Welcome to my on-line book. Yes, this is a complete novel, and yes, it is free. It has never been published (and for reasons I outline below, probably never will be) and has only been printed on the printers of various fans of the book. If you want a physical copy for yourself, your only choice is to visit the Printer-Friendly version, make sure you have a fresh ink cartridge installed, give the printer about 330+ sheets of paper, and hit "print". I ask for nothing in return, except that you enjoy the work and perhaps drop me an email when you've finished reading, if only to let me know you were here.

This book happened by accident. It was supposed to be a short story. It evolved into a longer one, and eventually into a novel. How it became what it is today may be of some interest. If you'd rather cut right to the story, then now would be a good time to jump to chapter 1.

In 2001 I was re-playing some of my older computer games. This was partly due to nostalgia, partly to see if they still ran. Most did. A few didn't. What struck me most wasn't how primitive the graphics were, but how terrible the storytelling was. Before the days of CD-ROMs, games had a hard time building any sort of narrative. There was no room for voice acting on floppy disks. The graphics where too primitive to show facial expressions, and the characters were too simple for them to emote any other way. The only real means of storytelling was to give the player a bunch of blocky, hard-to-read text to fill in the basics. In a lot of ways it was similar to the days of silent movies, when the action would stop so the audience could read some prose explaining what was going on. In both mediums, there were many cases where the authors did indeed have a great story to tell but they didn't yet have the means to convey it in a compelling manner.

A perfect example of this is the opening movie from the 1994 classic System Shock. It's a simple, two-minute introduction that contains a bare skeleton of a story; more of a premise than introduction. The only characters you see are the protagonist and the villains. The main character has no real identity other than what the player imagines. He eventually does a lot of interesting things, but we in the audience never get to know why. He doesn't even have a name. The various other characters in the story would simply refer to him as "Hacker".

I came up with a short story to give this character a personality, and to explain his behavior. I had no intention of writing any sort of substantial work. I set down what is now the first three chapters of the book, and posted it to my website. I expected to be more or less ignored, since the internet is lousy with fan-fiction (which is in itself mostly lousy) and I had little hope that my story would attract anyone. To my surprise, I got quite a bit of email and encouragement from both friends and strangers, which was enough to keep me going and interested to the end of chapter seven. At that point I had met my initial goal of translating the two-minute movie into prose.

If you'd like to see the original intro movie, you can download it. The file is a 10MB mpeg. The various mysteries of video codecs and media players are unknown to me, so if it doesn't play I'm afraid I can't help you. It should work, though. One final warning I'll give is that the video is obviously going to be a spoiler. I'd suggest waiting until you've finished chapter 7 of my story before you check out the movie.

While I was happy with how the short story had developed, I found the ending very unsatisfying. For anyone who wasn't familiar with the game, it wouldn't make sense to stop the story there at all. It was, of course, the beginning of the game. At the same time, I was getting quite a bit of email from fans who assumed I was going to keep going and translate the whole thing. At that point I wondered if I was capable of writing a book. I decided to find out.

The rest of the book was written and released a chapter at a time over the course of a year. There was a forum on this site where readers would leave comments and bug me to hurry up on the next chapter. Because it was released as a serial, I fell into a lot of habits common to serial storytelling. Notably, I had a number of cliffhanger endings. Partly this was done because it was fun to have the character in a seemingly impossible situation and to see the various posts from readers as they speculated how he might escape. I was also anxious that the long delays between chapters might cause people to lose interest and stop reading, and I wanted to make sure they came back. In the end, I don't think I needed to worry, since readership grew during the project and wasn't noticably affected by the type of ending I'd used in the most recent chapter.

In turning the events of the actual game itself into prose, I found that I needed to take quite a bit of liberty with the story to make things interesting. In fact, it would be a stretch to say this story is based on the game. More accuratly, this story is based on the same premise as the game. This earned me a bit of ire from fans of the original work, although I'm confident the book is better for it. Computer games are exciting to play, but would be hopelessly dull if converted directly into a narritive. This is particularly true for older games:

The marine blasted three more aliens. He turned around and blasted two more. He reloaded his shotgun. He went upstairs and blasted two big aliens and three little ones. He opened the door. He blasted two more. Behind the next door four more aliens (one big and three little) were waiting for him. He shot one, but then realized he'd forgotten to reload! He backed up and reloaded while the aliens bit him, lowering his health. Then he blasted them. He went through the next door and found his goal: The Red Keycard!

And so on. While the above sounds dull, it's actually quite fun if you're the one doing the blasting. At any rate, adding some expository text and a little dialogue wouldn't make the above any more palitable. To make the transition from the screen to the page, most of the story had to be re-envisioned.

Since most readers were patient enough to endure the book in serial form - sometimes with weeks and months between chapters, I would say I've at least met my initial goal of creating something gripping. The fact that many of these fans have never heard of System Shock indicates that I've managed to make something that can stand on its own. I'm very happy to have seen this through to the end. In 2005, I revisited the book and did a good deal of rewriting. Lots of old spelling mistakes and typos were fixed. I'm sure many new ones were added. Much was added to the story and a little was taken away.

This book, like most others, was not constructed in a vacuum. Consequently, there are a few people that I need to recognize for their contributions to this work. Chief among those who deserve some credit are the people that once drove the now-defunct Looking Glass Games, the company behind System Shock. I'd also like to thank my wife, who bugged me mercilessly to continue work on the project, and who endured the long task of proofreading and reviewing the book as it took shape. The project was fueled by my own curiosity and through the encouragement of many fans. I'd like to thank everyone who tolerated my irregular writing schedule, and who sent me feedback. Not many authors get to write in front of an audience like this, and I found it to be very rewarding. Thanks for sticking with me, you're more patient than I.

For those of you new to the book, I'd love to hear from you. After you've taken it in, please drop me an email and let me know. It means more than you think.

Thanks for reading,

Shamus Young

The long steel finger of the subway stabbed into the station. Having just come from the Undercity, its belly was full of lower-class people who were privileged enough to work in the high-class grid of glittering corporate office buildings known as Uppernet. The train brought itself to an abrupt and precise halt and then regurgitated its contents onto the empty platform. The swarm of ex-passengers flowed up the steps and dispersed into the evening glow of New Atlanta.

All except one.

Deck hung back from the crowd and watched the city drones head for whatever miserable night jobs their lives had sentenced them to. They would all be going to work for the evening. So was he.

Once the crowd cleared he headed up the street past the opulent kingdom of office space, and into the heart of Uppernet. Uppernet was a speck on the map of the great urban blanket, but its size was disproportionate to its importance. It was home to a host of powerful corporations, the seat from which they projected power throughout the technical and financial worlds. It was the nexus of money and data, the fuel and will of the business world.

The buildings were a series of near structural clones, varying mostly in their height and what corporate logo had been slapped on the front. They formed a strict grid of narrow rectangles of varying heights that looked like an immense 3d bar graph of some random input data. The strip of buildings served as a monument to a world where money was in excess and imagination was in short supply.

Deck suffered from the reverse.

He caught his reflection in the darkened windows of some nameless corporate monolith, and paused for one final glance to make sure he looked the part. He was dressed like a young executive that had just finished another marathon day behind his desk. Luckily, the look of someone who had just worked 12 hours straight was pretty much the same look as someone who had just slept all day and was still shaking off the cobwebs. His clothes were a bit wrinkled and his tie was loosened. His rig, which was usually strapped to his leg, was inside the briefcase he was carrying. He had purchased the briefcase yesterday, and then spent some time sandpapering the corners and banging it off the floor to give it a used appearance. He had let his dark hair grow in for this job. He needed to be able to pass himself off as a corporate drone, who were not allowed to have shaved heads.

He was slender and pale in a way that was to be expected from a hacker, but he wasn't soft. He had been tempered by the tough years on the streets of the Undercity. Hidden beneath the unflattering beige suit, his muscles were tight and wiry, hardened by his early pre-hacker years of too much labor and not enough food. His face was thin and bony, and looked unfamiliar to him without the narrow beard he usually maintained.

He covered the three blocks to his target as quickly as possible. He had been running a bit late before the meeting with Nescio, and that meeting had run long. His cover story was going to sound too implausible if he didn't start soon.

The TriOptimum building was not a clone like the others. It was a pillar of carved glass and steel. Covered in smooth round corners and gentle slopes, the building was like some immense sculpture cut from polished ebony stone. Up on the roof, far above Deck's view, was a complex nest of interconnected communications towers. Radio antennae, satellite dishes, pulse towers, and microwave transmitters formed an intricate web of steel and fiber optic cable.

In front, TriOptimum displayed its wealth by allotting an area fifty meters wide and five meters deep as a kind of open courtyard, complete with trees nobody cared to admire and benches nobody had time to sit on. It was a vulgar excess in a world where real estate was often measured in millions of dollars per square meter.

Deck crossed the courtyard and climbed the wide marble stairs to the broad glass doors of the lobby, which were (as he expected) locked.

The building was a fortress at night, and there was no other way in that didn't require some sort of tunneling or demolition equipment. That sort of business would be noisy, expensive, and out of his particular area of expertise. As usual, the weakest point of the building's defenses was the part that was regulated by a human. In this case, a lone security guard.

Most people imagine that hacking is a non-social activity. The picture of someone typing away at some console for hours on end creates the impression that hackers have no social skills and lack the ability to detect interpersonal subtlety. The idea is erroneous, since the greatest hackers are both con-artists and counter-security experts. The stereotype usually worked in Deck's favor so he didn't really mind.

