Irreconcilable Differences, page 15
Ed puts coffee in the Mr. Coffee. Fills it with water. The water system in the Winnebago groans with the effort. When the reservoir's full, Ed turns it on. Sits next to Carl. Looks forward to where his sister is sitting, then at Nate.
Nate takes a couple steps backward, goes to sit with Kari. Strange bedfellows. And a lovely good cop/bad cop play.
“Uppers are bad, Micki,” Ed says, earnestly. “Bad for your heart.” He nods toward his sister. “She worries about you.”
Micki looks at him. Just looks, staring icicles into the back of his head. Ed meets her gaze with a vaguely glassy, fish-eyed stare. Eventually Micki looks away. She glances back, and he's still staring. She finally shakes her head and plugs her deck into one of her jack ports. “I fucking hate coffee,” she says. I guess that's my cue. Lean forward, so to speak. Let myself fall into her again, and her into me. Mostly me into her. I'm the one who has to stay hidden.
Feet first into the purple landscape of Micki's deck. Land hard. Micki slots up the ice, and I know what she's using. Firewall penetrators. Crypto crackers. Worse. Deck scramblers. Burnout ice. The hard black, or so the hackers call it. Software weapons. The tools of mayhem. Start the gestalt. I hide in Micki more carefully. She turns on the stealth options for our gestalt.
Sparks joins us. “Go easy on Kari, kid. She really is a sweet girl,” he says.
“Shut the fuck up, Sparks. Just shut the fuck up, okay? We've got work to do, and I don't need you thinking about Ms. Scarycrotch and her brother over the gestalt. I already feel like I need a shower.” Um. Oops.
“What? It's no different from virtual. They're tech-ninjas. They get off having other people drive,” he says.
“It's completely different from virtual. And even if it wasn't, if you and Blackjack have it so bad for each other, just be honest and rent a room, okay? And shut the fuck up. We're working.” Micki punctuates that with a steep dive into KanREN. Jump through the link to Leo's. “Fiber's working.”
I can feel annoyance steam off of Sparks. “When did you get to be such a bitch, Hotty?”
“I get it from working with you, Sparky. Now, let's go.” Micki sets another coordinate and jumps back out through the encrypted tunnel over Leo's legitimate fiber. No resistance. Nobody even notices we're here. Arrive at the Reaper's home environment.
When I was in grade school, we used to read, especially online, about Pripyat, the town in the Ukraine closest to the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. I remember the pictures. Buildings slowly decaying away, as the land and the living things consumed them, in the absence of man.
This is the virtual world. Landscape is unlimited, if you have the money to put a server on your network, and it doesn't cost much. If you're lucky, whatever business you build online draws crowds. You make money. People come to your slice of the virtual world, and inhabit it. Sometimes, though, despite the best intentions, a virtual environment dies. People go on to the next big thing. The business dies, gets acquired, or whatever. Whither the server? The answer is, it depends. If the company that ran it was acquired, the server may get dumped into someone else's machine room, where their tech staff will hook it up and leave it. Or the hosting company gets bought, and the registration of a given server falls through the cracks, and it's easier for the techies to leave the server running, rather than track down who owns it, figure out what it's doing, and shut it off. The server goes on doing its job, offering a virtual world to nobody, until it finally breaks down, or someone cracks it and makes a nuisance of themselves. The decay doesn't happen online. The inexorable march of bacteria, plants, and animals doesn't occur online, and the only opportunistic scavengers are of the two-legged variety. Digital ghost towns look as shiny and new as the day they were built, but they feel just as empty.
Micki looks around this one. A pizzeria, it looks like. Probably somewhere in Topeka. The software doesn't see us — Micki, Sparks, or me. Walk past the busty waitress in the tight ‘Super Crust Pizza’ t-shirt. She looks past us, frozen to save cycles for nobody. The ceiling fans turn. They're defined as turning, and Micki's deck renders them that way. Tables are spotless and unoccupied. The neon sign in the window buzzes a little. A nice touch. Random imperfections. A higher-end job, by whoever did this place. The air, such as it is, is described to Micki's sensorium with the smell of fresh pizza. Her stomach twitches a little at that, but I'm not sure if that's good or bad.
