Xenoform (40 page)

‘
What
now
?’ yelled Smith, hiding her fear behind irritation. But then she saw.

Where there should have been road ahead of them there seemed to be water. Only as she studied it closer it became clear that it wasn’t water at all, but something darker and glossier, dark green or black, even. It looked shallow, whatever it was, although it covered the surface of the entire road junction. Smith looked back over her shoulder. People were flooding out of unlit doorways into the street, darker shadows in the dark night, lit only by the dim glow of the moon and the now-muted smouldering of the city. They moved rapidly, awkwardly, encumbered by weapons, fanning out. Somebody shouted, ‘The pods! Stop the pods!’

‘Drive through it!’ barked Smith. ‘We’ve got trouble behind!’

‘Yeah,’ said Grace, ‘I’ve got them.’ The front pod eased into the large puddle and Grace followed. Linden rolled down his window, leaned out and began to take pot-shots into the crowd behind them. They were getting close now, filling the night with savage war cries. Grace began to accelerate.

‘Gah!’ cried Linden, ducking back into the pod. He was rubbing frantically at his neck. ‘Fuckin’ splashed me! What is that shit?’

The pod was picking up speed now, riding above the liquid on its suspensor cushion, occasionally dipping when it passed over some unseen bump.

‘It’s getting deeper,’ said Grace, adjusting the ride height with one hand.

The crowd behind them had tailed off. They stood, jeering at the edge of the pool, clearly unwilling to set foot in it. Some threw missiles inaccurately at the pods, and these splashed down behind them, but luckily nobody seemed to have a gun.

‘How can it be getting deeper?’ asked Linden irritably, still rubbing at his neck. ‘The surface of the street ain’t going anywhere. Same as back there.’

‘Dunno,’ grunted Grace, minutely adjusting the ride height again. ‘This is a damn lake.’ He pointed to the side, where the liquid covered another street as far as they could see.

‘Wow...’ breathed Linden.

Then the escort pod began to slow, pitching and rolling, its edges dipping into the liquid. Smith’s pod began to falter a second later. Grace tweaked and adjusted the ride height more rapidly, his shaking hands betraying his concern. He was muttering between clenched teeth. The pod bucked sharply and Smith bumped her elbow on the door handle. She looked around fearfully.

‘What’s happening?’ she demanded.

‘Something’s stopping us,’ answered Grace, the muscles in his jaw working tensely as his hands flew over the controls.

The pod gave one more determined lurch forwards and then stopped, its suspensor singing a high, straining note. The escort unit in front of them had also come to a halt. Smith realised with horror that fingers or tentacles were reaching up from the liquid and gripping on to the sills and underside of the escort pod, holding it back, dragging it down. And then her own vehicle began to sink towards the pool. Grace thumped the dash in frustration, giving up. Red LEDs had come on all over the readouts. The three occupants exchanged fearful looks.

There was a terrible sucking, squelching noise from below them and a horrendous stink – the stench of the GDD, Smith knew – suddenly filled the pod, making them gag.

Smith felt something sting her bare wrist and looked down to see that those creeping, questing fingers were stealing in through the open window of the vehicle, wriggling like fat worms, oozing with thick green slime. Then Smith did something she had never done before – she screamed.

‘Bon voyage, man,’ said Tec, holding out the end of the hi-flo cable. ‘If you look like you’re in trouble, I’m pulling the plug, okay?’

‘I’m counting on it,’ answered Debian, taking the connector delicately between finger and thumb. He looked at it with a mixture of trepidation and eager anticipation. The ready lights of the router blinked beside him.

