by Sarah Stone
An alarm sounded, and as one, the E-Bloc slingers looked up at Sun. Some of them hurled attack programs at her, though in the blink of an eye Hayden watched her deploy a dropshield.exe to absorb the incoming hostile code. Sun's spear had disappeared, and in its place, she had manifested a dull glass cube in one hand and a machine pistol in the other. The Prime slinger leapt into the darkness of the open window, her pistol ringing out as he unloaded on whomever yet remained inside.
Hayden recognized a data-raid when he saw one.
It didn't take long for three of the E-Bloc slingers, still looking to Hayden like anthropomorphic beetles, scurried up the scaffolding to Sun's window entrance.
They had stopped firing on the dropshield.exe, having decided they knew it was a shield. Unlike Hayden, who knew Sun to be radically cunning, they failed to realize that it was more than just a static defense.
The dropshield.exe was one part of the legacy left behind by Overdog from his glory days in MassNet before he'd burned out.
The E-Bloc slingers must have all been young, wage warriors fresh from whatever passed for slicing academy in E-Bloc for them to not have recognized it.
The .exe was designed to appear and function as a simple static shield, though once set it was also a proximity mine filled with hostile programs.
Hayden's star was rising just as Overdog's was waning, and he knew just how deadly the .exe could be. Apparently, Sun, despite being fresh to the game, was not only a student of history but a collector of expensive, rare, and deadly programs.
The first of the three E-Bloc slingers to reach the dropshield were reduced to pixels as the .exe's secondary function activated.
Somewhere in E-Bloc's HQ, Hayden knew there were blown out surge protectors leaking melted plastic and a slinger dying of massive brain injury.
The other two were knocked back, barely managing to save themselves from a long fall by grasping the scaffolding. Seconds later, Sun emerged from the window, her pistol gone and both hands grasping the glass cube, which now glowed brightly with vast amounts of condensed and sensitive information.
Behind him, near the edges of the jungle, the presence of Nibiru and her drones remained unnoticed by the warring slingers and her data usage remained at the baseline.
So far so good, for the Union at least, thought Hayden as he returned his attention to the escalating battle below. Sun, knowing she had a fight coming and with little avenue for a clean getaway, had tossed the cube into the air.
At first, Hayden wasn't sure what she was doing until the Prime slinger manifested a stasis.exe around the cube. Now the glowing device hung in the air, encased in an orb that looked to Hayden's imagination like a floating pearl the size of a basketball.
With her prize firmly on display and the attention of the E-Bloc slingers now divided between their enemy and the prize, Sun manifested another spear and leapt down to a lower level of scaffolding to impale an E-Bloc slinger upon its burning tip. The last of the three who had ascended lashed out at Sun with a scorch.exe that appeared in the form of a handheld flamethrower, forcing the Prime slinger to take a flying leap through the scaffolding. She was on fire, but it looked as it most of the deadly code had missed her, and Hayden wondered how many hard systems back at Asia Prime HQ just got toasted, each bit of damage aimed at reducing Sun's data usage capacity.
As Nibiru worked and the rival slingers fought, Hayden made his own move.
Hayden spun a peek.exe, his imagination making the spyware appear like a thread of spider silk that he hurled from his hand onto the floating orb.
He'd been a fan of superhero comics as a kid, and though the print editions were long gone, plenty of archived digital versions existed. He'd grown up too poor to pay for access, but even in his younger years it had been hard to deny Hayden Cole something he wanted if it existed in a digital space.
His thread gently penetrated the orb's outer, layer, though he was careful not to peek too deeply into the cube itself, as that would have likely triggered a meltdown.exe or some other sort of failsafe program the Prime slinger had put in place to protect it while she fought. Hayden probed and skimmed the surface of the data, looking without taking, without downloading anything onto Americana’s servers.
He winced at what he saw and realized why the slingers were fighting so hard for the information contained on the cube, and why they'd so openly assaulted the place where it had been formerly stored.
It was everything the Akiaten needed to keep the resistance going, safe locations and sympathizers, locals they could go to for help of one sort or another.
Most of the space taken up on the cube was encryption protocols. Apparently, though, whatever Prime exclusive device this cube was, had already cracked it, revealing an exhaustive series of lists and files. Even a resistance as seemingly backwater as this Akiaten force might have been, was, in truth, still a part of the high tech post-war world. The resistance had burned the info before, and probably buried those who collected it, and yet here it was, ripe for the slicing.
Names, locations, types of services available. Everything.
He could still smell the blood from the marketplace, metallic and heavy and stuck in his nose.
Fuck.
His stomach felt twisted, wrung out like a wet rag, and it only grew worse when further digging in the cache revealed images that contained both Una’s and the old man’s faces, uncovered and plain to see. There were no names, but there didn’t need to be. With the right resources, a face was enough to destroy nearly anyone.
All the files bore the watermark of the Manila government, along with the encryption keys, and Hayden realized that this data had been compiled by the local government. At some point, someone, presumably the resistance, had sliced the government databases and done a slash and burn on the data. These files likely represented tremendous amounts of staff hours, both of analysists and field observers, in addition to who knew how much money it would have taken in bribes to get locals to turn on their own freedom fighters.
