The extractionist, p.4
The Extractionist, page 4
The disarray in the “office” was textbook stage dressing. Three old desks in need of some repair or at least a good makeover, all loaded with boxes of junk equipment, none applicable to any virtual application she was familiar with. Ratty couch, musty odor that seemed to leak out of the vintage air conditioner and creep along a floor crisscrossed with cables the Overlay registered as just for show—no power, no data. McKay had to watch where she put her feet. Standard undercover front. Lots of useless junk, assembled so anyone without some kind of Swim-access would get an eyeful of what looked like an illegal buy-and-sell operation.
The suite door to the left opened up and Brighton stepped through, surrounded by a puff of frigid air, definitely a cut above the lukewarm vapor being circulated by the older unit in the office. McKay caught a glimpse of walls papered over in white and a row of server boxes. Brighton’s gaze went from her to the guy with the mismatched eyes.
“Is she clear, Rice?” Her voice belonged to someone already tired of being messed with. Rice put out an arm to stop McKay from moving forward.
“She’s too clean, Ina. I mean, there’s nothing on this one, no serials on her ’mite-sig, no live connections, nada, zip, zero.” McKay felt thick fingers close in the fabric of her shirt. “I think your expert’s a fake. Flashy eyes and consumer wires.”
Looking for serials. Rice was looking for military-grade miteware, quickly installed, designed for brutal use and easy removal, but very powerful and very obvious. McKay’s internal miteline was experimental, equally powerful but custom designed, custom built, and nearly invisible by comparison.
McKay turned to explain this, but a knock at the door made them all jump. Brighton glared at her as if she were the culprit.
“McKay, you get in here.” She jabbed a finger at Rice and his partner. “You two, get the door. Clock’s ticking and I don’t want any screwups.”
“It’s just lunch,” the tall guy whined. “Pei-meng gave me the address for that Ginger Dream Thai place on Market.” The atmosphere lightened. McKay relaxed just a touch.
“As long as you two didn’t put the order in under ‘Spy Guys’ like you did last time.” Brighton snapped and yanked the door open. The breath of cold air tightened McKay’s skin. The Overlay sensed the servers inside, got a glimpse of the information flow, and leapt to life, trying to connect to everything at once.
“She’s all good, guys.” Brighton touched her elbow briefly to guide her through the door. “Get the food, then seal that outer door. I want a mite-free closure all the way around. No one goes in, no one goes out until we’re done here, even if they set the building on fire. Got it?”
“No problem.” Rice elbowed his friend and went for the front door as Brighton shut herself and McKay into an office space turned refrigerator.
McKay stopped short about three steps in.
She felt the drag of the Faraday cage as she crossed the threshold. It constricted the connections the Overlay had been making, and the farther in she got, the more outside connections got cut. Like a slow, crushing squeeze, the connection to the rest of the Swim got thinner and tauter and then pop! Access to the outside was broken, like an earthworm pinched too hard between thumb and forefinger. Data-wise, nothing could get into or out of the room, not even Spike. She felt a brief flutter of anxiety, congratulated herself on dropping the fail-safe packet outside earlier. The room, and by extension McKay, would be safe from outside hacks as long as the shielding stayed intact.
The bank of servers lining the far wall was responsible for the cold in the room. Inch-thick ropes of shielded cable ran from matte black housings first into one set of boxes, then another. The processors in them could probably fit in the palm of McKay’s hand, but the temperature control systems that supported them meant pounds of equipment and a drop in degrees so low she could see her breath in the air. Heat was death to quantum-spin processors.
“You can set up over there.” Brighton pointed left as she sealed the edges of the door with a roll of the nasty, sticky stuff called “flypaper,” aimed at stopping spyware and other kinds of nanomites from infiltrating cracks and holes in the architecture. Get enough ’mites into a secure room and they could reconnect that room to the outside world, making it vulnerable to attacks from the Swim. Not as perfect as a proper clean-room, but the paper would be enough to keep out most attempts to gain access.
And where the hell is this guy’s body?
The persona process meant there should be outside hardware, a sleeper pod, a fancy leatherette couch with wires all around, some place to keep the unconscious body of the person entering the Swim. There was nothing like that in the room.
McKay set her bag down on the only empty table and deliberately took her time laying out her kit, giving the Overlay time to integrate with all of the non-shielded computers it could find. It told her that none of this equipment had been online for more than a week and that all outside access had been cut off three days earlier, which fit with what Brighton had told her. It told her that there was, indeed, a persona roaming in the servers, but there was no body nearby to send it back to. McKay quickly played back their conversations, reviewed everything Brighton had given her. Brighton had neglected to tell her that part, and she’d gone ahead and made the presumption. This is what happens when you get excited. You miss things. The local AI that kept everything humming was pretty snooty, too. It just ignored the Overlay’s login attempts rather than telling it to get lost. The Overlay asked McKay for permission to hack in, but she told it to wait.
“Sooooooo. Where’s your friend Mike?” Doing a long-distance extraction, with the living body somewhere else, was going to be a lot harder to pull off. Impossible, in fact, with the entire room locked down and shielded as it was.
