Trouble and Her Friends

The data itself slips unconstrained through the internal nets, the brainworm turning it sharp and sweet as candy, like a taste of honey in the wind.

A light flares, hot pink, winks instantly to the blue of IC(E), but she’s seen it and is moving, launching herself along the familiar paths. She draws armor about her as she goes, blue-grey IC(E) as sharp as steel, slips within the datashell in the blink of a code. The bright shards of data slid past unchanged, stinging rain against her skin. Nothing missing, nothing spoiled—but she queries the system and finds nothing there, too. No one has been there, the system says, and that is wrong. She sets the intruder alert wailing, sends the message racing along the datastream, confining all but the highest-level users to their own spheres. The lights dim around her as the internal codewalls thicken. Beyond it, the alarm flares like lightning, crackling along the lattice of the external IC(E); behind her, the junior syscops and their watchdogs come on-line, bright shapes coursing the system, leaving her to deal with the hole in the heart of their most secure system

Inside the cracked shell she finds the flaw, and behind it teases out the tangled bits that were her favorite monitor, and something else She lays the pieces out module by module and line by line, bright against a slab of black she conjures out of nothing, and separates her own program from the stranger She recognizes the hand at once, and swears softly, checks the routines again It’s a familiar program, anyway, though there’s no guarantee that the one who wrote it was the one who launched it against the company—but she feels the knowledge cold against her, the fragments of data pricking her fingers like shards of glass

Overhead, a syscop calls from where the system IC(E) was dented. It’s a bruise along the edge of one bright bar of the codewall, but it’s all the trail she’ll ever find. She leaves the scraps of program to the nearest watchdog, and lets herself out the way the stranger came in—the stranger who may not be a stranger, not at all. She puts that thought aside, and launches herself out into the greater net.

Power lies before her, planes and fields and streams of light, the familiar night-city that lies always in her core. She smiles her pleasure even as she shapes a tool to filter the information, searching for a method that was once as familiar to her as her own best tools, a hand on the keyboards as clever as her own. The program darts away, a shape vaguely like a bird, spiraling out across the glittering fields, finds a trace and stoops to it, transmitting codes. Numbers flash in front of her eyes—MATCH INEXACT, PROBABILITY OF MATCH 70.09%, FOLLOW YES/NO—but she barely sees them. The brainworm translates the same input into a touch, a scent and a feeling, like and yet not the same as the hand she thought she’d followed. Frowning now, she signals FOLLOW and lets the program run, drifting armored along the lines of light, through datastreams like rivers of white fire. She passes a familiar node, and then another, bathed in sudden flares as systems challenge and then accept her presence. She knows even before the stream slows and swells and tangles in and around itself that she will lose this trail in the spreading swamp of the BBS, the market delta where all the data in the world eventually collects, puddles, and, muddied, goes free.

The trail ends, her program vanishes with a spark like an exclamation point. She slows herself, surveying the vast and marshy space, where lines and lights merge and cross and twine like parasites around each other’s roots. There are few shadows here, at least to the sight, but the steady glow, the slow pulse and steady buzz of unprotected data, hides more than it reveals. She gives herself a moment longer, savoring the salt tang of the free data, then finds a familiar line and follows it, moving through the crowding symbols and the overloaded petty-nodes with the ease of long familiarity. A major node flashes green and welcoming at last, terminus and gateway for a thousand low-budget users. She touches it, whispers code, and lets it snatch her home.

Coigne called the meeting for breakfast the next morning, leaving her six hours to prepare. She didn’t really need the time, had done all that could be done in the first few minutes after the codewall had been breached, but she complained about it anyway, knowing Coigne would respect her more for objecting to his plans. She spent another hour or so reviewing the data her hardworking staff had culled from the records—there were no surprises there, nothing she hadn’t already figured out in the seconds it had taken her to analyze the wreckage of the program and to trace the stranger’s trail—and went to bed.