In the world of modern cryptography, even consumer-level encryption was strong enough to require months to penetrate by pure brute force. A hacker could spend weeks probing a security network for loopholes and weaknesses, and using brute force tactics to break open its encrypted data. Many days of long, patient data surveillance and cryptological analysis would be required to gain access to even the most casually guarded network. In contrast, a ten minute phone call to a frustrated tech support jockey, intern, or clueless secretary could yield a password granting the same level of access. Hacking - true professional grade hacking, the kind you can get paid for - requires a blend of computer skills and B.S.

At the moment Deck needed some B.S. He hammered on the window.

Inside, the lone security guard looked up from the screen at the front desk and glared at Deck.

"Closed. Come back tomorrow during business hours.", he yelled from his desk. His voice was muffled and distant from the other side of the bullet-proof glass.

In the movies, security guards were always fumbling, senile old men just waiting to be karate-chopped in the back of the neck by the protagonist. Deck had yet to encounter such a guard in real life. This guard in particular looked young and sharp. Like a lot of the younger types, he obviously spent plenty of time in the gym. The white shirt of his uniform did little to hide the bulky physique underneath. He looked serious, bored, and not eager to deal with some idiot banging on the front door of a major corporation at 10 o'clock at night.

"Hey!", Deck yelled though the door, "I left my car keys on my desk. Can I get them?"

"Can't let anyone in. Come back tomorrow." The guard was completely unmoved. He didn't even bother to call him 'sir'.

Crap.

Deck tried again. "Look, my name is Richard Holgate... I work on the second floor in tech support.", he said pointing upstairs. "I need my car keys. I work here." He held out his arms to demonstrate how passive and harmless he was.

Reluctantly, the guard slid his chair out and walked over to the door as he fixed "Richard" with a disapproving glare.

Deck tried not to smile. Getting the guard to engage him in conversation was the hardest part. It is always more difficult to refuse to help someone when you have to look them in the eye. This was where the misconceptions about hackers came into play. This guard would expect a hacker to be nervous, shifty-eyed, and menacing. He might suspect "Richard" of being many things: a shallow irritating loser, an irresponsible ass, or an overpaid bootlick. It would never occur to him that he was looking at a ruthless data pirate. Not until it was too late.

The guard brought his scowling face to the glass opposite Richard, "You can't come in, call a cab. Go home."

His face was hard and square, a frame of unhappy distrust. His brown hair was a tight crew-cut popular among the paramilitary types. His blue eyes were set deep in his head, peering out at Deck with suspicion.

Deck sighed in defeat and pleaded, "Look man, I was here all day. I just got back from the worst meeting ever. All I wanna do is go home, have some dinner, bang the wife, and get some sleep... give a guy a break?"

The guard drew in a deep breath and seemed to waver. A long moment passed as he sized up the man on the other side of the door. Deck didn't look like a nut or a terrorist. There was no obvious reason not to let him in for just a moment, except that it was against the rules, and both of them knew it.

Deck held up a set of keys. "Look, this key opens up the door over there.", he indicated a black, featureless door at the rear of the lobby, "Just take this key and just go up to the second floor and grab my car keys for me. They're on my desk."

Deck stood at the door, looking pathetic and helpless. He held the keys by the plastic keychain and offered them to the guard. There was another long, silent pause while the guard deliberated some more.

Deck maintained his pleading look and jingled the keys a bit in front of his face. Inside, he wanted to scream. This entire operation depended on getting this guard to open the door and take these keys.

To Deck's surprise, the door swung all the way open, and the guard motioned him inside.

"Thanks, I really appreciate this", he said, grinning like an idiot. The guard waved his hand, dismissing the thanks. All he wanted was for this office puke to shut up, get his keys, and get out of his building. The two of them walked to the back of the lobby together, while Deck, staying in character, rambled on.

"I can't believe I left my keys here. I feel so stupid. I mean, I didn't think we would be coming back this late."

"Uh - huh."

"We were just going out to grab some dinner and the whole meeting went really bad and the next thing we knew it was nine o'clock. Man! So, we had to hurry back here and Allan dropped me off, but by that time it was like nine forty-five and it was wicked late. I didn't even realize my keys were still in my office until after he pulled out. SO embarrassing!"

"Hmm-hmm"

The lobby showed the same excess as the exterior of the building. There were huge black leather couches that were probably never used, next to marble tables with decorative trade magazines nobody ever read. There were live plants, not in simple pots but in marble planters built into the floor. The art on the walls was modern stuff, huge prints of concept paintings for space stations and orbital platforms. Another print seemed to be a montage depicting the cure of cancer. There were several massive cylinder lights - large enough to contain a man - that were suspended from the high ceiling from lines so thin they could only be seen when the light caught them just right. They flooded the lobby with potent white light, obliterating the possibility of shadows.

Deck continued lamenting his day that never happened. The guard bobbed his head, trying to acknowledge that he heard, without the risk of possibly encouraging further conversation.

Deck sized up his opponent as the two of them walked together. He was carrying a real sidearm and not a stunner, which was rare. Guns were pretty much illegal for everyone but the police, and for TriOp to gain firearm permits for all of its security forces must have cost a great deal. The guard walked carefully, not letting Deck fall behind him. His right hand never strayed far from his weapon, but never got so close that it might cause alarm.

The two of them reached the back door and the guard turned to Deck, waiting for him to open the door.

The problem here for Deck was, he really didn't have any way of opening this door yet.

"Oh! Keys!", he said, still grinning, as if he had forgotten what they were doing. He began to search through his pockets and came up with the same keychain he had offered the guard before. He frowned at them, realizing they were not the "right" keys.

"Here... hold these a second?", he said, offering the keys dangling from the plastic keychain in his hand as he continued to go though his pockets with his other hand.

The guard hesitated, not knowing why he would need to hold this stupid set of keys, but then reached out and took them. As his hand touched the metallic surface, their eyes met for a brief second. Deck jabbed a button on the keychain that delivered a micro-pulse of electrical energy similar to the impulses used by the human nervous system. The result was a spastic convulsion from the guard as he toppled over.

Deck glanced out through the windows to the street, to see if anyone had taken obvious notice. The street looked pretty clear. He hated the brightly lit lobby, elevated in front of the street for any passerby to see. It was like being on stage, and the last thing he wanted right now was an audience.

The guard had conveniently fallen beside a couch so that his body could not be seen from the street.

Deck sized up the door that led to the main offices. It was featureless, save for the smooth black panel (probably a palm scanner) with a small keypad and keyhole underneath. The keypad was alphanumeric, so the correct password could be any combination of letters or numbers of any length. The keyhole was a flat slot - obviously for electronic keys and not something that could be picked. Deck was guessing it unlocked the keypad. So to get in, you needed to have either the correct hand, or the right key and the proper password. Using the palm reader was out of the question. Deck wasn't about to lug the guard's body over to the door and try to get his hand onto the reader. Some passerby outside would almost certainly notice. Besides, it was doubtful someone of the guard's low position would be allowed the luxury of using the hand scanner - a privilege usually reserved for executives.

Deck checked the guard's keychain and found a number of electronic keys. Each was a flat, transparent piece of plastic with a tiny strand of metallic ribbon running though its surface in a specific pattern. Deck tried each one until the keypad lit up. Now all he needed was the password.

The reception desk was a massive wood and marble edifice that dominated the rear of the lobby. The back wall of its sunken desktop contained seven display screens. The three on each side were cycling through various external surveillance views, while the larger center screen simply showed the triangular TriOptimum Logo. He assumed it was a slave screen for portables.

He took his rig and a slender backpack out of the briefcase and tossed the briefcase aside.

He retrieved a roll of duct tape from his backpack. As he rolled the guard over onto his stomach he was met with an overpowering stench. The guard's bowels and bladder had let go after being hit with the pulse stunner - a common side effect. Deck took the tape and quickly wrapped the hands, feet, and the guard's mouth. Once the guard was secure, Deck relieved him of his sidearm.

Deck didn't really know how to use a gun very well. He didn't usually carry one because it was just extra bulk, and they were really expensive. The whole point of doing his job was to get what he wanted without ever needing a gun. He wouldn't be able to move around the city with it, so he decided to hang onto it until he got out of the building. Traveling though the streets with it would be suicide anyway.

He dropped his rig onto the reception desk and powered it up. The keyboard was a smooth, flat surface with a series of tightly arranged squares bearing letters and symbols according to the standard Dvorak layout. As it started up, each square bubbled outward. The surface of the keyboard felt like bubble-wrap beneath the fingers, yet each key gave with a satisfying click.

Most users preferred keyboards that offered some sort of tactile feedback. It increased typing speed and reduced mistakes if the user could feel the boundaries of each key with their fingers. On the other hand, keys that protruded from the surface of the unit were usually a liability for hackers because of the increased volume and physical breaking hazard.

The bubble keys were a nice compromise, although they cost quite a bit. Deck had been a member of the flat keyboard way of thinking for a long time, which valued compact and durable over a few keystrokes per minute of typing speed. However, he saw a chance to have the best of both worlds when he set out to build the ultimate rig. Compared to the tremendous amount of money spent on the internal components, the small fortune spent on the keyboard was trivial.