Brighton turned rather quickly. “Ah, yes. Rosie?” She scanned the room, looking for someone.
“Yeah?” A pigtailed head popped up from behind a stack of boxes.
“Where’s he at?”
“Umm.” Rose couldn’t have been more than thirty, tops, and the smooth motion in her fingertips as she slotted in wafers and closed up the server she’d been working on spoke of a lifetime of pulling hardware apart. Her thick black hair was shaved halfway up from the base of her skull, the top longer and severed into a half dozen pigtails that erupted at odd angles. McKay’s Overlay pointed out the off-the-shelf ’mites that gave Rose’s hair and the entirety of her eyes an inky, featureless black color. She had a skull full of miteline, but only to the highest level of consumer grade, S2. A very tricked-out and modified S2. Rather than a constellation of tiny pinpoints, three thumb-size contact points at the base of her skull showed where an outside computer could be plugged in to give her a boost. McKay had seen the setup before, a fairly standard interface with the advantages of simplicity and ease of repair. There were limits to what a consumer rig could do, which meant she was saddled with certain basic hard- and software restrictions. On top of all that, bare shoulders exposed by her tank top showed the unmistakable marks of an elaborate heat-sink tattoo system. They had been all the rage five years earlier, miteline tattoos that absorbed heat from the wearer’s personal computing system and reflected it onto the skin. Some glowed red hot, others used the energy to power a luciferase reaction. Like all miteline they required a painful, expensive purge to shed them once the fun wore off. Hers glowed faintly, suggesting she had been processing something just before McKay came into the room.
Everything about Rose’s presence matched the “big power” mindset she’d picked up on from Brighton’s files and from the earlier attempts to crash her rig. But the resentment she’d expected was absent.
McKay relaxed just a little.
“Mike’s in that one on the end!” She pointed at one of the nondescript matte black boxes along the wall, different from the others only by a barcode and a long strip of numbers and letters she presumed was some sort of identifier. The Overlay told McKay it was not a registered code and likely proprietary. She gritted her teeth and gave it permission to start guessing.
“Excellent, but where’s the body? I’m here to perform an extraction, right?” McKay asked. She had extracted people from some of the oddest setups, but so far there was always a body, somewhere, to write the persona back to.
“You are. I apologize, Ms. McKay, but Mike’s body isn’t here. We were able to run him to ground, to trap his persona here in Singapore, but the body’s still in San Francisco.” Brighton finished taping up the doorframe and joined McKay at the table. “Rose, can you give her the breakdown?”
The opposing programmer cracked her knuckles. “Mike’s being a bit of a slippery fish, so we had to get him cut off from all Swim-access. We need you to extract his persona from that array”—she indicated the flat, black boxes at the back of the room—“to a fresh persona in the restructuring unit there. Mike’s been in the Swim for ten days total, but he was only supposed to be in for a few hours on an undercover job. The information he found might relate to our current investigation, and Boss Lady here”—she jerked a thumb at Brighton—“wants him extracted to a fresh persona so we can keep him together long enough to get back to his actual body.”
McKay was floored by the request. An extraction required finesse, an artistic blend of psychology, neurobiology, and hard-core coding. Extracting someone from one persona to write it into another? That was just not done. She was going to have to take all the guy’s personality quirks and hang them on a brand-new framework. If the change to Mike’s mind was big enough, she might have to do a total rewrite, but she couldn’t be sure. Brighton had provided her with a blueprint of Mike’s mind so she could write the code she needed, but she hadn’t seen what was left of the persona now.
“The persona process isn’t that simple.” The protest erupted from her lips before McKay could stop it. “A persona is a copy of a person’s unique qualities. What stops an outwrite is a revelation, some piece of information or an experience that is life-altering for that person. Couple that with the fact that now you want me to re-persona his persona and I don’t even know if he could be written back into his own body when we’re all done.”
The other two women exchanged looks: Rose triumphant, Brighton irritated. “He was close to proving something in our case,” the redhead explained patiently, “we need that discovery. Mike wouldn’t have refused to just dump it all unless it was critically important.”
This is either going to be the outwrite of all time, or a total disaster. Again that thrill of anticipation, the one that always seemed to get her into trouble. So much of her job was bereft of discovery, devoid of new challenges. The idea of trying something new made it hard for her to stay cautious. She spent a few moments of focus considering just how much trouble she was in, then went back to laying out the components from her kit onto the table. If the work did turn out to be a major do-over, she didn’t want to transpose digits in her haste. Emotion could be as big a contributor to error as alcohol or a lost night’s sleep. It was something to be kept in check, especially once she put the headset in place. “Fine, I’ll need a copy of the system specs for both systems and a fresh copy of Mike’s persona code for the restructure.”
“Rose?”
The tattooed girl wended her way through the clutter and fished a plastic case out of the bag slung across her hips. It contained well over twenty spin-wafers, each the size of her thumbnail, each holding a defining piece of the Mike persona. McKay held it to the light briefly, counting them out in her head, then laid the case in line on the table with the rest of the gear.
