The apartment building's hallway was dim compared to the daylight. The globes were grey with dirt, and only a few of the bulbs behind them hadn't burned out. Hugo blinked in the gloom, letting his eyes adjust. He'd lived in the building long enough that its smell – a combination of off-brand disinfectant, stale beer, and rotting linoleum – hardly registered anymore.
He trotted down the rancid hallway, the slap of his sandals announcing his progress towards his own apartment. Then it was a matter of fishing for the keys in his pocket, shuffling the grocery bags to switch arms, and blinking again at the even deeper darkness of his abode. It smelled slightly of ramen and unwashed socks, and deeper inside, shadows danced to pale green electric lights.
He had to wrestle to free his key from the lock, trying not to squeeze the groceries as he did so. The ancient tumbler lock had claimed three keys already, and Jules kept saying they ought to get a new one, but he'd cracked too many card-swipes as a kid, just for fun, to even take the modern devices seriously. Not that it mattered; they didn't keep much cash around, they ran back-ups daily, and the comps were heavily alarmed. Even then, hardware was hardware. As far as Hugo was concerned, the only things he had that were truly irreplaceable were his roommate and the circuitry set into his own right hand.
"Jules! Food!" he called once he'd finally freed the key and could close the door behind himself. "Food and gossip. You'll never guess who I saw at the shops."
There was a rustle in the gloom as Hugo tugged the chord on the ancient Venetian blinds, filling the room with brash daylight. It illuminated tangles of wires, cases and circuit boards and scattered computer guts, a shredded tweed couch, keyboards, servers, and, on nearly every flat surface, stacked styrofoam cups that had at some point contained instant ramen.
It also revealed a chair whose existence had only been vaguely hinted by the dim glow of LEDs and an old monitor. The chair spun around, and its lanky occupant blinked up at Hugo.
"Food and gossip I'll take, but did you have to let the Daystar in? It burns," he complained, shielding his eyes. His red hair was tousled, unwashed, and several months due a haircut. "And did you get the landlord to agree to fix the tub yet? I'm this close to breaking into some rich guy's system just so I can go shower someplace."
"Sunlight only hurts vampires," Hugo said, clearing a space on the desk for the groceries. "They've blood-red eyes, and yours are still green. Landlord says it'll be another week before he can get someone to check things out, but Bart extends the offer of his shower until then. And this." He produced a plump red tomato from the bag. "You need to eat more vegetables anyway."
"It's a fruit," Julius "Caesar" Silvermount pointed out, but reached for it anyway. "I've decided to nominate him for sainthood, by the way. That he gets anything to grow in the bowels of the city is ten times the miracle walking on water would be. Anyway, you said gossip?"
Hugo nodded, collecting some of the empty ramen cups. "Bart says Perce is working late every night this week. Something big is going down at XN Corp, but he says only a very few teams are in on it. Senior hackers and 'divers only. No suits, no monkeys."
Julius frowned, brushing his hair out of his eyes. "Hmm. I wonder if that's to do with what Tom was saying." At Hugo's questioning glance, he elaborated. "He left us a holo just after you left, mentioned a big job later this week. He didn't give the details – said he had to take Ceci to County General on account of the twins. Just a check-up, I think. He wasn't in enough of a frenzy for it to be time. Anyway, he mentioned Kris might be joining us, and she's Perce's boss."
Hugo grimaced. "Perce is well enough, but if 'Lady Lumina' is on the job, Satan will have to salt his sidewalk and plow the driveway before I have anything to do with it."
"Are you ever going to let that grudge go?" Julius asked in exasperated tones. "You know she was doing was a livewire, hot-trigger run. Back before the basic safeties were in place, so she had to worry about every packet, 'cos even if they were clean, if they came too fast her meatware was toast just from the current. She had that L.O.O.K. bastard breathing down her neck, too."
"Yeah, but Lou was just a kid," Hugo muttered. "He didn't know anything about L.O.O.K. or any of the other Destroyerz. He was just a kid, on his first 'dive."