She was up before the alarm, showered and dressed to the familiar murmur of the in-house news service spilling from the muted screen. There was no word of the intrusion, even on the high-level channels that she was cleared for, and she didn’t quite know if she was glad of it, or worried. She listened with half an ear to the latest profit projections broken down by division—an exercise in controlled intimidation that she usually followed religiously, because the number-two and last-place divisions would be ripe for on-line mischief—and wondered what she was going to say to Coigne. As little as possible, she thought, as always, and reached into her closet for the rest of her suit. Most of her look was already in place, her nails painted the hard dull-surfaced fuchsia that looked like the icing on a cookie, a flat, cheap color that worried the suits who saw her because they didn’t know how she’d dare. She had painted her lips and cheeks and eyes the same hard color, shocking against the careful pallor of her skin, and the black of the chosen suit only intensified the effect. It was subtly wrong for her job, like the rest of her look—like all of her, wrong sex, wrong class, wrong attitude most of all: the skirt a little too short, the jacket too mannish, with none of the affectations or compromises of corporate femininity. The heels of her shoes were painted the same stark fuchsia as her nails.

She looked hard at herself in the mirror, straightening the narrow skirt a final time. It would do—she would do; the look would remind them none too subtly that she could dress the way she did, could walk into their boardroom on her terms because they needed her. She could afford to dress this way—she was the only one who could afford to dress this way—because she was who and what she was. She was the only one, of all of them, who had to.

She put that thought aside—not something she could afford to acknowledge, not with Coigne waiting—and turned to the banked consoles to collect the pocketbook system with its downloaded data. Everything she needed was there, from the sanitized version of her report—Coigne would get the real one—to the software that would let her display and manipulate those figures for the board, to the homebrew stripped-down interfaces that let her achieve limited access to the nets even from the low-powered pocketbook. It wasn’t enough to feed the brainworm, gave her only a standard view, but it was enough to work with. She touched an icon to check the directory one final time, then hit the sleeper key and folded the screen away. She took extra care to double-lock the flat’s door behind her when she left.

A car was waiting in the driveway, just outside the courtyard gates. Coigne’s car, she realized in the split second before the nearest window slid down to reveal the hard-boned face.

“Good morning, Cerise. I thought you might need a ride.”

“You still don’t trust me, Coigne.” She smiled to hide the cold knot in the pit of her stomach. It had not been in her mind to run, but the fact that Coigne had thought she might made her wonder if she should have done so. “I’m disappointed.”

“So am I.” Coigne’s face disappeared, and the door snapped open.

Cerise slid into the car’s dim interior, into the faint smell of leather and the sunlight cut by the smoky bulletproof windows. Coigne was outlined against the far window, a thin, fair man with white-blond hair cut close to the stark planes of his skull. His wide mouth twisted into a brief, humorless smile, and he leaned forward to touch a button on the control panel mounted just below the divider that separated the passengers from the driver’s pod. The door closed itself, and the car slid smoothly into gear, picking up speed as it passed through the courtyard gate and out onto the expressway feeder. It was all corporate land here, manicured to expensive perfection in front of the identical blocks of flats and houses bought from the same prefab supplier, allowed to go to an approximation of wilderness in the ditch that separated the access road from the feeder and the overarching flyway.

“So what happened?” Coigne asked.

Cerise reached into her carryall, handed him the disk she had prepared. “That’s my report.”

Coigne took it, slid it into the datadrive set into the armrest beside him. He slipped a pair of glasses from his breast pocket and plugged the fine cable into the drive before fitting the temple pieces over his ears. The dark backing on the display lenses made him look blind. “But what happened?” he said again.

“Pretty much what you see,” Cerise said, and then, because she knew he expected more, “Someone—a pretty skilled someone—pried a gap in main IC(E) and penetrated the Corvo division subgroup. Response time was excellent, and as far as I can tell nothing was damaged or stolen.”

“Copies?”

“Impossible to tell.” She gave the bad news without flinching, refusing to apologize or justify.