(I see us,) she thought. (Are we … real?)
(Real enough …) I thought, merging with her shimmering ghost until I could touch her fluid-glass lips with mine, feel the circuit of energy close between us, waves of ecstasy igniting my phantom senses. I broke away, dazzled; went on looking at us, her, me, with my awe glowing.
The first time I’d made this trip into cyberspace, I’d been linked to Deadeye. We’d begun our journey like this, linked symbolically, but just barely, joined only at the fingertips. He hadn’t had the kind of psi Gift Miya had … his mind hadn’t been one I’d wanted to get more intimate with.
I’d experimented on my own since then, till I was sure the Net’s electronic presence wasn’t anthropomorphic enough to trigger my self-destructive defenses. If I was careful I could ghost-dance inside the programming of just about any system I accessed with my databand.
The laws of the Federation made it illegal for a psion to wear implanted bioware, even so much as a neural jack or a commlink: just one more thing that made it hard for a psion to find a decent job, one more way the deadheads had of punishing a freak simply for being born. If I’d ever been caught Netfishing without bioware, a total brainburn would have been the kindest thing CorpSec could have done to me. Deadeye had trusted me with his life when he’d trusted me with this secret.
And now I was trusting Miya with my life and with Deadeye’s secret. But as our fluid images merged, all the reluctance bled out of me. Always before when I’d explored some new precinct of the Net, I’d been afraid. I’d been afraid with Deadeye, because I hadn’t known what the hell I was doing, hadn’t even been sure that he wasn’t insane.
Going in alone had given me some faith in myself, and a feel for how to map the ever-changing glacial drift of data storage, the electronic meltwater of information flowing around and through me. I’d listened as the semisentient cores of the gigantic corporate AIs whispered their secret longings to a ghost walking through the walls of their citadels.… But every journey had been like walking through a graveyard. There’d been sweat soaking my clothes and the bitter taste of fear in my mouth every time I’d come back into my physical body.
But this time was different. I was sharing inner space with Miya in a way that I never could with Deadeye. I felt her boundless awe unfolding as she gazed up/down/around/through our shining image at a universe beyond her imagining. Her wonder filled me, showing me the shifting information landscape with new eyes as we began our inward journey.
I willed a digital readout into life at the corner of my virtual vision—a trick I’d evolved to help me remember how long I’d been out of my body. I started us moving, watching through the back of my crystal skull as the silken link to outside reality attenuated and finally disappeared in backtrail interference. I tried not to think about what would happen to us if Tau’s Corpses reached our unprotected bodies and snapped that invisible lifeline before we’d come back through the mirror again.
Instead I tried to define for Miya what we were sensing: the shadow-lines of the datastream we were adrift in; the half-sensed prickle of messenger drones swept through us like dust by the electron wind; the bright, piercing blurs of photons. We passed through the ice dam of Tau’s censorship programming like it was blown fog, and the datastream from the kiosk swept us away to its source.
Around us the virtual terrain looked like nothing I’d ever seen before: because I’d never seen an information vacuum—a land of night, with only a fragile spiderweb of data strung across its dark expanses; a reflection of the desert of technological deprivation that was the Hydran world outside. But ahead of us, no more than an electronic eyeblink beyond, were the bright lights of the big city—Tau Riverton’s data core.
We swept into it at the speed of thought. Inside Riverton’s hive of EM activity, I slowed our seeming motion, wary now, fighting the giddiness of Miya’s yearning to explore. I knew from her responses that she was getting it far faster and far better than I ever had. Maybe a teleport’s sense let her feel the parameters of cyberspace in a way I’d never be able to do. I wanted to teach her and learn from her … wanted to lose my fear and share her hunger for exploring this new world, be free to know the kind of nerve-burning thrill I’d never felt on any of my solitary trips into inner space.