"I know!" Julius slapped the desk in frustration, and hit the keypad. The displays danced. With a curse, he turned back to the monitors and began typing. "Dammit, Hugo, I know. And I'm sick of rehashing it. Just give it a rest for once, and don't demand we refuse the job until we know she's even in on it."
"Fine, fine. I'll wait until Tom gives us the specifics." He said it to appease his roommate, but the image of Lou, alone in the long-term ward of County General, hovered in the corner of his mind. He'd wait, and if Tom said Lady Lumina was on the job, they wouldn't take it. That's all there was to it.
Julius finished his corrections in silence, and jabbed the input lock key with extra vehemence. "Good. We need the work.
"Was that all the gossip you had? Offer of a shower and a big to-do up at XN Corp?"
"Oh, right." Hugo shook his head, trying to recover his earlier mood as easily as his partner had. "Guess who I ran into today. Rody."
"In the flesh?" Julius spun himself around in his chair. "Seriously? Our old friend Greek-ro-capital-de? Is he still running around with the guy who calls himself asterisks or whatever?"
"Hah, yes. Only he says it's pronounced 'Estrella.' Says they're Spanish asterisks, which we'd know if we looked at chat logs in Hex. Or something like that. Anyway, she told him she'd teach him to hack and crack. So what's the first thing she's had him do? Download a rootkit for the latest hARMONĒ release and hijack machines to send spam. She's got him selling herbal supplements and porn. Promised him a commission on all sales."
"Scriptkiddies," Julius said with contempt, spinning back to the computer. "Indiscriminant mayhem with someone else's tools. No skill, no creativity, no finesse. Spamming, to boot. And they always go after Jay Random clueless hARMONĒ user, so no ambition. Zero skepticism, it seems. The mythical existence of extant Spanish charsets aside, these are just the basic Unicode 002A anyway. Did he by chance share his addy? I'd like to mayhem his box."
Hugo snickered. "No, he says Estrella made him promise to only share it with her. It's their secret. Oh, and she's the most beautiful woman in the world. He knows because she sent him a picture. And it's really a picture of her, honest-to-god."
"Oh, for the love of Pete," Julius said, pretending to throw up. "Someone contact the media. Or a priest – I think the end times are coming. Rody's finally hit puberty."
----------
A few days later, Hugo and Julius made their way to meet Tom Bodhuck and the rest of his recruits at a local bar.
The place had been classy and modern one day; that day had been roughly thirty years ago. Still, it was reasonably clean, the barkeepers didn't gob in the drinks and the clientele were relatively nonviolent. Among those who wanted to get plastered, most generally went from upright to horizontal rather peacefully; for the rest, there were the bouncers Leo and Borus. Every few years, ownership changed hands and consequently the place was renamed, but the main bartender stayed on; as a result everyone just called the place "Anne's".
"What's the name these days?" Jules asked, squinting as they approached the painted-brick shop front. The sign was painted in psychedelic colors and illuminated by a couple of cheap sodium lights. "The LoveShack. I like it." A few aged bells tinkled as they pushed through the door and down the steps to the dim interior. Already there was a haze of smoke in the air. Hugo shoved his right hand deep in his pocked and covered his mouth with the other, trying to breath through the sleeve.
It was early yet, and the crowd was thin. A group of actors from a local theatre, some still in greasepaint, sat in one corner, smoking and chatting. An auto mechanic, a regular named Kathy, nursed her drink at the bar while a man old enough to be her father tried unsuccessfully to chat her up. Leo, bouncing solo that evening, kept one eye on that situation. At one of the tables, a pale-skinned Southern couple shared drinks and an order of fries. Julius stared unabashedly at their pointed, pierced ears until Hugo elbowed him and they gravitated to the bar.
The bar was currently tended by the eponymous Anne; she was smoking a cigarette and reading a celebrity gossip rag. "You order anything 'sides a soda, I want some ID," she told them in a voice that brooked no nonsense, not looking up.
