Spin State - Chris Moriarty [48]
The money trail dried up in the heavily shielded datacore of an offshore account in Freetown’s finance sector. Li reset her safety cutout and crossed onto FreeNet before she had time for second thoughts.
FreeNet was older and wilder than the rest of streamspace. It was off the UN grid, ungoverned by the safety protocols of the white-market sectors, the virtual homeland of black marketeers, hijackers, infoanarchists, and the rogue AIs of the Consortium.
Li’s cutout offered some protection even there; if her vital signs changed too drastically, it would shunt her into a firewalled decompression program until it could get her safely off-line. But that only helped against outright net assassination. A cutout wouldn’t stop wet bugs. Li remembered Kolodny and shivered.
She spent half the day on FreeNet, riding the stream until her back ached and her eyes burned. All she found were firewalls, dead ends, cul-de-sacs. She cursed, fatigue bearing down on her. There were no answers here. Just boxes within boxes, questions within questions.
Common sense and the urge for self-preservation were both telling her to give up. The motto of the FreeNetters might be “Information seeks its own freedom,” but in practice FreeNet was made for hiding data, not finding it. And, like Freetown’s realspace streets, it was a place you could get killed for asking too many questions. Or asking any questions at all about the wrong people.
The hijacker nabbed her twenty seconds after she crossed back onto the UN grid.
The first sign of trouble was a subtle ripple in the numbers. Streamspace froze, shuddered, desynchronized around her. When it clicked back into place, she was nose to nose with a blue-eyed Hispanic face. Fourteen, maybe fifteen years old. Baby fat padding jaw and cheekbone. Hard-edged, industrial-finish nose ring. Good unkinked genes.
Li breathed a virtual sigh of relief and relaxed. It was a Riot Grrl, some rich hacker wanna-be hot-dogging on her parents’ VR gear. Real danger was never this pretty, even in streamspace.
She smiled and shut down the window.
Nothing happened.
Streamspace ground gears on her again. When it phased back in, the Riot Grrl’s eyes were changing color. Blue to brown, brown to near black. And the face around the eyes was changing. Shifting, melting, re-forming until Li was staring at a face she knew far too well. A face she’d last seen fifteen years ago staring back out of the streaky mirror of a Shantytown chop shop. She ran, but the hijacker was too fast for her. A hand lashed out before she could turn and clamped down on her jugular. She kicked and bit. She tried to shut down the VR window and couldn’t. She tried to drop out of VR into code so she could at least see what she was up against. She tried to shut down everything and found that her realspace feed had been disabled. The hand twisted, shooting Li down into pain and darkness. The pain in her throat eased, and she returned to something like breathing. She was crouching in a dark acrid-smelling place, holding something. Her head throbbed. She felt a dull, itchy sting in her lungs that reminded her of . . . someplace. She couldn’t see clearly, and what she could see—tools, cables, a shadowy computer console—made no sense to her. She was moving, doing something with her hands, manipulating a piece of machinery whose function she couldn’t guess at. She strained to drag her gaze upward, to get some idea of her surroundings. Impossible. Her hands, her eyes, her whole body seemed to be moving of their own volition. A claustrophobic panic gripped her. She was ghosting, wired into someone else’s body, experiencing a digitized memory that could be past, present, or pure simulation.