by Sarah Stone
“More than a little,” Hayden admitted. The house seemed even more full of both Akiaten and humans when he walked back in than it had when he entered and he tried his best not to let their presence make him nervous. He tried his best to shake the sight of the woman drinking blood from his head, but was unsuccessful.
“I don’t like you, company man,” Cabal said. “I don’t like foreigners, especially not those who came here to exploit us,” Hayden felt the man’s gaze narrow behind the face mask. “But someone should have told you sooner about our thirst, and our arrangement with the people who aide us. Kapre likes his riddles though; none of us can stop that.”
The man’s voice had a familiar tone to it, and though Hayden did not remember the man’s armor or the shape of his silhouette, he did remember the voice. He’d been one of the Akiaten crammed into the room where Hayden had dozed in a drugged stupor on the couch. He’d been one of the voices, the voice arguing for Hayden’s death. He suppressed at a shudder at the memory, as he usually had to when his thoughts made him touch on the fact that he could have been killed that easily, and that it all rested on the decisions of others with no contribution from him. He could have slept right through it, half-awake to choke on the blood running down his throat.
“If you don’t trust me, why am I still here?”
The man, Cabal, kept looking at him steadily. “Didn’t say anything about trust. I said ‘like’. I didn’t trust you when you pulled that stunt at the market. Thought you were just some soft-hearted slinger, or maybe making an attempt at being a double-agent. But you’ve proven yourself an asset so far. Glitch may not have been able to pull off that hack without your help.”
He held something out, and it took Hayden a moment to realize that it was one of the bandana masks like all other Akiaten wore, a blank slate for him to customize. It was a blue so dark that it was a scant few shades away from solid black. Hayden held it carefully, as though his fingers might tarnish the fabric. From the other side of the room, just barely visible in the poor lighting, he glimpsed Una smile. Though she was just as hard as Laine, her smiles always looked real, always reached her eyes and warmed her cold face.
“Asia Prime hit us hard today. With Glitch and most of the other slingers gone, and 8 getting weaker by the day, we’re gonna need more muscle in the datascape. 8 will ride her throne until her last breath, but she can't hold the line by herself. We need a slinger worth his jacks, who knows the corporate systems and strategies, to stand with us.”
The man’s voice was hard, steady as the gaze Hayden could feel through the armor. Alejandro had paused on his way up the stairs, standing next to Una as he watched the proceedings with a curious expression. Despite what he’d seen, impossible things, he knew what was right in his bones. He’d known perhaps since before he’d stepped off the plane in the Manila airport, and it just took the right set of circumstances to wake him up. He already knew what his answer would be, but he could not find a way to say it aloud.
Instead of tarnishing the moment with his clumsy attempt at an acceptance speech, Hayden raised the mask, met Una’s eyes before it covered his lips, and tied it about his face.
Chapter 9
Asia Prime spent several days tearing the city apart unopposed, as both E-Bloc and the local government were reeling from Lunatic 8's brutal hack and occupied with shoring up their own defenses in both the physical realm and the datascape.
Union Americana was strangely inactive, at least on the surface, as the potent new Asia Prime military presence all but owned the streets. Hirohito had captured a number of the resistance slingers and a few of the bootlegger higher-ups during his raid, and it became clear that he was dreadfully effective at interrogation and intel extraction.
Armor-clad military operatives, masquerading as law enforcement contractors, purged several modest safe houses and shut down some small-time black sites. The Akiaten engaged the operatives in a handful of street skirmishes, though there was little to be done by the resistance other than back off and let things cool down.
Given that their defiance was decentralized, for the most part, the Asia Prime purge was only able to work with the limited information possessed by that specific resistance cell. Hayden came to learn that not even the more potent figures in the resistance, such as Alejandro, Cabal, Una, or Lunatic 8 had a full spectrum awareness of their organization. It was the only way to prevent defeat and betrayal, and while it took everything to stay their hand while the purge occurred, it was the only way to move forward.
Things cooled down after about a week, and Hayden was moved to a safe-house in the city. Below the loft he stayed in was the last functioning resistance black site aside from wherever Lunatic 8 was holed up. No one seemed sure of where that was when he asked them. He thought that perhaps they moved her so often that that really was the case, which was quite a feat considering that she traveled with a MassNet throne.
He was in a smaller building than the one containing the basement where he'd met Glitch. A disused office in one of the worst neighborhoods of Manila, far from city center and with increased surveillance from all sides.
The resistance had been all but purged from city center as far as he knew, which would make his job harder, though he felt up to the challenge. There were many sympathizers in the building, sleeping in lower level apartments, keeping up the illusion of habitation by civilians, which made infiltration by the corporations more complicated if no less likely. With all the floors they had, there was ample time for sympathizers with spun lies or Akiaten with guns to intercept whatever might come for them. And in the meantime, there were plenty of avenues of escape for anyone still working on the upper levels.
It was good to see them adjust their strategies, however late it came for Glitch and the bootleggers killed in the last black site. Alejandro had argued for much more integration between the resistance and their support network.
