The extractionist, p.18
The Extractionist, page 18
McKay grabbed a pipette from the kit and roughly measured ten ccs of what looked like black cherry syrup into the bottom of a shot-size plastic squeeze bottle, then added the next three liquids in sequence, capped the bottle, and gave it a vigorous shake.
“That’s a step too far, even for me. I spend enough time in the Swim as it is, I don’t need to start installing stents to stay in longer.”
“Wuss.” Again Spike showed a snarky grin.
McKay couldn’t remember if facial expressions were part of Spike’s original code or if it picked them up during the decade or so it’d been free-roaming. She mixed up three more doses, following Spike’s instructions.
“That’s Latin for ‘not-insane,’ right?” McKay drank off one of the neurotransmitter shots and grimaced. There were few flavors that could make any mix that involved caffeine and l-lysine taste better than awful. She got comfortable, kept one of the shots in one hand, set the other two on the bed in easy reach so she didn’t have to break concentration to take them later if needed. The Overlay seemed to shiver in response, and the concrete amphitheater took shape around her once again.
“I thought you were going to redecorate this place.” Spike gained resolution again as it transferred back to the House servers. “And why do you keep it so cold in here?”
“I did redecorate. The floor’s different.”
Spike looked down as if the floor of the virtual space had become covered in virtual snakes. “Oh yes. Ferroconcrete is such an aesthetic upgrade from plain old concrete.”
“It was cheap. Are you going to show me where we’re going, or what?”
“And you wonder why no dude will date you after you bring him in here. Bachelorette city.”
“How the hell would you know?”
Spike spun itself into an icon, not the rattle-jawed spike and skull McKay knew so well, but something simpler, a fifth grade geography homework assignment, not worthy of hacking, cracking, disbanding, or mucking with at all. McKay did something similar to her own appearance, no sense in going out without cover. She looked up at the circular hatch in the ceiling of the concrete dome and cycled it open with a thought, giving herself direct access to the Swim beyond.
The metaphor of the space was important. It reminded her to set and reset the software firewalls that protected the House systems from an outside attack, an attack she was starting to feel was inevitable. The stress inhibitors in the mix she drank whisked that thought away, took with it the chattering fear that she’d been keeping crammed into the corner of her mind. She had more immediate problems, actionable problems, like who was tearing up her ’bots and what she was going to do to them in return.
Spike slipped out into the Swim and McKay stepped aside to avoid the data trickling in—half notes, prefixes, bits and semicolons dripped from larger, less efficient programs as they traveled, leaving a snail trail of data in their wake. McKay leapt up and caught the lip, then pulled herself into the digital current. A quick look back into the bunker showed a copy of herself left behind, the core version of McKay, the original, as it were, cross-legged on the concrete floor in a puddle of data, eyes closed and drifting as she followed the action, relaxed for the first time in days. The extra power the headset afforded gave McKay room to split her attention into multiple copies, an advanced form of the persona process that Mike had used. The danger was that McKay’s experiences in the Swim were sent right to the brain. No buffer, no chance to soften the blow if something went wrong. A livemind experienced everything in the Swim at full volume and a careless engineer could wind up, had wound up, with a brutal case of PTSD, or worse, without proper precautions. Multiply that by every copy McKay created and the risk kept climbing.
Spike shifted gears and found an eddy in the currents around the House firewalls. McKay executed a quick flip and followed him. Around her, a cluster of smaller programs skimmed and darted into the eddy like minnows, around and down until it flushed them all out into the City trunk line’s broader currents. Spike fed them information in quickly fired packets that looped out in the Swim like homing missiles and came back.
In an instant, the host of smaller ’bots surrounded McKay, swarming like pigeons, picking and pecking, shoving each other aside to intercept Spike’s data packets. They could be malware, search ’bots, viruses, crawlers, scavengers, inhabitants of the Swim’s sticky underside, some coded and forgotten, some released or dumped like a bag of unwanted kittens; some were set free like little digital panthers to stalk and do harm, others designed by some kid who didn’t understand how to write in the unravel to finish them off when their tasks were done.
Spike fired another dozen or so packets, probably dummies, then dove into the main current. McKay stayed a moment, watching the lost ’bots squabble. Some got the packets and destroyed them or turned them into tiny, malformed copies of themselves. One broody search program cached a couple of packets and guarded them with an alley cat’s jealous eye. Three lost ’bots—taken over, rewritten, and repurposed by Spike’s data packets—displayed their new master’s spike-and-skull icon. They too flung themselves into the Swim, flitting away on whatever errand the more sophisticated program gave them.
McKay tethered herself to Spike and let the sprite tow her along while she reviewed the situation. One of the ’bots McKay sent looking for Mike Miyamoto’s persona had located its quarry in the City Swim, where the ten square blocks of corporate sector hubs dumped their information into the pool. Its report placed Mike at Ban National Insurance, from where she could integrate with the system and then use the company’s internal network to drop back out in any one of a dozen locations worldwide.
Curiously, while the little ’bot had recorded the persona going into and coming out of a half dozen corporate systems, it always came back into the City Swim somewhere, circling the same spaces. Looking for something, or someone?