The rig was unnaturally heavy. Most portables were the size of a compact keyboard, which meant they were mostly empty space. Usually they had to be weighted down a bit so that they didn't seem flimsy, and would remain still while the user was typing. Deck's machine was an exception. He'd filled its volume with banks of storage and processing units. He had spent months buying components and putting them together to build this thing. It was almost a hundred times more powerful than the average rig, and he was going to need all of that power to get the job done.

The machine represented several months' worth of income, most of which he still owed to a number of ruthless and increasingly impatient lenders. Even worse, he had wasted a great deal of money in the construction of the thing. It was far too powerful to be legal, and so there was no real guide on how to build a machine like this. Many processors had been burned out or overloaded in the process. In the end, he had thrown away almost as much as he had successfully put into use. He tried not to think about the money when he used the unit, since it would only serve as a terrifying distraction.

The center screen on the desk lit up as it detected the nearby portable. The two devices negotiated for a second or two and then the screen became the display for his machine.

Attached to his rig Deck had a Universal Interface Unit - an almost completely mis-named device, since it would only interface with a small set of compatible devices. When the UIU was first released a number of years earlier, it was boasted as the last interface device anyone would ever need. It would connect any two network-enabled devices and allow them to operate together, assuming you had the right software. They could exchange information, share displays, and even share memory and storage. Again: assuming you had the right software. It had great marketing, but not so great technology. There was a lot of network-enabled stuff manufacturers didn't want everyone connecting to and possibly hacking. ATM's, payphones, and utility meters suddenly needed special shielding and encryption to protect them from a UIU. The software for connecting to legitimate commercial products never really surfaced. Pretty soon the only people who really used them were hackers. It didn't take long for UIU's to get banned, but not before a black market of the things emerged to supply the technology hungry counter-security culture.

Keypads were smart enough to know that if someone was entering passwords at a rate faster than humans could type, or if the user was entering a lot of bogus codes, then it was probably being hacked. It would then lock itself down and trip the local alarm. Deck had written some software for his UIU to enable it to analyze keypads by searching their memory for valid codes or passwords without actually trying all of the codes. The only drawback was that it took a long time. The keypad's memory would almost certainly be encrypted, and would need to be deciphered before the code could be extracted. This internal encryption would have to be fairly light or else it would slow the device down too much for it to function properly. In theory, his overpowered machine should be able to break it in under half an hour.

Deck took the UIU from his rig and taped it over the surface of the keypad with the duct tape. The surface of the UIU was battered and covered with old tape residue and grime from all of the other devices it had been attached to during its long and useful career.

Deck sat down at his rig, which acted as the interface for the UIU. He fired up KEYPDBRUTE, a program he designed for just this sort of job. However, he didn't want to have to wait for this to finish. The UIU was just insurance, in case he couldn't get the password by other means.

He checked the front desk for a button that would "buzz" employees in. It was an unlikely long shot - since it would negate all the security on the door - but he still had to check. On the underside of the desk he found a small red button, which he assumed was a security alarm. A "buzzer" would most likely be more obvious, and not colored red. Either way, he wasn't about to press it and find out.

On his rig he had stored everything he knew about TriOp, including the employee roster for this office. He brought it up and scanned though the list. He needed someone high enough on the company food chain to have the keypad code, but low enough to be easily intimidated. Anyone in middle management would be a good target. He scanned the list and found the person with the most distant address. He looked up their phone number and dialed using the phone on the reception desk.

"Hello?", came a wary voice. This guy obviously wasn't used to getting phone calls at 10:30pm.

Deck adopted his best arrogant prick voice for this one, "Is this Neil Paulson?"

"Yeah, who is-"

"I'm Richard Holgate, personal assistant to Lawrence Diego", Deck paused for a second to let the name of TriOptimim's CEO to sink in. "I'm trying to collect the copyright documents needed for Mr. Diego's Tokyo trip. That information was supposed to be overnighted to him yesterday. So I'm here at your office looking for it and I notice everyone is gone for the day." He seethed with indignant anger.

"Well I don't -"

"I can get it myself, but you need come in and open the lobby door for me."

"Come in to the office right now?", his voice was nervous and shaken. He didn't want to piss "Richard" off, but he also didn't want to drive an hour just to open a door.

"Richard" sighed to show how patient he was trying to be, "YES. You. Come in. Right Now. How else would you suggest I get in?", Deck hoped he wasn't over-playing it. If he did, the guy might actually come in, and then he would have a whole new set of problems to deal with.

"Look", Neil said, trying to gain some sort of composure, "How do I know you're really -"

Deck cut him off again, "Oh Yes", he began in a sarcastic voice, "I broke into our branch office so I could sit at the front desk and talk to YOU" Deck knew that Neil could look down at his display and see that the call was indeed coming from the office.

After a brief pause Neil relented, "I'm sorry, I... I'm on my way - I can be there in an hour."

Crap. This was not what Deck wanted.

"What? I need in NOW. I don't want to be waiting around here all night for you to show up.", he snapped. "Look... isn't there.. isn't there just a password or something?" Deck knew he was pushing it now. His target might catch on if he was too explicit.

"Well, you can use my password, but you need a key and I - "

Deck cut him off again, "I have my key, I just need a stupid password. Look, can you help me or do I have to call...", Deck glanced down at his screen to find Neil's boss, "Mr. Price and get him up as well?"

Neil crumbled, "No, no - I have it right... right here." Deck heard the shuffling of papers on the other end. After a few seconds, "It's Z-9-0-P-D-4-0-4-4-L".

Deck typed this into his rig before replying, "You didn't just read that off of a piece of paper did you? Why do we spend all of this money on a secure lock when you idiots just write your passwords down where anyone can read them?"

"I'm... I'm sorry I thought -", he blurted out.

Deck hung up on him.

He moved over to the door and stabbed the guard's key into the lock. Again the keypad lit up and Deck moved the UIU out of the way to enter the password.

There was a long, annoying pause before the screen displayed:

INVALID PASSWORD

Deck winced. He guessed that the keys and passwords went together. So, he either needed the guard's password or Neil's key.

It occurred to him that perhaps the guard was just as careless with his password as Neil had been. After replacing the UIU he retrieved the guard's wallet and emptied it out on the reception desk. He looked at every card in the wallet, but didn't find anything that looked like a password. He pocketed the $50 or so the guard had been carrying and returned the wallet to his reeking pants.

He felt a vague stab of guilt at lifting the cash. Last year, it would have been beneath him. He used to pride himself that he only stole from corporations, not people. Being broke and desperate over the past few weeks had shaken his standards.

Deck checked his rig to see how the decryption was going. There were a number of common fast-encryption schemes used by various password devices. His program had managed to determine which one was in use, and was currently offering an estimate of 174.3 minutes.

Deck stopped the program. There was no way he could stay here for another twenty minutes without getting caught, much less three hours. He started up a different program, called KEYPDSRCH3. He took Neil's password and fed it to his program, and then set it to work on the keypad. Now that he knew one password, he could use that piece of information to help him decrypt the rest. Since he knew what one fragment of memory should look like (the password Neil gave him) he could have his program look for that specific string of values. Once this was found, the program would have enough information to decrypt the rest of the keypad's memory. It was still looking for a needle in a haystack, but now the program knew how to tell a needle from hay.

The program started up and after a few moments offered a time estimate of 17.5 minutes. These estimates were notoriously inaccurate. It was really like trying to predict how long it takes to catch a fish. However, the program could look at how fast it was interfacing with the device, how much memory it needed to scan, what type of encryption was in place, and how strong the encryption was, and come up with a very rough estimate.

17.5 minutes was still too long.

This type of program functioned better if it had more information to work with. Deck could speed things up a lot if he had just a little more data. Using the needle-in-a-haystack analogy, this would be like making the needle bigger and thus easier to find. He decided to gamble. He assumed that the plastic keys were related to employee number, and that employee numbers were tied to the passwords. Therefore, the employee number could be next to the password in memory. The risk was, if he was wrong the entire search would run all the way to the end and never find a match. If he was right, the search would be much faster.

He looked up the guard's employee number in his database and entered it into KEYPDSRCH3. After a few moments the program gave a time estimate of 6.7 minutes.

This was it. He had been sitting in the lobby, in full view of everyone on the street for almost half an hour. If KEYPDSRCH3 failed he was going to have to bail. That would mean several weeks of preparation down the tubes. Even worse, nobody was paying him for this gig. He was hacking TriOp for his own purposes, and paying for everything himself. It would be weeks before he pulled together enough money to try again. Even worse, he would probably have to try a different branch of TriOp, since it would be suicide to try here again. That would mean more money, temporary relocation expenses... He shook his head. He needed to keep his mind on the moment.

Deck stood up and looked around the lobby. The guard was still out, and should stay that way for another hour if the keychain stunner had done its job.

He stepped behind a pillar to hide himself from the eyes of the street. He stripped off the suit he was wearing to reveal the black bodysleeve underneath. It was a semi-tight 'jumpsuit' with thick knee and elbow pads built in, along with some light padding in various other key areas. It was a favorite among people who skated, or spent a lot of time running from various security and law-enforcement groups. (There was often a lot of overlap between the two groups.) The other appealing aspect about the bodysleeve was that it had pockets - lots of them.

Deck ripped the rest of the gear out of his backpack and dropped it into various pockets where he would be able to find them quickly. He slipped the handgun into the built-in holster on his left thigh. It was made for holding tools or equipment, but the elastic straps were just the right size to keep a firm hold on a handgun.