Hayden had cringed at the first sight of the MassNet throne they'd been able to provide him with, but now that he'd made his own modifications, he sat in it comfortably enough and with confidence that it wouldn't fry his brain due to the wear and tear on the salvaged machine. It was a mess of loose wires and half melted plastic, the cushion for the seat crumbling in places. It had taken Hayden and a resistance engineer, a woman his own age, who preferred technical work in the physical world to unraveling and rebuilding things in the code, more than a day to get it in good enough condition that Hayden felt comfortable sitting himself down atop it.
The woman was called Risa, and she knew her way around CodeSource, but was wholly unfamiliar with MassNet, and preferred the physical world, where the things she built and fixed were more tangible, to the fantasy world built up from Code.
She was a good second, and pleasant enough company despite her aversion to conversation while they worked, but her presence made him miss the easy camaraderie that he and Nibiru had reached during the relatively short time they’d shared on Americana’s payroll. Risa was good but had nowhere near the skill and raw talent of his former Union partner.
He had worried for Nibiru the past week, when he wasn’t worrying about himself. Hayden might have been in more danger, more frequently than he’d first considered, but Nibiru was in the viper's nest. One wrong move on her part and she’d be hollowed (if she wasn’t outright killed).
Picturing Laine putting a gun to the back of the engineer’s skull, the muzzle of the gun against bright blue hair, bothered him just as much, if not more, than picturing his own death at the hands of the alpha augment. That was what made this mission so difficult and so complex. He needed Nibiru on his team to pull it off, but one fuck-up would be enough to clue her superiors in to just who she’d been spinning ideas with, and he had no doubt that at this stage, Hayden was public enemy number one as far as the Union was concerned.
If Nibiru ended up another corpse photograph in Laine's database it would be Hayden's fault, and he struggled with that mightily.
With Cabal and Alej
andro on board with his plan, they’d smuggled him across the city to a black site with a near-functioning throne as soon as they were able.
Unlike Lunatic 8, he apparently didn’t yet rate having a throne brought to him, instead, he was taken to it. Such was the difficulty in acquiring such high-end tech in these low-grade regions. It was unlikely the local government had more than one of these, so for the resistance to possess a handful was a major feat indeed. The past two days had been spent prepping the under-used space and the tired old throne.
Despite all the work and failed test runs, he was honestly excited when it hummed to life, the equipment around it lighting up and buzzing with power.
Still skeptical of being electrocuted, when he pulled the helmet into place and slotted the cables to his jacks his heart was racing with excitement, and he knew that it was time to get to work.
Risa gave him a questioning thumbs-up, and he cautiously returned it.
“Brain damage risks seem to be minimal,” he joked, but he only received a puzzled smile as opposed to a laugh. He was really looking forward to seeing Nibiru again.
He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed the full immersion of MassNet until he dropped into the imagined cityscape from the throne, felt the code shifting around him.
It was good to be home.
He was far from the Union HQ in a physical sense, but it took him little time to reach it in the datascape, where distances could be manipulated as well as anything else. He was careful in his approach, the pulsing neon cityscape his imagination conjured around him masking his progress.
As packets of data ebbed and flowed around him, the slinger imagined himself walking cautiously through the crowded streets. He was aware that the other individuals he saw around him were little more than datapoints moving through the system, and not actually human beings at all, though by managing his hallucination in such a way he was more able to blend in with his surroundings. Regardless of the metaphor that any opposing slinger was creating, thanks to his own maneuvering, Hayden would likely appear to be part of the environment, just another leaf on the wind.
He’d rested well in the past two days, and everything he did felt easy, seamless, as though he was walking on air as he moved.
There was no way to contact Nibiru directly, no safe way to set up a meeting with a direct message. Her HUD was probably being monitored as closely as her activity within the code. This meant, of course, that his actions were restricted to waiting for her to enter CodeSource, and thus, become visible to him in the datascape. They would have to communicate through message drops, leaving data packets for each other as she ostensibly moved through the wires and went about her duties. Given that the Union was still using the drones to search for the pulse, and that Nibiru was undoubtedly stalling on her progress in order to avoid revealing what she knew, her sweeps should pick up the drops without being too obvious.
Knowing that this was his best option, he made his way to the HQ, which he saw as a rather fantastical dark tower of gleaming black stone, and settled in to wait.
He found it amusing that his mental image of the Union base had changed so radically since his defection, though it made perfect sense. He shielded himself, of course, layering a background.exe over his existing baffle.exe so that his signature would be all but indistinguishable from the datascape itself. If someone managed to pierce the first layer of stealth programming the baffle would buy him enough time to make his escape, or at least put some distance between him and his pursuers.
Hayden found it nearly impossible to idle, and could not help but to gently test the HQ's perimeter defenses. It wasn’t long before he recognized the weaving of a few half-hearted slingers, who had done their best to keep up the barriers around the new HQ that kept interlopers out of their hardware, slinking into the guts of the system and overriding it for their own gain.
