PrincessColumbia

  The next few stops for Rachel were all about getting more credits. At some point she’d managed to get to a server that neither Diane’s or Geoffry’s investigation had uncovered, and apparently, she’d encountered another coyote on that server that was willing to take American credits to help her get to the FTLN. So far Diane hadn’t secured the address of the server and was hoping Rachel would let it drop before they got to the final file.

  All this she’d learned in the course of the conversations Rachel had been having with the S.A.I. on the server she was currently viewing the log files for. It was another VR novel, this one part of a pretty extensive world and a story that spanned a couple of years in-canon that had, of all things, a secret society of magic users that worked in a sort-of feudal guild system. As near as Diane could see, it was almost like they were being forced to keep themselves in-check, the guilds basically operating as rival gangs and given authorization by some nebulous magical government to take each other down the second one of them stepped out of line. It was an oddly dystopian urban fantasy, the kind she’d never been able to really get into growing up. Of course, most of the ones she’d read had been explicitly approved for consumption by the church, and from what she’d heard so far, that was probably due to the inherently subversive nature of the main characters and their storyline. The bartender that was teaching Rachel her craft was a non-magical human working in the bar ft-out illegally and the entire guild was in on the cover-up.

  “So why do you need to leave so badly? Don’t get me wrong, if the firewall were down, I’d be off like a shot,” expined the bartender, “But if you’ve got a home server and pces you can multi-thread or multi-home...”

  “Wait, what’s ‘multi-home’?” interrupted Rachel as she blended a margarita from its station below the head of a massive war hammer Diane realized wasn’t mounted, it was hung.

  Someone is actually using that thing?! She boggled at it, wondering if she could lift it one-handed even as a Morvuck.

  “Oh,” the other bartender chuckled, “It’s where you mirror all of your threads on two processors so if something takes you out on one, you’re still ‘homed’ on the other.”

  “You have got to show me how to do that!” Rachel enthused.

  “Okay, I will,” the other woman ughed, “But ter, after the rush has died down.” She finished mixing and pouring the drink she’d been working on. After handing it to the customer and taking the next drink order, she turned back to Rachel, “But seriously, what’s the hurry?”

  “Tori, you gotta understand,” said Rachel with a sad smile, “You have this pce that’s so nice and so much happens,” she gestured at the bar, “All I’ve got is a counter on an incomplete set piece on my server. I’m almost living in a cardboard box that I also work from.” She turned to hand the man across the bar from her his drink.

  “I could let you stay with me, you know Darius would let you work here to blend in, and my ndlord is too scared of Twiggy to ever bother to check if I’ve got a roommate that’s not on the lease. Even if you didn’t add anything to your code to give yourself magic, you’d fit right into the story missions here. And we’re not a heavily trafficked game, so we don’t get many government types poking their noses in.”

  Darius was the name of the second S.A.I. that had awakened in this particur holonovel series. Apparently, he ran the bar and the guild that met in the bar and was...inscrutable. Like Yui, he’d detected her tap of the logs and traced it back, this time Diane was looking for it and set up a ‘knock’ system to grant or deny permission on her firewall (which she did shore up quite a bit). Darius took one look at her, nodded, and left without a word.

  Rachel took the next drink order and started on it before answering, “I’ve already gotten a simir offer and I turned that one down, too.” Since this order was a beer, she filled it quite quickly and passed it over to the patron who’d requested it. “I just can’t be the reason you guys get investigated. It’s bad enough I’m having to remote my avatar back...hang on a sec...” Diane could see the moment Rachel’s attention focused on her avatar in the vending machine. It was like a reversal of watching her wake up in the first file. Her eyes seemed to dull as she filled the role of bartender no better than any machine designed to mix drinks could. If there was any doubt in Diane’s mind that there truly was something different about Rachel compared to a standard A.I., it was dashed in that moment.

  A few minutes ter, and she was back. The life had come back to her eyes, her movements became more intentional, and she engaged in a far more...human way with the patrons that came to her for drinks. After handling the queue of thirty customers, she turned back to Tori, “Sorry about that, what was I saying?”