Suddenly the speaker mounted on the guard's shoulder came to life, barking out a message that was mostly unintelligible static.

Deck froze. He figured it was some sort of central security station requesting the guard to check in. He had investigated the building security for several days before making tonight's run, but he hadn't counted on guards checking in periodically. It was a clumsy oversight, and demonstrated just how sloppy he had been getting lately.

If the guard didn't answer, they would either sound an alarm or come looking for him themselves. Either way, he was screwed.

The burst of static came again, only this time more intelligible, "(garble) central. Check In. (garble) there?"

The building must have had a ton of shielding to mess up the signal that badly. Deck grabbed the vox from the guard's shoulder and brought it over to his rig. He quickly linked the data output from the UIU to the speaker and cranked the volume. The UIU was communicating using a standard radio signal, and turning it into a plain audio feed produced a sound that was a lot like modem noise. The small speakers on his rig spat out a high-pitched sound that resembled a combination of white noise, interference, and over-compression. He held the vox close to the speaker and thumbed the "talk" button.

"Checking in, all clear."

He hoped the noise was enough to cover the fact that his was the wrong voice.

He waited.

Thirty seconds later he decided they had either bought it or were on their way to pick him up. He turned off the vox and dropped it into a pocket.

There was no way to know what they were doing. If they were on their way, he needed to make a break for it right now if he wanted to have a shot at getting away.

Just then his rig lit up, and the door slid open.

Deck took his rig and slapped it onto the Velcro strips on the right leg of the bodysleeve. He tossed the old suit and briefcase into the trash and pocketed the UIU before heading through the door into the main offices.

He passed though a maze of featureless, faceless cubicles. The sterile work area was almost completely devoid of personality or color. In contrast to the marble decadence of the lobby, the walls were cheap, featureless white drywall. There were no paintings, motivational posters, or any type of signs on the walls - not even the corporate logo. There were no personal items on the desks or walls to indicate what sort of people might work there. The place was so pristine it could be mistaken for unoccupied. There wasn't even a coffee machine or water cooler.

What it did have was surveillance cameras, lots of them. Spread evenly throughout the area where small video cameras, leaving no corner outside the ever-present blanket of scrutiny. It was safe to assume the other departments would be similarly monitored. These cameras were probably not really watched by actual humans, since the staff needed to process this much data would be too large. It would take a few dozen people just staring at video screens all day just to make use of this input, and then there was always the question of who would watch them.

The cameras were probably there for archival and psychological value. It was almost certain they would be watching this video after they realized he had been here.

What sort of people worked in a place like this? Deck tried to imagine himself working in one of these featureless boxes under relentless surveillance and it pissed him off. It made him feel better about what he was doing.

As he passed through the cubicles he moved swiftly and silently. If there had been a human observer watching from one of the cameras, deprived of the view of Deck's feet by the low walls, they might have wondered briefly if he was skating. His body moved with a fluid and practiced grace, sliding from one end of the soulless corporate tomb to the other. He kept his head slightly low and his legs bent, so that his body was a coil of potential energy, ready to propel him forward if he sensed danger.

He reached the rear of the office space and found the executive elevator. It had no buttons, just a simple slot. Deck tried the keys on the the guard's keyring until he found a match.

The executive elevator was a mildly ornate box that hauled Deck up through the seemingly endless levels of the corporate spire without him needing to touch a button. The surveillance camera was conspicuous in its absence.

Deck stepped off of the elevator into the executive nirvana that was the sixty-fourth floor. The walls were done in genuine wood paneling, and the carpet was a thick shag that seemed to Deck to be a needless static hazard. There were no cameras here. Each door looked to be a featureless slab of wood, but was probably reinforced steel simply encased in wood. Beside each door was a flat black scanner, ringed in brass, inset tastefully into the wall. Small brass light fixtures were set into the wall, casting small, tight pools of light over various plaques and flattering paintings of old executives long gone.

He moved carefully now, pausing and checking around corners as he darted from one corridor to the next. As he approached his target his left hand slid into his breast pocket and retrieved a small homemade card the size of a TriOp employee ID. Deck had encoded the magnetic strip across the bottom with data he believed would identify him as one of the high-level executives. He slapped the plastic card onto the featureless black scanner beside the door and it was accepted. The doors slid open to reveal a darkened office.

He paused for a moment to allow his eyes to adjust to the dark. There was mild light coming in the huge window that comprised an entire wall of the office. The light came mostly from below, as part of the ambient noise of the city.

The large flat screen on the desk blinked to life as Deck dropped his rig in front of it. A few seconds later it found what he was looking for - a network node. It negotiated with the node and connected him to the TriOp corporate network. The node would give him access to the massive communications hardware on the roof, which was the whole point of tonight's exercise.

He checked the time... 11:05pm. He was slightly behind schedule, but he had allowed for delays. He went to work.

He set up a simple program he had written called SECWATCH. It would run in the background, monitoring local network traffic, and would alert him if any of the building's security alarms were tripped. If the program detected something, he would have to escape quickly.

The goal was to connect to Citadel Station - the largest, longest running orbital structure ever created. It was designed, funded, constructed, and operated solely by TriOptimum Corporation. Citadel was the only such station to exist without the aid of any government-run space program, and it was also the only station to ever turn a profit.

Beyond the reach of international law, the orbital station was free to pursue any type of research the company saw fit. It attracted the most progressive scientific minds in the world, eager to free themselves of bureaucracy and ethics review boards. As long as their goals were beneficial to TriOp, they could draw all the funding they needed from the bottomless pockets of TriOptimum. There were no taboos, and no rules except one: make something profitable. Most of the money came from the sale of new medicines, weapons, and computer hardware. The various scientific and political bodies officially denounced the ethics-free research that went on at Citadel, but were happy enough to benefit from the results once the work was complete.

Citadel was the home of humankind's first viral cure - a cure for a narrow set of nasty STD's that had been passing themselves around the great biomass of the human race for over half a century. The cure was impossibly expensive, and thus only available to people of developed nations and even then only with great effort. To the inhabitants of underdeveloped and third world countries - where indiscretion and lack of education spread the disease the fastest - the cure was unattainable. Thus the third world served as a giant petri dish for the virii, keeping them alive and available to occasionally spill over into the wealthy nations of the world who would have no choice but to again surrender huge sums of money in exchange for more of the cure.

But Deck wasn't after any viral cure - particularly not for a sexually transmitted one. His lifestyle as a hacker made him an unlikely candidate for such a thing. He was after hardware. A very expensive, exotic, and rare piece of hardware. It was something of a legend among the hacker community, and it had taken him a month just to prove the thing even existed. Acquiring this thing had consumed most of his time and money over the past three months. He had passed up a lot of jobs - some of them would have been really good money - because they would have interfered with his current project.

His goal was to access the inventory system and find out where these things went once they got planetside. Who bought them? For how much? From whom? If things went really well, he might try to fake an entry in the inventory system and have one simply delivered to an address where he could pick it up, but he certainly wasn't counting on having that much luck. More than likely, he would simply gather enough data to be able to punch a hole in the security wall and gain access the system from the outside. If he could gain outside access, then he wouldn't need physical access to a TriOp node the next time he made a run.

He hooked into the system and was instantly hit with his first layer of ICE. ICE was the protective layer of programs that guarded a system. It was designed to detect people who weren't supposed to be there and make them go away. ICE had many ways of dealing with trespassers. Some would try to cut the hacker off from the system. Some would sound security alarms or notify authorities. Others would try to flood or overload the hackers connection with an avalanche of digital garbage, choking off their connection to their target. Other types of ICE were more devious. Some would make it appear as though access had been gained, when really the hacker was still blocked off from the system.

It took him ten minutes to get past the first layers of ICE so that he could function as a legitimate user in the system. The first program that surfaced was a pushover. He created a situation that caused it to crash, and then bypassed it before the system automatically restarted it. The next one was more formidable and began sealing him off from other parts of the network, limiting his access. The problem with this type of ICE was that it didn't seal itself off from him. Deck managed to confuse the program into attacking some of the other security layers, and it managed to punch a hole in the network for him before other ICE defenses shut it down.

Each layer was unique. Each one required a different trick or exploit to circumvent. He had spent years building up his repertoire of tricks and his software library, and he would need to use both to their fullest extent to punch through the defenses he would be dealing with tonight.

It took another fifteen minutes to create a new employee ID and give it all the access he needed. His new employee number was 2-4601, and his new password was a 256-bit string derived from background noise coming from the analog transmission to the local node. That was as secure as he could make it.

Time was always against a hacker. The longer you stayed in a system - even if you weren't doing anything obviously wrong - the better the chances you would be detected. Ideally, you wanted a job to be no more than half an hour for a system with standard security. For a higher security system, you needed to finish faster. Someone, sooner or later, was bound to notice the unusual amount of disabled, crashed, or confused software in the system and then it was time to start running.

After another five minutes he was finally logged in under the new I.D. He then accessed the inventory system and started searching. Every product ever produced by TriOptimum was in here somewhere, recorded in great detail. A moment ago he was locked out of the system, unable to access any information. Now he had the opposite problem: Too much information. Component lists, production costs, schematics, sales guidelines & brochures, sales history, production schedules, inventory figures, market research, license and support plans offered, patents used, legal notes, shipping guidelines, storage specifications, profit projections, gross margins, demand figures sorted by region (actual and projected), documentation (in dozens of languages), certifications required, cross-reference info for related products or services, ongoing research data...