It appeared to Hayden, at least on the surface, that the data had been ripped from the government and then deleted, though as with all things in the datascape, nothing ever really went away for good. Someone had stashed this delete record as deep as they could, and Sun had mined it from the darkness, killing who knew how many in the process.
Hayden was jolted from the data cache by the sound of reality being ripped apart. It was static, glitching in the datascape, the physical representation of the data sinking into the concrete below it. It acted as a shield, thick walls around it made it twice as hard to penetrate as it was just moments before.
Hayden realized that someone had just seized control of this entire region of MassNet in a hack the size and complexity of which made his brain hurt just thinking about. The number of subroutines required to exert and maintain control of even a small patch of MassNet would require a whole cadre of slingers to manage. The manifestations of guns and knives and swords in the hands of the squabbling slingers clicked uselessly as triggers were pulled, and blades splintered and snapped as they made contact with their targets. The entire shared hallucination began to artifact and fragment.
Lunatic 8.
He only knew her from rumors printed in Bascilica’s report. Knew there must have been a powerful slinger behind the Akiaten’s cause, but that was nothing compared to seeing her in action.
Though he was still invisible, his feet left what he perceived as the ground as Lunatic 8 took possession of the very laws of physics and eliminated gravity.
He noted the oddness of her appearance, eyes shadowed with exhaustion, body thin and face on the gaunt side, though he could tell she had once been pretty. There was no idealized version of herself that she wore like armor in the datascape—he had come to expect that from slingers-even from himself. As much as one's appearance was dependent upon the eye of the beholder, so it was with the one being perceived, which made it all the more disturbing that Hayden saw the E-Bloc slingers as insectile
.
It was as though she poured all of her energy into the fight, not needing the confidence or defensive boost that armor would have provided. She moved like Laine through a battlefield, dodging everything that came her way as though she’d seen it coming before the fight had broken out, and she carried no weapons, simply moving her hands to hurl bodies and buildings as if she were a god of this realm, and in a functional sense, she was.
The earth churned under their feet, a quake that would have knocked Hayden down had he not already been floating behind his shield. He’d never seen anything like it.
Most slingers could manipulate reality to some degree in MassNet, but it was usually confined to weapons or single objects in space, things you could hold. It took an unheard-of level of skill to affect the environment itself. Even the trick Hayden had pulled with the car in his battle with Sun had taken nearly everything out of him.
All the slingers on every side, thanks to Lunatic 8, they lost their footing as they fought against the lack of gravity, but it wouldn’t last long. Hayden could already see Sun manifesting what appeared to be some kind of tether.exe to allow herself to gain some leverage.
As the Prime slinger adjusted to the new battlespace another half dozen E-Bloc slingers barreled into the fight. They were all wearing plated armor, and they passed through the barriers into Lunatic 8's temporary MassNet reality bubble, the code flowing across and away from them in the way that Hayden imagined water would fall from a bird's feathers.
The swiftness of their response time made Hayden realize that E-Bloc, for all its blunt force trauma of a business model, did have a kind of low cunning it could employ at times.
Apparently, after the first encounter with Lunatic 8, E-Bloc had recruited heavily and was bringing in dozens of slingers. Individually, they might not rate much better than Qais back at the Union HQ, but collectively they could wield a significant amount of power.
They’d been expecting the resistance hacker, making their attack so obvious that they hoped to draw her out for a clean kill. Watching them leap into combat, guns blazing and flamethrowers roaring, Hayden could not help but think that this must have been what it was like when primitive humans fought mammoths on the frozen fields of ancient history.
Hayden stood and let the shield fall away. He had to do something and he had to do it now. He shook his head, looked to Lunatic 8 across the imagined street, and compiled a message to Nibiru in the Code.
He could not speak directly to her for fear of all the scanners and recorders that were no doubt tightly monitoring this part of the datascape, especially not with her using CodeSource and he MassNet, but she would receive the words on her terminal all the same through the hard system in the Union HQ that connected them locally.
Ground the drones and get out.
Her response was delayed. Hayden had nearly reached the battle when he received the words.
Cole? What are you doing?
Probably something stupid. But something right.
He wasn’t sure how to communicate to Lunatic 8 that he was on her side for the time being, at least in this, other than throwing himself into the fight and hoping she didn't waste him out of hand. So that was what he did, doing his best to weave weaponry he could wield to compliment her strategy.
As half the E-Bloc slingers focused their energy on re-establishing control of the physical properties of the area, the others poured on the fire against the resistance hacker.
Lunatic 8 moved her hands ahead of her, forming shields and shooting lightning bolts from her fingertips in equal measure, though the punishing fire was beginning to take effect. She was being forced to divert more and more of her energy and attention towards the battle and away from dominating the environment.
It had been a hell of an entrance, but those slingers worth their jacks were already adjusting to the unpredictable physics and were pressing the attack. Just like the last time Hayden fought both E-Bloc and Asia Prime, the slingers of E-Bloc had stopped fighting Sun and she them, an unspoken truce having arisen in order to push back against a common enemy.