McKay shifted her attention back to the original version of herself, waiting in the bunker of her own mind, and opened her eyes. Around her the dome came to life, bringing up the Ban National system’s schematics. Like any bit-island in the Swim, an edifice like that affected the flow of data around it profoundly. Once inside you got a direct route to a handful of much faster privately owned servers, but also to a host of seedier, undoubtedly virus-laden and kludged-together legacy systems as well. Why Ban National, and why all the hopping in and out?
What exactly do you want, Mike? McKay asked the data silently. Clearly something game-changing had overcome the persona, something that altered the concept of perception so completely that the system couldn’t parse how to write it back. Not likely information, as Brighton expected, not a fact, but an experience, a revelation—but what? What could a guy in a special operations unit discover to cause such a turnaround? That sort of thing was usually the purview of porn seekers and genius-level mathematicians.
But maybe that was the point. Maybe whatever had happened to Mike in the Swim hadn’t been work related. Brighton was fixated on the idea, sure, so was Rose. She had no clue what Rice was thinking: the man never said more than three words at a stretch.
In the five years since she set up shop as a freelancer she’d seen a wide variety of reasons to perform an extraction. Occasionally, committing one’s mind to the copy process afforded an unusual level of self-examination and clarity. Sometimes you just figured something out about yourself or your worldview that didn’t fit any longer. A few upscale therapists had her on speed dial for patients of theirs who finally made a breakthrough. Maybe whatever had happened to Mike had been the same.
Not that Brighton would listen to her on the subject. Or maybe she’d already figured that out and wanted the change in Mike’s mindset written out anyway. She was using work reasons to help her boss hang on to that growth. Now that’s an interesting thought.
In the back of her mind, McKay mulled over the problem of what to do with the rogue persona, provided she could corner it. Dismissing the persona-version of Mike as a rogue is the wrong way to think about it, she reminded herself. Whatever its proper nature, the persona had at least the perception of free will, which meant that it had a goal, an end to attain, and it was McKay’s job to sort that out.
The modified, undercover Mike would have one set of motivations and the new, stripped-clean Mike would have another. That’s got to be the focus of this next conversation. What does he want now?
McKay refocused and jumped herself back to the copy of herself being pulled by Spike through the Ban National internal network’s knotty system. Like many companies, they just kept adding systems, new on top of old, so the access point was there, somewhere. McKay just had to figure out where they put it. She dove down to the Swim’s slowest bottom levels.
Spike found it first. There, in a thousand sticky lines of code, the sprite found the access point, folded itself flat, then flat again, and slid in sideways with McKay close behind. The access point dithered a moment, opening and closing like a spiky anemone, then went about its business as McKay and Spike slid into the system’s slower, thicker Swim stream.
Piece of cake. McKay reconfigured herself into something more powerful, something that could shove through the morass of data. Ban National had a direct link into the Peninsula Technological University systems, a thin pipe Spike led her through next. McKay was beginning to feel a little stretched.
The university system was far more chaotic than the City or even the multiple layers of Ban National. It was more like diving into the crazed technobubble under Berkeley. Communications packets, long looping strings of data, some non-optimized software oozing slowly along the floor, uploading and downloading massive copyright violations. Inexpertly written student projects, trailing long brittle spires and tails of unnecessary code, puttered along on their way to the different course servers. It was like wandering through a natural jungle experiment gone wild—until Spike side-slipped into one of the puddles of data housed by PenTech’s swimLab.
The creepily pristine space inside was very quiet and very well organized. McKay moved very carefully. Unlike the messier public institute servers, the swimLab was dedicated to research and development projects that affected the Swim. It meant any security she was likely to encounter was experimental, something she would have to code for on the fly. Spike’s icon shimmered and faded, and McKay followed suit, matching her outward appearance to the orderly semi-translucent bits of information parading through the space. The Mike persona, if thereat all, must have done something similar, disguising itself as something that belonged.
Spike’s icon hovered nearby, pinging McKay occasionally with little packets of information as she discovered traces of Mike’s passage. Tripping the system alarm to flush the persona out would be quick but costly, and McKay’d likely risk getting Spike and herself flushed as well. She was about to call off this segment of the search when Spike pinged a warning and something shot past.
Dammit, there he goes!
The shimmering form of Mike’s persona flashed as it erupted from hiding. Three more blips shot by in close pursuit, the recognition codes identifying them as the remnants of her cloud of little ’bots. Spike’s warning stopped McKay as she turned to follow.
A long, opaque tentacle of malware streaked past and struck one of McKay’s ’bots, unraveling it into flashing lines of code that faded into nothing as they errored out and failed. McKay’s glance followed the darkness back to the main body squeezing itself through the narrow pipe into the swimLab. It roiled along the floor, a mass of tentacles that reached out constantly, touching, retrieving, collecting, assembling. It resembled nothing so much as an octopus made out of the space between keystrokes.
McKay’s tiny construct babbled as it came undone, firing data packets in all directions in a virtual death scream. Its remaining two colleagues swooped through like minnows, picking the packets up and scattering. What was worse, the ’bot’s remnants stuck to the tentacle as it drew back, clips and phrases of code McKay recognized dangling limply like cut seaweed.
