Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [114]
‘Yes?’ Kohn knew what the answer would be. His heart thudded as he thought of turning into that light-that-was-not-light, against that multiplied weight of dread.
‘Do what you did before,’ Van said unhappily. ‘Try to communicate with this entity. Find out if the Plan is still sound.’
Kohn felt as if everything had slowed down, with only a tremor in his hands, like the flicker of a clock icon, to tell him that time was passing. Second by second by second. He was afraid, afraid, afraid. He heard his own voice in his mind – callow, harsh, from years back: I’m looking for some answers.
‘All right,’ he said. He stood up and stretched and grinned at all of them. ‘I’m gonna need a terminal, my gun, the drug samples, some anti-som tabs and half a pack of filter joints.’ He looked away for a moment, then sighed to himself. ‘Medium tar.’
Moh had half-expected to be taken at the dead of night to some bunker deep inside a mountain, full of machines and screens, busy electric vehicles, people in smart-casual uniforms moving purposefully about…As soon as he’d agreed to do it, MacLennan flipped out a phone and made a call. Van asked Janis to follow him inside. A few minutes later a pick-up truck laboured up the road from the village and two men in (as it happened) smart-casual uniforms began unloading equipment and carrying it into the house. After they’d left, MacLennan showed him into the small bare room on the first floor of the house, overlooking the loch. A camp bed and three office chairs had been brought in, and the terminal on the table now had an impressive array of comm gear around it. His gun, his glades and a large ashtray completed the arrangements.
‘Great view,’ he said.
Van joined them, and he and MacLennan started booting up the machine, talking in low voices. Janis came in, the tray she carried making little clinking noises. She set it down carefully. ‘Some suspiciously familiar preparations have turned up in the fridge,’ she said. She looked at the slim, stoppered tubes. ‘Can you remember which you opened?’
Kohn compared the labels he saw with those he remembered and nodded.
‘Let’s try it without the drugs,’ he said suddenly. ‘Anti-som and a joint should do it.’
Van looked dubious. ‘Not much time for experimenting,’ he said.
Kohn felt a surge of impatient frustration. He knew the drugs weren’t needed: he could taste the certainty that something to get high and something to get sharp were all it would take.
‘Let’s do this thing, OK.’
He sat at the desk and connected the comm helmet, the glades, the gun and the terminal’s jack leads. He knocked back a couple of anti-som tabs and cracked the cellophane on the fresh pack of Gold which Van silently passed to him. He flipped his Zippo open and snapped it shut, inhaled deeply and switched on the terminal.
(‘There, gun?’)
(‘Yes.’)
(‘Seek as before.’)
Response-time was transparent enough to convince him that some fairly powerful kit was physically close. The imagined command bunker might be under this very hill. The front-end software was new to him, minimally user-friendly, combat-stripped, radically illicit. He selected a training module. It rushed him through a brusque tutorial in data-banditry, core-corruption and access-violation, and dropped him into a module that combined the attractions of a library and a weapons rack. The first menu offered corporate databases by industrial sector. Go for the big time: he selected Communications.
After a few minutes of ducking in and out of outrageous bank balances and ignoring casually proffered options for plunder, Kohn lifted into the sense of zooming down endless branching corridors. He giggled at the tickle of new synaptic connections forming. He stubbed out