Into Twilight (The Stefan Mendoza Trilogy Book 1)

by P. R. Adams

  “Best if you join me,” Chan said as the terminal powered on.

  I pulled my avatar up from the Grid and walked into the environment. It was from before Korea—with a body still whole and in its prime. I had dressed it in a tight pullover and black slacks. Vanity, I guess.

  The tricks VR programming used to fool other senses through optic stimulation seemed even more effective with my cybernetic eyes. When I leaned against the cubicle wall, the hard plastic cover felt cool and smooth under my arm. The acrid smell of overheated circuitry rose from the clear display that flickered into an image of an interface I’d seen during my final year as an employee: APAS—Agency Personnel Assignment System.

  Avatar-Chan’s fingers danced over the virtual interface. “Good news. No recent personnel records access. Not from this account. Not since official transfer.”

  Ravi’s APAS record had been closed nearly eight years ago, when he’d transferred to Secret Service.

  After staring at the record for a while, I said, “I don’t buy it. He could still be a contractor. Or part of the cover he uses could be this official system closure. What about his evaluation files? Expense accounting?”

  Avatar-Chan breezed through one system after another. “Nothing. All records closed. Wait. Need to check something.”

  The terminal flicked back out to the front-end interface, then to a command line. Avatar-Chan typed commands in short bursts. The data flew by in chunks that were too hard to process.

  “Shit.” The avatar’s head shook.

  I leaned in and increased magnification. “What?”

  “Look. Last login.” Avatar-Chan tapped a line in the display. It showed the same date as the termination.

  “If he’s not logging in, why carry the device around?”

  “Maybe…” More typing, more data dumps to the display. A new window opened, and a line of data scrolled across it. Avatar-Chan stopped suddenly. “See that?”

  “What, the window?”

  Avatar-Chan’s hands moved back from the interface device. “Yeah.”

  Dim the hills. Run the night. Swim the rivers of data.

  I read it again. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “My snowcrash.” Avatar-Chan pushed the chair back and looked over the cubicle walls. “You know the name?”

  “Boho?”

  “Bohol. The Philippines. Home. For families. Or us. There’s a place, the Chocolate Hills.” Avatar-Chan walked out of the cubicle farm, and more carpeting appeared, along with more cubicles. “They’re like cones. Jacinto said giant tits. Grass-covered. Green during the rains. Brown during the dry season.”

  I’d never heard so much from Chan, and I didn’t like the almost zombie-like stare of those magenta eyes, as if the build-out of the VR environment was unexpected. “You’re still not making sense, Chan.”

  “There’s rivers. Seeing the Grid, it’s like that. Nodes. Circuits. Hills. Rivers. Data flows. Crash the systems—Dim the hills. Run the night. Own the systems, swim the rivers.”

  “Not helping.” I moved up on Chan, who was spinning around now, looking past me and the cubicles.

  “Pass phrase. Only we knew it. The snowcrash.”

  Something popped in the distance, plunging the office into darkness.

  I switched to infrared, but the VR world stayed dark. Avatar-Chan was a dark, wiry form in the black. “Chan, this isn’t what we want. My eyes aren’t working.”

  “Not me. Him.”

  “Him?” I grabbed and spun Avatar-Chan around. “What the hell is going on? Is this session compromised? Shut it down.” I reached for my VR goggles. My hands didn’t move.

  “He’s locked us in. The goggles, optical stimulation, complete immersion.”

  “He who? Ravi?”

  Something echoed in the darkness, like a stick or piece of wood cracking against plastic. A chuckle came on the heels, then another crack.

  Avatar-Chan shivered in my hands. “Jacinto.”

  “Shit, Chan. Jacinto’s dead. The Koreans got him. Or Stovall did.”

  Another chuckle, this one louder, and then a globe of light revealed a small form. A man in an unzipped black leather jacket and pants covered with metal studs. Beneath the jacket, matching suspenders covered a bony, gold-brown chest. An oversized head with thinning black hair and dark lips twisted into a pout.

  Jacinto.

  I turned Avatar-Chan to look at me. Those normally unreadable magenta eyes were full of terror. “What’s going on?”