Lunatic 8 gave up trying to use gravity against her enemies and switched to causing tremendous earthquakes. When the E-Bloc slingers struggled to rise, the ground opening up in a great crack beneath them. One of them did not drag himself away fast enough and seemed to be lost in the crevice.
Sun was fast enough to back away, weaving barriers nearly as fast as Lunatic 8 could tear them down, the young slinger using everything she had to keep the resistance slinger from frying her system with the arcing lighting of her assault programs.
The E-Bloc survivors continued to pound at Lunatic 8 with offensive code, constantly switching out programs as her shields evolved to cope with them. The combined opponents were wearing her down, but at a high cost, and they didn’t count on another factor.
An automatic rifle was not his weapon of choice outside of MassNet, where he preferred nothing heavier than a pistol in his hand, but it was the most effective weapon he could bring into play with such immediacy.
It was his own hybrid version of a shutdown.exe patterned after the scorch.exe, with a little more sting and a bit less area of effect. He sprayed the E-Bloc slingers who were hampering the resistance slinger's control of the reality bubble with machine gun fire, channeling the movements he had seen Laine and the E-Bloc troopers make in the marketplace, driving them back and away from their positions. Each time his bullets hit their signatures the .exe robbed them of data usage by traveling through their systems and burning out circuits back in HQ.
While the slinger's surge protectors guarded them, it took a particularly savvy engineer to keep the systems going while shutdown and scorch programs were frying wires and toasting processors. For every round that landed, each slinger got slower, less capable, and basically hobbled.
When one of them was reduced to smoldering ash by lightning from the resistance slinger, it became clear that the order to retreat was given.
One by one, the remaining E-Bloc troopers faded from sight as they removed the cables from their jacks and aborted the mission, they all crashed out hard, and Hayden knew that it would be days, perhaps even a week or more before any of the surviving slingers would be able to return to action.
Sun, however, didn’t move, still strengthening her shield as she watched Hayden’s bullets dent its surface. Lunatic 8 did not stop working. Steam rose from the cracks in the ground that surrounded Sun.
Sun looked through her shield at Hayden, then trailed her gaze to Lunatic 8 and tilted her head in either confusion or consideration. Her lip curled into something that was not a smile and she too faded from sight. Hayden realized that she'd been working on her exit behind her shield. Sun would still crash out hard, but not enough to keep her offline for long. While the E-Bloc slingers didn't have a chance to ID him, the Prime slinger had him dead to rights.
Damn, she was good.
The ground stopped trembling abruptly, and Hayden was suddenly standing face to face with Lunatic 8, the glowing cube gripped firmly in her hand. Her dark eyes burned into his, her hair floating through the air as if she were underwater, and for a moment it looked as if she was about to unleash on him, the lightning seeming to lay in wait just under her sun-starved skin.
They stood like that for a moment longer, slingers staring at each other point-blank, so close that they'd have shared the same breath had they been there in person.
Then, as abruptly as she'd appeared, the resistance slinger departed, her avatar dissipating into the code like leaves falling from a tree in autumn.
Hayden found himself alone in the datascape, the gravity of his actions only now tugging at the corner of his awareness.
Chapter 4
Hayden Cole was many things, but stupid was not one of them, at least that's what he liked to tell himself in moments when he wasn't so certain it was true.
What went on in MassNet was generally a private affair in which the results were generally all that could be
considered tangible. Given how subjective it all was, it took honest reporting and more than a little forensic coding to paint an accurate picture for anyone not directly involved. His actions weren’t broadcasted on every terminal hooked into the operation center’s wireless like it would be in CodeSource. They had only been visible to Nibiru, viewing his behavior without intervening from CodeSource. While she might not have seen exactly what he'd seen, given their mutual patch, she was able to see the various programs getting thrown around and who they targeted, not to mention being able to see the code change when Lunatic 8 started messing with the basic properties of the operating system.
He had been relieved, after the fight, that she had gathered her drones and pulled back, as he’d asked. Still, part of him had expected to emerge from the datascape to find her and Overdog huddled together, discussing his radical breach of sanctioned engagement and how easily it could be construed as corporate treason.
When he powered down the throne and looked around the center with his own eyes, he didn’t see her anywhere. Not a trace. Of course, she hadn’t been there in the first place when he’d set up, so there was always the option that she’d been working from her workshop, her rig balanced on her desk or on her knees. That was where he headed, powering down the throne and hurrying through the maze of desks and high-quality terminals, each with a slinger situated in front of a screen.
It was just his luck that Overdog decided now was the optimal time to speak. Hayden couldn't blame the gruff manager, given that Hayden and Nibiru had taken some significant liberties with the timing of their activity and the lack of support or oversight.
All would be forgiven if they could produce some results, though at that moment Hayden wasn't quite sure how much truth he was prepared to tell about what had just transpired and it wasn't like they had any useful finds on the pulse either.
Man, the mission creep was taking them deep in the weeds on this operation, Hayden thought grimly as he prepared for Overdog's approach.