Here and there, someone's been tampering in the place's code. The marijuana plants growing in the vases at each table are probably new. The ‘Shit and Cream Cheese’ pizza on the menu board, that's definitely new. And in a family place like this, it's not very likely that the waitress's skirt would be quite that short, and her original creators undoubtedly made her with underwear. And a bra.
These signs of technological vandalism, however, are nothing compared to what the Reapers have done, moving in. A forest of hundreds of glowing connections spread out to the world from the dining room of the pizzeria. We watch connections go by as the Reapers' hackers monitor inbound connections at Leo's. But they're looking in the wrong place, to find us. The new fiber paid off.
“Man,” Sparks says, “this is weird.”
Kind of like walking through a ‘ friendly’ minefield. It's your minefield. You know where the mines are. Are you in danger? No, but yes. If you make one misstep, trigger one mine sensor system, they'll kill or maim you as readily as they would have anyone else. Worse, your buddies have to make their way into the minefield to try and save you before you bleed out from whatever limb has just been blown off. And they're in a hurry. And they've watched you get splattered, so their adrenaline levels are sky high. If you're really unlucky, the detonation has notified the enemy of your location. And it's dark. Yeah. This feels a lot like that. One misstep and everything goes quickly to hell.
Watch the Reapers. We're still invisible. They could find us if they knew we were here, of course, but they don't. All their alarms assume intruders from outside. We're inside, through a door they don't know exists.
“Is that all of them?” Sparks whispers in our gestalt.
We check, Micki and I. Their operator gestalt is big. Twelve human beings tied together in the artificial intimacy that is a gestalt. But they're servicing hundreds of business networks. Checking firewall security indicators. We watch the packets. Micki collects security keys. More packets. Micki nudges Sparks, and points out two other gestalts. Four-person operator teams, two riding field people, two exclusively doing data work. Four teams like that.
“Fuck me,” Sparks whispers. “Twenty eight operators. And at least eight field people.”
“Yeah,” Micki says. “Still wanna just yop these guys?”
“Hell, no,” Sparks replies. “I'm all for letting other people do our dirty work.”
“Then let's get to work,” Micki says.
Sparks cracks his knuckles, feeds the Reaper firewall the access codes Micki pilfered, and goes after a bowling alley. “Yeah. FBOFs, for sure,” he says. “Shit. Their firewall ice is on me.”
Bowling alley? I didn't think anyone bowled anymore. “Let it tangle with you a little,” Micki says. “Let ‘em follow you home.” We're busy hitting a garage, though. Connect. Hit their firewall with off-the-net crypto-cracking software. Beat on it noisily. We get through after a few minutes. It's not even a matter of league this time. Micki's good, but she's not The Lady or anything. A lot of mediocre data talent out here. A lot of junior plugheads who will never get out.
“Ow! Shit, the FBOF guys are on me. They were monitoring that firewall!” Sparks is yelling.
“Drop the link! Drop the link!” Micki yells. “Shit! Bizmen. They're going after my connection.”
“I'm out,” Sparks says. “I'm okay.”
The alarms are ringing in the Reapers' firewall. Whatever their attack team was doing, they've come home to back up the operators. But we don't tarry. Sparks, Micki, and I drop out of the Reapers' ghost town altogether. Log out. Before the Reapers scan their environment as part of defending it.
Open the eyes. Blink a few times. Look at Sparks. “Think we got away clean?” Micki asks.”
“I sure as hell hope so,” Sparks says. But his lips do twist into a smirk. “Man. I've never been happy someone crawled up my ass that fast before. Those FBOFers are pretty good.”
Draw back from Micki. “Are all hackers easily impressed?” It slips out before I can stop it.
Micki chuckles inwardly. “You're in Kansas any more, Toto. Like you said, this isn't exactly the happenin' place.”
She speaks up. “Hey, Nate. Might want to move this thing, just in case anyone got a valid trace back.”
Nate looks back. “You guys are done already?”