  “I—”

  Jacinto took a step closer. He held a staff, a thick pole nearly as tall as his scrawny body. He swung that staff against the plastic top of the cubicle walls every few steps. Behind him, lights came up, revealing three naked forms impaled on fist-sized, metal beams that ran from the floor to the ceiling tiles. Two men and a woman, all small, one of the men and the woman slender, all dark-haired and with the same gold-brown skin as Jacinto. Blood trickled down the beams and bubbled up from the mouths of the victims as their throats worked to drag in air.

  I shook Avatar-Chan, felt a shiver. “What is this!”

  “We heard Jacinto died. Two years ago. He was going to Korea. Working for you. Needed the money. Bad. Needed to get away.”

  “Why? Drugs? A system attack gone bad?”

  “A few months before—”

  Avatar-Jacinto cracked the staff again.

  Avatar-Chan tried to pull away from me. I held on. “What about it? What happened a few months before?”

  “Jacinto. Cracked the banking cartel.”

  The banking cartel. Probably the single nastiest group of businesses in the world. Unimaginably greedy. Even more bloodthirsty. “Got into their systems?”

  Avatar-Chan nodded. “Remote hack. Penetrated physical security. Somewhere in the Caymans. Got into their orbital data systems.”

  The data systems were just the first step for them to escape Earth. It was an open secret that the human employees would follow when it was feasible. They would do anything—had already pressured governments to force painful change—to avoid regulation and maximize profit. “He stole money?”

  “No. Proof-of-concept run. Told us about it. Going to make a big run. After Korea. With the rest of us. Get rich and disappear.”

  Avatar-Jacinto was only twenty feet away now. He pulled the jacket off and draped it over a cubicle wall. The staff was back in his hands then, spinning. “Chan,” he whispered. “I missed you so.”

  I pushed Avatar-Chan back. “So is this Jacinto? This whole thing we’re in, it’s a big Jacinto simulation? A simulacrum? The deleted restaurant video, the thing keeping you out of systems? It’s him?”

  “I think so,” Avatar-Chan whimpered. “Sort of.”

  Avatar-Jacinto was suddenly in front of me, swinging the staff with both hands. It caught me in the jaw, firing pain and numbness through my head. I staggered back and my legs gave out. The real Jacinto was small and weak, but this avatar hit like a pile driver.

  Avatar-Chan turned away, only to be grabbed by Avatar-Jacinto. He swung the staff against Avatar-Chan’s leg, drawing a scream. Avatar-Jacinto pressed his crotch against Avatar-Chan’s butt until the two of them were pressed against a cubicle wall.

  I tried to tell Avatar-Chan to fight, but I couldn’t get my jaw to work. It was a struggle to even focus. The staff hit the carpet with a muffled thud, then there was the sound of cloth tearing. It dawned on me that Avatar-Jacinto had torn off Avatar-Chan’s hoodie, revealing a baggy, black T-shirt. Avatar-Chan tried to grab Avatar-Jacinto’s hands, but he broke free and tore the T-shirt off, then viciously clawed at the exposed breasts. Avatar-Chan alternated between shrieks and grunts and futilely clawed at Avatar-Jacinto’s eyes until a backhand stilled all struggle. Avatar-Chan slumped over the cubicle, unable to stop Avatar-Jacinto from yanking jeans off bony hips.

  I finally managed to get to my feet and staggered toward the little bastard as he unbuckled his leather pants. He was bent over Avatar-Chan, whispering someth
ing low and smooth and menacing. My cybernetics might not have been built into the VR trap, but I still knew enough to seriously hurt someone. I drove my elbow into the base of Avatar-Jacinto’s skull—hard enough to cripple or kill.

  Avatar-Jacinto groaned and fell to the ground. His eyes locked onto mine, and he smiled, even as his face began to discolor. He wasn’t breathing, but he didn’t seem panicked.

  Laughter dropped from the ceiling tiles. His laughter. The avatar faded out.

  I pulled Avatar-Chan’s pants back up and peeled my shirt off, working it on over wet noodle limbs.

  The walls transformed into rough, black stone; the cubicles twisted into small prison cells enclosed by rusty bars. Manacles hung from the walls inside the cells, and blood-blackened torture implements lined a long, crude, wooden table in the corridor between the cells. The three impaled forms were in the closest cells, each dangling from the manacles, their bodies covered in welts and deep cuts. My brain filled in other details: the stench of charred flesh and excrement, the sticky chill of a closed-off dungeon, and the whimpers of broken victims.

  “Chan? What’s going on? What is this?”

