***
Just before Evgeny’s untimely visit to the archivist, we’d been dealing with problems of our own.
We’d been logged out for 20 minutes, nervously pacing the lobby of the seedy hotel, trying to keep an eye on the private rooms to make sure one was open when needed. With minutes ticking away online at ten times normal speed, windows of opportunity could go by quickly.
At the same time, we didn’t have the creds to just stay online. We needed to serve the Archivist, get paid and get the hell off Earth.
I just had an uneasy sense that things were heading south.
Jayde motioned for me to join her on the other side of the room. “Boss, why don’t we speed this up?”
“What have you got in mind?”
“Well, even if Evgeny can give us an entry point, the security’s still going to be insane. We could use some help.”
Freeverse hackers. “We don’t have the creds.”
She smiled broadly. “Leave that to me. I’ve got a friend in New Frisco who can get in quietly and cleanly, and more to the point, free. He can start working the entry point if we can distract the security team governing access.”
If Jayde was anything else, she was a good judge of character. Her friend, a Freeverse student who went by the handle NewCastro4Freedom, was apparently relishing the chance of showing us how easily he could tear through VirtuTech security protocols.
Plus, she’d bailed him out – using the last of her creds in the process – two years earlier, on Jayde’s last visit to Earth.
She’d arrived somewhat fortuitously for her friend, who had decided to try to hack directly into VirtuTech’s personnel database and needed both legal representation and to post a bond.
Once we’d logged back in through Kensaku Stop we mixed in anonymously with a class of kids and their teachers, until passing a small, out of the way lounge, the kind of Bohemian coffee shop the virtual students from the nearby virtual version of McGill University no doubt enjoyed back in Montreal in 1976.
It was still snowing in the virtual city, and as we sat in our booth and Jayde sipped her hot chocolate, I watched through the frosty front window as the flakes descended.
It felt … natural. Like this was how it was supposed to be, not the toxic shithole Earth had become, or the technocratic, autocratic, near-sociopathic trading environment in the broader galaxy, an environment Earthers fostered more than anyone.
I looked at the couples walking by, youngsters in winter coats and woolens holding hands and laughing, carrying shopping bags, clodding along in winter boots.
When was the last time anyone on Earth had even seen real snow?
If you can’t have something ever again, does it make a sort of irrational sense to pretend the artificial version is the real thing, to get by with a sharp-turn denial of reality in the face of accepting a brutal-but-futile truth?
Jayde tapped my hand. “Boss. Boss! Snap out of it.”
I gave my head a shake. “What? Shit. Sorry. Got all introspective there for a minute and sort of zoned out on how much I like this place. You know? It had sort of a warm feeling that….”
She flicked my index knuckle fiercely with the tip of a diamond-hard fingernail. “Snap out of it Bob!”
I gave my head a shake and just focused on the moment and talking to her. “This place creeps up on you quickly.”
The Handbook of Joshua would have called this “hearing the call,” an acceptance that any sense of security – even a holographic one – can delude a person into making poor decisions.
I just called it getting loopy.
My datapad buzzed and I pulled up a set of virtual keys. “Message from Evgeny. His second team tracked the security detail’s entry point.”
The contractor’s time couldn’t have been better. A few seconds later, the front door opened and a young Latino with a tight, neat Mohawk – perhaps 18 years old – walked in, his hands shoved in the front pockets of his jeans, grey hoodie-clad shoulders slumping indolently.
He saw Jayde and walked right up to the table. “What up?”
She fist-bumped him. “What up Clarence? This is Bob. He’s a Smith.”
Clarence offered me a fist and I obliged, trying to look appropriately nonchalant and, thus, “cool.”
He was nodding gently. “Gotta say Jayde, I dig your company. I like me some Smiths. Good people.”
She smiled at him. “Clarence has been helping to keep the Frisco Freeversers in business for quite a few years now.
The young man joined us, sitting down next to Jayde. “We do really well because of all the Big Six attention to our ‘deviant’ lifestyles in the New Castro,” he said. “They covertly fund local operations to shut us down, and we covertly break into their systems and divert their funds.”
I nodded approvingly. “Well that sounds rewarding. But don’t you worry about talking about this stuff while logged on?”
Not so much, he said. “I’m good at what I do. If they manage to get a traceback on anything offensive I say, it’ll lead right back to their own people. So … what are we up to today?”
I leaned in and lowered my voice, unable at a quick glance to separate virtual Montrealers from avatars. “We need you to find a backdoor into the entry/exit records for Shen-Fui Shen Stop. There’s a security team apparently….”