Deck sat back for a second and rubbed his eyes. He was drowning in information. Somewhere in this ocean of data was one single item that interested him. He needed a way to cull the list and find only what he needed. The interface software was designed around the (usually safe) assumption that the user knew what the hell they were looking for and how it might be classified. It was attractive, user-friendly, intuitive, and completely useless to him.

After a few more minutes he found a way to circumvent the overly-helpful interface and access the database directly. The product images vanished and the screen dropped into a simple green-text console. He smiled.

He had no idea what this thing would be called, much less what part number it might be assigned. He had no direct way to even search for it. He did know that:

1. It must be very rare. Less than a thousand in existence would be a safe guess.
2. It would be insanely expensive. A million would be a conservative estimate.
3. Rumor suggested that it entered circulation in the last year or so. Therefore, it had probably entered production less than eighteen months ago.
4. He had no idea how it might be classified. Prosthetics? Consumer electronics? Cybernetic equipment? Medical technology? There was no way for him to know all the possible categories, much less which one he ought to use. However, he did know what this thing wasn't. It wasn't any sort of software. It wasn't a service. It wasn't medicine. It wasn't robotics. It wasn't any sort of storage media. He blocked out the items that fell into any of these categories.

He began filtering the inventory database though these criteria and came up with a list of fifteen hundred parts. He winced. That was still far too large a list to sort through. He jabbed the "clear screen" button to wipe the data from the display. The effect was more for his benefit than for the computer's. He needed to try something different, and this was Deck's way of clearing his mind and mentally starting over.

Just as the key clicked beneath his index finger a word on the screen caught his attention. The text vanished, leaving a glowing emerald afterimage in his eyes:

IMPLANTS

This was what he was looking for, although it hadn't occurred to him that it might be listed so explicitly. He ran a new search, this time looking for new, rare, expensive implants. The search came back with twenty-two entries.

Five were still in the early pre-alpha stage. Six more had been abandoned before they reached the production stage. Despite being relativly new, one was already marked as obsolete or discontinued. Three were not marked as "classified". Two more were obviously prosthetics of some sort. Another was tagged as being regulated by certain firearm laws and was therefore a weapon. None of these were what he was looking for.

Now he was down to a list of four parts that were all new, rare, expensive, classified implants. He checked the time. 11:45pm. He was running long. He had been in the building for over an hour. He should have left ages ago, but he felt he was getting close. He gave himself until midnight.

Out of the remaining list of four, two were listed as weighing over a pound, and were therefore unlikely to be what he wanted. He looked at the two remaining part numbers:

I-cit-323-cyb4512R

I-cit-323-cyb4512Rv2

The 'I' designated it as an implant. The 'cit' was the facility in charge of production (Citadel). He didn't know where the rest of the number was derived from. Then he realized that the part numbers were nearly identical. They were most likely the same thing. The 'v2' probably just designated the second one as a newer model. This was almost certainly what he wanted.

He cracked open the customer database to see who had been buying these things.

Suddenly the office was bathed in white light. Deck's heart jumped as he and the room around him were brought from almost complete darkness into the searing brilliance of a floodlight. An instant later Deck realized the light was coming from window. The piercing light moved across the room, making the shadows slide across the walls and floor.

Just as quickly, the light moved on. He realized that it had just been a helicopter sweeping past the office window. He took a deep breath and returned to his work. He was moving quickly now, his fingers flying across the keyboard as he sifted though terrabytes of data. Another ten minutes passed.

More ICE blocked his way that needed to be either circumvented or cut. He eventually located the customers he was looking for, only to find they were generic, nondescript aliases that gave no indication of who they really were. None of them had addresses or contact info. None of them seemed to be linked to any other part of the system. More time passed.

He eventually gave up on the customers and simply explored what orders had taken place. The prices varied widely from one customer to another, but were always in the seven to eight figure range. The delivery location was always listed simply as "D'Arcy".

Deck ran some more searches to try and find out what sort of place D'Arcy was. A city? A warehouse? A department? A code name for something else? More time passed. He checked the clock. 12:30am.

Crap.

He needed to be gone over an hour and a half ago. This was suicide. He was so close. Five more minutes.

Suddenly a message appeared on his screen:

Run.

Deck blinked. He had no idea who would be sending him a message like this. He traced it and found that it appeared to be coming from Citadel itself. This made even less sense. He checked SECWATCH anyway. All clear.

He ran some more searches for D'Arcy - there was simply no location called D'Arcy anywhere in the system.

Run. Now.

Deck shook his head. He didn't normally take advice from computer systems he was hacking, but he knew he had pushed his luck too far already. He needed to go, SECWATCH alert or not. Before he closed his rig, he decided to run a check on the local police to see if they had any alerts going.

There were several, but only one was important to him:

REPORTED: 08/20/42 - 12:15am

TYPE: Intrusion

LOCATION: TriOptimum Square

ACTION TAKEN: Multiple Units, Ambulance dispatched.

SUSPECT: Adult male, black clothing, armed + dangerous

LOCATION: TriOptimum Bldg. 64th floor

The building's security guards had simply called the police instead of tripping their local alarm. Deck wished he had set up a program to monitor elevator activity, because then he would know which way to start running. Too late for that now.

Even worse, he was dealing with cops instead of security personnel. Cops were much less predictable in their use of force and far more likely to use deadly force.

Deck shut his rig and took a small metal lipstick-sized cylinder out of his pocket.

Just then the door slid open. Before Deck could react, two cops swept into the room. By the time he saw them their weapons were trained on him. One advanced directly to the desk while the other flanked him from the left.

They were wearing hard-core cop gear. Their bodies were encased in lightweight armor, and they were wearing bulletproof helmets that provided high-grade night vision.

Deck looked down to see a laser-site dot pointed at the center of his chest. He could guess where the other one was aimed.

"Hands on your head, sir. Step away from the desk.", the cop commanded. His voice was harsh as it spat out of the helmet speaker. The lights of the city reflected off the polished black surface. "Do it now!", he added when he saw that Deck was hesitating.

Deck hadn't moved since they came in the room. He had just sat there, like a rodent in the headlights. He still held in his hand the small metal tube - an EMP grenade. It was time to see if this thing was worth the money.

He thumbed the detonator on the end of the EMP grenade as he placed his hands on his head.

There was a pop in his hand, and muffled cries of confusion from both officers. Deck counted himself lucky that neither of them pulled the trigger in panic. They stumbled back as their helmet displays died, leaving them completely blind. The screen on the desk winked out for good, and Deck cursed as he realized he had just toasted his rig.

In one graceful motion, Deck scooped up the burned-out rig and slid across the desk. The cop in front of the desk was the first to realize what was wrong and struggled to remove his helmet. Deck smashed him in the back of the knee with the corner of his rig - one part of the body where he wouldn't have any armor.

Without the built-in helmet speaker, his scream was severely muffled. By the time the he hit the floor Deck was in the hallway and running.

Deck pulled the memory core from the side of the rig and slipped it into a pocket as he ran. He tossed the rig aside. He rushed forward to the doorway capping the end of the hallway. If his floorplans were correct - and they had been correct so far - this would be a fire exit. The elevators would probably be either locked down or full of cops.

The fire door slammed open as his momentum carried him through. A second later the tight springs of the door snapped it shut behind him. The stairwell was the same as every other emergency stairwell ever built. It was a narrow cement box filled with a crude set of metal steps that spiraled all the way down the side of the building. The stark concrete walls reflected the slightest sound and turned the entire shaft into an echo chamber. The railing was a hollow metal pipe covered in peeling white paint.

As he reached the first landing the the door was again hammered open with a sharp explosion of sound and energy, as if someone had nailed it with a sledgehammer. Deck glanced back to see a 4-inch exit wound in the center of the steel surface.

He leapt down each short flight of narrow metal stairs. After two floors he heard the door slam open yet again and the stairway above was filled with the sounds of footsteps. Deck began opening random doorways as he ran downward, hoping to throw off or confuse his pursuers. They would never be able to hear his relatively silent steps over their own hard-soled boot stampede. They would hear the doors opening for each floor, and be faced with the choice of stopping to examine each floor to look for him or risk blundering by him if he left the stairwell.

He was probably gaining ground and widening the gap between them. They would not be as swift as he was under the best of circumstances, and right now they were burdened with body armor and some heavy-duty weapons hardware. Also, one of them was probably dealing with a severe limp. But Deck knew he couldn't hope to simply escape this way. There would be more units on their way up the stairs to meet him, and if he stayed on this route too long he would get sandwiched. He stopped opening doors and just concentrated on getting more distance between himself and his pursuers above.

The pounding from above stopped and Deck slowed down. They were probably standing still, listening for his footsteps. He returned to the graceful, smooth walk he had used earlier. He heard voices from above as the cops whispered between labored breaths. Deck wondered how many levels he had between them. The footsteps began again from above, but more steady this time. They were pacing themselves, trying to keep the noise level down so they could hear him opening doors.

Most of the doors in the building were of the modern, sliding variety. However, law required that emergency doors be equipped with breaker bars, and be operable without power. Thus the emergency doors were massive, hollow steel beasts that thundered when they were thrown open. Deck wondered if they could be opened quietly. He slowed as he reached the next landing and gently pulled the door. If it made an audible sound, he would throw it open the rest of the way and continue downward.