  “Jacinto.” Avatar-Chan’s voice floated in from a dream. “He liked…control.”

  “Who are these people?” Their faces were too damaged to recognize. “Your snowcrash?”

  “Yes.” Whimpered.

  “He did this sort of thing to all of you? Hurt you? Raped you?”

  “Just me. Intimidation for them. Mental. Psychological.”

  A monster. I looked around for an exit—stairs, a door. “How do we get out?”

  “No exit. Why program that? It’s his world. His dream.”

  “It’s just VR. It has its limits.”

  “More than that.” Avatar-Chan stumbled to the nearest cell, where the female avatar dangled. “Marlene?”

  The avatar’s head came up. The eyelids had been cut away, and where there should have been eyes, data flowed in glowing red streams. Broken lips twisted. “It’s real, Chan. The sim is real. Get out. Before it’s too late.”

  Avatar-Chan pushed off the bars, long, skinny arms shaking.

  Avatar-Jacinto was there again, immediately behind Avatar-Chan, now wearing nothing but leather suspenders that connected to a belt. He held a red-hot poker in his right hand, which he drove up into Avatar-Chan’s cheek. A scream, the crack of bone, the hiss and odor of roasting flesh—and Avatar-Chan fell.

  Then faded.

  Avatar-Jacinto turned to me, and I thought I saw confusion in his eyes. I took the opportunity, leaping in, grabbing the wrist and bicep of his right arm, then pulling down while bringing my knee up. He was too slow resisting. The impact was painful, but I heard the reassuring pop of dislocating bones and saw his eyes bulge in surprise. The poker clattered to the stone floor.

  There was no killing the avatar as far as I could tell, but it seemed to register pain and damage. I snatched up the poker and drove it into his dangling, unprotected scrotum. He swatted me with his left hand, and I was lifted off the stone and flung into rusty iron bars.

  Once again, my vision blurred and my legs gave out when I slid down. Digital or not, I was vulnerable to injury.

  I tried to find him, but my head was a stone I couldn’t lift.

  The poker tip drove into my right shoulder, twisted, and tore away flesh and muscle. Pain worked through me like a fire through dry tinder.

  I screamed, then woke.

  Danny stood in front of me, VR goggles in his hand, mouth drooping, sleepy eyes wide. “What the hell, Stefan?”

  I looked at my shoulder to be sure it was still intact, then got up. “Chan?”

  Curled beneath the cartoon cat pillows, only dark hair and darker jeans still visible. Crying. “They’re gone.”

  I reached out to pat Chan’s head, hesitated. “Who’s gone?”

  “The snowcrash. I just checked.”

  I turned to be sure Danny had both VR goggles. He held them up. “Chan,” I said. “We’re back in reality. The simulation’s over.”

  One of Chan’s hands crept out from cover and pointed at the displays. “No. Here, they’re all gone.”

  I adjusted magnification and saw the window Chan had indicated. Three locate requests had been sent out: W0rt_h0g_Kng, Mrl3n3_D1c@, and B0ndy_B0y0. Each had come back with a status of offline.

  “They could be disconnected at this hour. Sleeping.”

  Chan’s head rose from the pillow fortress. “You don’t understand.”

  I sat on the coffee table. “Enlighten me.”

  A snot-stained sleeve wiped tears from Chan’s cheeks. “Four years ago. Another snowcrash went offline. Indian. Krishna War. Good, not great. They’d been chasing a rumor. Legend. A big simulation. Simulacrum. Sim. A trap. Someone was…copying Gridhounds. Recording them, duplicating them. Spoofing. Like AI. But you couldn’t tell it wasn’t real. It was always newbs. Nobodies. No one believed. Then Krishna War disappeared. We started to believe. Jacinto and Marlene traced them down. Six unexplained deaths. Four major cities. Chennai, Mumbai, New Delhi, Hyderabad. Suspected Gridhounds.”

  “That sounds pretty flimsy and coincidental. You knew these people?”

  Chan’s brow knitted and the LED earrings flared, a signal that I’d asked a ridiculous question. “In the Grid.”

  “Okay, so they disappeared. Why? For this thing that Jacinto did?”

  “Not Jacinto. His avatar.”

  “Sure, but Jacinto built whatever that was, and he was running it the whole time, right?”

  “No! He’s dead!”

