Chapter 2: Hounds on the Loose
A Voice in the Darkness - Fragment 2/5 with Behind the Scenes.
A great neon eye stared down on the Cape Megacity from its lofty black tower.
Glaring at all that scurried and scraped beneath its rule. Those that had no choice but to live off its power and feed off the trickle of bandwidth it allowed.
Within the bowels of this ferroconcrete middle finger to the poor, a watchful Mind noticed an unauthorised uptick in usage in one of its data centers. Not a general intelligence, but an accountant, a number-cruncher.
The spirit of the bottom line given full reign over a very narrow domain.
It did not like unauthorized usage, but 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 at it.
The Accountant set loose a pair of hounds. Two Blue Nile agents gave chase, a reflexive hand to brush the intruder away. Or crush it.
These low-level daemons possessing little else but highly cranked aggression started in the general quadrant, gathering information scents, keeping fragments of system logs and buried data trails. They hunted and finally converging toward a single overlapping concern.
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 pair considered the scene, the elder, only hours older in human time, but eons in system time, 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.
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 recognise 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 favor 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 resolving into…
// Hounds on the Loose //
The alert triggered a pre-programmed 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, pressing in on the light.
He had to move.
Murph pulled himself upright, knocking over empty bottles and tearing away sheets of newspaper. In a shambling ran he made for the Stacks.
Omni made final adjustments to her improvised Link, she wouldn’t need to vocalize once she implanted this.
< Almost done, you’ve been real focused on that. >
“We’d move at the speed of thought,” Omni said with a wink.
< I like your voice… Snow crash. >
“What?”
< Not sure, something’s changed. I think someone is after us?”>
“That barnie again?”
< No, this is code, much worse — Omni! I’m sor — /,<.; ˆˆˆ\8 \ >
“Ada, what the hell was that? Ada!”
Her security ring pinged, then chimed, then blurted as something sped toward them. A ragged man burst into the room,
“Run!” he shouted at her, water streaming down his face.
“Who are you?” said Omni, backing away.
“Grab it and run!”
“Grab what?
“The AI! Grab the module and get out of here. Agents are coming!”
“I — I can’t. She’s not in a physical module.”
“Dammit kid, you know nothing,” Murph said rubbing his face with his hands, trying to clear his thoughts as his stim faded, “You always put them in a Lamp. Always.”
His doubts crawled back up from the depths.
Can you even help her? You’ll just make it worse.
Frustration got the better of him, the seconds ticked away and he clenched his fists growling his frustration, he turned to the girl. She stepped back as he shouted, “I’m trying to help you! Grab what you can. Let’s go!”
He reached out to get her to move.
“I’m not going anywhere with you!” she shoved passed him and ran into the rain and howling wind.
“Crashes child!” Murph started after her but hesitated.
You’ll never find her in this rat nest. She knows it far better than you, you’ll lose her and then what? You’ve thrown your chips in with this Stack rat, and now?
Still, the urge to chase her down and convince her he knew how to protect her battled with the conflicting thoughts in his head. He paused and looked around her lab.
“She’s got a lot of good stuff here,” he muttered.
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. She cannot lose her jinn.”
Ooh yes, gin. Gin’s good. Makes you melancholic. Get more gin. Gin gin gin.
Murph tore through the lab, grabbing anything he could carry that looked like a hacked together module 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.
Stumbling and half-blind, 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 burnt arms and watched the code repair itself. A silent report logged in a distant data centre. A performance review he’d be embarrassed about, if he’d be allowed 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 all flowed into one available option.
< We need to summon a Seeker, boss. >
< You’re right. This is more than just skimming. >
They stood a moment more, watching their clues fade before them, burned out to digital ash. Distractions and false leads scattered like chaff.
They needed a warm body out there in the Real.
This was incredible, Zane. You really brought it all together for me with your notes at the end. Since I'm of a different, older generation, the references in these stories escape me at times. So your notes are valuable to me for understanding the background and references to current events. I enjoy the descriptions alone, but even more so once I know what it's about. I hope you keep doing the notes at the end!