He waved me off. “Please. I know it better than the guys who built it. So Easy! I could probably do it from here. But just to impress you? OK, I can backdoor it.”
I smiled. “You’re a confident guy. What the fuck are you still doing on Earth?”
He shrugged. “Eh. A guy’s gotta do what he’s gotta do. Gotta help out when your boys are getting a raw deal, right? ‘Sides, I got a lot of time yet to get my shit together.”
Mating call of the future doomed MultiNet addict: I’ve got lots of time to get my shit together.
Again, it wasn’t my place to judge.
Ten minutes later, we were standing outside Rue Atwater, the last virtual street before Shen-Fui Shen Stop.
The stop inherited its name from an early MultiNet pioneer and was primarily a jumping-on spot for the Pacific Rim.
It was evening now, and the crowds had thinned, but the short two blocks to it had been blocked off with construction barricades. “Temporarily closed to out traffic,” it said.
Across the road, at the base of a large, nondescript office tower, a security force had set up, exactly where Evgeny’s men had pegged them. They lolled around in fatigues, carrying small automatic weapons and pistols, one man in a red beret obviously leading them.
Jayde and I surveyed the scene from up the road. “That building has to be where they’re keeping the archivist’s target busy,” I said. “We need to distract them for a few minutes.”
It’s been said, of course, that the greatest lure of the MultiNet is that scenarios can’t kill their users. And that’s true.
But some of the results of pulse feedback, used as a deterrent for online crime by VirtuTech in public areas, had come surprisingly close to death.
It was possible to at the very least give someone a nasty headache and at worst, fry some serious brain cells.
And more than once, the sudden shock of a virtual death had caused spontaneous disconnection, never a pleasant sensation.
One consequence of this was that weaponry was banned in public places without the proper security license. The Archivist, doubtless, had the right paperwork.
We didn’t.
None of this prevented the occasional kidnapping of a copyright developer online. Once they had the person, even in virtual avatar form, wringing his real-world location out of him wouldn’t take long. In fact, some of the possibilities for psychological torture afforded by virtual Scenarios were creative, to say the least.
I said, “We just need to keep their attention focused away from the security office long enough for your guy to do his thing.”
Jayde smiled at that. “I was thinking abo
ut that. I was wondering what would happen if you lit synth alcohol on fire. Just how real is the stuff?”
With that, she pulled a bottle of 100-year-old scotch out of her avatar’s inside pocket. “Borrowed this from your friend Evgeny,” she said. Then she drew a large bandana out of her other pocket and soaked it in booze, before stuffing the cloth into the bottle as an impromptu wick.
I signaled Clarence to be ready, but Jayde was fumbling around. “Got a match?” she asked.
I didn’t. “Oh for crying out loud! Hold on.”
I closed my eyes, then squeezed my left hand tight and brought up my visor options menu until I’d found the character trait “smoker.” When the street came back into view, I had a pack of cigarettes in my top pocket and a lighter in my hand. “Truly cancer free,” I said.
She took the lighter from me then lit the fuse. “But dangerous nonetheless.” And then she hefted it towards the cars parked alongside the building next to the security team.
The bottle smashed, and the flaming liquor crept out and over the car. We’d stepped back behind the corner into cover as soon as she’d thrown it, then peaked around.
Most of the team had retreated into the building’s lobby to secure their assignment, but two were beating at the flames with coats.
Jayde said, “Well, we know it behaves like real burning alcohol. I wonder what will happen to the car when it hits…”
And then it did.
The explosion was a quick orange ball of flame and black smoke, blowing the two men backwards momentarily before their connection was severed and they blipped right out of existence in midair.
“No shit,” I said. “You learn something new every day.” I momentarily wondered what it must have felt like for them to be wrenched forcibly back to reality.
The remainder of the security team had been so distracted by the blast and their colleagues’ sudden departure that they’d missed Clarence walking right by the barricade and in through the back door of the security office.
We casually crossed the street, watching the security team cautiously set up a rather useless perimeter around the burning vehicle, the captain frantically radioing out their situation.
A minute later, Clarence strolled right out the back door and up the street to where we casually waited.
***
An hour later, back in the real world, we stood outside Kobe Travel Stop. The records indicated Dregba’s day and time of city sector entry. Jayde ran a cursory registry search on the five nearest hotels for the same time period. A series of suites had been reserved under a corporate number.
“That’s your guy,” she said. “Only pattern of reservations that could even come close.”