Micki nods. “Yeah. Now we sit back and see how trigger-happy everyone is. Um. Anyone else want some pizza? I'm starving.”
I've leaned on these people as hard as I dare, and yeah, we really do need to see what effect our little run has had. One more day on the farm? At school? Hell. I'm getting used to it. It might even give me some time to make some sense of stuff. Use the time wisely. Improvise. Adapt. Overcome. Ooh, fucking, rah.
Chapter 19
Lie in Micki's bed with her. Micki's staring at the ceiling. “Jesus,” she says.
“What?”
“You read the rumors we were getting as well as I did. We started a war.”
“Mick, you knew this was serious. You knew these guys weren't playing around. You knew it was life and death.”
She squeezes her eyes shut. “I know.”
Reach up with her hand to ruffle her hair softly. “It doesn't seem like it should be fun, does it?”
Her eyes snap open, and she stares at the ceiling once more. Then closes them again. “No. It doesn't. It isn't fun. We got those people killed.”
“It was fun. We got in. We changed everything, none of our people got hurt, we got out, and the badguys do all the work for us. Classic, classic infowar.”
“What about them? They're dying, Rae. What about them, and their lives, and their families, and all that stuff?”
“They made the situation. They knew the risks as well as we did. They agreed to it as much as we did. If we'd screwed up, they'd be partying over our graves right now.”
“‘S that supposed to make me feel better?” She demands. “Fuck. Rae … I know you're a killer and everything, but this is my first time, okay?” Her eyes begin to tear up.
“Mick. Micki.” Hang my head, as any sense of victory falls away, dragged down chemically by the weight of Micki's brain. And the fact that I can't, I won't, control her mind by manipulating how she feels about things.
“I just want to quit. God. I should have just gone when Nate told me to. Just gone home. Gotten some sleep. Gotten on with my life.”
“Mick, we're in this clusterfuck now, and all we can do is fight our way out, and live with it.” Sergeant McNally again, probably. It sounds like something she'd have said. Something I learned, made part of myself a long time ago. It was enough for me for a long time.
“That's your solution? More bloodshed?”
“I don't see any others. I told you what I am, Micki. I don't see that changing. For what it's worth, I'm sorry it's screwing up your life.”
“But why do you have to make me that way? Can't you see it? It's getting so easy for me to just throw someone's life away. I never used to be like that.”
“It's the only way I know,” is finally what I tell her.Shake my head. Her head. “I didn't get you into this mess, Mick. I'm just part of the mess. And I'm trying damn hard to get you out of it in one piece, okay? But there's going to be a cost for it. I'm used to paying that cost. You're not. Yet.”
There's a shiver. A bone deep fear, a clarity of vision I can feel radiating out from Micki's brain, through the interconnecting hardware into our gestalt, and from there into the cluster of neurofibers that I'm using as a brain. It comes direct. Rides hard. That sudden, unbending realization that what I do, what she does, what we do together, has consequences. That there are things that cannot be undone.
“Oh, God,” she says, quietly, “oh, God.”
“I know, sweetie. Believe me, I know.”
“How … how do you live with this?”
“What they teach you … taught you, in the military is that you look out for your guys. Your buddies. And you don't worry about the enemy and his buddies, because if you do, they'll kill you and yours. That's as far as it goes, really. Well, that and deliberately desensitizing you to violence so it's not such a big deal to do it in the first place. Show you some really ghastly pictures about what the enemy is willing to do to you. Stuff like that.” Try to make it sound casual. It feels casual. “Hard to remember a time when I thought differently, to be honest.” Except that Micki keeps bringing it back to me. God, please let this op end soon.
“So much for civilization, huh? I mean … what chance is there for things to get better if everybody's like that? If you have to be like that to survive?” Micki asks quietly.
“This is civilization. What you've been taught is wrong. Civilization makes bigger wars possible. When it was just family groups, your body count was a lot lower. Even when it was tribes and city-states, you had to stop fighting eventually, because you needed these people at home growing food. Civilization means you can have professional soldiers, and give them better tools, so it takes fewer of them.”
“It's also art, and music, and creating beauty. It doesn't have to be about war.”