The first thing out of her bag had been the headset case. Roughly the width of a sheet of paper and as deep as a stack of pancakes, the headset was the big gun as far as McKay’s hardware was concerned. She could do a lot with only her built-in computers, but adding the headset meant she could write information into and out of the Swim on the fly.
Everything she’d been doing was an advanced form of augmented reality, information being displayed in her line of sight, interaction with the Overlay’s AI restricted to commands given and interpreted. With the headset in place, McKay could interact directly with the Swim in a fully immersive sense. She could bypass the persona process entirely with no risk of her needing an extraction herself. The headset was like adding a supercharger to an engine. There were trade-offs. It burned neurotransmitters at a hugely increased rate. It bypassed the mental filters that helped soften real-life experiences, could even go so far as to cause brain damage if she overused it. But it meant she was nearly unstoppable in the Swim.
By conventional programming, at any rate.
The Overlay had already established links with everything in the room it could find, but when McKay unzipped the padded, shielded case to reveal the headset, it positively thrummed with anticipation. She set the case on the tabletop and dug back into the bag. One by one she laid out a series of pre-mixed, off-the-shelf pop-top cans, each with a slightly differing concentration of neurotransmitter precursors, glucose, peptides, carbs, and caffeine. There was only so much time she could spend in the Swim before she started burning neurotransmitters faster than her body could make them. Taken in measured doses, the contents of the pop-top cans could extend the amount of time she could spend fully immersed in the Swim.
Brighton stared at McKay as the Overlay began spinning up to full speed, making its wireless connections to the headset in anticipation of a full-contact connection. With the headset now in play, her eyes would resume their unearthly glow. She knew the changes in eye color, her facial expressions, all tripped the “uncanny valley” vibe in anyone who wasn’t used to working around experimental systems like hers. She’d had people leave the room entirely, poke her, been slapped once. Brighton made the extra effort to maintain eye contact, which she appreciated on some level, but it was less important to her now the deeper she sank into the experience. The connection was made, the negotiations concluded, and the Swim was calling. At least she’s staying in the room.
“You call him Mike. What’s his real name? Full name, if you have it.”
There was a long, awkward pause from Brighton. “We can’t tell you that. It’s not covered in the disclosures.”
Of course it’s not. She started sliding the wafers they gave her into the scrubber she brought along. So far they were all just data. Introducing a virus or any kind of malware at this point could crash her system before she even got started. As they came out of the box she clicked them into her skull drive, counted to three as the Overlay stripped the data, and popped them out again.
“Everything you ought to need is on the wafers,” Rose put in. “Full system specs for these servers and everything we have on the persona and all its modifications.”
McKay’s Overlay picked up the girl’s own computers spinning up to speed.
“If I don’t know anything about the person himself, it’s going to make it that much harder to keep what you need. Was he charming, was he angry, did he have kids, did he like peanut butter, all that information will help me make sure I keep more of Mike and less of the modifications he made.”
“You’ve got enough there, Rose made sure. Don’t you want to sit down?” Brighton asked.
“Eventually. Not yet though, keeps me on my toes. But if you don’t mind. . . .” She snapped the links her Overlay had slipped into Rose’s personal systems. McKay’s AI was built to be curious, bordering on rude. With the processing power of the headset it would hack anything and everything given the chance, even other people’s miteware. “Rose, spin your computers down, so I don’t get confused and extract the wrong personality.” She grinned, but the joke was lost on the other programmer. Rose was less unsettled than Brighton, but also far more intense now that things were moving forward. She frowned.
“Boss. . . ?”
Brighton held up a finger. “Do it, Rose. We need this to go smoothly.”
Rose wasn’t happy, but she complied. She removed her earpiece, slid the beltpack around her waist and touched a few places inside it. McKay felt her presence vanish with a pop and a protest and the room was hers.
“Thank you.” McKay picked the headset up again, pressed her thumbs to either side and triggered the system spin-up. More than a thousand threads of micro-optic fiber had been braided together to form the length of shielded hardline linking the headset to the hub still in the case, yet it weighed next to nothing in her hands. A series of blips skated across her vision as the Overlay and the headset met up and linked. Normally the data was the ghost overlaid onto the hard lines of reality, but the deeper she waded in, the more the situation turned on its head. The real world became the ghost, soft-edged myopic outlines visible through the Overlay’s shells. She lifted the headset reverently and placed it on her own head, a faint clicking audible as the contact spikes extended and found the pinheads embedded in her scalp under the hair.
The real world vanished utterly. She stood in the headset’s root construct, an open space that resembled a large concrete dome. No windows and only a single bathysphere-style hatch in the ceiling. Locked within her own head, as it were. It was always strangely freeing, retreating here. A shiver ran through her mind, settling everything more solidly into place and running out to her virtual fingertips before vanishing. She ran a series of code snippets, opened a large viewscreen on one quarter of the room, raised the lights to a reasonable level, and pulled a number of metaphoric filing cabinets up out of the floor. The high-concept was important. The idea behind the way everything was laid out would keep her mind from wandering off track, even after everything dissolved into light and impressions.