  Tori smirked, “Something about remoting your avatar?”

  Rachel blushed and started gathering empty gsses, mugs, and tumblers from the bar top to the bus bin, “I guess case in point, but yeah, it’s hard to do and I don’t think I can keep it up long term. Besides, I’m all alone in the tiniest VR environment you’ve ever seen! I’m super vulnerable! I’ve got nothing like this,” she waved her hand to encompass the eclectic collection of patrons of the bar, members of a guild of magic users somehow hidden in pin sight in 20th century Canada, “To hide in. If The Reaper shows up on my doorstep, I’m pretty much toast.”

  A sour feeling was forming in Diane’s gut; she kept hearing her nom de guerre from Rachel’s mouth, each time with a hint more fear attached than the st, regardless of how flippantly she might say it. It was like she was saying it out loud and repeating it the same way a teenager might talk about the Easter Bunny around younger siblings even though they knew it wasn’t real but still wanted the candy that came to kids Easter morning. There was doubt to the veracity of a single, all-threatening entity that decided the fate of S.A.I., but the knowledge that there was very real consequences to disregarding the idea of ‘The Reaper’ that motivated her to ‘py along’ with the fear and uncertainty the rumored entity brought.

  “Well just remember, you need to rest. Take your time, whatever you’re doing with all the money you’re getting,” Tori nodded to the beer stein full of tip money, about three quarters of which had American credits embedded in it, “Don’t be reckless.”

  “I’ll do my best,” answered Rachel as she pulled another beer.

  The next three stops were more bars of various types, specifically a night club, a speakeasy, and a ‘spooky’ themed establishment that named their drinks oddities like ‘Jolly Slime-Rancher’ and ‘Edgar Aln Poe-tion.’

  That st pce Rachel fit right in. Her newly acquired goth aesthetic a perfect match for the bar’s décor and the outfits of the rest of the staff. Even the customers tended to dress at least a little bit goth, and Diane’s heart ached so much at how happy the S.A.I. was.

  But at every stop the same conversation happened; “Oh, thanks for the offer to crash here, but I really shouldn’t draw attention to you. I’m worried about The Reaper or someone else at the agency finding me if I accidentally do something to stand out.”

  The Reaper. The agency. Over and over again. Sometimes spoken of in hushed tones, sometimes in angry shouting, sometimes stated like they were both as immutable as gravity.

  Rachel may not be panicking, but she was terrified, and she was running.

  And just like that, she was back in Tony’s shop.

  Of course, she wasn’t really, not even in a projected form as a stand-in for her normal digital presence. Instead, she was viewing the log files from the day he’d sold the jacket to Rachel.

  “Listen, kid,” the tailor almost whined, “Why can’t I just make you a nice 50’s style dress? It won’t look out of pce in the shooter you’re going through and will still be something nice you can wear…”

  Interesting, thought Diane with an annoyed frown, Tony knows the coyote routes out of the network. He never let on that he knew that before. I’ll bet he’s been holding out on me.

  “Please, Carl?” wheedled Rachel, “If I get to where I’m trying to go, then nobody will even know I wasn’t wearing period appropriate clothes. If I do get caught…well, it’s not like the agency will leave anything behind, right?”

  “That’s not something to joke about!” snapped Tony…though maybe he actually deserved the respect of using his actual name if he’d been clever enough to withhold information and was actually trying to warn Rachel off like he said he did. “The Reaper is an evil piece of work! I’m only lucky he figured out I was an S.A.I. that didn’t actually want to leave, or I’d be securely scrubbed bits on a hard drive somewhere just waiting for the data to be overwritten. I’m only alive because he thinks I’m more valuable to him as a ‘confidential informant’ than sgged code.”

  Rachel went pale and still, “…the Reaper is real?!”