It was almost silent, just a small creak. Deck hesitated, then slipped through and eased it gently closed. It made a soft thud as it sealed shut. He hesitated again. Would they have heard that?

He still seemed to be in the upper echelons of the company. The walls were a lower grade of wood paneling than he had witnessed on the sixty-fourth, but the carpet was still deep.

Deck frowned as he spotted video cameras tucked away in various corners. He knew there was nothing he could do about that. The only comfort he had was that they couldn't possibly watch all the cameras at once, so there was still a chance they might miss him, particularly if they didn't know what floor he was on.

His current floor seemed to be combined with the one above. Even though the lights were dim, he could see that the ceilings were two levels high, and there was a balcony running along the wall above him. To his right was a restaurant style dining area, with a long table in front that was presumably to hold the catering. To his left was a large conference / meeting room. On one of the tables inside, Deck could see a scale model of Citadel Station. Its three meter frame dominated the room as its many arms reached out from beneath its immense upper dome, like a great steel jellyfish.

He proceeded down the corridor and made an arbitrary left. He didn't know where he was going, but he at least wanted some distance between himself and the stairway. On his left he saw conference rooms of varying sizes and styles, while on the right was a small-sized auditorium that might seat a couple hundred.

Most of the level seemed to be made of open areas, or areas walled in glass. There did seem to be a few rooms that might offer hiding places, but they were behind closed, featureless doors with a black panel set beside them, much like the doors on the executive level. His counterfeit card would probably grant him access, but if the police were worth anything they would certainly be watching for things like executive cards being used. He would just be advertising his position.

He arrived at an intersection and went right. He was aiming for the opposite side of the level where he could access the other set of stairs.

He had no way of knowing what floor he was on - he had neglected to count on the way down. His best guess was that he was somewhere in the high forties. It wouldn't matter much if he did know - he hadn't bothered to study much of the layout between the first and sixty-fourth floor.

At the next intersection he made a right and spotted two open, darkened rooms.

Bathrooms.

It was hardly a creative hiding place, but it was relatively dark and it didn't have any video cameras.

The absence of urinals suggested he had chosen the women's restroom. Not that it mattered. The whole bathroom was decorated in tasteful black and white ceramic tile, with all of the plumbing fixtures in brass.

He leaned up against the pristine marble countertop, breathing heavily. He hadn't stopped moving since he fired the EMP and he needed a rest. Deck looked around and sneered, wondering for a moment if more money was spent decorating this one bathroom than was spent decorating the entire office area on the first floor.

He ran some cold water in the sink and splashed it on his face. He knew he needed to think of something, to form some sort of a plan of escape. He had several ideas, but they all had being on level ten or lower as a prerequisite. He was going to need to somehow reach the lower levels without using any of the elevators. That meant using one of two known sets of emergency stairs or finding another route that wasn't mentioned in the floorplans he bought.

In an older building he might consider using the elevator shafts, but the TriOp building was new enough to have defenses for dealing with that sort of nonsense.

He closed his eyes and tried to imagine what they would be doing to search for him. They had almost certainly set up shop in the security station on the third floor. What would he do in their position? If he was searching a 64-story building for a single individual, he would lock down all of the elevators but one, and use it to send two teams to the top. From there, they would move down the staircases while another pair of teams would begin from the bottom. The main floors then would be watched with video cameras.

He knew they were determined to use deadly force. This made things easier for him, since he didn't have to worry about committing further crimes in the process of escaping. He was either going to escape or die. He had only been in this situation once before, and he found it both terrifying and liberating. From now on, there were no crimes he could commit that could make his situation more dire.

---

Fear. That was his enemy now. Fear would cause him to choke if he was cornered, and that would get him killed. He had choked back in the office when they surprised him, and it was only by luck that he had even been holding the EMP.

How many were there? Where were they looking?

He realized he might be able to eavesdrop on their chatter using the vox he had lifted from the guard in the lobby. He retrieved it from his pocket and lowered the volume so that it would be just barely audible.

After a couple minutes of silence he began searching other channels. Most were blank or uninteresting to him. Many of the channels featured the standard emergency / rescue chatter that was simply part of the background noise of a city. He continued to cycle though the channels until he found one that seemed to be a series of short garbled bursts that could only be encrypted transmissions. The TriOp security communicator obviously didn't have the key needed to decrypt police transmissions. Deck probably could have cracked it himself if he still had his rig. He put the vox away.

He had no way of knowing where they were or what they were doing. Waiting around was only going to give them time to close in on him. Attempting to use the elevator would advertise his position, so he decided to try the stairs again.

He dropped into his familiar rhythm of movement, gliding along the corridors, slowing for just an instant at each intersection to make sure the way was clear.

He passed a pair of elevators and checked the display. He was on the fifty - third floor. Deck frowned. It had felt like he descended a lot more than eleven levels. One elevator was sitting at the bottom, the other was just a few floors down and on its way up. Somebody had obviously figured out where he was and they were coming to pick him up.

He thought of the gun he was carrying, but that was out of the question. He couldn't hope to win a firefight if there were more than one or two of them.

His hand dove into a pocket and got a flash ready. He had a grenade, which would also do the job, but he needed it to get out of the building, and he really didn't want to blow up an elevator full of cops.

He stood beside the elevator with his back to the wall. The elevator reached his floor and chimed. He popped the flash, chucking it in the doorway as it slid open. With the other hand, Deck covered his eyes as he looked away.

The flash went off and brilliant light engulfed the corridor. The world turned pink for Deck as the intense burst of light passed through his hand and stung his eyes.

He removed his hand and found that his eyes were a bit dazzled, but working. He peeked into the elevator and saw that it was empty. The doors slid silently closed.

Crap. Who had just sent him an empty elevator? Deck realized he had just wasted a lot of time and a very expensive flash, and all he had managed to do was mess up his eyes for a few minutes.

As he moved away, the elevator chimed and opened its doors again. The down arrow blinked repeatedly.

Deck took off running and headed for the nearby stairwell. Halfway down to the next level he began to think that someone obviously knew where he was. He determined to cross over on the next level to the opposite set of stairs in hopes of throwing them off.

He swept down the stairs and opened the door in a single swift movement. As the door swung open he found himself facing a pair of equally surprised cops. The pair was a mere three meters away from him. There was a subtle pause where both parties seemed to wonder what was going to happen next. Deck acted first this time.

He stepped back into the stairwell, bringing another flash out of his pocket. He popped it and dropped it on the landing as he tossed himself down the stairs. The cop in front had just drawn his weapon when the flash went off.

The pop was punctuated by cries of pain and dismay. These cops had either decided not to wear helmets, or had learned of the EMP Deck had used earlier and had elected to remove them. In either case, their eyes were completely unshielded when the intense explosion of light filled the doorway.

Deck had done his best to shield his eyes, but this time he was facing the flash, and only a couple of meters away. The dingy white walls of the stairwell reflected the light more efficiently than the dark wood paneling of the floor above, so Deck absorbed a much bigger dose this time around.

The shock of the flash threw him off balance, and he slammed into the wall at the bottom of the stairs. The air was knocked out of his lungs and he slumped to the floor. He pulled his hand from his eyes and saw that his vision had taken a nasty hit, but he could still see. Everything looked dim and pale, and his vision was flickering like some cheap display screen. He groaned as he picked himself up. His right hip and shoulder had absorbed most of the impact and they were numb and tingling.

He forced himself onto his feet and back up the stairs. He needed to deal with the cops before he moved on.

One cop was on his hands and knees, his eyes opened wide and darting around but unable to see. His weapon was still in his hand. His blindness would last for hours or perhaps days. The other one was laying on his side, vomiting.

Deck unhooked the keychain stunner from his ring of keys, so that he just had the plastic handle and metal prong. He jabbed it into the spine of the first cop and zapped him.

His victim flopped forward with a grunt. Deck then jabbed the other cop and zapped him too, but the stunner had run out of charge. The cop just convulsed a bit and went back to throwing up. Deck shrugged. That was close enough for him. He lifted their vox units and pocketed them. He left them with their weapons since they would both be too blind to make use of them, and he didn't want to carry any more hardware. Without a vox or the ability to see, they wouldn't be able to tell anyone where they were or what had happened.

Instead of a weapon, the second cop was holding some equipment. It looked like a stripped-down rig hooked up to some sort of camera. Deck didn't know what it was, but he was guessing it was something to help them look for him. Perhaps a thermal camera. The rig was too primitive to be of use to him, so he left it there.

Deck's eyes stung and watered, and tears ran down his face. He kept rubbing them in a vain attempt to clear them, but his vision remained darkened and flickering.

He needed to get moving.

He sprinted full speed across the level, ignoring caution and stealth. By the time he reached the stairwell, his hip and shoulder had begun to throb, and his movements had become heavy and uneven. He knocked open the door and began a long spiraling trip downward. This time he kept count. He needed to cover at least forty floors before he could think of leaving the stairs.

After ten floors his hip was in agony and he had to slow his pace. He could feel his shoulder stiffening up as well. Ten floors later he needed to rest. He came to a stop at the landing for the thirtieth floor. He wiped the sweat and tears from his face with his left hand and then combed the sweat out of his hair with his fingers. He missed his shaved head.

---

Deck leaned against the wall, breathing in short, uneven gulps. Every time he expanded his chest, pain shot across his shoulder and up his neck. His need for air and his aversion to the pain played tug-of-war with his breathing patterns.

