They drove out to The Flues around sundown. The sky was bruised deep, bloody purples and reds, the sun a molten gold coin. A haze hung in the air, steaming up from the concrete and asphalt.
"So where 'zactly are the Myasniki holed up?" asked V. She was sitting in the back of the Quadra with Judy. The air-vents were open now that the day had cooled, a warm, comfortable wind streaming into the car.
"Fabrika," said Ayako on the voxbox, personal jacked into the mobile, her projected consciousness monitoring the corpo comsnets, and the Locos subnet, Vertedero. "Old apartment complex used to be low-income housing," she added helpfully, her voice fuzzing in over the netlink. "Been abandoned since the 2050s. Scavs moved in like fuckin' roaches."
"How 'bout Vertedero? Any weird activity?"
"No," said Ayako, "it's temp data-storage, Val. Cobbled together from cached metadata, since the Locos were piggybacking off Las Palmeras's Net-architecture. And anyway, they don't have the shard anymore. Fried when Juan nuked the subnet."
"No biggy," said V, shrugging. "We can reconstruct the sporeware event by pulling data off the Locos's firmware and cobbling it back together in an isolate. Gotta thing I wanna confirm."
"A theory?" said Judy, giggling.
V grinned and elbowed Judy in the side, then repeated her proxy theory to Ayako. Ayako's tone on the voxbox suggested uneasiness. She said, "Sounds 'bout right. Spores. Seed whatever systems they can, includin' cyberware." Then, for Judy's benefit, she elaborated, "Basically, if the AI couldn't seed the Digitales' system first, could try again usin' the Locos netrunners as vectors. Like fucked-up sperm."
"Couldn't the sporeware just infect the Locos?" asked Judy, furrowing her brow. "One of 'em becomes Uncle Sam."
"Not exactly," said Ayako, on the voxbox. "Sporeware, think of it as compressed malicious data that continuously expands, overwrites code as it goes. Essentially, it's an overwriting virus. And if there ain't enough storage capacity, processin' power in whatever 'ware it's tryin' to infect? Blows the host."
"Flatline," said V, looking at Judy. "But traces of that malicious data remain in the firmware. Like fallout after a nuke. But y'can take that fallout, reconstruct the sporeware event with it usin' a recompiler program. Method used by NetWatch to reconstruct cyberterrorist events."
"I don't gotta worry 'bout Valerie catchin' somethin', do I?" asked Judy.
Ayako's face appeared in the rear-view cam, ghost-white against a backdrop of colorless static void. "Nah, most self-ICE will kill it," she said. "Whole reason an AI needs vectors for its spores. ICE kills a lot of the spores before they even manage to penetrate the system and root in the firmware. Once a spore's infected a powerful enough system, however, or several? Boom. The AI is reborn—sometimes with siblings."
Judy grimaced. "So s'like a hydra?"
"Somethin' like that," said Ayako's render in the rear-view cam. "But if it's any consolation? Not many systems powerful enough to house an AI. We're talkin' super fuckin' rare, choom. Might as well be mythological, these 'sibling' events. And should be happy 'bout that. Otherwise we'd have to destroy multiple cores."
"So right now," said Judy, "the AI is dyin', but we destroy its core, it kills all the spores. Right? No siblings, no new cores, yadda yadda."
Ayako nodded. "It's a race against the clock," she said, frowning. "Gotta find Uncle Sam and destroy its core before it uploads itself somewhere else; and if it does, we're back to square fuckin' one." She paused, her render in the camera flickering like a mirage, revealing, in those interstices between resolutions, wireframe bones. "We know it's in space somewhere," she told them. "Gotta be the Crystal Palace. Buster thinks so, too. Moon's strict 'bout regulatin' AIs. But the Crystal Palace? Corpos do lots of illicit biz there, under all the glitz."
"Can't be that hard t'find, right?" asked Judy. "Crystal Palace is big, sure. But really so big we can't just nose 'round the place and find the AI?"
"It's five toruses—those're the station's rings—and each one is hostin' a giant fuckin' city. We'd be diggin' around forever, and then it'd be too late," said Ayako. She paused. "Had Mochi do some diggin'," she continued. "Lots of corpo fuckery went down at the Crystal Palace. Illegal projects. Most of that data's been corrupted, though. Lost. Includin' the locations of the wards these projects were conducted in. Cyberattacks durin' all those orbital skirmishes, you know? And there was a bad solar flare, couple years ago, did some damage to the station's hardware, thanks to chinks in its radiation shielding. For a while, they—the European Space Agency, I mean—were sayin' it was Russian sabotage." Although she couldn't roll her eyes, V imagined Ayako rolling them then.
