked a lot like themselves. It could see their faces. And they couldn’t stop looking at its grotesque visage. Angry at being hacked. Anger radiating impossibly, tangibly from those hot flat eyes. Violet’s only consolation was that it was a site looking up from the void; they were safe. She hoped.
An instant later, the deadly claw reached out from the pit and landed on the spinning vortex of the bottom ring. The entire Undernet shook. The spinning ring shattered with sickening lag. Textures across the Undernet began to lose resolution. Motion became jerky as it hit, freezing up and making sound chirp painfully as its stream broke up. Violet couldn’t grasp what was happening. The Crag was not only moving but disrupting the Undernet. It shouldn’t have been able to touch the damn thing at all, only users could step onto a new site, not another—
“It’s not a site!” shouted Vibs. “The Crag’s not a site! It’s a user!” And what they were seeing made sense. The contact barriers didn’t exist because the people there were walking on a person. They accepted it in as soon as they touched it. And their hack, the Gullinkambi, it could see through page code but not a living avatar. Yoshi’s modification could. He had just tried to peel the skin off of a person, and now the person was very pissed off.
V team began to run for the higher rings, toward the logout protocol. It was difficult amid the lag. Time kept freezing, and by the time it caught up, there was more and more damage. The rings shook and jammed. Their visual output lost resolution or flashed out entirely for several seconds. Avatars tumbled down the walls as the Crag’s gravity coding took them over. The Undernet was getting deleted by its claws as they climbed.
They jumped off of the unspeakable pornography ring just as a claw hit behind them. Obscenity spilled from the stores into the void by the terabyte. Violet saw Varg recall his Tikari, still a separate avatar but one revealed as a mechanical caterpillar. It coiled around him as in the real world. She did the same with Nelson and hid him in her chest. What avatars the Crag didn’t crush and destroy outright were landing on its massive shell, the mountain where its native avatars, like lice, would begin to devour them, or beat them away toward the void in fear. V team climbed as fast as the new gravity would allow. The Crag followed, slowly clawing its way up the rings, smashing them along with any users who hadn’t yet logged out in the panic. The log-outs jammed the top door to the Nikkei. A crowd of frightened criminals, mutants, and perverts formed to block the way. The top rings had escaped. The middle rings were blocking the door. Those from the lowest rings were doomed.
“We need Alopex!” Violet shouted.
“C will know!” Vibs replied.
“Fuck C team! It won’t matter if we’re dead.”
“This will make every news log on the planet anyway, trust me. Call Aloe!”
All four activated their emergency calls. The information tore through the Undernet ceiling and into the Nikkei, and from there back home. It hit every link in Valhalla. C team saw V’s signature, and Cato cursed loudly before running to a pogo to find their real world bodies. Alf and Balder halted their chess game to monitor. T team recalled their mosquitoes and headed for a pogo. R team rushed onto the Nikkei to begin rescue procedures. Half the other teams in Valhalla began monitoring. Alopex’s priorities also shifted like an avalanche. The fox manifested at the Undernet portal.
Violet began to feel nauseated from the jerking lag and fits of deafness. The Undernet was breaking up around them. The crowd of remaining avatars was blinking and shifting rapidly from their own contact barriers mashed against each other. Suddenly Alopex broke through. Seeing the crowd, she first tore a new portal into the underground, programming a fifteen thousand channel log-out complex to get rid of the crowd. Trolls and Skuzzbots began to pour out onto the Nikkei floor before the eyes of startled stockbrokers and business avatars.
The Crag’s legs were almost upon the top ring. Some of the spambots tried to attack it to no avail. They burst into code as they hit its thick armor. A kind of hack armor they’d never seen before. What kind of mind was inside that thing? It had clearly grown beyond all common capabilities for avatar scaling allowed online. Its destructive power was beyond comprehension, as if a thousand denial attacks emanated from its every limb. It forced physics onto every site it touched, like its presence made the net vulnerable to earthly peril. And it came so close now Violet could see its eyes again, glowing yellow within red from behind the crustaceous spiky mandibles and claws.
Another leg emerged from the mountain shell and reached straight for V team. Alopex emerged through the emptying portal and assessed the threat. Within a thousandth of a second, she ran every denuding program she had on the beast. Her trace program hit it
first with no results. Her invasive trace couldn’t penetrate it either. Half a dozen more programs failed before a scanning cloud routine running off the surrounding netscape contact points made it through: The user was Bill Ulster from Amarillo Texas, 176 kg, fifty-four years old, multiple arrests for net crimes, disappeared twenty-one years earlier, the same day the Black Crag went online. Alopex attempted to disrupt his link to no avail. It was a tunnel-penetrative tomography link. His higher brain functions were taking place completely online.
V team climbed topside into the Nikkei. The market was mayhem, in chaos from the influx of spambots and fleeing porn connoisseurs. The logs and news volumes were getting flooded by users and programs alike. Violet saw an economic log toppled and smothered by a crowd of gamblers. Debuggers were at the rim of the portal trying to keep the code-rot at bay. A monetary planetoid above was falling into the Crag gravity and several dead avatars lay scattered, either crippled users or improper log outs, some disfigured by the Undernet collapse missing texture maps, others mutilated with their nurbs ripped off. The Alopex system felt out for V team and ingested them, resorting their link from AleGel into herself. New safety protocols loaded instantly.
The rest of Alopex jumped out from the pit. Violet was about to ask if she’d neutralized the Crag when a claw erupted from the ground. The thing had torn all the way through, up to the proper Nikkei. It began to prop itself up as the Nikkei began to fall into the void left by the Undernet’s destruction. Orbiting logs and company sites disappeared, going offline to escape. One hit an immersion log-out error and got impaled on the top of the Crag’s rising spire. Its segfault lines cracked open, and the lice swarm crawled inside. The whole planetoid, once labeled as XeServ, went dead black and crumbled to binary.
Alopex was busily scanning for any weakness. It took several seconds, an eternity for Alopex, to find one. And only one. In order to maintain a site-like gravity and enormous size, the user had put a great deal of dependence on physical simulators. He was so invested in the sims that the Crag very nearly functioned in netspace like an animal in the real world. Alopex could work with that.