  “Apparently not. Not if he was—”

  Chan lunged forward. “Jacinto’s dead! They’re all dead. Understand? That? What happened? It was a system. A simulacrum. Those were copies. Of my snowcrash!” Chan pushed me aside and typed in another window for a bit, then sat back. Eventually, the window spawned other windows, each with stories on people who had died in the last few weeks. All of them Philippine-Americans. One of the names was Marlene De La Cruz. Mrl3n3_D1c.

  “Your friends?”

  Chan nodded. “Marlene said…a stalker. Online. Started with fake links. Fake links became strange jobs. Thought it was just a nut. Talked to her yesterday. Told her about the things. Things hacking me. Messing with me. She said not to worry. Anonymity. We always had that. Hide behind it. No one ever knew. Who we were. Where we were.”

  “So maybe it was unrelated. Ever think about that?”

  Chan’s magenta eyes rolled. “The dates. Look.”

  I glanced at the window on the display, starting with Marlene De La Cruz’s obituary. She had been dead nearly two weeks. “That was her simulacrum?”

  “Yeah. Found her. Found me. Jacinto heard a rumor. On an Agency job. Something about an army of Gridhounds. A giant snowcrash. All automated. All controlled. All running attacks and countering them. Never growing tired. Never getting strung out. No distractions. No flesh. No fatigue. No mistakes. Faster than humans.”

  It was a frightening thought. “The Agency is doing this?”

  “Maybe. Someone. It makes Gridhounds obsolete. That’s why…” Chan’s voice choked off. “They’re killing us. Feed us data, see how we work. Build a simulacrum. Delete the original.”

  Danny said, “That’s pretty cold-blooded.”

  Delete. It was a nice euphemism. “Any different from what we do?”

  He looked at the VR goggles in his hand. “No. But it sure makes my job harder.”

  It made all of our jobs harder. I got to my feet, suddenly unsure of the solidity of the world around me. “We need to work up new plans. Chan, look into ways to harden our communications. New protocols and encryption, frequency hopping, limiting connections to specific addresses—whatever you can get to work, do it.”

  “Against a system?” Chan curled up, chin resting on raised knees. “Simulations of elite Gridhounds? What’s the point?”

  “They’re simulations,” I said. “They’re not the real person. There are goin
g to be as many limits as there are benefits. We just need to capitalize on the limits. Your friends weren’t just programmers. They solved problems using creativity. This system isn’t creative; it just emulates creativity. Figure out a way to get around that.”

  Chan rocked back and forth.

  “Who was the best Gridhound in your snowcrash? Jacinto? Marlene? You?”

  After a second, Chan’s chin slid down until only black hair covered the jeans. “Me.”

  “Then prove it. Figure this out.”

  Danny followed me into the hallway, where we nearly ran into a room service robot. I watched it until it rolled out of sight. A few seconds later, I heard the elevator chime. Danny seemed to hold his breath. Neither of us had any trust in automatons after what Chan had told us.

  I leaned in close to his ear and said, “Chan’s going to need someone watching every minute of the day. That simulation, what happened there, it would fuck with anybody.”

  Danny glanced at the door. “What did you see?”

  “Enough to think this thing with Ravi was a dead end. I don’t know why he carries that device around with him, but he doesn’t use it. He’s not Agency. Maybe they asked him to keep it on him. Maybe that team that was running surveillance on him gave it to him.”

  “So, what? The El Salvador twins are behind it? The Agency?”

  “I still haven’t figured that out. The El Salvador twins are just tools. If they really wanted Weaver dead, she’d be dead. No one saw them coming. They had a couple clean shots. Ravi’s team did their job, so they’re not in on it. The Agency…I’m still trying to figure that out. They’re in on it. They have to be.”

  Danny sighed. “I know you want the money, but I say we bail. Walk away. This is too messy.”

  It was. “I think we’re close. The answer’s right in front of us, but we’re missing it. Maybe it’s tied to this simulacrum. Let me get some sleep and think on it. You keep an eye out.”

  I waited until I heard the click of the door lock before crossing the hall and slipping into my suite. Ichi’s door was closed. I closed my own, stripped, and crawled into my bed. My time with Gillian seemed a distant memory compared to the burning pain that remained from Jacinto’s attacks in the simulation. There had been no physical damage, but the simulacrum had left psychic pain so real and intense that it carried into my dreams.