Black Madonna

3

“Very, very nice,” Geraint said again. “Can’t get these on any market I know of.”

“Cute, isn’t it? I got the personamorph program from certain corporate contacts. Lets us slip into their sculpted system and become an absolutely integral part of it,” Michael said as he worked to complete the cyberdeck coupling. It wasn’t easy connecting his Fairlight to Geraint's humble Fuchi Cyber-7, and there would be delays in communication, but it was a far better option than his friend just jacking in for the ride.

“I think that’s done,” he said finally standing back to admire his handiwork. “Now for the monitors. Green lead on the datajack, blue lead over your heart, old man.”

“What are these for?” Geraint said, somewhat apprehensively.

“Cardiomonitors. We’re headed into IC thick and deep enough to sink a whole flotilla of Titanics, and if you get zapped by bad black stuff this will jack you out before your brain can fry or the T’n’B rips your heart out of your chest,” Michael replied with bloodthirsty relish. “Saved my skin a couple of times.”

“I’m not really sure I should have let myself in for this,” Geraint said disapprovingly. Good job we kept the port down to two glasses.”

We’ll finish the bottles later,” Michael replied, settling himself down in the Chippendale chair and flexing his arms.

“Let’s get down to it, Hello, Chiba.”

“What the frag is this?” Geraint said unenthusiastically. “What a ghastly, tacky pinstripe suit you have there.”

Michael checked out his own persona, the icon that et him navigate the Matrix even as his own meat body sat jacked into his deck. He looked rather like a cheap gangster from a bad black-and-white trid from way back, the kind where the main character calls everybody ‘Blue eyes’ or ‘Sweetheart’.

“We appear to be someplace like Nebraska,” Geraint said disapprovingly “That is, somewhere entirely devoid of interest or value.”

Michael peered up the long gray road ahead of them. “This is more fascinating than it seems,” he mused. “We’re not even into their system yet and there’s a radiating sculpted effect. This shouldn’t happen. Renraku’s been doing some very interesting things.”

“Never mind the interesting things they’ve been doing, let’s find out about the interesting things someone’s been doing to them,” Geraint retorted, adjusting his fedora and setting off down the highway. There was a roadblock before them, a gaggle of 1930s black American autos and a group of policemen awaiting them at the system access node.

“Since when has Renraku sculpted their system to look like an old gangster movie?” Geraint whispered.

“Since now,” Michael replied. “This must be a direct response to the system invasion.”

“A bit tacky, if you ask me,” Geraint said. “Oh, well, get that sleaze program working.” They advanced on the police squad.

“Ain’t nobody goin’ up that road without authorization, bud,” the harrier program instructed. Michael put a hand into his pants pocket with exaggerated slowness, so as not to activate any alert IC, and flourished a badge with the symbol of Chicago’s finest on it.

“Authorization from the mayor himself, Mac,” he said. palming it again swiftly. The policeman looked a little dubious and then waved them past the platoon of armed goons standing behind him.

“That was easy,” Michael chuckled as they headed down the road and on to the dataline junctions.

“Great when we have to go back and get past that attack IC,” Geraint said plaintively. The goons had been carrying disagreeably large heavy machine guns. Renraku had gotten heavy since the system invasion.

“Not to worry,” Michael smiled. “We’ll be leaving in an armored car, old boy.”

They sidled into the outskirts of town, and down the narrow road saw a series of fortified buildings.

“The bank, I would think,” Michael said. “Time to send off a browsing probe.” He opened his violin case and a slightly mangy pigeon circled out into the skies above, coming briefly to rest on a distant roof, then hopping from one to the next. From one of the buildings in the middle distance, a sheriff emerged, wearing his badge of office and wielding a machine gun that made the weapons of the SAN IC look like popguns.

“System decker.” Michael said dismissively. His armor program, and that of Geraint, had already equipped them with bulletproof jackets, and the Englishman had other surprises in store for the Renraku decker prowling the system. What worried him was whether this was just a random appearance, or whether the system was already alerted to their presence, and how long it would take the decker to alert it now.

As the sheriff leveled his weapon to fire, smoke exploded around him and a harmless burst of gunfire chattered off somewhere into the skies as the two intruders ran down the other side of the Street to the bank. The stumbling figure barely emerged before they’d shot the locks off the bank doors, and above him the pigeon had already been replaced by Geraint’s eagle, a scanner program searching for reinforcements Michael’s smart frame had already given the sheriff something else to worry about as they ran into the building.

“Hold it right there, lawman,” the frame-persona drawled, “or your guts will have more holes than a Swiss cheese.”

“Love it,” Michael grinned as he activated the evaluate program and switched to sensor mode. Geraint covered his back, gun leveled at the swinging bank doorway. “Now, Tracey my dear, crack that code,” Michael said.

The second smart frame got to work on the encrypted barrier, decoding and analyzing, Michael desperate to get at the data in the vaults. He got through just as the evaluate program gave him the final feedback.