"Hey, Anne. Tom been here today?" Julius asked, dropping a fiver on the scarred and graffit'd wooden counter. "A glass of whatever's on tap, please."
"Oh, it's you boys." The woman's olive face split into a grin, and she cupped her free hand over the end of the cigarette. "He's in the back room, 'cuz it's business. Your usual, Hugo?"
"Yeah." He dug in his pocket for the cost of a diet cola while Anne pulled Julius's pint and his soda.
"Aspartame's stunting your growth, 'diver-boy," she told him as she counted out their change. "You'd better kick the habit or you still won't be tall enough to see over the bar when you're old enough to drink."
"Hah, right." It was an old joke; 'divers didn't drink alcohol any more than they smoked. At least, sensible 'divers didn't, not if they didn't want strange and unpleasant things happening to their implants.
They took their drinks and their change and crossed the bar, Julius needing another prod when he got sidetracked by the foreigners.
The back room was stuffy but mercifully free of the reek of smoke, and Hugo took a grateful lungful of air before looking around. Tom sat at the head of a crowded table, his wife Cecile conspicuous in her absence. Hugo was disappointed; the young woman was lively and optimistic, one of the few 'divers close to his age that he knew well.
"Hey, Tom. How's Ceci doing?" Julius said with a wave for their friend.
"Well enough at seven months. Everything's fine, but she didn't feel up to coming tonight. And you know she's not to happy about having to sit this one out."
"If it's as big as you hinted, I'd be sulking if I were in her shoes," Julius responded with a grin. "Good thing I'll never be pregnant."
Perce and Bart sat side by side, arms casually slung over the other's shoulders. They waved their greetings, and Hugo nodded back. The rest of the group looked unfamiliar, until the profile of a nose or the turn of a chin struck a chord in Hugo's memory.
It was always something of a shock, seeing the real faces of people he usually only ever met by avatar, some of which he'd known for years. Hair color, skin tone, sex, build, wardrobe – all these were malleable on the 'net, where you could choose how you appeared to others. But hackers and 'divers were vain, he'd found. They might choose to be a blue-skinned Northerner in gold lamé with a shock of green hair and an eye patch, or a centaur, or an animated ketchup bottle, but there was a curious tendency among this sort of elite company to shape the face like their own. He suspected it wasn't quite a conscious decision in some cases.
So it was with a little bit of squinting and a fair measure of guessing that he was able to work out who the rest of the crowd was. Jack, Queen, Joker, Ace, and Ten (he had no idea what their real names were) ranged along one bench, Queen and Joker already on their second beers. Perce and Bart were joined by Roland, Borus (off-duty for the meeting, apparently – he was a 'diver in his own right), and Lewis, a young man his age who'd been brought up by his uncle and aunt – Julius stepped on his foot just before he recognized their persons - Kris and Samuel Harris.
Hugo flinched away from looking at them, turning his attention to the rest of the room once more. He knew he'd be easy to recognize; it was Julius the rest regarded with suspicion or curiosity. Hugo's own avatar was meant to resemble him fairly closely – olive complexion, dark eyes, unruly mop of hair. He'd styled his clothes after a boyhood idea of what his native warrior ancestors might've worn before colonial days, but that was all. Julius, by contrast, liked to deck himself out in a toga and laurel branches, if he wasn't donning Napoleon's greatcoat or Alexander the Great's helmet. People always noticed the clothes before anything else.
"That's everyone but Jed," Tom announced after Perce broke the awkward silence by greeting Julius and Hugo by the aliases of Caesar and Champ, names the rest of the crowd would know.
"Jed?" Julius asked, sliding onto the bench next to Bart. He made a space for Hugo, who took the corner, conveniently turning his back to the Harrises.
"King of Spades to you," Ace said, looking mournfully at Joker's beer. The hacker grinned and took a deep draught; Ace sighed. He'd gotten his RUNE only recently, and the teetotalism clearly bore down hard on him. "Should've been named Godot. We're always waiting for him. Can't we start without him for once?"