Although frightened, he was looking forward to stepping back into the net. He was desperate for answers to the questions that circled round and round his head. Who was Alcubierre?
Who were Cyberlife? Did they make the AI, find it, or receive it from some third party? Was it really related to the goings-on outside, the so-called GDD? Could it yet be stopped? And of course, he genuinely wanted to find Spider and Roberts. Although he hardly knew them himself, it seemed like the least he could do to repay this strange band of people who had taken him in, excepting the actual payment he had made into their bank account. He had decided that he liked them, especially Whistler, and there weren’t many people in his life that he could say that of. But even more than that he wanted to scratch that itch, that old familiar need to tread the data-ways, walk the web. He had been shut out of what he considered his own empire, and frankly he was beyond annoyed. He felt as if a part of him had been amputated and he wanted it back. He wanted back in. That was the most important reason of all.

‘Any sniff of danger, bail out,’ said Tec.

‘Will do,’ replied Debian, trying to smile. He felt like a man about to undertake a deep-sea dive. ‘Well...No time like the present.’ And with that, he clicked the hi-flo plug into his head.

He activated the uplink, felt the burst of microwave energy as a physical beam, not originating from the satellite dish on the base’s roof but actually spearing him directly like a butterfly on a pin. His avatars, stored on his own DNI, scrambled into the tangled pathways of the net, scanning, retrieving, relaying, creating the impression of a true, direct interface. The image they produced was bizarre at best.

Debian fell into a twisted and mangled landscape, a parody of the net he knew so well. The wreckage of mutilated sites and servers was a blackened bomb-site through which a weak and pestilent data-stream flowed, incoherent and brackish. The servers were still there, but twisted and strange. He began to launch probes in every direction, the avatars following and tweaking their data-trails as if controlling fly-by-wire missiles, the avatars themselves continually checking back with Debian’s DNI, taking updates of his wishes and priorities. They zipped off brightly enough but didn’t return any useful information. Strange. Only the vaguest humps and malformed outlines of once-familiar servers remained, and it was as if they were behind a wall of foam that could be pushed, probed at, but not broken through. Their ports were deaf and mute, unlit.

He cycled through connection protocols, trying to get the attention of a public server, but it didn’t even return his pings. On one – a university computer – he knew full well that he had left a sleeper sub some months before. He tried to access it but met with no response. The whole fabric of the net, the protocols on which its communications were built, seemed to have broken down. He set multiple avatars on the problem. Finally he got a response from the sub-verter. He tried to access the server behind it, but the sub-verter seemed unable to talk to the server on which it was hosted. He began to rapidly write adaptive interrogation programs on his DNI in a variety of languages and try to use those to access the server. It seemed that there was an underlying language in operation, with a floating base that he couldn’t pin down. He had never seen anything like it before. It was as if every machine on the net was being re-written from the ground up on a continual, rolling basis.

And then he found an algorithm that seemed to work. He cycled the base of the language on the fly, following the pattern suggested by his calculations. It seemed to play out. The sub began to let his avatars retrieve information from the server. Debian suffered a brief moment of doubt. Wasn’t this a little too easy? What were the chances of him stumbling on the correct algorithm so quickly? He was good, he knew he was, and he was beginning to feel infused again with the power he had felt after his brush with the AI. He remembered sending the pod chasing after Hex’s men, remembered the strength he had felt. It was beginning to fill him again. His mind crackled with power, seeming to buzz within his head like some mighty transformer. But even so...It seemed too easy. Why would the AI even base its floating language on a decipherable algorithm? Was he being
allowed
in? Another trap? A test?

He forcibly shrugged his own concerns aside and attempted to get the university computer to speak to what remained of the wider net.
In the circumstances it seemed odd that they had even left the server connected, but he was happy to use their lapse in security for his own ends. Perhaps the people in charge of it were so overrun with real-world problems that the server was nowhere near the top of their priorities. Whatever. Work to do.

From the university computer he sent avatars out into every available channel – into the banks of the server itself, into user mail accounts, from those into every reachable destination, direct from their computer to every scanned server on the net that would return a ping. He picked several wide-pipe governmental and financial machines with good, credible connections to as many places as possible. His avatars assaulted them, laying traps, probing defences, brute-forcing passwords, sidestepping quantum security protocols, sometimes meeting brick walls, sometimes extending their tendrils.