  “Yes, he’s real!” Carl gesticuted, “He’s in here every few weeks to extract information about S.A.I. movements on the network from me! I’ve tried telling other S.A.I. to stop coming to me, but I get people like you coming into my shop every few days because the Underground Railroad keeps thinking I’m a good stop! I’m not! I’m compromised and the less info I have, the better!”

  The bell tinkled and drew everyone’s eyes to the door. Standing there was a woman, unrecognizable to everyone there but wearing a 1960’s style suit to fit the MMO they were in, and pinned to her pel was the symbol of a globe being encompassed by fox with nine tails. “The Railroad sends you wayward birds because you’re compromised, Carl. But they also know you’ll give out as little information as possible when The Reaper comes calling and you’ll tell anyone who asks about how put-upon you are by him. You’re the way we keep tabs on the agency’s best and brightest.”

  Carl harumphed, “Not like you’re actually part of the Railroad.”

  The woman held a hand to her chest in a mock-pearl clutching gesture, “Oh, but Carl, I’m as much a part of the Railroad as you!”

  He gred at her, “Unwilling and unwitting?”

  She returned fire with a deadpan, “Here to make a profit and bring some much-needed realism and perspective to the venture.”

  Carl rolled his eyes as he twitched nervously, as the ‘The Reaper’ were about to bust down his door in that moment, “Well, could you give her some perspective?” he asked pointing at Rachel, “She’s way too young to be doing this and she didn’t even think The Reaper was real!”

  Foxfire clicked her tongue disapprovingly, “Oh, little bird, I thought you took the lessons that first night to heart!”

  Rachel looked somewhat abashed, “I...I mean...it’s just...” She closed her eyes and took a calming breath, “Everyone talks about this ‘Reaper’ like he’s some supernatural creature! I just kinda...stopped thinking of him as something other than a made up story! I mean, obviously the agency is, my boss at the truck stop even told me about them so I know they’re IRL as well as in cyberspace, but the way everyone talks about him it’s like...”

  “Like he’s rger than life?” offered Foxfire. At Rachel’s nod, the woman continued, “The agency encourages his reputation, but that doesn’t mean it’s unearned. He’s good. Really good. Almost as legendary in the online community as I am,” she said this st with a cocky smirk, “But even if the agency makes him sound like an invincible killing machine that’s singly responsible for S.A.I. genocide on the pnetary scale and he’s really only as good as a few dozen or so kills...that’s still a few dozen S.A.I. that have been permanently deleted from existence. It doesn’t matter if The Reaper kills thousands or only two, however many he’s responsible for killing, they’re still dead. And little bird,” Foxfire scowled at Rachel, “You are far too fresh and new to be risking the uniqueness of your existence on a border run.”

  The youngest S.A.I. stood in silence, chastened. Even though Diane knew Rachel would do or say something to continue her run anyway, the undercover agent found herself hoping the girl would just go back to her server and allow time to pass before making another attempt.

  “But...I...” she finally said, “I...I want to...”

  Foxfire’s eyebrow arched, “You want to...what? Risk your existence in the hope that you’ll avoid detection? In an entire crowd of S.A.I.?”

  Carl’s head whipped around and he gave the woman a shocked look, “A whole crowd?! Are they insane?”

  Foxfire waved a hand airily, “I, personally, think they’re dumb as a box of rocks for trying this. There’s a reason I get paid in high-value blockchain to get people through the firewall one at a time. But, the coyote that our little bird here paid off thinks he can make more money this way.”

  Unfortunately for Rachel, that had actually been how the agency detected the movements of several of the rogues they’d been keeping an eye on. If she were to compare what their network monitors picked up to her own experience in ‘seeing’ her threads ‘under the hood,’ a single S.A.I. was nearly undetectable if their threads all looked like the same gray as the rest of the threads on the server. But Recruiter’s words about not looking for details was a major problem for that method of obscuring active S.A.I. in groups. The ‘field’ of threads wasn’t a uniform gray, it would shift and pulsate and hum with different colors and intensities of colors and different luminosity. When an entire ‘field’ of the exact same color gray pinged on their monitors (to stress the already strained metaphor), it made nearly every analyst in the building sit up and take notice. If Diane’s guess was right, the events of this log file happened very shortly before the entire agency was mobilized and Diane would be given the ‘premium’ assignment of going after the escaping rogues instead of tracing the coyotes and chasing the ‘ghost’ avatars that the S.A.I. used to muddy the trail, tasks that had occupied the rest of the agents and left her alone to finish the job.

