Doctor Who_ Transit - Ben Aaronovitch [52]
One of her faceless executives came to see her. It was a strange experience for Francine, like listening to a talking dog. She was a bit surprised to find that one other companies was a contracted arm of the state, the Data Protection Agency. The executive explained the position and fled, suitably terrified by Francine's presence, leaving behind a bonded EPROM cartridge.
She saw echoes of herself in the Flying Dutchman. He cruised the datascape with impunity. His targets were a random scattering of commercial and governmental databases. Security never saw him, his trail was only visible in the files he misplaced.
So Francine broke her exile from the silicon sea and went hunting. She sailed out brain-naked with just enough software to navigate. The datascape had changed in eight years, the translucent towers had been replaced by squat bunkers black with lethal countermeasures. Scrambled data was shunted in secure buses like silver bullets. Francine ghosted across the sea, a random search to catch a random pirate.
She caught sight of the Flying Dutchman only once.
It was out on the margins by the Ministry of Education. A backwater region where shoals of whales swam, grazing quietly through the history files - students running search programs. A fine haze of translation flags hung over the still surface of the data. A flock of updates wheeled overhead. Occasionally one would dive into the files and vanish, rising up moments later with an error squirming in its beak.
The three-masted galleon was beautiful, image resolution so high that it looked like a physical object. She ran swiftly, heeling over as she beam reached into an imaginary wind, sails puffed out like sheets in a wind tunnel. A flag flew from the top of the mainmast, a white skull and crossbones on a black background. As the ship bore down on her, Francine began to make out details, gilded scrollwork on the forecastle, the neat stitching around a patch on the forestay sail. Only the figurehead was indistinct. The underlying figure was female but the features were constantly shifting.
The galleon swept past her like a tilted wall of clinkered timber. Francine could see a crew swarming over the rigging, cartoon skeletons in striped jerseys and navy-blue bellbottoms. There was a sensation of falling, and sudden confusion in Francine's inner ear. The file surface was in motion, rippling in the galleon's wash-white pixel spray flying up around its bow. She realized that the image of the galleon was so intense that it was distorting the fabric of the datascape, dragging everything into its own reality.
A man appeared at the galleon's rail, wearing a felt hat and an afghan coat. He looked down at Francine and said something. It was a strange thing to do in the perpetual silence of the silicon sea. The man seemed to realize this, and held up his hand -just a moment - and produced a megaphone. Nothing technological, just a metal cone with a mouthpiece at one end.
'Ahoy there, software off the starboard rail!' he shouted and with his voice the silence broke. Sound rushed in, the creak of the galleon's rigging, the slap of water against its hull, the raucous cries of the circling updates and the long slow white noise of the sea itself. There was the feel of wind against her face and salt spray in her nostrils. Canvas cracked above her head and suddenly she rode a ship, a white schooner that cut through the swelling waves of data, keeping a parallel track with the galleon.
'Good, isn't it?' shouted the man at the rail.
'How's it done?' There was brilliant sunshine now; she could feel the warmth of it on her skin.
'That would be telling,' said the man. 'Are you the Angel Francine?'
'Yes.'
'Good, I have a message for you.' The man tossed a bottle down to her. The glass sparkled in the sunlight. There was a roll of parchment stuffed inside.
'Who are you?' shouted Francine but the man had vanished from the rail. There was a crash as the bottle smashed on the deck of the schooner, glass fragments shattering the unreal light.
Francine found herself back in the darkness