Someone is in my apartment.

The security system pings me for normal shit like a B&E, but I’d got nothing while working at the Jinteki people plant. Whatever this is then, it isn’t anything normal, and so the New Angeles Police Department aren’t my best option. Lucky me. I can do without the awkward questions my ‘guest’ would prompt if they found him.

So instead I find him. He’s lounging in the poly-fibe settee, ThreeD up too loud, console, voicePAD, data packs, empty Diesel cans and Shankers food containers strewn about. Like he owned the hab, just as he had way back when.

Ryp Phays. Self-styled ‘cyber-guerrilla’ as if that makes his brand of virt-terrorism any better. He calls himself a Runner when he’s not being pompous, which is really a cyberspace criminal as far as the Corporation targets are concerned. Justifying it as sticking it to the Corps where they hurt the most – their bottom line – is just so much bullshit when he’s just trashing other people’s property for the thrill of it. Ryp lacks elegance. There’s no style to his running; his cyberspace hacking is all about burning it down with viruses and ice-eaters.

He grins at me.

“How did you get in here?” I ask. Stupid question. Why did I even bother asking it? Locks, physical or virtual, don’t mean much to Ryp.

He lop-sidedly looks at me from under his neo-Goth fringe, a retro-fashonista rebel affectation that was cool six years ago. I’d liked it back then but fashion, and I, have moved on.

“I need a safe hab, Liv. Gonna stay with you for a bit.” Like it’s a done deal already.

“You can’t stay here.”

“Just for a little while. I know they have my hab under surveil.”

“So go somewhere else.”

“Where better than here, munchkin?”

“Don’t call me that,” I snap. Oh Christ, stop it. You sound like a whiney teen gang-banger. “I can’t afford to have you hanging around me. It’ll cost me my job.” A known hacker and worse, one who’s ‘tagged’ – marked by the Corporations for a sudden, unfortunate demise – isn’t exactly the most reputable associate for a nice, safe company employee like me to have hanging around.

“C’mon ‘Liv,” he sneers. “How long do you think you’re going to be able to keep that cushy wageslave gig going when they find out you used to go out with the infamous cyber-guerrilla–”

“A two-cred hacker?” I growl back at him. Two and a half years of disintegrating relationship means he knows just how to push my buttons. “You little shit! You wouldn’t dare.”

“It’s just ‘til things cool off.”

He stares at me. Something’s different from the cocksure little bastard I used to love, back before I worked out what a waste of O 2 he was. What is it? There’s the same green eyes, gene-tweaked into a cat-like reflective sheen, shadowed from too many years of late-night abuse at the console, running on Diesel, adrenalin and sheer balls. Thinner, sure, but not Stim-junkie thin. I know he uses it; the pressure bumps on his throat from too many hypoderms tell me that. What’s so different from before?

Oh, that was it.

Fear.

Shit.

“I want you gone in a week.”

“Yeah, OK.”

“Take a shower, Ryp. You stink.”

* * *

“What the hell did you do anyway?”

Two days later and he’s not even remotely looking like moving on. The hab has started to look more like a per-hour roachbox motel than my apartment. The scrubbers are working overtime, but there’s only so much a robovac can do and I’m sick of picking up shit that isn’t mine. Guests are like fish: after a couple of days they start to smell.

“I pissed off the wrong people.”

“You mean you got clumsy, or stupid? And who?”

He winces at the ‘stupid’. Good. One thing I could always needle him with was insulting his intelligence. Ryp thinks he’s smarter than anyone, and if you face-check him with a reminder of his dumbass moves he really burns over it.

“No,” his voice rises, on the defence. “I ran into something my rig couldn’t handle. There’s nothing like it out there that I’ve ever seen. It must be a new type of ice.”