“Follow Mike, make sure he gets out.” She pinged Spike with the instruction and slipped into a form more apt for pursuing the few remaining ’bots. The tentacle came again, but they were all well out of range, and it retracted this time without a prize.
McKay was careful not to antagonize it but watched and analyzed the code as the swimLab’s security noticed its presence and started to sling attacks at it. As a piece of programming, it was messy—a solid, tightly coded inner core under layers and layers of junk, useless numbers, defunct functions. Unlike the garbage code in the inexperienced student work she’d seen in the Peninsula Tech main servers, this was calculated, written to confuse and disguise. This beast of a program could lie in the bowels of some legacy system for weeks like a malformed crocodile, waiting for an event to trigger it again. As she watched, the opaque tentacles whipped out repeatedly, stilling the whirring security protocols and silencing the half-empty server. There was something oddly familiar about it.
Just where the hell did you come from?
Her first thought was that it belonged in the swimLab, a pet project maybe, or a rough draft of something yet to be polished. She could see the familiar lines of a basic AI program in there, but parts were missing: it seemed incomplete. If it belonged, lab security should have ignored it. That’s what’s been destroying my ’bots. That’s what Spike brought me here to see.
That Beast was hunting Mike, keeping him on the run, which meant that McKay needed to keep track of its movements as well. McKay wrote a silver string of code and flung it. Like a remora, it would fasten on the underbelly of the Beast, invisible among the sheets of misdirection. McKay would need to be better prepared to tackle a program this complex. The remora would tell her just where to come looking when she was ready.
McKay changed her focus, prepared to make the jump back to her own head. She didn’t wait to watch the remora strike, and she didn’t see the Beast cast an attack back in return. The slip of bad code the Beast sent out, dark and oily as her own had been bright, caught her unawares, getting a hook into her as she made the jump. What the hell was THAT?!? McKay jerked, felt herself coming apart around the edges as she frantically triggered the code that would dump her out of the Swim and back into her own head. The Swim copy of herself screamed as it came undone, rattled her as she opened her eyes back in the vault of her own headspace again.
Too goddamn close. She shuddered and stared around the concrete vault, reassuring herself that she was, in fact, back in her own skull. She’d never been caught like that before. Disassembling a program or persona was one thing, but she wasn’t even sure what would happen to a livemind caught that way. She’d had nightmares about it—every xWire she knew had secret fears about what it might do if you tried to take a living mind apart as if were a program. She didn’t know anyone who’d tried it.
In theory, you could snap back to yourself like a ball on a rubber band, or the unravel might work just like it did on a persona, leaving you to wake up back in your own skull with no recollection of the event. It was also possible that the shock of having your living personality unraveled would leave you brain dead, or even dead-dead.
She eyed the door in the concrete ceiling of her own mind, debating shutting the link off entirely, but Spike hadn’t returned, and she wasn’t comfortable shutting the sprite out just yet. It was probably foolish; the program lived and breathed the Swim, but McKay couldn’t help feeling like she’d abandoned a friend.
But maybe she could do something about that.
McKay brought the filing systems up, racks of carefully organized tabs holding his library of programming gems, sketched in light against the metaphor of the space behind her eyelids. She pulled open a large workspace with her hands and began to write in the air. Every so often she rifled the cabinets, pulling out saved snippets of code and plugging them into the imaginary space. The algorithms and phrases glowed faintly, changing colors as parameters changed and checks failed. At one point she tore a whole segment out with her fingers, crumpled it into a ball, and chucked it on the floor. The hexagonal concrete tiles shifted aside, exposing a long, bright tongue snaking from a toothed maw to grab the discarded snippet and draw it in for disposal.
Finally McKay was satisfied, or at least mostly so. She tore the code down in one long movement, like ripping off a sheet of paper, and carried it between her hands to the chamber wall and attached it, smoothing it against the cold concrete until it sank in, glowing numbers and letters etching themselves into the surface, then skittering away like little shining crabs, vanishing. They were patches: add enough of them and over time they’d create new vulnerabilities. For now they’d offer additional protection, just in case the Beast followed her home.
McKay repeated the ritual twice, then a third time, but rather than fuse the final round of code with the defensive concrete structure in her mind, she folded it over and over until the packet was the size of her thumb. In a moment, she wrote out another ’bot and sent it into the Swim with instructions to deliver the packet to Spike. She felt a twinge of guilt at what had happened to the previous batch of ’bots, but they were created to be disposable. The ’bots weren’t people, or even full-blown AIs, but that didn’t make her feel any better when they were shredded while following her instructions.
McKay made more adjustments, tightened security here and there. The link between herself and the now-destroyed Swim copy of her mind had been cut. The Beast shouldn’t be able to follow her back.
Unless the Beast can pull something out of the ’bot it took. Shit. And I thought I was already getting paranoid. The ’bots always knew where home was, where to come back to. She hadn’t coded them to specifically wipe that information because she hadn’t anticipated something was actively going to attack them.
Spike, as “search engine with issues,” had been running around in the Swim for a decade. McKay had always just assumed it could take care of itself.
