Resonance Dogs Part 1

Resonance Dogs
Part 1 – Bug in the System

Cockroaches adhere to walls with a combination of deforming pads, hooked tarsal claws, and a semi-liquid injection. Each pad is covered in impossibly small hairs that form a smooth surface, useless for sticking to anything on its own, but a series of pressure-sensing mechanisms inject glycogen-based polymers between the pad and the surface; the exact mechanism that keeps the insect stuck to the wall is unknown, simply that all the parts need to be in place in order for it to work.

Roach's feet were not that dissimilar; her hands, all four of them, and feet would slap down on the concrete and hold firm, and when she pulled up, she could feel the thick gel being drawn back into the pores of her palms. The Underground ran all through downtown Seattle, radiating out from the massive pyramid that was the Arcology Commercial and Housing Enclave like the plains of Giza, if the plains of Giza were an oppressive coral reef with schools of mechanical fish that had a propensity for commercial broadcasting; buildings rose to grasp at the sky like clutching hands, the upshot of which that they needed an extensive support structure, with sewers, tunnels, and older buildings serving as scaffolding for the decadence of the world above, and it was in these crawlspaces where people like Roach could easily move around without alerting any measure of authority.

She wasn't the only one that had the idea, either; the full name of the place was the Ork Underground for a reason, serving as a haven for ruddy, bulky-framed people of all stripes. It was dank, it was smelly, and it was stocked with people who still used the term "chrome" to refer to cybernetic implants because it was likely that old. At the moment, however, she was alone, crawling upside-down across the broad surface of an anti-earthquake foundation, with free floating pillars anchored to dynamo magnets with supercooled semiconductors anchored to the bedrock beneath Washington. The lack of light made it seem all the more hollow and lonely than it was, with the walls of the confines invisible and wrapped in solid, inky shadows.

A cold wind ripped over her; liquid Nitrogen pumped in to keep the superconductors cold created plumes of chill mist that forced a nearly constant wind exchange and fresh air rolling; the corps' mindless pursuit of self indulgence created the pulse of life in the depths beyond the reach of their hunt for profit. Paydata lived here, forgotten codes, files, lists, and the contents of corporate pocket secretaries downloaded into hard boxes and cables, abandoned and fragmented during the global computer crash six years ago.

She skittered across a series of cables, following them to a junction box, which she ran over with her nose, extending four pedipalps, like four slender fingers, from where they usually rested alongside her jaw behind the ear, to dance over the edges, feeling and tasting things in the dark that she couldn't with her eyes. Finding a weak point in the panel, she pulled up the corner, bracing on two legs and her smaller pair of arms, popping it off with her larger pair.

On her back was a cyberdeck, a bulky Fuchi Cyber-4, which looked something like an oversized keyboard that a drunken Christmas elf had vomited over after too many bomb shot cocktails down at Matchstick's on a super Tuesday. In the grand old days of seven years ago, it would jack into a matrix terminal and then get plugged into some brainer's skull, where it would translate digital impulses into a virtual reality image. These days, it was mostly just a neat drink holder. Unless you had a converter box for a wireless commlink, a palm sized smart device that hooked up to computers like this and made them feel like an elven man watching troll porn, which is to say inadequate and disgusted at the same time. So, when she flipped that bad boy around and plugged in her converter, her little burn commlink tore through the box's firewall all by its lonesome.

She dove the commlink. In the meat, she was a freak; a changeling, mutated into the semblance of gigantic vermin by some twisted combination of genetics and the wrong dose of mana at the wrong time. Most such changelings got useful traits, tough scales, rhinocerous-like skin, finned ears for better hearing, or even gills. She got a misshapen carapace, entrapment in a kid-sized body, sticky pads on all of her limbs, one extra degenerate set of arms, and the special ability to cause people to try and empty their clips into her hide when they saw her. Surfing the resonance, on the other hand, listening to the song of connectivity and the hiss and pop of electromagnetic emissions, she was empowered. She became her icon, a svelte gunslinger in a long flowing scarf. Her brain and the machine dancing together, rushing at the speed of light, senses thrown into bountiful, almost religious ecstasy fueled by the crazed and manic pulse of radio emissions racing down the cables or through the heavens on beams of life.

For over eleven years now she'd lived through this, but it was the past six that had been truly spectacular, when the unstoppable, lightning-fast hiss of the beating of the world's information started pounding in her head, straight through her eyes, down her limbs, causing her to shiver in ecstasy as she ran past pyramids on a green and black grid dotted with cylinders and cubes of letters and numbers. Copying data in those blocks was exceedingly fast; it wasn't like this anymore, either. Intrusion countermeasures moved in slow motion compared to the attack programs she'd seen in the wireless world, and they dropped long before they even reached her. She'd never seen the Matrix before the crash, not before hearing the Resonance, but if it was all like watching everything move through aspic, it was a wonder anything ever got done in time. She even had to sit through loading icons more than once.

Once everything was done, copied over and uploaded into a shell on her commlink, she struggled with great effort against the joy that pressed in on her at all sides, against the sensation of the unfolding of a vast revelation, like standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon and slowly falling. She shook herself, letting the tunnel vision that would pull her back to reality overtake her. For a moment she felt cold and dead, unable to move, but that was her brain fighting to regain motor control. She shuddered like a sleeping moth and unplugged her gear before skittering back up the wall toward the surface.

Might Be Asian wanted everything that was still on the node, and had given her the location of the functioning box earlier today. What he wanted with a pile of twenty year old employee name sheets and stock transfer files she still wasn't clear on, but she figured this was why he made the big bucks and she ate out of dumpsters. Not that she disliked eating out of dumpsters. People throw away the best food.

