Chrysalis

60

As a child, Logan had been plagued by several recurring dreams. One — steeped in the supernatural — had ultimately led him to his vocation as enigmalogist. In another, he’d been trying to escape some off-world penal colony. He’d fled down a series of dimly lit, horribly long corridors, with the kind of low gravity that allowed astronauts like Gene Cernan to bunny-hop across the surface of the moon. Except the low-gravity hops in Logan’s getaway nightmare had been agonizingly long: minutes spent gliding through air before he could land and take another jump. For most people who flew in their dreams, the sensation was exhilarating. For him, it had been just the opposite.

Especially cruel, then, that the transit of the Nexus reminded him so strongly of that dream. Unlike his high-speed, uncontrolled passage through the optical pathways of Omega, he was in control of his movements here — almost too much so.

For the last twelve minutes, Snow’s voice had been guiding him down the photonic backbone of the Nexus. That’s what Snow called it, and Logan hadn’t asked for a clearer description. What he knew for sure was this time, they couldn’t slingshot him to a destination. Now that he was outside the digital moat around Omega, the best Snow could do was optimize his route along the server farm, from one rack to the next to the next, while monitoring his approach to the one that contained what, more and more, began to feel like buried treasure.

The corridors — in reality, thin hollow cables barely wider than a thread — were all the same, save for their stenciled letters, and were all ridiculously long and straight. A combination of leaping and hopping — far enough to gain the most distance, without prematurely impacting the ceiling — was the fastest method of propulsion. At first, it had been almost unbearably slow. But he’d soon gotten the hang of the strange virtual gravity and was able to move along the backbone efficiently. One bound per rack; a brief transit of darkness, lit somehow by Snow; and then another bound through another rack. He felt like Major Heyward in The Last of the Mohicans, with Snow as his Natty Bumppo, guiding the way through a dim and trackless wilderness. He preferred not to consider what was actually taking place: via what was essentially a high-tech optical hack, he was using Wrigley’s VR to move — with all the size of the tiniest mite — through the endless row of blade servers he’d seen, lined up in a lazy curve deep beneath the Torus. Somewhere nearby, walking alongside the racks of CPUs and following Logan’s virtual progress via radio with Snow, was Grady, one of the worker bees who tended the Helix, making sure everything was on track and eventually — when the correct linear block was reached — who would do the physical work of downloading a specific node and transmitting its contents to the waiting Mossby.

“How much farther?” he asked Snow.

The answer that came back was garbled. This had become increasingly frequent the farther he proceeded. “Repeat, please?”

“Just keep on trucking. I’ll let you know.”

Shit. If Snow was being coy, that meant he still had a ways to go.

Although the brain that controlled the Helix had been shut down to avoid some catastrophic chain reaction, the physical ring itself remained nominally powered; in essence, idling. It seemed endless. Logan tried occupying himself by counting the server racks he’d transited. Eight hundred ninety, eight hundred ninety-one —

“Logan,” came Snow’s voice. “Stop at the next set of interstices.”

He’d been at this repetitive motion so long, it felt like an effort to pause. Logan passed through the brief darkness between racks. “Okay.”

“That stenciling on the locking mechanism. What does it say?”

Logan had to pivot his head ninety degrees upward to take in the entire thing. “Four Nine Able Foxtrot… Three Two Charlie.”

“Okay. Go another two racks and read back its ID, please.”

Twenty seconds later, Logan repeated the process. “Four Nine Romeo Victor Zero One Zulu.”

“That’s it.” The garbled background noise of the lab grew briefly more distinct, and Logan heard Snow, conferring with Grady down there — here — by the Nexus. “I’m going to open a portal. Get ready.”

Logan waited. A moment later, a black circle suddenly opened right before his feet. “Christ!” he shouted. “You didn’t say it would be in the floor. I might have fallen.”

“You’re not going to fall. You’re going to jump in — now.”

Logan followed these instructions before he could think better of it. After about ten seconds of dropping past long, ghostly structures, he hit another floor — and bounced slightly.

“Ouch,” he said. In his childhood dreams, he’d never felt his feet actually hit the ground as he ran. How strange that a fiber-optic tube — real, yet artificially reconstructed in this VR simulacrum — seemed so much more tangible.