‘Ice’: technically it means Intrusion Countermeasure Electronics, which is a fancy way of saying computer network security systems. Once it was dumb algorithms and a little bit of good old-fashioned artificial intelligence working faster than the hacker to prevent the hack from working. Then people realised that to catch a thief you needed a better thief, and so they went for a hybrid system of artificial persons like bioroids or purpose-grown clones, and so the acronym became all the more redundant. These days we call it ice because nobody’s got any better ideas.

“I haven’t heard of any new classes.”

“I know what I saw, ‘Liv.”

“What you think you saw, Ryp,” I remind him. Ryp’s direct neural interface (DNI) cyberspace access means he doesn’t truly see anything while running. He hates it when I get technical and correct him, but suck it up you whiney maggot. ‘The student is now the master’ here and I know more about ice types out in the wild by working from the inside. Cyber-insurgency efforts need know-how from the other side of the attack pattern, so my bygone days as a Runner bring valuable insights into the Jinteki SysOp cubefarm.

“I saw enough, munchkin,” he sneers, trying to rile me again. I don’t even dignify that with a response.

“So you got your arse traced?”

“Traced and tagged. I bailed fast, grabbed what I could and ducked offscreen for a couple of days. Needed some crash space after a while, before the gang-bangers worked out I had stuff they could sell.”

“And now you’re here scumming up my hab. Nice.”

He dares me to throw him out, putting on a half wince, half grin little-boy-lost look. I hate that look – it makes me feel things I don’t want to any more. I should take him up on the dare before I start getting stupid ideas.

“Who were you running?”

If falling back in love with Ryp is stupid, what I’m contemplating is probably even more stupid. I need him out of my life before I make the mistake of taking him back, the relationship inevitably goes to shit and I get to work through all that regret all over again. Instead I’m planning to make the run that he couldn’t, to get rid of his ‘tag’. If whoever is looking for him loses the profile, he can fuck off back to his Anarch buddies without getting painted with a homing laser. You laugh? The Corp goons do far worse. ‘Urban renewal’ they call it, with rocket launchers.

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Yes it does, you stupid little shit.” Now I am getting riled. “Apart from the fact that they could come here looking for you, I need to know who has you tagged so I can get it cleared for you, seeing as you’re too gutless to pull off that run yourself.”

That did it.

“You wanna know?” he spits. Cheeks flushed, vein in his neck throbbing, he’s storming to the door, but I know he’ll be back when he cools off and needs to sleep.

“I was running on HB, into their Cerebral Imaging Division.”

Oh awesome. It’s not like Ryp could have picked a dinky CyberSec startup, with ice full of buggy exploits I can easily deal with. No, he has to go get himself marked by one of the Big Four, with security measures out to the moon and back, literally. HB, that’s Haas-Bioroid for the under-rock dwellers, has installations all the way up the space elevator – Weyland Corporation’s “Beanstalk” – and on the lunar base. Apart from Jinteki, maybe NBN, and Weyland, HB is as big as a megacorporation gets, with ice to match their magnitude. This is going to be a lot harder than I hoped.

“Fine,” I sigh. “I’ll get what I need, get you cleared and then you get out.”

“Sure babe, whatever.”

And he’s gone.

* * *

I look at the console.

I don’t want to do this. I don’t have any other choice. Ryp’s eating away at my life and I don’t even love him anymore.

I look at the console, evaluating it with pursed lips. Nigh-on cutting edge; it’ll do if I can tweak the interface to be compatible, which saves me buying off the shelf and shaving off all the giveaways – RFIDs and other obvious tracers. The only other option is going underground for dodgy tech that I can’t trust with my life. A bad console fritzing up at the wrong time mid-run won’t just end my run; against HB it’ll get my brain fried. But for programs? Ryp got himself traced using whatever he had loaded up on that thing which means they aren’t good enough for what I need to do.

I need to hunt me up some software.

I look at the console, I slowly close my eyes and draw a breath.

Exhale, and go.

* * *

One deep breath and I walk in.