Jumping was a trick; because her hands and feet got stickier the more pressure she applied, hunkering down for a leap to another wall took some effort into setting up she had to learn how to wiggle her arms at the apex of her momentum, putting a like snap to all her limbs like a whip so that she flung herself free of the wall she was climbing and up a few meters into a tangled next of pipes and wires, scampering over a big, snow-covered television screen and up into the maze. Roaches can crawl through some surprisingly narrow shit.

Leaving the Underground and even the sewer behind, she crawled up into augmented reality objects clustered like flies over rotten fruit. Billboards, open signs, neon crawlers, and assistant agents mingled with physical crowds moving back and forth along the bright fluorescent lights of a market stall-studded street. She pulled on her hat and jacket, turning up the collar, and moved amid warm bodies in the cold rain. It was easier to get lost here, up along the crowds, sliding like a smooth octopus over the ocean floor, changing speed and direction without startling the schools. She clambered up over some convenience store and out to Auburn, with pipes and factory stacks like burning cigarette cherries in the angry night, seeking out the noodle stall again.

Finding MBA crouched over a bowl of soba, a dirty half-Chinese man with the fat of his low income puffing up in rolls on his body, laughing with his friends, she waited patiently until one of the men with him pointed at her, standing half in the rain, and she pulled out her burn commlink and another, smooth black number that served as her personal one. The fat man pursed his lips and picked up his bowl so he could eat while he was talking, slurping up noodles while the buzz of the electric lights captured moths and some high-pitched crooning in Cantonese wafted over the smell of burning pork. He cracked a smile.

"Still using that little gopher?" he chortled in thickly accented English. "Someone is going to think you have a complex."

She punched up her icon, a genderless figure, white and cylindrical, the default commlink figure for anyone who just picked up something random at the Novatech outlet. She liked using it because it obfuscated her identity; she looked like a twelve year old in heavy clothing, and used that to her advantage, letting her clients think she was just a messenger for a hacker off in some bunker someplace, wired into place. It gave them a sense of mystery, and made them think that if she disappeared, a hacker they couldn't put a face to would make life very difficult for them.

"I got the information," her icon said, its voice a tinny, artificial whine. She dropped the burn commlink on the table.

"Business only," the big man replied sadly. "You should come down sometime, have some drinks with the boys and me."

She made the icon flicker and hiss; it was MBA's attitude that made her think he was a cop. Whether it was that or curiosity, she had little time for either. The longer she stood here, the more likely it was a strong Poverty Bay wind would tear off her hat, and that was not a pleasant thought.

"Payment can be made to my agent," it answered. "Cash, please."

MBA let out a heaving sigh and shook his head, counting out some bills and passing them over. Reason number three she liked to make people think she was someone's errand girl was that they had a tendency to tip. She nodded curtly and made the icon wave its mitten-hand while she jogged off into the night towards home.

Home, in this case, was a literal hole in the wall. Two buildings, one with an abandoned Stuffer Shack at the base with some slum lord-owned apartments above it and the still blank wall of a Renraku building next door; the block had suffered some major economic blows when the company's stock tanked for a few weeks following the arcology incident, and she had moved in some time after her initial transformation seven years ago. The local cops used to know she was here, but with the election two years ago, the local officers kept getting swapped out because Knight Errant liked to look as though they kept things moving. For a moment, she took note that the bum she'd seen the last few weeks wasn't on the corner smoking up a storm, but threw up his absence to the cleaning run that the Knights had done earlier in the day.

Through the alley, down past the side doors and fire escapes, there was an old maintenance grate that belonged to the warehouse section of the Renraku building, and about four meters down, she'd punched a hole through the floor. She used to have to come up through the sewers, but blocked that passage off when she made this one; the collapsed tunnels in the area meant getting to her personal space required actually being able to climb on the walls, which meant she'd never really suffered a home invasion. The personal space was a concrete bunker behind a metal door and was about three and a half meters on each side, a space she shared with an autocooker for soy packets, meager amounts of stolen electricity, some blankets, a devil rat named Snarf, and a whole lot of bouncing wireless signals that served as the river she used to sweep herself into the digital world.

As she approached, she shed her hat and coat, skittering through solid pitch using her antennae to feel along the tunnel and relaxed as the smells grew ever more familiar, except one. She froze, taking in a breath through her nose, antennae twitching nervously. Slowing her pace, she dropped from the shaft in the ceiling into the tunnel and pushed aside the door to the abandoned maintenance room slowly, seeing the harsh glow of lighting on inside. Snarf was nowhere to be seen, and in addition to the foreign smell, there was the hum of a personal area network. Someone was in her space. Not knowing how to react to that, feeling her lungs start to burn as her heart sped up, she turned to leap for a wall, and an unseen hand grabbed her by the shirt.

"Shit, did you ever get hit by the SURGE truck," the voice seemed to laugh.

For a brief moment she saw down to the end of the tunnel where someone had torn through the wall of garbage and concrete, and she was manually turned to look into the blank, featureless mask of someone in a helmet and chameleon suit just turning off the ruthenium coat. He was well-built, and all his gear was worn under the suit's hip flaps, with his PAN turned to hidden mode; she probably wouldn't have noticed it if her antennae weren't so good at picking up smells and she had started listening for it actively.

"Come on inside," she heard his voice say, his tone thick and authoritative. "I've got some questions about wireless networking that I hear you can answer."

He dragged her into the room and closed the door.