Trouble reaches out again, and, finally, feels her hand slide in the wrong direction, out away from the walkway. Found it, she says, and hears Cerise sigh in relief.
*I’m rigging our own codewall,* she says, my own IC(E). As she speaks, she sets the program running, sees the first clear-glass spokes of the lattice spin themselves out of thin air, and stoops to guide the forming wall. Her counterroutines fan out from it to face the watchdogs, backed by the secondary counters and then by a brace of icepicks. She will be able to release some of her programs through the IC(E)—it’s programmed to let them through—but that opening is a weakness that the Mayor may be able to exploit, if he can analyze the wall’s construction in time. She closes her mind to that thought, and concentrates on the wall itself. The spikes of IC(E) are stronger now, thicker, building on each other like crystals growing out of a solution, and she guides the pattern, walling herself and Trouble inside a glittering dome.
Trouble looks back over her shoulder, sees them encased in shards of bright glass—tinged here and there with purple, with fuchsia, a reinforcement lattice within the main system. She can leave the defense to Cerise—she has no choice, and anyway Cerise is the better at running IC(E); it’s always been her specialty and she’s had the time at Multiplane to hone her skills. Her own job is to concentrate on the Mayor, to root him out of the heart of his system, so that all of this, all the effort and anger, won’t have been in vain. She reaches out again, feels her hand stop as though she’s hit a barrier, knows it’s only the mismatch of sight and reality. She takes a deep breath, concentrates, and eases forward into chaos.
THIS TIME THE disorientation is worse, so that she can barely move at all, muscles throbbing with useless effort. Then, as she starts to pull back, to try again, her hand moves by chance as she wants it to go, straight ahead along the path traced by the walkway. She freezes in sudden understanding, her hand still outstretched toward the invisible IC(E). The silver ripples are puddled under her feet, solid silver that shimmers like cloth in a breeze. This time the mirror has inverted her perception as well as reversed it, or at least partly so; she must reach down to move ahead, as well as right to go left. But knowing isn’t the same as doing: she tries to take a step, and nearly falls, saves herself only by a graceless twist. There’s only one thing she can do, what she’s been doing all along, and she drops again to her knees, eyes closed, and gropes forward, running her hand across the surface of the walkway. It seems to rise slightly under her fingers, and she slides cautiously forward, not daring to open her eyes. She finds first one edge, and then the other, sweeping her hand back and forth like a blind woman’s cane, slides forward again on her knees. She reaches out, and her fingers shock painfully against hard IC(E), the pain of it driving up into her shoulder and down into her ribs.
She cries out, eyes flying open, and sees the world flung sideways around her, the walkway twisted like a Mobius strip, so that Cerise and the wall of their IC(E) hangs at an impossible angle. In the same instant an illusion of gravity tugs at her, so that she can feel herself on the verge of falling, a heartbeat, a second, a fraction of a second away from losing her grip on the walkway and spilling out into empty space. She squeezes her eyes shut, and the worst of the sensations vanishes. The pain in her arm returns, but the pins-and-needles feeling is already fading: just a warning, really, this time, just to let her know this IC(E) is diamond- hard.
She clings there, the red-black darkness behind her eyelids a perverse comfort, bracing herself to try again. She needs to see the Mayor’s IC(E) to breach it, needs to find a control point and destroy the illusion of invisibility, but to do that, she has to open her eyes. Tune the worm lower? she thinks, and discards the thought as quickly as it forms. She needs the full input, the full intensity and range of sensation, if she’s to beat the Mayor. She opens her eyes, swallowing nausea, makes herself ignore the tugging gravity, her palms flat on the walkway’s cool surface. She can still feel herself starting to fall, resists the temptation to go with that illusion, and flattens her whole body against the path, pressing herself, hips and thighs and breasts and shoulders, into the silver surface as though she would embrace it. She lays her cheek against the rippling light, imagines she feels the faint ebb and flow of it against her skin. The falling sensation recedes a little, and she shifts her head to study the invisible IC(E) and the illusion that protects it.