The whining pseudo-syncopation of new-new-weird starts buzzing against my skull immediately. It’s like someone took the off-key shrilling of a yokobue and pumped it through a guitar phaser before dubbing in moog tones, then shredding the lot and calling it music.

So it’s a down-beat night for Casa del Mode, amusement parlour of choice for the Runner elite. I feel like I’m in a crappy 1990’s movie about hackers or something, going to a nightclub to make contact with a legendary cyber-terrorist. It’s so cliché, I should fuck it off as a bad joke, but the software I need can only be had in places like this.

I can’t believe that I’m doing this. Years ago I quit running to make a new life for myself that didn’t involve wasting my days fruitlessly looking for the next new thing in the cyberspace hacking trade. I had ditched Ryp and his Anarch buddies and run with a new crowd for a while, who were more into the art of the thing, but art fills a hungry soul and does dick to fill a hungry gut. So I got out: a final run, a new Ident (that’s Miss Salazar to you, thanks), a real job. Not the short-term contract that buys the new rig for the next big run, but a real-life honest-to-goodness sarariman-type job in Jinteki’s New Angeles Clonal R&D Division.

And now it’s ‘Liv, back in the trade, looking to buy some of the most illegal software on the planet, outside the black ice crap the Corporations protect themselves with. Its close enough; I’m in the market for Icebreakers. The kind of programs you need to hack through ice designed to stop you dead. To get Icebreakers though, you need contacts like Exile.

Exile’s a streethawk, so he isn’t well off like some of his compadres. It does mean that he can turn up all sorts of new and interesting toys which I’m going to need for this run. He’s thin, almost undernourished, like you get living on the street when data is more important than food. Sharp nose, long light brown hair, and bright eyes boring out from behind blue-tinted dataglass, a wearable variant of my own access cybersystem. He’s online and looking up whatever he can dig up on my profiles as he glances at me.

No, he’s done that already before coming here, sniffed out my past and decided it’s still worth the risk of meeting me. Otherwise I’d never get within a mile of him, and likely wouldn’t have made it through the door without getting black flagged.

“Miss Salazar? Charmed,” says he, extending a hand. Fair enough, I nod affirm and extend my own. Now he’s got my DNA; it’s a sign of trust.

“Exile.”

“I understand that you have a ‘business’ proposition for me?” His accent is cultured and distinctly not street. I don’t think it’s even from New Angeles, but I can’t tell where. The UK or somewhere in the Eurozone, perhaps?

“I’m looking for ‘breakers,” I state. No sense in beating about the bush. “They need to be cutting edge, something I can mod to the role, flexible, but top class. No mid-strength hacks.”

There’s too many would-be Runners out there, Levy U postgrads and the like, who think they know their way around c-space enough to be able to compose Icebreaker programs. For each one somebody took seriously, there are as many corpses.

“Mm,” he demurs, flexing the conversation back on me to give more info. I need to play this carefully; Shapers are a fickle bunch. Anarchs you can count on, if you tell them you want to light up the cyberspace sky with digital flames, they’re all in. Criminals won’t do dick for anything less than credits, usually more than you can afford. Shapers, now Shapers won’t play nicely unless you pique their interest. There’s an aesthete about them, almost to a ‘t’, which needs to be intrigued by what you’re proposing.

“It’s for a little experiment that I’m considering. It’s a back door hack on Bioroid-type ice, through the BHS.” I’m only half lying. I’ve read some classified Jinteki files on Bioroid ice compiled by some of the best counter-ice SysOps in the company. There’s a possible weakness that they think that they can exploit, but nobody’s tried it… yet.

“What you’re proposing is a novel approach?” his clipped accent emphasises the word in a way that is almost suggestive, as if he’s hungry for something to break the ennui of humdrum hacker theorycrafting.

“Never been done before.”

“Ah,” he smiles now. “Do tell?”

“Let’s leave the details for the after party, Exile,” I smile, trying not to show that I think I have him intrigued. Leave him hungry for more; the price may go up, but then the chances of him offering me something decent just went up too.