And then he gradually became aware of a feeling of being watched. In his mind’s typical desire to relate the electronic landscape to a physical one it felt as if some vast and brooding presence was looking down from the sky and that he crawled upon the broken earth like an ant beneath its gaze. A worried sub-routine in his head began replicating defensive avatars and fine-tuning his firewalls. He hoped that the enhancements and modifications he had made would be enough. And then it spoke to him:

WELCOME BACK. I HAVE BEEN BUSY SINCE LAST WE MET.

Sillick twisted the throttle of his ground bike all the way to the stop, revelling in the rising roar of the antique petrol engine. The wind fluttered the lapels of his leather jacket, stung his eyes, tore his breath from his throat. He swerved around a crashed pod, gaining on Tumbler as they neared the junction. Tumbler braked hard, decking his bike right over, and took a left towards the heart of the Lanes. Sillick followed, closing the gap to shouting-distance, scraps of rubbish flapping in his wake. The others were several blocks behind now, but Tumbler was on a roll, losing himself in the thrill of speed – wild, young and unstoppable.

Sillick pulled alongside him and shouted, ‘Hey, man – shouldn’t we hang back, wait for the gang?’

Tumbler laughed, his green eyes glinting. ‘Live a little, Sill – you worry too fucking much!’ And he swerved into a side street suddenly – Sillick struggled to brake in time to follow him, nearly clipping a lamp post.

They raced along beneath hanging balconies, unlit windows, smashed and looted shop-fronts, the walls to either side passing so close that they could have reached out and touched them. The night was thick with smoke, grey-green and gloomy. Occasional gunshots could be heard in the distance. Shadowy figures bolted into a boarded-up building as the bikers roared past them.

‘I just don’t think we should split up, is all,’ yelled Sillick as the bike jolted hard over a manhole cover. He accelerated out of the near-tankslapper, fully in tune with the machine, adjusting his centre of gravity to retain control, relaxing his body to damp the vibrations. The bike settled down. He felt the tacky grip of its tread upon the road surface, felt its mechanical heart throbbing within as if it were his own.

‘What?’ yelled back Tumbler.

‘I don’t think we should split up! Strength in numbers, right? That’s what you taught me!’

Tumbler shook his head, dismissing his own words of wisdom, grinning widely. ‘This is the revolution, Sill! Free-for-all! The city is ripe for the taking!’

‘You really believe that? The revolution, the great uprising, all that political shit?’

The street narrowed, forcing Sillick to drop behind again. He followed the jittering rear light of his friend’s bike, concentrating intently on every minute scrap of sensory feedback from his own machine. Tumbler swerved around a pothole with incredible agility – his Tsunami-950 was legendarily nimble for a machine of its size, and retro-fitted with carbon fibre aftermarket parts that reduced its weight by almost thirty kilos, it was even more light on its toes than the standard model. Sillick, on his heavier and longer CCR-900V, shadowed him with a little difficulty. They crossed a deserted junction, which would ordinarily have been teeming at this time of night, at over ninety miles per hour, ignoring the traffic signals, Tumbler whooping over the roar of their engines. As they followed the road ahead, which widened into a seedy tumbledown plaza lined with deserted muso-bars, Sillick pulled alongside again.

‘You really think this is the uprising?’

Tumbler shrugged, not taking his eyes from the road. The uprising was an urban legend – the time when some great and nameless, uber-powerful gang which existed entirely behind the normal scenes of the everyday world would send a message, a sign, and all the gangs would rise as one to take the city and divide it between themselves. Nobody really believed in it, of course, but all gang-members
wanted
to believe it. ‘Probably not,’ he admitted indifferently. ‘But fuck it, Sill,
something’s
happening. Might as well exploit it, right? Come on! ICB! Wooo!’ And he smoothly dialled up the speed another notch.