The shield is very well made, a seamless, recursive image, the walkway twisting back on itself; its surface stretches without flaw, without a glitch in the code to give her a handle. And even if she found one, she thinks, she couldn’t reach it, not lying flat like this, trapped by the illusion that surrounds her… She suppresses the thought, shifts her head again. Gravity clutches harder with each fractional movement, threatening to pry her from her place. She tells herself it is unreal, an image, a sensation, transmitted by the brainworm; tells herself then that she is coated in glue, that she will stick to the walkway, that she cannot fall. Slowly, she reaches out again, sliding her hand along the cool and silver-rippling surface, gropes for the control points she has found before. She finds nothing, just the inchoate, general presence—not even warmth, just the tremor of movement—of the silver ripples that have gathered there under her body. She starts to reach for the IC(E), to try a blind assault, but stops herself, makes herself pause again and think. There is something about the way the light moves beneath her body, something familiar in the faint sensation…
And then she has it, the source of the memory and of the answer all in one: the light is an echo, incomplete and nearly insubstantial, of the bright control points she has seen outside the pyramid. Either it hides the control points in its diffuse light or it is in itself a control mechanism, fragile and ephemeral, hard to manipulate but as effective as any more permanent node. She lies very still, letting the sensations seep through her, the gentle pulse gather against her skin. No control points are hidden in the seashell flicker; the light itself, the cool delicate ripples of it, is the mechanism. She presses her hand flat, as though she would force it through the rigid surface, spreads her fingers and watches the ripples spread and then return, rebounding from the edge of the invisible IC(E). She shifts her hand again, wriggling her fingers, feels the ripples build, bouncing back from the IC(E), from the walkway’s edge, from the surface of her body. The feedback swells, a flush of heat now present in the walk beneath her hand, where the program has to manifest in order to maintain control of the illusion. She waits, letting the substance build, and feels an override cut in, emerging to banish the program before it can be manipulated. She closes her hand, feeling the pulse of the override strum through her body, and her fingers sink deep into the solid warmth of a temporary control point. She twists her hand, shuts off the override, and the program vanishes, leaving her abruptly chilled. But the control point stays warm in the palm of her hand, as though she holds a handful of embers.
And that’s all she needs. The Mayor set his reality to respond to these controls; she adjusts it, carefully, feels gravity vanish and then return, oriented now so that she can stand straight against it, feel its pull through the soles of her feet. She strips away the illusion covering the IC(E), and a wall like a tangle of thornbrush spun from glass blinks into existence in front of her. The light that streams from it is all but blinding, hiding detail. She blinks, eyes watering, looks away, and in that instant the control point evaporates in her hand. She braces herself for the return of the illusions she has banished, but the walkway stays beneath her, and the wall of IC(E) remains. She studies it, head cocked to one side, does her best to ignore time passing, the knowledge that there’s only Cerise watching her back, keeping back the active defenses. The pattern of the thorn wall shifts and shimmers, writhing as though alive, as though with heat, and then, quite suddenly, she sees it, sees the key. It is like Cerise’s work, just as Cerise said, the complexity of the system elaborated and reelaborated from a matrix Trouble remembers all too well. She smiles, tasting triumph, reaches into the glittering hedge; the spines stab her hand, and then skid painfully along her arm as she reaches deep into the tangled code, leaving dark trails like blood against her skin. She ignores them, ignores the pain shivering through her, finds the single branch that is the key to the pattern. She takes it in two fingers, delicately, presses down and away. The glass resists, impossibly, bends and stretches, and then, suddenly overloaded, snaps like a brittle twig. The wall of IC(E) vanishes as though it had never been.
She stands at the edge of a space so mundane that it must mirror reality, a room crowded with hardware, a room with a desk and a lamp and a single window that shows rooftops and the arc of the Parcade Ferris wheel. The Mayor stands in the center of that space, frozen in the heart of his machines, at one with his machines, clothed in sheets of chips and wrapped with flickers of wire, each hand splayed wide across control mechanisms impossibly magnified, so that with the flick of a finger he shifts electrons, changes, recreates