“Bugger, it’s not here,” he growled. “We’re going to have to wait for the dove to fly back. Well, let’s face it-it would have been too easy to find it here.”

Obligingly, the bird flew back into the room, as a confused system decker exchanged attacks with a smart frame in the road outside.

“I think I hear sirens” Geraint said anxiously.

“Bollocks,” Michael said flatly as he took the tourist map from the bird’s beak. “Down the high street and make for the travel agency. Travel agency? I like that! Very eccentric humor. They must have an Englishman on the programming staff.”

“Not that I know of,” Geraint said. “Listen, there are sirens.”

“So there are, old man. Well, let’s get moving. The back door, I think.”

They got out of the datastore and raced down the side road, into the commercial district, Cars sped along the highway, data packets headed along the vast freeway of Renraku’s innermost computer systems.

“Look, never mind subtlety,” Michael said, extracting a grenade from his case and lobbing it at the doors of the

travel agency. “No more sleazing. Let’s just frag everything that moves.”

“Sometime I wonder whether you haven’t been living in America too long,” Geraint muttered, keeping his gun leveled at their backs. The doors blew off the in a splendidly agreeable cloud of dust and debris. Michael was already halfway into the place.

“Find it, find it!” he urged on his evaluate program. The customized program, specifically instructed to search for data on system intrusions, was already scurrying to the locked cupboards. It took the form of a rat in the sculpted system. Halting before one securely fastened cupboard in the distance, the rat raised up on its hind legs, sniffed, and twitched its whiskers.

Michael pried the lock off the door, and began shoveling files into his voluminous case. The first gunshots began to splinter the windows.

“Get to the fragging back door!” Geraint urged as he let off a flurry of his own shots at the advancing figures just visible outside. The armor won’t last forever.” He scooped up a last handful of files as they blew their way out the back door and found themselves in an alleyway.

“Whoops,” Geraint said as he looked at the cul-de-sac. A platoon of police were running at them from the far end.

“This program cost me half a million nuyen and it had better bloody well work,” Michael muttered grimly as he yanked open the doors of the mechanic’s shop opposite and raced into the gloom. He opened the door of the vehicle and started the ignition. Geraint had already flung himself into the passenger seat and flattened himself as close to the floor as he could. The armored car advanced into the street, performed a tire-screeching ninety-degree turn and raced toward the policemen. It scattered them far and wide, sprays of bullets bouncing off its armor as Michael raced the thing toward the outskirts of town again. Then, extraordinarily, he stopped and opened the driver’s door. A policeman was approaching from the side of the road.

“What the hell-”

“Trojan horse, old man,” Michael said as he handed over his case to the smart frame. “They almost certainly have special locks on data loss, and we may have trouble getting out with the data not ending up degraded. But Simon here won’t have any problems.

“Simon?”

“Give them names, helps me remember what does what. Simple Simon-simple to get data out with.”

“Doesn’t make any sense to me,” said the mystified Geraint.

“Doesn’t have to, it only needs to make sense to me.” Michael pointed out. “Now we have a roadblock to get past and, by the sound of it, half of Renraku’s best are on our tails.” The sirens got louder behind them.

“Now, let’s go knock down that barrier!”

“Well, it wasn’t traceable of course,” Radev said consolingly as he lit another of his endless chain of cigarettes. “But then we wouldn’t expect it to be. If it had been, we’d have been very disappointed. After all, we do pay him to get into other people’s systems without being traced, so at least we know he does what he does for us rather well.”

“Fine,” Kryzinski growled. “And the data?”

“The data in the proximity of the invading personas was transformed by the morphic encrypters at one hundred percent efficiency,” Radev smiled. “He will learn that what we told him was almost correct. If it had matched exactly he’d have been suspicious, of course. Now he’ll think we had a slightly more serious system invasion than we told him we had, and we won’t have to worry about being compromised by our own operative.”

“Good.” Sam sighed happily. “He’s good, we’re good, everything’s just fraggin’ hunky dory. Apart from twenty billion nuyen or you can all expect to wear brown pants for a fortnight.”

“We’ll have to see Sutherland’s initial report,” the Bulgarian replied. “It should conform to the initial assessment we have and then we can proceed from there.”

Kryzinski yawned and looked at the clock. He resented having to work beyond his normal shift to be on hand when Sutherland’s anticipated system intrusion occurred.

“I’m going home to get some sleep,” he sighed. “That’s enough excitement for one day.”

“Our bosses will be pleased,” Radev said consolingly, giving him a nicotine-stained smile.

“They’d fragging better be!” Kryzinski said fervently.