Hayden slowly detached himself from his vantage point across the imaginary street and crossed along with a crowd of human metaphors that waited for the 'walk' signal. It was just a routine upload of sensory data from the surveillance machines surrounding the HQ, and Hayden presented himself as just another suit wearing wage slave that passed through the wicked gates of the tower.
There were sentry guns tracking his movements along with all the others, but it was easy for Hayden to slip past them, making small adjustments to their coding that allowed him to slip through the outer firewalls and into the periphery of the independent mainframe.
Hayden hadn't intended to assault the Union mainframe, but he was so familiar with the particulars of his former co-workers, he couldn't help but neatly slice his way in.
Inside, in what he perceived as a wide courtyard, he watched and waited, making a sort of game of picking out the patterns and movements of the different slingers as he blended into the background once more. He dared not penetrate the system any deeper and remained still as he watched slingers move through CodeSource like worker bees, not a one of them yet plugged into MassNet.
He knew few of them well enough for more than small-talk but was familiar with their preferred methods and movements. That was common for slingers, who knew each other more by their handiwork than any sort of personal interaction.
Qais, he was wholly unfamiliar with other than the growing scope of the younger slinger’s work, the confidence in his moves that mirrored Hayden’s own.
His replacement.
It should have been Nibiru. She was intelligent, driven, and better at multi-tasking engineering and slinging than anyone he’d known. It only made sense that, as his backup, she would have been nudged into the first spot when he was gone. But it seemed that Qais, from what Hayden could see, had been pushed into a command position. The orders the slingers followed were his, Nibiru included. Overdog was grooming Qais to be his next Hayden Cole, and it was clear that even if Nibiru was still an employee in good standing, she was outside the circle of trust.
He could see her shadow in the code as she worked her plans through CodeSource, seemingly mapping out the path her drones would soon take when they were released. As Nibiru brought the drones online they appeared to him as a murder of crows roosting in the courtyard of the tower. He carefully observed them, recording the movements of their heads, the feathers of their wings, all the while in the binary reality the code he was learning how to mimic them. Once he'd garnered the information he needed to do so, he made his exit from the courtyard by joining a group of utility usage datapoints on their way to the municipal meter, which appeared to him as yet more suit wearing salary workers, and left the tower.
Once he was back outside, and well away from the routine security sweeps of the tower defenses, he began crafting his own crow.
Hayden moved into an alley and reached down to pick up what he perceived as a discarded newspaper, one of the printed sets of pages that went out of production when he was just a toddler. He began folding the pages into the shape of a bird, weaving the mimic.exe into the trash code of the discarded delete files. It took him some time to get it right, but by the time he was finished a reasonable facsimile of a crow was perched upon his arm.
He waited for what seemed like hours to his impatient mind until finally, at long last, the murder of crows launched from within the tower. As the multitude of crows, which were actually metaphors for the drones that even now spread out across the physical city itself, Hayden waited for the right moment.
Qais would be in MassNet, riding shotgun on the drone flock as it moved through the city and Hayden knew he had to be careful. Just as the crows flew overhead he launched his mimic.exe and then settled down next to what he imagined as a dumpster to close his eyes and focus on keeping his awareness fixed on his freshly crafted program.
It didn't take long for Nibiru to notice the extra signature in her drone fleet, the one that wasn't attached to any actual drone and while it moved with her others in the datascape it yielded no actual data from the physical world.
“Good to see you, Cole,” she sa
id, using her direct connection to the drones to move her message from one in the field to the mimic.exe that flew alongside it in the datascape. “I mean, relatively speaking.”
With CodeSource, she could only see his false drone signature in the code beside her, as he was no Lunatic 8, and lacked the power to project an image to her.
“You, too,” he answered, words directly to her drone's onboard system, which deleted the data it pulled in as soon as it uploaded to Nibiru's deck, lasting scarcely more than a handful of seconds before they were gone, allowing them the communicate in self-deleting bursts. “I wish there were more time for pleasantries, but-"
“Yeah,” she cut in, surveying her surroundings nervously. “We’ve got five minutes if we’re lucky, and that’s only if Sun or the E-Bloc goon squad don't come after us. Qais was a newbie a week ago, but he's been made a vet by how many times we've tangled with slingers trying to down the drones. So,” He imagined her grin. “Get going, cowboy. Corrupt me. Give it your best shot.”
He did.
Hayden told her the relative respect with which he’d been treated since defecting and assured her that she could receive the same, perhaps even more so. While Hayden and Lunatic 8 did their best to keep the resistance effective in the datascape, it was just a stopgap until the pulse could be fully harnessed. For that, they needed a world-class engineer. The locals, like Risa, were good, but the harsh reality was that only a corporate level engineer would have the technical experience and sophistication level to make the tech leap from theoretical to functionality.
Nibiru swiftly recounted the increasingly suspicious way any behavior on her part was recorded and analyzed. “And it’s not just me,” she said. “Since you ‘went rogue’ as they’re saying, they’ve got this whole place on lockdown save for the operatives. Like they think we’re in danger of losing more people, either to the resistance or just getting popped by the other corporations, even the goddamn kitchen staff.