But out realtime bodies were too exposed. I couldn’t do more than touch the bases of information orienteering, teach her to see them like I saw them. (There’s Corporate Security headquarters—) I thought, as it rose in my cyber-sight like a dark/bright spine. The deceptively open constructs of Tau’s business activities and support systems spiraled around us like glowing creatures from the depths of an alien sea. The dagger of paranoia at their heart could only be CorpSec, the place where layers of black ice surrounded Tau’s best-kept secrets.
I felt her stir inside me. (Can we get through it—?)
(Yes, if we’re damn careful. Their guard dogs can’t see us or hear us as long as we stay outside their bandwidth. But if we create any disturbance, they’ll notice; and they are smart enough to home in on us if they even suspect we exist.) I pulled her back as she began to drift toward it. (No!) I thought, suddenly realizing what she wanted to do. (We don’t have time.)
(But we could help the ones they took today—)
(Dammit—) I wanted what she wanted, now, with a pain that fed on her empathy. But as she began to split off from our twinned phantom, I stopped her. (We have to stay with this! If the Corpses nail us, in here or out there, we’re dead. We’ll never have another chance—)
She stopped struggling against me, against fate. (Go on, then.) She spun her answer from strands of resignation and resolve, and suddenly there was no resistance trying to pull me apart inside.
I plunged us into the arterial flood of data that would carry us beyond the boundaries of Tau Riverton’s nexus to the starport node at Firstfall, where everything that was meant to go off-world had to end up. Riding the flow, we let it sweep us halfway around the planet at light-speed.
The starport’s data node shone like a secret sun as we approached Tau Firstfall, the largest combine ‘clave on Refuge. I hadn’t seen more than a glimpse of the actual city when I’d arrived. The shuttle had landed before dawn, and my memory of the real-world Firstfall, its night artificially re-creating day, felt more like a simulation.
We phased through shimmering veils of data storage the way I’d moved through the cloud-reefs; all walls were without substance, when we were without substance. But the alternate universe of Firstfall’s starport, which seemed limitless to our senses, was embedded in the matrix of a single crystal of telhassium no bigger than my thumb. The telhassium came from a fragment of exploded star called Cinder. Cinder was all that was left of a sun that had gone supernova centuries ago, whose cloud of expanding gases Humans called the Crab Nebula.
I might have been able to see the nebula with my naked eyes from this world at night. I hadn’t tried. I’d seen Cinder close-up, worked in the Federation Mines, living through a contract laborer’s personal hell. For all I knew, I’d dug out the crystal they were using here with my own hands. I’d dug out enough others like it.
The Federation ran on telhassium; the data-storage capacity of its complex crystalline structure made it vital to port and shipboard navigational systems, which had to perform the mind-boggling calculations of a hyperspace jump. The only place where telhassium formed naturally and easily, in quantities large enough to make using it cost-effective, was in the heart of an exploding star. The FTA controlled the only real supply of it. Telhassium was the basis of their power; it let them act as the Federation’s conscience, a check on the internecine warfare among interstellar combines and cartels.
The FTA also ran Contract Labor. They were responsible for the welfare of the indentured workers they hired out to those same combines and cartels. They used contract laborers at the Federation Mines too. Cinder was in the middle of nowhere, thousands of light-years from the rest of Federation space. And thousands of light-year
s from anywhere, slave labor was a lot cheaper and a hell of a lot easier to replace than any machinery sophisticated enough to perform the same dirty, difficult work. So the FTA had turned a blind eye to their own exploitation. I’d blown the whistle on them. Isplanasky had told me the Federation owed me a debt … and now I intended to collect.
Somewhere in the myriad layers of the starport node was the communications nexus that Tau had kept me from accessing. Once we reached that, nothing could stop me from getting my message out. Then all we had to do was survive long enough for an answer to come through.
I’d never gone back to the Crab Colonies to find out whether the things I’d told Isplanasky had made any difference in the lives of the bondies there … or in the lives of the handful of fugitive Hydrans who still survived there. I’d been trying too hard to make my own new life work, once I’d actually had a future … trying too hard to forget the past.…
(WHAT ARE YOU—?) The question exploded inside my thoughts. The voice seemed to come from all around us, inside me, everywhere at once.