“Ah,” disappointed but even more interested. “Well then. In that case I think that I may have something which is just the thing for your little experiment. It’s called Atman, an AI breaker, but one that requires some finesse to exploit properly.”

AI’s. I mentally sigh. Though they make for a more flexible breaker than many of the standard (as if there were such a thing) killers and fracters they tended to be finicky things. AIs require careful handling to work to full capacity, which makes life more complex mid-run, but when they’re fully initialised there isn’t much ice that can stop them. Still, this was probably the best Exile had to offer, and turning it down would seem churlish or worse, naïf.

“I’ll need a dedicated decoder, too.”

“Easily done. The latest thing, but do be warned, it morphs when you initialize it to match the server being targeted, so you can’t switch targets mid-run. I could find you something more… appropriate, if I knew more about the proposed intrusion.”

“That won’t be a problem, if Atman is as good as you say.” I smile more, then. It helps that he’s cute when he wants to ask for more, but his all-important street cred won’t let him beg.

“But the price is steep. And I do need to request a debrief, on the efficacy of the soft-ware, as well as your novel technique.”

The price flashes up on his dataglass. Steep would be an understatement.

“Knock fifteen percent off the top and you can have the anonymized logs.”

“Ten percent down,” he smiles like a Cheshire Cat, knowing we’re dealing now.

“No, thirteen, and you can have the logs unsanitized. I’ll trust you to not leave them lying around where ‘bad people’ can find them.”

“My lady,” he smiled. “I promise that I shall be the soul of discretion when it comes to your findings.”

I make payment with a gesture over my card to his dataglass and the data packs slide over the table.

The manic yokobue shrills a belated warning cry.

* * *

I’m walking and running at the same time.

When I’m running I can see both realities, the meat and the virt. A micro-thin LED film coating the cornea of my eyes projects an image of cyberspace to float before me. Powered by solar collector nano-coating over my eyebrows, the electro-static connection at the lip of my eye and the surface of the eyeball itches sometimes, in a phantom irritation which I’d finally learned not to scratch after weeks of weeping aggravation. Meanwhile I can keep on the move, jumping my link from node to node to make myself harder to trace.

Some Runners swear DNI is the only way to experience cyberspace, but do the math: turning the 1/0s of a virtual reality into projected images is a quick algorithm. Re-translating it into neural signals pumped directly into the striate visual cortex is so complex that it takes entire milliseconds longer to compute, which costs you reaction time. ‘Speed of thought’ is such a myth, like the one that has Einstein saying we only use ten percent of our brains. Thinking is a slow process, like a turtle swimming through molasses, compared to the speed at which ice subroutines execute.

And execution is what a lot of ice has ‘in mind’, especially the Haas-Bioroid garbage. Luckily for me, most of this garbage is brain-mapped Bioroids: human minds taped and reprinted onto artificial brains composed of supercooled ceramic pathways attempting to mimic the original, human brain. The reprinting only imperfectly matches the paths laid down to take the imprint, slowing the Bioroids down and making them vulnerable. There’s ways to out fox them, tricking your way past the imperfect minds.

And there are other ways. Nastier ways.

Viktor, they call it. Like giving it a name makes it somehow more… palatable? Viktor is an expensive machine, needing constant monitoring and maintenance. System health checks are mandatory, and HB’s Bioroid Health System is necessarily open. New Angeles is a city full of artificial persons, a slave population spread amongst the humans, which needs to be monitored, updated and adjusted for various working conditions.