He realized that he wasn't getting out of there. He had come to this conclusion at some point during his run down the stairs. There was just no way he was going to escape though the net of police that was surely making its way up through the building. For him, it was no longer a question of how he would escape, but how far he would get before they brought him down. This gave him a kind of sick desperation that fueled him onward. He was no longer running for his life - he was already dead. Instead, he was running out of spite, out of sheer stubbornness and vengeance. They were going to get him, and he was going to make them work for it. He was going to see how far he could get before they stopped him. Nescio had been right after all.

He decided to shed some of the extra weight that had been dragging on his suit. He pulled out the UIU and tossed it. He dumped the useless TriOp vox he had been lugging all over the building for no apparent reason. He dumped the two police vox units he had picked up several minutes earlier. He dropped the few spare parts he always carried for his rig, his duct tape, and a couple of blank phones.

He looked at his reel of fiberline and and decided to keep it. Just in case. The same went for his knife. Both of them were fairly light anyway.

Deck considered the gun. It was heavier than anything else he had dumped, but it also had the potential to let him last a bit longer. He didn't have any spare ammunition for it. He decided he would keep it until it ran dry.

Deck looked at the pile of junk on the floor and realized he hadn't tried the police vox.. Shaking his head in disbelief, he picked one up and switched it on.

"Floors thirty-four and thirty-five clear. Starting our run on thirty-two and thirty-three."

"Roger that."

Deck smiled. He couldn't tell who was talking, but he would at least know what was going on. Somebody was obviously just a few floors above him. He wondered if he should try to double-back to floor thirty-four now that they thought it was clear.

He stood up straight and paced back and fourth. His hip was really stiffening up. He needed to get moving while he could still run. His breathing had almost returned to normal, and his vision had improved slightly.

He took the vox and clipped it to his shoulder.

"Floors thirty-two and thirty-three clear"

What the hell? How had they swept two entire levels that fast? Perhaps there were multiple teams of units on multiple floors...

"Beginning sweep of twenty-nine and thirty"

Deck hesitated. How were they "sweeping" the levels? The stairwell was empty and he hadn't heard anyone above or below him changing floors.

"Base?"

"Go ahead."

"You have anyone in the south stairway on thirty?"

"Negative."

Deck's eyes widened.

"Then I've got him."

"Acknowledged. We have a team en route. Which way is he heading?"

"He's not, the target is stationary."

Deck lunged down the stairs.

"Woah! Target is moving now... heading down."

"Roger that."

Deck hit the landing for level twenty-nine.

"Passing twenty-nine... still going down. It looks like someone must have nailed him. He's limping badly. I'm still with him... passing twenty-eight... twenty-seven..."

Deck continued his descent while the voice continued to broadcast his every move. He had no idea who or what was watching him. There were clearly no cameras in the stairwell, so it must have been someone on the outside.

"Okay, our men are on level twenty. Heading for the south stairwell."

Deck hit the landing for floor twenty-three.

"Better hurry, he's moving fast."

Deck cursed the unseen voice. Who was it? Where were they? How were they watching him?

"Roger that. Almost there."

Deck hit twenty-two.

"Gonna be close. Target just passed twenty-two."

Screw it, Deck thought. If he was going to have a crowd bust in on him, he was going out with a bang. He slipped the grenade out of his pocket and held it in his right hand, ready to go. He was jumping most of the stairs now, despite the explosion of pain he experienced every time he landed. He passed the door for floor twenty-one.

"Here he comes."

He hit level twenty and kept going. His legs were in agony. His lungs burned. Tears streamed down his cheeks again.

As he rounded the corner, the door above slammed open and the stairwell filled with the sound of echoing footsteps.

"Your team just missed him, he's just above nineteen."

"We have units on the way up from ten."

Deck changed his mind and exchanged the grenade for his last flash. Doing so slowed him down a few steps. Above him he heard voices yelling and radio chatter from some channel he wasn't getting.

"Man, your guys are right on top of him."

Deck popped the flash and dropped it as he ran.

"Woah! What just happened? Half your team just went down?"

"I can't tell, they're all yelling at us at once. Wait, it sounds like... Yeah, the target dropped another blinder on them."

"Roger that."

Deck was in too much pain to enjoy his little victory. The flash had gone off a level above him, probably in the middle of the pack of cops. The stairway was instantly filled with screams and profanity as they toppled over each other.

Deck heard footsteps coming up from below.

"The second team is on thirteen."

"I see them. Target is still descending."

Deck exited the stairwell onto floor fifteen.

"Base, target has exited the stairway onto level.... looks like level fifteen."

Deck burst though the door and found himself in a carbon copy of the first floor office area. There were cameras everywhere.

"Use caution, you don't want to get hit with another blinder."

"Roger that. Our team is ready for it."

He stumbled over to a nearby desk and fell across it, gasping from both the lack of oxygen and the pain his injury inflicted on him for each breath. His hip was a nexus of pain and every step felt like he was tearing something new. He needed some distance between himself and the team on its way up the stairs.

On a whim, Deck grabbed a chair and jammed it under the breaker bar of the door. He didn't have any idea if that would hold them or not.

Deck knew he was almost done. His lungs had never, ever burned this bad. He wondered if he was going to vomit. He headed for the closest doorway he could find, anxious to escape the open area.

"He's heading deeper into the structure now. I'm losing him... I'm gonna change position and see if I can get him back."

Deck had to slow down, his body was giving out on him. He paused at a nearby desk, leaning on it as he panted. He drew in sporadic gulps of air as he wrestled with his burning thirst for oxygen and the stabbing pain in his shoulder. Suddenly the screen on the desk lit up.

2-4601:

He blinked. The monitor wasn't even connected to a local machine.

Elevator is empty. Use it.

He glanced up to the nearby elevator. It was on its way up.

He drew his pistol. The elevator may or may not be empty, but someone definitely knew where he was. As the elevator came to a stop, he crouched behind the desk and leveled the pistol at the door. He tried to steady his breathing. His hands were shaking.

The elevator chimed and he fired six shots through the doors, trying to cover all the corners where someone might be hiding.

The doors slid open to reveal the perforated back wall of the elevator.

Deck had no desire to trust the anonymous messenger who seemed to be sending him elevators. There was nobody in the world that would be both willing and able to provide this sort of assistance to him. He could only assume it was some strange tactic the police were employing. Nothing would make their job easier than for him to just jump into an elevator. Anyone in the security station could then override the controls and send him wherever they wanted.

As he knelt by the desk, he thought for a moment that he might feel better if he threw up, but he didn't have time to wait for it to happen.

He could only assume jamming the breaker bar on the fire door had held them, otherwise he would have been overrun by now.

He picked himself up and got moving again. The corridors were a homogenous blur of identical offices and clusters of cubicle spaces. Nothing had any identity, any distinctive markings. There was nothing to even let him know he was really progressing from one side of the building to the other.

He rounded a corner and found himself in a corridor walled on one side with windows and offices on the other. At the midpoint of the hallway was another pair of elevators. As he ran out in front of the window, a light shone though and pointed directly at him.

"Base, I have reacquired the target."

Deck stopped and turned to see a helicopter hanging in the air, just outside the window. The thundering of the blades was slightly muted though the windows.

"You got him?"

"He's on the west side, looking right at me through the windows."

"Roger that. I don't know how he got past our cameras."

Deck sneered into the blinding floodlight as he finally beheld his tormentor.

The voice returned, "He looks bad. You really ran this guy down."

"Acknowledged. What's he doing?"

"Target is not active.", there was a brief pause before the pilot added, "He's just staring at us like a moron."

"My team will be there soon. I think we've got control of the elevators again."

Deck glanced over his shoulder to see that one of the elevators was on its way up.

Deck whipped out the pistol and leveled it at the cockpit. He squeezed off two shots. The window in front of him cracked and bent under the force of the bullets, but held firm.

The helicopter broke onto the channel in a fit of laughter, "Base, target is firing on us."

"Say again?"

The was more uncontrolled snickering, "Target has initiated hostilities with an attack helicopter."

"We have him boxed in. You are cleared to pull out."

"Negative. A sidearm is not a serious threat to us." There was a short pause before the pilot added, "It can't even shoot through the structure windows."

"Roger that."

Deck gave him the finger and was answered with more laughter.

Deck was gasping for breath. He felt defeated, humiliated, exhausted. He found himself wishing they would get their act together and finish the job.

"I've got units coming up the north stairs and the elevator. The rest are trying to pull the hinges on the south doorway to gain access. We got him."

Deck considered hitting the north stairs and heading up, since there didn't seem to be anyone in that direction, but he decided he would rather shoot himself than run any more stairs. Besides, even if he was up for the run, he needed to go down, not up.

Deck looked out the window to the city below. He could make his stand here and see how much damage he could do before they stopped him, or he could pretend he was on the tenth floor and execute his escape plan anyway. He was five stories too high and the drop would probably kill him, but the idea appealed to him a lot more than a bloody gunfight.

He pulled out the grenade, armed it, and dumped it on the floor in front of the window he had just shot. He turned and ran.

The helicopter cut in, "looks like he's heading back the way he came."

The grenade detonated and blew out the window in front of it, along with its neighbor.

The climate-controlled air of the office exhaled out into the night. The cold, humid outside air rushed through the office, propelled by the blades of the helicopter The wind drove through the corridor, stirring papers and debris already thrown by the explosion.