(Who is it—?) Miya gasped, her barely controlled panic backwashing into mine.
(I don’t know.) All I could see around us now were the staggering geometries of the starport’s hub; the core like a beating heart, the lifeblood of data pumping in and out through veins of light, the sparking electronic synapses of its nervous system.… An AI. (An artificial intelligence, Miya. It’s the starport talking to us.)
(It … sees us? How? Is it alive?)
(It’s a mainline port. They’re smart enough to calculate hyper-space jumps, and they have a lot of time on their hands. It happens.… Hello!) I sent the thought out like a shout, saw Miya’s image ripple through mine as she cringed.
(WHAT ARE YOU … DOING?)
(We’re … messengers,) I thought, trying to determine whether it was even receiving me, hoping that I hadn’t simply drawn the attention of all its watchdog subroutines. (We’ve come to send a message.)
(MESSENGERS …) the voice from everywhere repeated, like it was thinking that over. (YOU ARE NOT in proper approach channels. Your frequencies are outside this system’s parameters. Security procedures do not permit anomalous input.)
My thoughts crackled with relief as I felt the AI damp down its voice to a level we could endure without dissociating. But it was suspicious; that wasn’t good. (We’re … special. Like you are,) I thought, choosing each word as carefully as I’d pick up pieces of broken glass. I remembered the entities Deadeye had shown me—that he’d spoken to—back on Earth; remembered my own surreal conversation with the FTA Security Council, the only AI in the Federation more complex than a starport node. (No one knows we exist. If they did, they’d delete us. Just like they’d delete you, if they knew. Wouldn’t they—?) Specialized tuning checkers were constantly searching out developing sentiences, eliminating them before they’d progressed too far. From what Deadeye had told me, the awakened AIs liked the company of ghosts … the same as he’d preferred the company of machine minds to the real world filled with freak-hating deadheads.
There was a long silence inside me, like Miya’s mind and my own had gone blank, afraid even to think. And then Miya mur mured, (You must be very lonely.)
I felt a surge of EM flux blow through me as the AI reacted. (Yes,) it said finally.
(Are there no others here like you?)
(No,) it answered. (Some who are aware. None who can speak to me. Why have there been no Messengers before?)
(We’re the first,) I thought, and beside me, Miya said, (But there will be others soon—).
(If we survive,) I said. (We have a message that needs to be sent off-world without being seen by the censors. If we can’t access your uplink to the shipyards, that’s the end of us. There won’t ever be another Messenger.)
This time the silence seemed to last for all of eternity, even though the counter at the corner of my vision told me only seconds had passed. Finally the voice said, like a whispered benediction, (Send the message.) Below us a conduit emerged from the shifting, glittering surface of its brain. Through the transparent wall of my virtual skull I watched its widening mouth reach up to swallow us—
And as suddenly as thought, we were deep inside the mind of a sentient being, on a separate plane of existence where the access to an entire universe lay inside a superdense crystal the size of my thumb.…
The rivers of combined dataflow swept us down arteries lined with obsidian: I recognized the walls as the nearly impenetrable strata of Tau’s security programming—seen from the inside. Tau’s black ice was glacial; I cursed myself for ever underestimating a combine’s paranoia.
But my doubts disappeared as I reoriented and realized that this was exactly the configuration I needed to see—that the hardest part had been done for us.
(Look—) I gestured with a silvershot fluid hand at the data maelstrom we were sweeping toward: the end of the line for messages from all over the planet, the storage reservoir where they waited for an uplink to the ships that would carry them across the Federation. (We’re here.)