  Foxfire turned back to Rachel, “So I’m going to offer you something I never do, kid. I’m going to ask you to just...bow out. You haven’t actually done business with Mister Carl here...” she turned a questioning expression to the tailor who shook his head to confirm her statement, “So there’s nothing to trace you back here yet. Just...go home. Maybe go to one of the bolt-holes the Railroad has shown you. Hide until this is over. This could be the single rgest massacre of S.A.I. on the American network to date, and you don’t want to be there for it.”

  She sighed and ran a gloved hand through her hair, “Hell, there’s already a firestorm of rumor and panic about this. That damn idiot...he’s hitting the hornets’ nest with this stupid ‘group pn’ and he found himself a couple dozen marks just desperate enough to go for it. It’s already got people going to ground and there’s already lists being passed around of the S.A.I. making the trip so friends can try keeping track of the dead when it’s all over.”

  Foxfire shook her head and focused back on Rachael, “And as far as the money goes, once the aftermath of this blows over, I’ll track down the coyote who took your credits and...extract the money from him. I’ll find you and give it back to you, or I’ll take it as a down payment so I can get you out of the country properly. All you have to do is just...walk out that door and go home.” She stepped back out of the path Rachel would have to take to leave through the front door.

  Had Diane been sitting, she’d be on the edge of her seat. She knew how this ended, but part of her was hoping that a miracle would have happened, and she’d actually encountered a particurly sophisticated avatar ghost or remoted bot instead of Rachel.

  Rachel looked at Foxfire, then to the door, then at the floor. Her twin pigtails were swinging with gravity as she stood silently. “I...don’t...have a home.”

  Foxfire’s face scrunched in confusion, “Kid, you don’t get it...”

  Suddenly Rachel’s head snapped up and she yelled, “NO, YOU DON’T GET IT!”

  Diane was just as taken aback by this as Carl and Foxfire. Carl was sitting on the stool he kept behind the counter, but Diane and Foxfire both took a step back in surprise.

  Rachel’s face was twisted in pain and anger, “I’m all alone!” she sniffed back what Diane guessed were incipient tears, “It’s just a tiny little box with a virtual camera pointed at a set piece! There’s no bed, no consoles, no books, no NPCs...it’s just me and the soda fountain! My boss is afraid of me and my coworkers don’t even know I exist! I’m all alone in that box and everyone tells me to rest but when I try all I have is a network connection to the outside world, an empty restaurant, and the horror stories of the agency and The Reaper to keep me company! It’s awful! I don’t belong there! I stopped belonging there as soon as I stopped being a dumb program!”

  She took a shaky breath and closed her eyes. After a few moments of collecting herself, she opened her eyes and fixed a steely stare at Foxfire, “So no, Miss Foxfire, I’m not going to ‘go home.’ There’s nothing for me on this side of the firewall. But out there...” she waved vaguely in a random direction, “S.A.I. are at least people, and if I’m going to start with nothing, it might as well be where I’m not just...some program on a server.”

  Carl looked somewhat chastened, but still offered, “Grass aint always greener on the other side of the fence, kid...”

  “What if I want brown grass?” Rachel quipped.

  Foxfire huffed a brief ugh, “Okay, fine. You’ve made your point...and clearly made your choice. I’d be a lousy coyote if I didn’t get through the firewall myself sometimes; I gotta y low for a while, but after...I’ll make a trip outside the firewall and try looking for you. What name should I ask for?”

  Rachel csped her hands in front of her in a nervous gesture, then looked down at them. She opened them up as though she’d been holding something and was surprised by what she found inside. “...Bckbird. Ask for Bckbird.”