Tom was spared answering, because the door creaked open, admitting a middle-aged man with a lined face and two fully functional eyes. The latter was something of a surprise to Hugo, used to the eye patch sported by the famous hacker's preferred avatar.
"All right, we're all here." Tom leaned forward as the King of Spades took a seat on the bench with his team. "I want to make it clear up front that this is a dangerous undertaking. Important, and we could gain a great deal by it, but very dangerous. Moreso than anything I've ever asked you to do. I don't expect you to commit tonight, I don't want you to commit tonight. But if you do, once you're in – no second thoughts, no backing out."
He exhaled, and Hugo realized he'd been holding his breath as well. He'd seen Tom serious before, but this was… well, he'd come a long way, that was for certain. Not quite three years ago, during the FireBrand campaign, the nervous, stuttering Tom had somehow managed them all, himself implantless and yet instinctively knowing what tasks needed a 'diver and which could be done by code, and who to send to do what. Hugo still wasn't sure how it had all worked, but the young man had a peculiar brand of charisma that had inspired the loyalty of even the fiercely independent Spades.
"Target?" the King of Spades asked in the stillness that followed, hands folded in front of him. The light glinted off his implant; the jagged scars around it were dark against his skin. Unconsciously, Hugo rubbed his own, thumb brushing the tattooed flames he'd had done to cover the scars.
"H.K.S.K.," Tom said without preamble. There was a marked increase in tension in the room. Queen her beer down with an audible click; Lewis dropped his spoon. But Perce, Samuel, Borus, and Kris were all nodding; apparently they'd expected this.
Queen's eyebrows shot up. "We're going up against a division of hARMONĒ that the company insists doesn't even exist. Is there a reason you want to do this, or are you just feeling suicidal?"
Tom said nothing, but his eyes darted to the group from XN Corp.
"It's the ū protocol," Kris said quietly. "They've found a way around it."
"And I presume they're not inclined to share," mused Joker. "That hardly seems fair." He raised his eyebrows at King, but the Spades' leader's face was still impassive.
Tom answered, his tone grim. "Once they can protect themselves from ū, they'll have no reason not to incorporate it into their security systems. All of them."
"It'll be Red Crescent all over again," Julius said, repulsed. "Worse, because they only fried their own employees developing that virus. But hARMONĒ has no qualms about hurting their competition."
"What else are they hiding?" Jack asked softly. "They're running a legal risk here. A big one. Red Crescent got taken apart once they were exposed."
Ten nodded in agreement. "Just one sniff that they're intentionally zapping 'divers into a coma, and the Fed will be all over them. Ū isn't proof against plummeting stocks or cops with guns."
Ace snorted. "Aren't we cynical today. Isn't killer code bad enough?"
Kris chewed on the end of her braid. "Nothing's bad enough for hARMONĒ."
"Spoken like someone with stock benefits in XN Corp," Perce observed. His boss stuck her tongue out at him.
"So, we go in, we get the – whatever it is, a firewall, a cure? Then what?" Julius drummed his fingers. "I'm not signing on if we're just going to sell it to another greedy market monster."
Tom said nothing.
Julius's fingers stilled. "We are," he said accusingly. "We're selling it to a major competitor, aren't we."
Tom remained silent, his face stony. There was a motion from Lewis, just the slightest shifting in his seat. It was enough; Hugo realized with rising anger what the answer was. "It's XN. I'm out," he said flatly. "I don't want any of their filthy money."
Tom held up his bare hands. "Hang on. What XN's paying for is not exclusive rights. What they're paying for is our keeping it from being a hARMONĒ exclusive."