The Quadra wove through evening traffic: mostly suits in their slick Villeforts and Chevillons on their way from the arcologies to hunt for pleasures their company recreation itineraries didn't include. V assumed those pleasures were drugs and cheap joytoys. Although that had never made sense to her, how suits went for cheap. They could afford the best, but it seemed to V that the more money someone made, the less of it they spent. Jackie had once told her that was how the corpos stayed rich. They just hoarded all their money, he'd said—stashed it in bunkers, in hidden accounts, in investment assets. Doomsday survivalists prepping for a crash that would never affect them.
They turned off the Rossi, rode the deceleration ramp into an unfamiliar part of The Flues. Abandoned warehouses and factories, and the company tenements in which the workers had lived, seemed to be the dominant phenotype of this particular neighborhood in The Flues. Interspersed between these were the kinds of businesses that thrived on misery and destitution, and weed-tufted concrete lots that seemed to nominally function as playgrounds for the local kids. V observed a raggedy group of kids, most of whom were obese, playing on the rusty skeleton of a jungle-gym, or feeding ennies to the lot's resident S.C. .
"If misery was a picture, that's it," said Judy, watching the kids as the Quadra slid past.
"Reminds me of Heywood," said V. Although she'd been a scrawny kid—her parents had worked hard, three jobs each, to afford actual food—she'd lived a similar existence as those kids: playing among trampled garbage and weeds, on slabs of concrete glittering with jagged shards of green bottle-glass, her playground slowly disintegrating under the patient abrasion of time. "Parents dead or always workin', so the kids take to the streets, and the streets take to the kids."
"The Flues got hit especially hard," said Ayako. "Once the warehouses and factories closed, the local economy went to shit. Corpos kinda just left the place to rot, like Las Palmeras. But unlike Las Palmeras, The Flues ain't had the Digitales to fill the vacuum. They just got Scavs, and Scavs don't care 'bout anyone but themselves. Real dangerous place, The Flues, especially at night." She grinned, adding, "Not that you or Judy are worried 'bout that, I'm sure."
"S'gonna happen in Las Palmeras anyway? Now that Digis have kinda eaten it," said V, looking at Ayako's render and straightening up in the backseat, shopfronts lit up in lurid neon scudding by the window. She figured what would happen there was the same thing that happened everywhere else: new bosses, new rules. And something told her that the Locos weren't too concerned about the locals.
"Locos are gonna run it into the ground," said Ayako. "Probably try to bite Militech, too. But I don't think Militech's got anythin' to do with 'em."
"Yeah?" said Judy, raising her eyebrow.
"Ain't seein' any communications on Vertedero with the Militech comsnet," said Ayako. "Possible the logs could've been lost in Juan's subnet nuke, but I dunno. But," and she seemed worried, "I checked out that little cube again, just now. The one made of ICE. Pinged Militech's comsnet at some point recently, but the comms-protocol was spoofed, made to look like it was comin' from the Locos, then pinged Vertedero to make the Locos think they were dealin' with Militech."
"Someone, whoever owns that cube, is playin' both sides," said V, frowning.
"Someone's tryin' to instigate a war behind Yorinobu's back," said Ayako. Then, "The pings to the 'Saka comsnet, the ones I'd sussed out earlier, they weren't spoofed. Makes me think it's someone on the inside, or someone with access to official channels."
"Y'think that cube could belong to a vector? One's got access to 'Saka's comsnet protocols?"
"Wouldn't be surprised, Val," said Ayako.
"Couldn't run some kinda traceback, find out if that's the case?"
Ayako shook her head. "If Uncle Sam's communicatin' with a vector, it's usin' a self-destruct comms-protocol. Kinda mil-grade shit used by NetWatch to communicate with agents embedded in hostile Net sectors. Ping instructions, then boom, nothin' to traceback. Avoids nosy AIs and netrunners, and allows NetWatch to coordinate their people without giving anythin' away."
Fabrika was a modular megabuilding complex, a vaguely brutalist thing resembling a tower of stacked boxes. Repurposed neon, and holograms displaying Cyrillic ideograms, and images of skulls and leering Baba Yagas, shimmered out of jury-rigged projection units epoxied to the building's sandblasted steel. It was an ugly thing, Fabrika, looming like a hungry giant, webs of rubber cables and fiber-optic filament spilling from its roof like tangled hair, their connectors hooked to makeshift fission generators grounded to huge slabs of cracked concrete.