“You want to know what civilization is? It's having enough food, and a functional economy, to support specialists in any field, be they soldiers, artists, musicians, taxicab drivers, or even criminals, terrorists, and politicians. All of those people eat because of civilization. It's always been a mixed blessing. But it's our way, as human beings. It's what we do.”
She's quiet for a long time. Digesting that, maybe. Trying to find holes in it? Maybe. Or maybe she's fallen asleep.
“Don't go philosophical on me. Not at this time of night,” she says, finally.
“Well, what do you want to talk about, then? Boys? Girls? Both?”
“It seems to be your favorite topic,” Micki grumps.
“Your hormones are probably affecting me.”
“Very funny,” Micki grumps. “I'm not in that kind of mood.”
Ruffle her hair softly. “Sorry, Mick. I told you I'm not a very nice person.”
“Eh. You're not so bad. If you had a body of your own, I'd say you should join us. The 785s, I mean. Full time.”
“That'd be different from working for a corp how, exactly? Ignoring the lack of a health plan, and the whole illegal thing?”
Micki shrugs. “We're real people. Not some faceless corp or government. Yeah, we're in it for the cash, but…”
Curl on myself a little, in my mind. “But it's like being in your own little pirate crew. Friends. Even family. That sound familiar?”
It's Micki's turn to be quiet. She nods, finally. “Something like that.”
“Would you believe me if I told you Interpol Covert Services is like that?”
She thinks about it. “Yeah. I guess I hadn't thought about them that way, but yeah. Kinda puts a different spin on things. Even Director Neil.”
“Our inscrutable pirate captain. Whom we just have to trust, because he's not always forthcoming with the whole picture.”
“He doesn't trust his own people?” she asks. All I can do is shrug and change the subject. Maybe, I tell myself, she can give me some clue who's really tied where in all this. If she knows.
“How did you meet the 785s, Micki?”
She shrugs again. “Online, obviously. Playing the virts. Did a little cracking on one of the Open-Anima servers. Ran into Sparks there.”
“Seriously?” I ask her.
“Yeah.”
“Virts weren't entertaining enough? You had to go hacking them?”
“You can be lonelier online than anywhere else. People all around you, millions and millions of them, and it's just like real life. You get ignored. Everything is sharp and clean and beautiful and hi-res, and … except for the newbies coming on to you, you're alone, and none of it matters,” she says. “I used to love it. And then it got … I dunno. I just stopped. You know?”
And the scary thing is, I do.
“Is that how you hooked up with the 785s?”
“It's how I hooked up with Sparks. He hooked me up with the rest of them. Met him on an Open-Anima server. He was trolling for free porn, and I was screwing around with something like a virus. I'd never written one before. Never seen the source from one. He saw what I was building and got all impressed. He said he'd never seen one like that. I was like, duh. That's because I don't know what I'm doing. So we hacked together for a while. I think he was feeling me out even then. For the gang, I mean. Then one day, bam. He says, ‘Hotwire, I want you to meet some friends of mine.’ So I did. Him, Nate, Kari, Ed. That was pretty much it.”
“Were you and Sparks an item?”
She shakes her head. “Sparky's funny about that. About the whole sex thing. He loves his porn, he loves running Kari when he and Nate are screwing around, but … actual real sex?” She shakes her head. “He makes sleazy comments, but he never seems to get any.”
“Who did catch your eye?”
“Who do you think?”
“Kari.”
“Actually Ed, first. You gotta admit the guy is hot.”
Chuckle at her. “Ed? Yeah. He's kind of cute. Nice body. Not very bright, but that's not always a bad thing in a man. I'm less enthusiastic about Mr. Spikey, though.”
Micki giggles at me. “You like ‘em big and stooopid, huh?”
“Oh, you know. Eye candy's better when it's big and stooopid. That way they don't open their mouths and complicate things.” I'm laughing. “I thought you weren't in this kind of mood.”
Micki looks down. “I'm not. I wasn't. I don't know. Listen, Rae, don't take this wrong, but I thought maybe … I mean … you seem like you really come alive for runs, for causing trouble, for … I dunno. Mayhem, I guess.”
