Chapter 02 - Hounds on the Loose

Slave to Memory [3 of 44] - Hounds chase a gifted teen through neon-lit Stacks. A mysterious AI, a desperate man, and corporate daemons collide in a high-stakes digital hunt.

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From atop its towering perch, a neon eye scrutinized the patchwork city below. Crumbling gray sat next to crystal glass and rusted metal. Citizens in the shadows called this aggradation of humanity Escape, for all they wanted to do. The rich had their own names, too.

The eye glared at all that scurried and scraped beneath its rule. Those that had no choice but to live off its power and feed off the censored data trickle it allowed.

Within the bowels of this ferroconcrete middle finger, a watchful Mind, the spirit of the bottom line, noticed an unauthorized uptick in usage in one of its data centers.

Not a general intelligence no that was illegal, or at least heavily regulated. No, this was just a narrow, a specialist, but this number-cruncher did not like unauthorized usage. Nothing got higher up its digital nostrils than unbilled usage.

Just as a man may feel a spider crawling across his naked leg and swat it, this Accountant, jealous of the Company's resources, unleashed two hounds. Sending these two daemon enforcers to track and neutralise the skimmer.

A reflexive hand to brush the intruder away. Or crush it.

These two Company agents—low-level daemons possessing little else but highly cranked aggression—gave chase.

They started in the general quadrant, gathering information scents, finding fragments of system logs and buried data trails. They hunted and pursued, finally converging on a single overlapping concern. They discovered the breach, appearing in the Verse, as a gaping tear in a wall of flaming bricks. Electricity crackled and sparked from the fissures as loose and cracked fragments tumbled to the floor.

The Hounds considered the scene, the elder, only hours older in human time, but eons at their system clock speed, nodded at the younger daemon, "We have the breach," an echo of his statement scurried back to a growing database for the Accountant to cross-reference and catalog.

If it were human, it would be chew a cuticle. But it was not, so it scanned oceans of database, until the discomfort went away.

The younger manifested a black tie and straightened it before pulling out a gun. The other put on a pair of black-lensed aviators. They looked like evil twins in dark gray suits, white shirts and now matching black skinny ties.

Hackers of the old Net would recognize the reference. Their code traced part of its lineage from the cinematic fantasies of their creators.

They stepped through the punctured firewall and set out, leaving the orderly confines of the audited corporate network for the trash streams and data dumps of the public Net.

A billion anti-corporate scents filled the noses of the two hounds, but they ignored them all in favour of one that led to a teenage girl in the Stacks.

Murph woke with a start in an alley, his own daemons cursing him awake. They jolted him awake with klaxons and neon text in the center of his blurry field of view.

Hands to his aching head, he squeezed his eyes shut and slowly opened to read the words that resolved into…

// Hounds on the Loose //

The alert triggered a pre-programed cascade that jolted a stim of synthetic adrenalin into his veins, erasing the last whispers of happier dreams. An old after-market add-on he'd long forgotten flooded his body with electric cool, buying him precious moments of lucidity.

He gasped, "Save her."

His singular purpose burned anew in his mind, pushing back the shadows, the voices, and the darkness. But they swirled still, and pressed in on the light.

He had to move.

Murph pulled himself upright, knocked over empty bottles and tore away sheets of newspaper.

In a shambling run he made for the Stacks.

Omni made final adjustments to her improvised Link, she wouldn't need to vocalize once she finished.

< Almost done, you've been real focused on that, > Ada's thought-spoke in Omni's mind.

"We'd move at the speed of thought," Omni said with a wink.

< I like your voice… ^%/ — > said Ada, her voice garbling.

"What was that?" said Omni, dropping her tools.

< Not sure, something's changed, > said Ada. She sounded confused. < I think someone is after us? >

"That barnie again?"

< No, this is code, much worse — Omni! I'm sor — /,<.; ˆˆˆ\8 \ >

"Ada? Ada**!**" Omni cried.

She jumped to her feet as her perimeter security sensors pinged, then chimed, then blurted as something sped toward them.

A ragged man burst in, rain-soaked and desperate.

"Grab it and run!" he panted.

Omni, startled, stepped back. "Who are you?"

Her voice trembled, not just from fear, but from the sudden intrusion of reality into her digital dominion.

"Grab what?" Omni's mind swirled.

Ada's disconnected, and this man appears. It couldn't be a coincidence.

"Your djinn,” he said and leaned forward and speaking in a conspiratorial whisper, “Your rogue AI — grab the module and get out of here. They're after you."

"Who? I — I can't. She's not in a physical module."

"Dammit kid, you know nothing," the man said. He rubbed at his face, wiping the water off his head. "You always put them in a Lamp. Always."

Omni didn't understand. She didn't know this raving mad man. Did he know what happened to Ada? He seemed to.

The man clenched his fists, growling his frustration. "I'm trying to help you! Grab what you can," he turned to Omni, and she stepped back as he shouted, "Let's go!"

He reached out to get her to move.

"I'm not going anywhere with you!" she shoved past him and ran into the rain and howling wind.

"Dammit, child!" she heard him yell. He started after her, but hesitated and that was all she needed to disappear.

You'll never find her in this rat nest. She knows it far better than you. You've thrown your chips in with this Stack rat. You'll lose her, and then what?

Still, the urge to chase her down and convince her he knew how to protect her battled with the conflicting voices in his head. Murph glanced around her lab.

"She's got a lot of good stuff here," he said.

Go ahead, steal something. Anything for a meal and out of that damn alley.

Or even better, something more to numb the pain. To forget. You deserve that.

"No, I need to find her Lamp," he said to himself, searching through her collection of salvaged and stolen tech.

He wasn't finding it, "She can't lose her djinn."

Ooh yes, gin. Gin's good. Makes you melancholic. Get more gin. Gin gin gin.

"What did she call her?" Murph tore through the lab. "Ada?"

He grabbed anything he could carry that looked like a hacked together module. A home for an artificial mind. He filled his backpack and as he reached for the last piece of upcycled tech, tearing it free from its cables, the room exploded in light.

Around him a ring of lights burst on, alarms blared, and he fell out of the container, stunned.

Oh, now you've done it. Run, Murph, run.

He stumbled half-blind down the stairs and he fled into the night.

In a disconnected dead end of a cobbled together network of cables and aging Starlinks, two humanoid entities of code and malice stood, a sinking code routine weighing down in their guts.

"This was… unexpected," said Senior.

Junior nodded.

The older hound looked at his burned arms and watched his code repair itself, raw polygons reforming and morphing back into his normal self. A silent report logged into a distant data center. A performance review he'd be embarrassed about, if they allowed him enough Compute to feel that.

"She's gone dark," said the older hound to the pup.

It was obvious, but he didn't know what else to say. He'd run out of sub-routines. They'd reached a dead end. All decision-trees flowed into one available option.

< We need to summon a Seeker, boss, > the younger pup transmitted.

< You're right, > the elder replied, but he hesitated. There would be no turning back, and they'd seed control. He scanned the local network. < This is more than just skimming. She's built something. >

They stood a moment more, watching their clues fade before them, burned out to digital ash. And fired off the request at the speed of light.

Distractions and false leads scattered like chaff. They needed a warm body out there in the Real.

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