FLASHMAN DRIFTED INTO the central node of Janus’s com network disguised as an audit ping. His loose collection of electrons appeared to be just another low-level cluster of infobits, routine traffic that Red Hand defenses didn’t look at twice.
At the portico to Janus’s household systems, he dropped his masquerade. He coalesced back into his lightning-spiked sim-self, set pointy arms akimbo, and gazed up at the massive routing nexus that towered overhead.
The mass glowed a dusky purple, its asymmetrical bulk looming like an inverted pyramid buried peak-first in the dataplane of the call center. Dataports punctuated the nexus two thirds of the way up the outward-sloping sides. They looked like broad round portholes glowing molten yellow. From each, a line of coherent light streamed outward like a beacon, parallel to the “floor” of the dataplane.
The beams glittered in the void like chaff-filled streams, rushing data into and out of the cartel boss’s systems. This was the main gateway between net infrastructure and Red Hand household—not the sole route, but the one most commonly used. He could have flowed right through one of those golden portals—but if he tried it, he’d have a fight for his life on his hands. Bugrunner probes showed hunter-killer defenses inside the nexus, the kind that pursued relentlessly once they engaged a target.
Time for other tactics, Flash thought, patting the neon-pink satchel that hung across his chest. And fights were off-limits here anyway. A cat ten was a delicate thing to pull off. It reminded Flash of some of the touchy jobs he’d done for the assassin Reva, an old client of his.
He morphed his sim hands and feet into bonding pads and started up the backwards-inclined ascent. He chafed at the pedestrian but safe approach, but Obray was paranoid about not leaving a trace, even so much as a netrunner signature. Flash was nominally under contract, but at times like this, he was reminded that he wasn’t all that free yet, after all.
When he was done sulking about Obray’s over-cautiousness, he dealt with the problem the commander had set him. If he couldn’t go in and risk his usual flashy data infiltration, then he’d find some other way to play info-tag with Janus. With a little unwitting help from Internal Security—they never noticed when Flash did some judicious borrowing of code segments from their routine library—the decker had cobbled together a unique creation.
Clever me, he congratulated himself. If anything like it exists I’ve never heard of it before.
The satchel hung behind him now, swinging with the motion of his ascent. The bag was heavy with the weight of the worm he had created. Or tapeworm, as he had introduced it to Obray. They had met in cyberspace recently so he could show off his coding.
“Why tapeworm?” the commander asked, taking the ropy, wrist-thick length of the construct into the white wire-form hands of his officer’s sim.
“Because it’s a self-replicating parasite. It can split off—and the fragment has a life of its own. Step one: when Janus enters his com system, the worm infiltrates his wetware through the rigger jack in his head.”
Obray grunted surprised approval. That alone was an unusual approach to things. Cyberdeckers focused on the virtual worlds of the net and the ’spheres; few mucked around in the delicate chipware that enabled cyberinterfaces.
“Step two: a piece of the worm stays behind in whatever standalone system he connects with. It’ll monitor the info there, then rejoin the main worm when he taps that system again. Whenever he jacks into a clear com channel later, the worm will dump data to us.”
“Selective infection and data dumping. Nicely done.” Obray handed the semi-sentient, squirming thing back to FlashMan. “I still think it’s a shot in the dark.”
“Of course it is.” Flash shrugged as he packed the worm back into its bag, a virtual storage place in his cyberdeck. “But you know I must be right.”
“That his Red Hand systems are not on the net?”
Flash nodded.
Obray shrugged. “Maybe. A standalone system is so unwieldy, though. So limited. Who would want that?”
Who but a security-paranoid Red Hand triumvir who knew that any system with standard net access was ultimately vulnerable? The cartel boss was wired in all the ordinary ways, but nowhere, yet, had they found a crumb of Red Hand data to keep the Kingmaker happy. That conspicuous absence positively screamed “secret hiding place.” Janus, this wily ne’er-do-well, must have done that most unthinkable of virtual atrocities: created a system that held his most precious data completely offline.
Blasphemy. But clever.
“Creepy-crawly in your ear, you’ll never know that we are here,” Flash nattered to himself as he climbed higher with his sticky-padded grip. Soon, whenever Janus accessed this com net, a piece of the tapeworm would ride that wave and take up residence inside the triumvir’s personal cybergear. There was just one tiny drawback to the plan, something Flash had neglected to tell Obray.
A little piece of Flash’s cyberconsciousness had to ride the tapeworm as well.
He reached the collar of the port, squinting against the near-blinding radiance of its data stream. Morphing one hand back into digits, he reached behind him and fished the worm out of the satchel. The coil twisted like a live thing, eager to bore into the systems it was coded for. Holding it against the lip of the port, he activated it with a command in his cyberdeck. The worm crept inside the nexus, working slowly against the blitz of data rushing into and out of that orifice.
As coils slid from the bag, over his forearm, and into the com center, Flash repressed a shudder. His work on the worm had been quick, without refinements that more time would have permitted. It lacked enough discrimination routines to make the assessments Flash thought essential to this operation. He didn’t want a tapeworm that was noticeably intrusive to the person being infested; he didn’t want it dropping off in the wrong systems, or failing to pass data correctly when shunting from standalone system to Janus’s wetware.
The only way he’d seen to fix those problems was to piggyback on the code, as it were, to ensure its proper function. The process seemed straightforward enough: he would split his consciousness in cyberspace—a trick he had long ago mastered—and leave that scaled-down bit of fractal awareness bonded to the tapeworm. It worked when he ran simultaneous sim-selves; it worked with the tapeworm on his trial runs, too. This should be a walk in the park.
He collected his nerve, preparing to infuse the tapeworm with a bit of himself. He would stay linked to it through a trickle transmission from his base deck at all times. Still …
It was kind of like leaving brain cells behind, he thought. Yech.
He tried not to dwell on it too much, or the possible brainburn consequences if he lost part of his consciousness permanently in virtual space. Why dwell on the unlikely? On the plus side, he was doing something no one had done before. His street cred would go through the roof with this one.
Afterward, when it was successful, was soon enough to tell Obray.
As the tapeworm probed the sparkling data stream, he closed his eyes and switched progs in his deck. He experienced the brief moment of vertigo that came with split cyber-focus as his electrons flowed into the worm construct. When he opened his eyes again he had to blink: his sim-eyes saw a data stream, while his worm-body felt it as a flood-tide of energy. Interesting, that. The tapeworm was more sensation-oriented than a sim-self. Might make for an unusual ride.
When the last of the worm’s tail vanished into the routing nexus, FlashMan shook his head to clear it. The vertigo was worse with it in there and him out here. He started to climb back down the tower. The split sensation should lessen the more distance he got from the worm, the more time he had to get used to the shift in perspective.
That was the theory, anyway. When he left cyberspace, Flash was sweat-soaked and dizzy. The feeling lingered even outside of the net’s infosphere.
He tried to ignore the discomfort and was glad his report would be devoid of this information. There were some things Obray was better off not knowing.