Viktor tries to trace my link, following the signal back towards the dummy reflector signal I’m bouncing off the GlobalSec satellites. Nobody runs through satellites, the lag will kill your hack. I throw a feint at Viktor’s cyber-shielding, keeping it distracted while reading off the metadata: make, model number, production number, IOF date... enough to make the match in the BHS medical banks. What the fuck – it’s a 3.0! Ryp’s right, this thing is new. I’ve never even heard of third generation Bioroids. Still, there’s this trick: I tweak the data in the medibanks, and Viktor suddenly appears to the subordinate computer system to be running too high a pH level of the synthetic cerebrospinal fluids that kept his silicon brain cooled. It immediately dials back the pumps that feed the SCSF into his system and Viktor is heading for a critical syncope in a few milliseconds.

Another few hundred micro-seconds pass with me firing Daggers into the churning virtual maze of data that Viktor has thrown up. It’s not really thinking commands to activate programs; I can’t afford to think things through like that when facing ice. Go with the gut, fast intuitive side of the brain, and let ‘instinct’ be the guide. The slow, analytic left brain would get fried trying to keep up with ice like this. It’s all delaying actions though, just buying time until I can do this! Punching the new data into the BHS, the stupid computer thinks that the Viktor is so low on SCSF it barrels up a full surge on the pumps in his artificial brain, and the pressure creates a ‘pop’ I imagine I can hear even across the silence of the net.

A ‘spontaneous’ CSF Leak Syndrome spurts synthetic crap out of his skull through a bunch of holes burst through his subdura and my duelling buddy derezzes from the server. His data cloud dissipates. Score one for the Jinteki counter-ice techs. I’m in.

Data spills across my vision; valuable data that HB wants to protect so badly it’s prepared to spend hundreds of thousands of credits on anti-personnel ice, and risk all that bad publicity. Were I of the Criminal bent I’d be downloading like a fiend, but that’s not why I’m here. Where are you, Ryp? Where’s your ‘tag’? Past the ice, the classified information is easy to crack open, within the server I can fake the necessary authentication to find just what I need.

There we go. Ryp Phays, cyber-guerrilla. Or…

“Sonovabitch!”

The little scumsucking, no-good cocks–

The sea of humanity I’m winding through as I make the run turn eyes towards me and then all slide off. Mothers pull children closer for protection and herd them away from me. The hacker woman is in trouble and being well clear of her is the safest place to be. Remember those rocket launchers?

Too late I see the information flowing from the server off deep into the HB security systems. Man-machine SysOps go all eyes-front on the new data appearing before them as my personal information flows from the console rigged to ‘tag’ me in their systems. I’ve been set up, the entire run was a trap and Ryp, a.k.a. Rik Fassbender, mid-level executive in Haas-Bioroid’s Counter-Insurgency Division is responsible.

Too late, I cut the connection and jack out of cyberspace. I need to keep moving, get offscreen before the tag leads them to me. I’m shit out of luck here. My hab is no safe haven, and I doubt my friendly neighbourhood Jinteki SysOps would be willing to risk helping me even if I do come back with the goods on the c-ice technique they’ve been itching to test. I flick a vmail to Exile with the downloaded logs, and enough cautionary flags on it that he won’t get hit by a backtrace following my run. The SysOp at the reflector node I ran through gets a friendly ‘move house’ vmail a few seconds later so I don’t catch a rep of not cleaning up my own poo.

A good rep might be all I’ve got left.

I’ve no idea why the fuck Rik set me up like this. Revenge for a dud relationship isn’t enough for this elaborate scam. Maybe it’s about drawing me into the open again so as to get to the real threats like Exile? Maybe. Wanting to test the Viktor 3.0 prototype is an option too, I guess; back to the drawing board on that one, guys.

So I’m out and burned. Rik just trashed my whole life, again. Olivia is gone once more, and it’ll be ten times as hard to recreate her than it was before. Exile gets a new streethawk buddy for now, I guess. ‘Liv is back in the Shaper trade. Crap.

But Rik, I’m saving something for you. Something I snagged at the last minute from the dying connections with the HB servers, something simple and elegant and all too much what you deserve. I have your whole Ident in that little tag you left for me. Just wait and see the art I can paint with that.

Thanks for the console, you little shit.