A few Myasniki hoods were hanging around out front, smoking acrid Russian cigarettes and mumbling to each other in Slavic creole. If Sergei had been ugly, these people would be hideous. Treated human skin grafted to salvaged prosthetics, their faces hidden behind other faces, masks of dead men and women. Made V think of that story, the one about the golem made of clay. But instead of clay, these people were golems made of dead meat and junkyard chrome.
One of the women said something to them, but V's auto-translator didn't have a package downloaded to translate the weird Slavic creole she was speaking. Then, in accented English, she asked, "What you want?"
"We're here to meet with Sergei," said Ayako, and then she said something else in that Slavic creole that made the woman ease off, go back to smoking. "C'mon," she told Judy and V, gesturing for them to follow.
"Kinda language is that?" asked Judy. "Ain't never heard it before."
"Mix of Russian, Slovak, Ukrainian, Serbian—bit of everything from the Sov-states," said Ayako, shrugging. "Call it Yazyk," she added, helpfully.
What used to be, V supposed, a yard for the former tenants of the building had been converted into a kind of trailer-park. The trailers were desert salvages shored up by chipboard, corrugated sheet metal, and hard plastic. They were stacked on top of each other like building blocks, connected by an intricate but sloppy network of collapsible ladders, and footbridges consisting of two-by-fours bolted into mortared cinder-blocks. Greasy light oozed from behind hard plastic panels caulked into the hand-sawn windows of the trailers. V could hear televisions murmuring, the pulse of Russian EDM, people talking in Yazyk, the clink of beer bottles. An odor pervaded here, an unpleasant emulsion of stale beer and rancid meat so thick that V gagged on it, tasting it in the back of her throat.
Judy pulled her tank-top up over her nose. "Place smells like a fuckin' lockerroom filled with rotten meat."
"Sounds 'bout right," said Ayako, looking a little squeamish herself.
"S'with the trailers?" asked V, gesturing around them, at the stacks of makeshift houses. "They gotta whole megabuildin'."
"Corner-crows," said Ayako. "Hang out lookin' for people to roll into the meat-mills. Lowest of the low on the Scav-ladder, so they live out here."
A couple of corner-crows watched the three of them as they passed, their faces unreadable under their corpse-masks. They were sipping Serbian beers, sitting on a stained dumpster-couch beside a fire-pit they'd built out of old tire rims. One of them, a man with a mask made out of a woman's face, said something to them in Yazyk, and Ayako said something back that made the guy put his hands up, back off.
"What was that 'bout?" asked V.
"Invited us to sit on their laps," said Ayako.
V flipped off the corner-crows, then followed Ayako through a pair of heavy steel doors, into the dimly lit interior of the megabuilding.
A big guy with corpse-grafts was sitting behind the Lexan partition of what used to be the building's security station. Dozens of peeling decals had been smoothed onto the Lexan, most of which V couldn't read, but understood as warnings. The office behind the partition was a room painted in flat yellow, though V suspected it had once been white, the walls lined with fiberglass shard-cabinets. The big guy was sitting behind an aluminum desk littered with grubby pieces of tech, narco-inhalers, screamsheets. He was staring at something on a chugging computer console cast in finger-smudged plastic.
Ayako knocked on the Lexan. "Here to see Sergei," she said.
The man didn't answer right away, punching something into his keyboard. Some of the keys were missing, their spots fitted with squares of compacted duct-tape, labeled in black marker. Once the graftee finished whatever he was doing on the computer, he looked up, moving in slow motion. His eyes, through his corpse-mask, were bloodshot and glazed. He grunted, waved them through a door-frame studded with sensors.
Beyond the security station, V saw a long hallway lined with doors. A row of S.C. stood off to their right, all but one of them glitching out. "How're we gonna find Sergei?" she asked, and thumbed over her shoulder, in the direction of the security guard. "Comrade back there ain't told us shit. Not sure he'd even know, high as he is."
"Sergei'll find us," Ayako assured her. "Guard'll call him. That's the protocol." She looked to their left, grinned. "Check it out, Val," she said, and pointed. "They got fuckin' payphones."
V looked. "Holy shit," she said. "Think they still work?"
"Only one way to find out," said Judy.
V took the handset off its cradle, dial-tone droning in her ear. Then the dial-tone went away suddenly, and Sergei's voice crackled over the line. "Twentieth floor," he said. "Meet, yes."