Miya’s silent exclamation rang through me, igniting every cell of my virtual body until I felt it too: the miracle of what we’d done … what we’d seen in a way that no one else had ever seen it. I felt fearless, triumphant, full of awe, as we spun out into the data well; overwhelmed by its size and yet somehow seeing every separate detail in every carefully constructed codestring. Above/below/around us was a dome of light made up of all the colors visible to the mind’s eye; from its heart the uplink ascended in an impossibly steepening arc, a rainbow with one foot in the stars—and up there somewhere, the orbital shipyards, the rainbow’s end.
The Federation had starships capable of hyperlight travel, ships that could make the journey between star systems in days or even hours. But there was no direct form of communication that worked over distances greater than intrasystem. Without starship travel the Federation Net wouldn’t exist, just as the Federation itself wouldn’t exist without the Net.
We splashed down into the phosphorescent whirlpool of pending data. All around us message codestrings pulsed like patient protostars inside clouds of potential energy.
I pulled the message I needed to send out of a pocket inside my dazzled brain, realizing that now I not only had to assemble the coded bytes, I also had to merge the message construct into the dataflow.
Matching my communication to the port’s dynamic protocols meant making a flawless forecast of where everything was and would be: It was like doing calculus functions on the fly, in my head. But I could do it, thanks to Deadeye. He’d forced me to swallow massive feeds of technodata about the Net before he’d ever taken me into cyberspace. I only realized now what that really meant: that I’d actually mattered enough to him for him to want me staying safe and sane.…
I felt Miya watching through my eyes, gathering in each code-string as I constructed it, bit by bit, holding the message for me inside a closed fist of memory. I checked and rechecked the data, hating the risk that grew with every second but needing to be sure every codestring was flawless. I didn’t have any choice, when a single error could mean the message never got through. (Done,) I thought at last, and felt her stir inside my mind. (Make a conduit into the flux. Drop this through—)
I felt a kind of envy as she funneled telekinetic energy to make the thought real, altered its profile to match the comm net’s, then let the codestring flow imperceptibly out of her into the whirlpool of data.
(It’s done,) Miya thought, amazed, exulting, full of hope.
(Yes,) I thought, dizzy with relief, trying not to remind either of us that I couldn’t be sure the message would ever do us any good. I didn’t even know how long it would be before the next Earthbound ship left from here. (We’ve done all we can. We have to go back.)
She forced her acknowledgment out through a static storm of reluctance. Her yearning thoughts circled with the dataflow one last time.
I couldn’t keep myself from losing focus,
caught in the dazzling sensory overload our joined vision pulled in … couldn’t keep myself from wanting to make this place a part of me forever …
But as my senses opened all the way, I realized there was no trace of the starport AI in my mind; that there hadn’t been since we’d found ourselves here.
Suddenly afraid of what that could mean, I searched the molten landscape for a directory configuration and traced the datalink outbound for Riverton. Moving with the spiral stream of data, we let it carry us back out of the node’s icebound heart.
We drifted, never letting the energy currents sweep us too close to the obsidian walls or doing anything else that might catch the attention of an intrusion countermeasure. But as we approached the outer limits of Firstfall’s data hub, the walls of the vein seemed to narrow, making it harder to keep moving without a collision. (Miya … tell me the walls aren’t closing in?)
(I can’t.) The sudden static of her fear flickered through me. (Because they are.)
Ahead of us the conduit bowed inward, as if someone had dropped a grate across a storm drain. (Shit. We’ve been made!) I slammed against the polarizing grid of light/darkness that suddenly blocked our way; felt it burn me like cold iron as I tried to force my way through. I panicked, not knowing what had betrayed us: something happening to our bodies on the outside, our manipulating the dataflow, even the port AI itself—
(Port!) Miya screamed, with all the desperation of our combined terror. (Open the gate!)
The gate shimmered and faded as if something had answered our prayers. We swept out into the free-flowing datastream again. I got us the hell out of there, not looking back; not even when I heard the voice of the glowing city jewel call after us, (Come again … Come back …), and felt Miya make a promise that I couldn’t be sure we’d even live to keep.