Michael keyed in the final instructions for the frame-analyzers and sat hack triumphantly. Getting out of the system had been easier than he’d expected. The tar pit program that had nearly trapped their car had been the least he’d expected and the attack utilities barking gunfire at the roadblock had been almost disappointingly easy to fend off. Now it was five in the morning and dawn was still an unfulfilled promise. Fresh coffee was just arriving, and gleaming dark bottles of port seemed to be making suggestive invitations to him from the table opposite, but after two days of slotting around with his body clocks, certain minor visual hallucinations were entirely acceptable. Geraint, having already used some minor booster or stabilizer through the cannula implant in his neck, took a shot of something psychoactive to prevent that happening, but Michael preferred a less direct route. Caffeine and alcohol into the gut would do fine, and he lit one of Geraint’s gold-banded cigarettes to add to the cocktail.

“They never saw it. What a bunch of dodos!” he smirked.

“Don’t get arrogant,” Geraint warned. “Wait to see what the discrepancies are. Don’t celebrate the data haul until you’ve seen it.”

“What we came out with was vanilla,” Michael protested. “What the Trojan horse will come out with is-”

Text was already filling the thirty-inch auxiliary screen. It scrolled through the initial sections of the inhouse Renraku evaluations in synchrony with the accelerated lasprint output until Michael keyed the screen to hold. He read fast. The blood drained from his face.

“Holy Mother of God!” he croaked, his hands grasping the edge of the table as if it were the edge of a cliff and he was about to fall off. “Look at this.”

Geraint leant over his shoulder, taking in the formal, emotionless language of the Renraku summarizer.

Total system invasion and collapse has been evaluated from corporate core systems with the following probabilities: Renraku, 100% known and evaluated; Fuchi, 100% with no error; Shiawase, 99% with error estimate +/- 1%; Saeder-Krupp, 99% +/- 1%…

“Total system invasion and collapse?” Michael said disbelievingly, “The whole enchilada? Everything?”

“Look at that,” Geraint said, his finger tracing down the rows on the screen. “They were instantaneous. Right on the stroke of 00:00, Chiba time, and again two hours later. Boy, that takes some doing to go back two hours later when the corps must have had everything cranked way beyond maximum alert. Impressive.”

“Someone invaded and collapsed every single megacorp at the same instant?” Michael cried out, hands falling into his lap as he leaned back in his chair. “No way. Utterly, absolutely no sodding way!”

“It appears to have happened, however,” Geraint pointed out.

Michael was already scrabbling through the printout. “Nothing here on the guy leaving the same icon anywhere else, and nothing on what he wants,” he complained.

“There is for Renraku,” Geraint observed. “He wants twenty billion.”

“Twenty billion?” Michael almost leapt from his chair. Then his voice became slightly manic and humorous. “Well, I mean, why not? Might as well ask for a fur coat for the missus and a bike for the kiddie while you’re at it.”

“If he can crash every Matrix system on the globe at the same instant, twenty billion is probably about the going rate,” Geraint said thoughtfully.

“He? Them must be a whole flock of them!” Michael said. “Working together, one at each system. There’s a whole gang of these people out there.”

“Now that is imposible,” Geraint replied. “Are there eight or so people in the whole world capable of doing this?”

“No,” Michael said, suddenly brought back to earth, “No, there cannot be eight megageniuses sprung from nowhere to conduct such an operation. But how one decker could do it…”

“Look at what you do with frames,” Geraint said.

Michael shook his head. “Couldn’t do this with a frame.”

“Couldn’t do this at all.” Geraint chuckled. “Let’s face it. Whoever did this could construct frames to act synchronously with his own handiwork.”

“How the hell am I ever going to find this guy? I had no idea. This isn’t anyone known in the community,” Michael lamented. “No way I can trace him.”

“Indeed,” Geraint said. “Well, old boy, looks like you’re just a has-been now. This guy could have you for breakfast.”

Michael bristled. “I’m not ready for a bath-chair yet,” he said slightly feebly.

“You couldn’t do this, though, could you?” Geraint said impishly, looking through some of the printout himself.

Maybe not.” Michael’s voice had a definite edge.

“What do you reckon Renraku would pay you if you found out who this was in time?”

“Well, considering that I’d be saving them twenty billion…”

Geraint laughed appreciatively. “I’d say it would certainly be enough to keep you in appalling luxury for the rest of your indulgent life, at a conservative estimate.”

“Yes, well…” Michael began in a suddenly perceptive tone of voice. “That’s all very well-but why are you so keen?”

“Why do people climb Everest?”

“Because they’re fragging idiots who ought to stay home and enjoy a comfortable existence instead!”

“No, laddie.” Geraint wagged an admonishing finger at him. “Because it’s there. This rather interests me, I must say. I need hardly point out that I’ve got a lot invested in various corporate interests around the world, and if this chap crashes everything on the planet, things could get a little ugly. And as it happens, I’ve grown rather fond of the creature comforts you so rightly appreciate yourself.

“One more glass and then I think we should get some sleep,” the nobleman suggested. “We’re going to have a lot of work to do tomorrow.” His attention was finally caught by the winking light on his telecom, and he poured himself a last glass of tawny port on the way to pick up the message.

“And Serrin will be with us by teatime, if we can manage to wake up by then,” Geraint said with a smile when he came back. “Dinner tomorrow will be even more interesting than I’d planned.”