"It'll go into the OS core in the next update," Kris added. "The part that's still open source under our license agreement with GrassR00ts. Ū is a problem for more than just XN 'divers. Surgeons, security consultants, kids who want to 'dive just for the fun of it…"
She spoke so calmly, reasonably. You would almost think she hadn't burnt a kid's mind out herself, four years ago, Hugo thought angrily. "I-"
"I don't want anyone telling me their decision tonight," Tom cut in firmly. "Think it over, all of you. Even if you're sure you're in, think it over. Look over your security. 'Divers, check the lists of known vulnerabilities to ū, and patch them. Even if you don't join us, if things go badly, you'll need all the protection you can get. Get your wills updated." He looked at Kris and Samuel. "I don't mean to insult you, but you two have kids. I'll understand if your answer is no."
"You need us," Kris retorted. "XN won't back it unless we're part of it, I told you that. We know what we're getting into."
Tom sighed, running a hand through his hair. "Fine. The rest of you, let me know by Friday. And I don't need to tell you that not a word of this leaves this room."
The meeting broke up.
"Well," Julius said to Hugo as they stood up, grinning crookedly. "I guess Lady Lumina's on the job."
Hugo scowled all the way home.
------------
The next day found Hugo at a bedside, surrounded by the smell of disinfectant and listening to the hum of various machines monitoring the bed's occupant.
Really, if you ignored the smells and the noises, and only watched the shallow rise and fall of his chest, he could just be sleeping. But only if you didn't look at his face. at his eyes. Sometimes, they were closed. Those were good days; you could continue to pretend he simply slept. But sometimes they popped open, pupils darting madly about, or crossing, or just standing still. They didn't actually see anything (the doctors explained, again and again, as if he'd forgotten). It was just the muscles spasming, a few remaining synapses shooting off.
Today they were open, two brown pools staring sightlessly at the white plaster ceiling. Hugo tried not to look at his friend's face, tried not to remember when there'd been light and laughter in those brown eyes. And was that stubble creeping across Lou's jaw? Yes, it was. Stubble, when in Hugo's memory he was thirteen forever…
It was a day early for him to visit Lou that week, but the meeting the night before had not been the end of the matter; once home, Jules had slapped the stack of bills in his face and told him flat out they were taking the job. Hugo's response had been indignant; the ensuing shouting match had ended with mutual scorn and cries of "Find yourself another 'diver, then," from Hugo and "maybe I will, then," from Jules.
"Some partners we are, Jules and me, huh, Lou?" Hugo asked the boy on the bed. "Caesar, I mean. Sorry to let you down; I know you looked up to the 'Dream Team.' But… I don't know what it is. He just doesn't seem to understand anymore.
"Remember how we all sneered when 'Lady Lumina' stopped freelancing? Caesar was pretty disgusted. I wish he still was. You were angrier, angriest of all three of us. I remember. Nothing you hated more than a sell-out, than someone who sold their freedom to some damn corp to be a wage slave. Workin' for The Man."
Despite the situation, Hugo found himself grinning. Lou'd had an unrivaled distain for sell-outs, expressing himself quite creatively. "What was that you liked to call them, Lou?"
Lou said nothing, of course, but Hugo knew what he'd say if there was enough left of him to speak. "Iron-brains, for letting their skills and souls go rusty and stiff."
Lou'd had a lot to say about people who abandoned their team-mates, too. Hugo grimaced. "I shouldn't have said that to Caesar. Jules. Whatever." He rubbed the back of his neck. The face in front of him was still and expressionless, but another one glared at him through the years. "I know, Lou, it was practically the unforgivable thing. I guess I should tell him I'm sorry. Much good as it'll do."
He ran a hand through his hair. Lou wouldn't have forgiven him, and he'd be right not to. But maybe Jules would. Jules had somehow learned to forgive the corporate sell-outs when Perce had taken the job with XN (Hugo hadn't, but Hugo also refused to think of Perce as a sell-out), and it was Jules who had been ragging on Hugo to forgive Kris for what happened to Lou…
But Jules wanted Hugo to work with Lady Lumina. Lou would never, never forgive that.
Dammit. It was easier when we were younger, thought Hugo, all of nineteen. Things had been simpler. Sell-outs were sell-outs, not friends, and there was no danger of the ū protocol setting fire to divers' brains.