“You’re almost there. Now you’re going to need to help us out. I’ll explain as best I can. Around you, if my calculations are right, are the SSD drives storing Cardiff’s activities of September fifth, around 3:10 p.m. We know which ones contain the program he uploaded to the medical implants, because under a microscope the code-storage drives differ slightly from the drives holding visual feeds. But we can’t just go digging around randomly. So we’re essentially going to do a little brain surgery — and you’ll guide the scalpel. Follow?”

“No. Yes. I guess so.”

“There should be a single optical passage ahead of you now — narrower than the backbone you’ve been traveling through. Do you see it?”

“I’m at one end of it.” Rising to his feet, he realized just how narrow the transparent tube was — he’d have to crawl.

“Good. That’s a fiber-optic line that channels data to integrated circuits. The true ‘information superhighway’ — currently dormant, of course.”

“Of course.” Logan wondered what would happen if the Helix wasn’t dormant, and he was caught in a cramped tunnel suddenly busy with data. He shook these thoughts away.

“You’re looking for ICs in rows of four,” Snow said. “Ending in…” A pause. “Ending in nine-nine-four-nine.” He repeated the number.

Logan started crawling, looking through the tall forest of silicon that rose dimly on both sides like silent sentinels. Among the mass of wires, transistors, diodes, and other confusing guts of the circuit boards, he could see numbers etched into the facing edges. They were small, even to his eyes. “They all end in nine-nine-four-nine.”

“Good. Now: look for a specific set in which the conductive pathways on the underside of the boards are purple instead of green. Those are the ones we want. You’ll find five, maybe six total.”

Conductive pathways. Jesus. Logan moved forward more slowly, peering at the slabs of silicon. He could see what Snow was referring to: green lines like mazy rivers between projecting nodules of solder. As he crawled on, the green lines turned to purple.

He checked the number on the edge of the closest board. Nine-nine-four-nine.

“Found them,” he said.

Snow’s voice was suddenly tight with excitement. “How many?”

“Five, I think. Yes: five.”

“All right.” There was some background chatter. “Now listen. I want you to back up and brace yourself. You might feel an unusual sensation, a buzzing, or maybe heat. That will be your Omega device sending my man Grady an exact position. Next, Grady will extract the ICs you’ve located. You’ll need to confirm he got the right ones — and that he got them all. Ready?”

“What happens once I’ve—” Logan fell silent. A tickling started up, inside his skull just behind his ear. It became warm, like a thermal pad. And then the warmth grew intense, and still more intense, until it felt like the inside of his skull was being microwaved. Just as he realized it was the prototype Omega III unit that was causing this, and he raised his hands instinctively to pluck it off, there was a massive tremor, like an earthquake. Part of the silicon forest ahead of him vanished, to be replaced by a flood of overpowering light. Through this light came an object so frightful in bulk that for a moment, Logan didn’t notice that the pain in his head had vanished.

It was a huge pair of calipers, surrounded by spidery arms forming a diamond-shaped frame. On the ends of the calipers were feet of soft rubber, large as bookshelves. As Logan scrambled backward, and the calipers plucked out one of the monolithic slabs of silicon, he realized what they were: a pair of IC extractors, used to safely pull integrated circuits from their sockets. His heart was racing like mad. This was a situation beyond anything he’d ever imagined, and he willed his pulse to slow as he watched the extractor remove the five chips, one after the other.

There was a pause. Then the piercing light melted away; another brief earthquake followed; and the narrow corridor was once again cloaked in darkness.

“Did he get the right ones?” Snow asked, voice still tight.

Logan crawled forward, blinking in the dimness. “All five.”

“Fuck, yes!” There was a babel of chatter as Snow apparently began talking to several people at once — Mossby, Grady the worker bee, others Logan couldn’t distinguish. He let himself go limp in the narrow tube, back resting against the smooth virtual wall. They weren’t done yet, he knew: Mossby still had to successfully extract the rogue computer program from the chips just removed, recode it, and upload the fix to the client implants — but for the moment, all Logan could think of was the miraculous journey he’d just undertaken to retrieve those precious bytes. Buried treasure wasn’t a bad metaphor, after all. And it had taken the accumulated expertise of so many people, a synchronicity of technologies never intended to mesh, to —

Then he paused. The sounds of excited chatter in the background had changed. Over the garbled audio channel, he now heard what sounded like screams.

“Snow?” he called. “Hey, Snow! Can you hear me?”

He listened intently. They were undoubtedly screams — along with cries of pain. And there was something else, intermingled with the confusion and static: the steady, rhythmic chatter of machine guns.