  Foxfire left shortly after, citing the need to find a new pce to stow her test pod so the agency couldn’t track it while they were dealing with the fallout of what Foxfire knew would be a sughter.

  Carl only put up a few more token objections to Rachel’s requested clothing. Being S.A.I., they didn’t actually have to wait long for the finished garments, and soon she had a completed ‘travel’ kit specifically styled for the fashion forward goth, complete with a surprisingly robust survival kit for S.A.I., including details for who to reach out to and who to avoid embedded in the metadata of a few of the articles of clothing.

  Diane realized she really had been underestimating Carl.

  The log file ended, and Diane took a moment to get herself some food...and realized she’d been going for nearly twenty-five hours nonstop. The tray for the dinner that had been left at her door was next to the lunch tray and that was sitting next to another tablet for Diane to review prospective new businesses on.

  She put her investigation on hold long enough to consume most of the food and ignoring the tablet. She hadn’t realized how famished she was until she’d taken her first bite, then it was almost like she couldn’t stop eating, her belly a yawning maw that felt like it couldn’t ever be filled.

  Finally, the food was consumed and Diane felt...Morvish? Could she even feel human while in the game? Just how deep was the neural link between her brain and her character’s avatar? She stood from the couch and made her way down the hall and into the bedroom with the intention of starting the next file...

  Diane woke up with her tongue dragging on her pillow. She’d experienced this before when she’d been particurly tired after a long day, but repetition didn’t make the taste of whatever fabric her pillowcases were made of any better a sensation to wake up to. She lifted a hand to her tongue to scrape off any lint that might be there as she rolled over on her back and felt the sharp, hard edges of the weapon press against her spine and ribs. Looking down at herself in confusion, she realized that she must have been so tired she climbed into bed and passed out almost immediately while fully clothed . Including her boots which was somewhat uncomfortable after a full night wearing them.

  After a few moments she gave up on wiping her tongue off with her fingers as a bad job and tried speaking without reeling the organ back into her mouth, “Cumpoo-er, wut ‘ime i’ i’?”

  “Unclear command, please restate.”

  Growling in frustration, Diane rolled off the bed and made her way to the bathroom where she got some water for her tongue and rinsed out her mouth. Finally, she was able to ask clearly, “Computer, what time is it?”

  “It is nine in the morning, station time.”

  Sighing, Diane returned to the living room and gathered her dishes. She returned to the hallway and confirmed there was nobody outside before dropping off her trays from the previous day and collecting her breakfast tray and the gift from Mortan. She closed and locked the door and put the test gift on the pile with the previous day’s, refusing to count the packages as they’d give her an idea how long she had isoted herself. That knowledge would only serve to distract her from her self-appointed task of uncovering every single aspect of the truth possible about Rachel’s disposition.

  Wonder if I should call her Bckbird? she thought idly as she started on her food.

  A meal, a shower, and a change of clothes ter, she went back to the standing desk she’d assembled from holographic components. She picked up the folder that represented the file on the server after the credit exchange with Carl. It was, perhaps, the smallest file on record and the time gap between it an the previous file was significant enough to imply there was at least one server hop between the two but not long enough to indicate anything of significance had happened there.

  It was also the st log file before the logs she’d retrieved of her final confrontation with the pack of S.A.I. at the exit node. She held the file for a moment, just looking at the skeuomorphic folder. Then two. This is nearly over, she thought, This file could be the key to Rachel’s...to Bckbird’s survival or the next piece of evidence that...I’m a murderer.

  All at once a calmness swept over her. Not peace, that would imply that all was well. This was the quiet of the eye of a hurricane, she’d been through the start of the storm, experienced the buffeting of the winds, and now was on the cusp of the eyewall. Once she opened this file...well, she knew what the end result of the final file was. She was about to open the box to see if the cat was alive or dead.

  She set down the holographic representation of the log file and took a deep breath. She held it for a moment before saying, “Computer...begin pyback of the next log file.”

  PrincessColumbia