Lou's eyes closed. Hugo sighed and stood, wincing at the stiffness his muscles had acquired during his vigil in the cheap plastic chair.
He brushed past the hanging privacy curtain, glancing about the room. The curtains were also drawn about the next bed, as they'd always been. As he passed, there was a rustle, and a middle-aged woman with black hair emerged.
"Oh, hello. Were you here to visit Lou?" she asked pleasantly.
Hugo blinked. "How did you know?"
The woman smiled, a little sadly. "I've gotten to know his mother, Ruth. We both come here often, so…"
There wasn't much to say to that. "I'm sorry," Hugo said awkwardly, shoving his hands in his pockets. "Lou was my best friend. When we were kids."
"Andrew was mine."
She looked old enough to be someone's mother, but there was a liveliness in her eyes, despite the sadness. On impulse, Hugo stuck out his hand. "I'm Hugo."
"Kasumi," she offered, shaking his hand. There was an implant on the back of her hand, the scars faded and nearly hidden by the delicate tattoo of a diving hawk. "You 'dive?"
"Oh, just a bit," Hugo answered easily. No way to hide it, but there was no reason to disclose his full online identity to a stranger, either. "Just for fun."
Kasumi glanced back at the curtained bed she'd left. "He was too."
"Any good?" the thoughtless words slipped out. Hugo cringed. "I'm sorry,"
Kasumi shrugged. "He was pretty well-known for a time. Went by the name of EcDohl. It was a long time ago – ten years. So I don't know if you'd have heard of him."
Hugo stared, embarrassment at the injudicious comment forgotten. "EcDohl? The EcDohl? Worked with Ode2Joy and later MattersHew? The Silvermount Sibs?"
Kasumi's face split into a grin. "Yes, he was that EcDohl. And he worked with both Ode and Mat. I didn't think anyone knew those names anymore."
"Well, I knew a cousin of theirs, once," Hugo mumbled, taken aback by this brush with celebrity. "Really EcDohl? Wow. I'd heard he retired, after the takedown of Red Crescent."
Kasumi's grin faded. "No. He was helping BronzeBoy – that would be President and CEO Lepant of Toran Enterprises, who took over what was left of the company and built it up again. They were trying to get at one of the databases, thinking there was an answer to ū there. It was even worse then, you know – no one had figured out how it spread yet. Andrew, EcDohl… he wanted to contain it if we could. Before it got into the 'net, especially into hospital 'nets. That's what Ode and Matters had been really worried about – that it would get into hospital 'nets, school 'nets, infect doctors and artists who interface to do their work. He felt there had to be some way around it, some way to protect against it. But Hurricane and RedBeard – sorry, the old heads of Red Crescent, we had code names for them – had left some… nasty traps behind." Her jaw tightened. "Now he's here."
"I'm sorry." Hugo rubbed the back of his neck. It was strange – scary – to think of the legendary 'diver EcDohl being rendered as helpless as Lou. Lou had just been a kid, in the wrong place at the wrong time, but EcDohl had been the best of the best.
"Would you like to see him?" she asked, perhaps misinterpreting his expression.
Hugo hesitated. He thought of Lou's empty face, the body aging while the boy stayed an unchanging memory, and the shining legend of the 'diver-hacker that no one could best.
No one but the ū protocol, apparently.
"Thanks, but I've… got somewhere I need to be." Hugo glanced back at the white curtains obscuring Lou's bed. Lou couldn't go anywhere, but Hugo had to keep going forwards. "There's someone I need to call."
------------
Back through the stale hallway, fumbling with the locks. Jules spun around as soon as he'd opened the door.
"Look, Hugo, Champ, I'm sorry. I said stupid stuff last night. We can find another job."
Hugo shook his head. "I said stupid stuff first. Hang on… " he punched the buttons on the holophone. The screen flickered, and a few moments later a familiar lean face blinked at him.
"Hey, Tom," he said. "About the job? Count us in."