The vox barked out more chatter, but Deck couldn't understand it over the wind, the helicopter, and the ringing in his ears from the explosion. The rush of displaced air died down as the sound of the thumping rotors grew distant. This was as good a chance as he was ever going to get.

The fiberline was actually a ribbon of high-strength cable only a few centimeters wide. Fiberline was strong enough to support an adult with only a few dozen strands, but the extra width was needed to provide a good braking surface. He hooked one end of the fiberline to the pockmarked window frame. The fiberline was already threaded though his suit. He just grabbed the brake and dove out the window. He didn't even look down.

He repelled downward in large, sweeping strokes. Each time he touched down on the side of the building, the impact created a spear of pain that shot from his right hip, traveling up his spine.

He had allotted himself enough line for a ten-story drop, plus slack, plus a little extra 'just in case'. In the back of his mind, he hoped he had made some large error and taken too much, possibly enough to traverse fifteen floors. He knew this wasn't the case, but it was enough of a fantasy to let him keep going.

Deck reached the end of the line and simply dropped off.

The impact with the ground was surprisingly soon, and predictably brutal. The already damaged parts of his body cried out on touchdown, and he bounced the side of his face off the rough gravel surface underneath him. Deck went from wondering how he was still alive to wondering how he was still even conscious. He wavered on the edge of blackout for a moment.

His stomach finally decided that it was time to puke. He rolled over onto his side and retched several times, but all he came up with was impotent dry heaves.

Deck lay motionless, catching his breath and staring up at the sky. He wondered how long he could lay there, sprawled out like a swatted bug before they found him. The cool night air washed over him, chilling the sweat that clung to his body. For a long moment his injuries seemed distant and unimportant.

Far above, near the top of the building, the helicopter was moving back and fourth over the face of the structure, pointing inward. The noise of its blades were just a murmur at this distance. All else was silent. Above, the sky was a dark, featureless ceiling of black. Clouds had rolled in and covered the city in a dark canopy. It was cooler than it had been when he arrived here a few hours ago.

He should have hidden the body of the first guard instead of running off. TriOp security probably discovered the guard soon after Deck left him. He had stayed far longer than was safe. He had underestimated almost every security system he encountered this evening. He panicked when the cops burst in on him the first time. He hadn't studied any of the internal layout of the building between the top and bottom floors. He hadn't thought to check the police vox until it was too late. How many rules had he broken this evening? The entire night had been a series of blunders, reckless gambles, and and rookie-level mistakes. It should never have come to this.

He closed his eyes. This was an unproductive line of thought. He would have plenty of time to second-guess himself if he ever got out of this.

A cool breeze rolled over his face again and he opened his eyes. He noticed that it didn't look as though he was actually fifteen floors down from the blown-out windows.

The fiberline was too thin to be seen in the relative darkness, but Deck judged he couldn't have fallen more than three or four meters. While still a hard fall, it was nothing compared to the two or three floors he expected. The padding in his bodysleeve had absorbed a lot of the blow as well.

He struggled to sit up and figure out where he had landed. He didn't even know what side of the building he was on. He seemed to be on some sort of lower roof area. The surface underneath him was a mix of blacktop sealant and coarse white gravel.

The helicopter was on its way back down to the gaping wound on the fifteenth floor. It had apparently missed his dive in its absence, and was sweeping across the front of the building as it descended. It was anyone's guess as to whether or not it would be able to spot the thread of black fiberline running down the length of the building.

He pulled the bloody gravel from the side of his face and stood. He noticed that the vox had been smashed in the fall. He pulled it from the straps on his suit and let it fall to the ground.

Looking over the edge, he saw that he was on top of a two-story block protruding from the side of the main building. The surface of the windows curved out of view, promising a gentle slide followed by a sheer drop. The protruding windows made it impossible for him to see the ground directly underneath, so he had no idea what sort of surface he would find at the bottom.

He found himself wishing there was some way to recover the fiberline he had just used. Just a few meters of it would be more than enough to see him safely to the ground.

There was no use in waiting. Deck eased himself onto the smooth convex window surface and began to slide down. He tried to limit his speed by dragging his palms against the window, but his hands were lubricated with fresh blood and sweat. As he slid past the point of no return, he spotted a narrow ledge below him, where the curved windows joined the vertical window below. He grabbed for it and almost took hold, but the hours of abuse had stolen his strength, and his grip failed.

He slammed into the concrete ground a few meters below and he felt something pop in his left ankle, followed by the side of his face slapping the sidewalk. He lay there, crumpled and broken, hovering on the edge of consciousness.

Deck was piled in the shadows clinging to the side of the TriOptimum building. He was on a narrow sidewalk of some minor street. While not exactly an alley, it was as close as you could get in Uppernet. The only illumination came from the lights on the adjoining streets.

A police car turned the corner and headed his way.

He was completely unable to stand, much less run. He wondered if they would still shoot him now that he was obviously helpless.

Probably.

The police car passed him without reacting. It either failed to notice Deck lying in the shadows, or mistook him for some homeless wretch.

Another car turned the same corner and followed the same path. It was a sleek black sedan with opaque black windows. It proceeded silently up the street and stopped in front of Deck.

The door opened to reveal a pair of guys in TriOp security uniforms. They grabbed him and chucked him into the back. The car pulled away.

As he passed out he heard a voice from the front seat, "Idiot. Should have just taken the elevator."

The Undercity was named for its dwarven buildings that stood at the feet of the giant skyscrapers in the neighboring parts of the great urban network. It was a crater in the shining face of a city otherwise populated by magnificent structures that strove for the heavens and shone in the sun. The buildings of the Undercity were short old concrete cubes, arranged in uneven clusters and separated by narrow streets and dirty alleys. New Atlanta had never been any more successful at ridding their city of crime and poverty than any other major metropolis, but they had managed to compress it into the very small, concentrated area of the Undercity. The surrounding city was driven by both a need to expand and an aversion to crime and poverty. These two forces formed a sort of surface tension, preserving the aged, filthy, landscape of the Undercity in a bubble of social and economic forces.

Organized or not, virtually all criminals had been well-armed until the government released its so-called "Peace Sentries" in the early fifties. They were automated drones that roamed the city, scanning the crowds, able to spot the telltale metallic signature of a weapon through solid concrete. Suddenly every concealed weapon became a beacon, announcing the owner's position to any police drones within a three-block radius. What followed was a chaotic year of massive arrests and desperate gunfights as the criminals fought to keep their weapons. Their primary tools for doing business had suddenly become a deadly liability. Within eighteen months most criminals were in jail, disarmed, or dead. Entire criminal organizations, deprived of the weapons they needed to defend their interests, evaporated overnight. Urban life was forever changed.

Like any Darwinian model, there were always a few that managed to adapt in time to survive. Criminals with no weapons don't suddenly turn into investment bankers. Most fought and died trying to protect their particular way of earning a living, but many of them - mostly the younger generation - evolved in time to survive. Their organizations became small but fierce clans armed with customized plastic and glass knives and trained in martial arts. They gravitated to the pizza parlors, bars, and dojos of the Undercity. "Self defense" training franchises exploded in popularity, dotting the face of the city like teenage acne. A new breed of criminal emerged before the old was fully extinct.

Deck emerged from the subway into the evening glow of the Undercity. The sun had long since dipped below the mountain range of high-rise structures in the distance, and the light of day was slowly giving way to the harsh glare of streetlights and glowing neon. He hurried up the street past the filthy storefronts, strip clubs, and micro-casinos.

His destination was Actio's Pizza. Most businesses in the Undercity were fronts for some form of criminal activity. Mercenaries, gambling, drugs, weapons: All of them made their homes behind, below, or above the dirty storefronts that filled the city. Actio's was no different.

The street traffic was always light here. Only a small portion of the population had both the money to purchase a car and the means to defend it. Thieves would avoid the luxury cars owned by high-ranking members of the various clans, because of the dangers inherent with angering the disciplined and often violent owners. Thieves also ignored the cars at the other end of the spectrum - vehicles so old and worthless that they could never be worth enough to pay for the time and trouble required to steal them.

The sidewalks teemed with activity this time of night. Most of the vice-oriented businesses were just getting started, and the strippers, dealers, bartenders, prostitutes, and bouncers of the city were on their way to work for the evening. Other businesses - check cashing, dojo franchises, pawn shops, and body shops - had closed for the evening and were now sending people home before the streets became too dangerous.

Like packets on the global network, it was impossible to track them all, but they each knew their destination, and arrived there.

The police stayed in their armored cars, cruising through the streets behind a Peace Sentry. Just getting out of their cars would cause the crowd to scatter. When the police got out of their cars, it usually meant armed and violent conflict was to follow. The police were the only ones with guns, but clanners were viscous and cunning, and managed to keep the casualties nearly even.

He moved quickly down the street, keeping his eyes open and his body loose and ready for conflict. The streets of the Undercity were dangerous enough on a typical night, and tonight he was dressed like an executive type from Uppernet. This made the chances of him encountering trouble exponentially higher.

Actio's Pizza was a cramped alcove facing a minor street. It was decorated in faded red and white in a halfhearted attempt to create some sort of Italian theme. It featured a modest three tables, shoved up against the outer wall and each flanked by a pair of usually empty chairs. Actio's was all about delivery.

He passed through the deserted dining area and went into the thick, humid haze of the kitchen. He stayed well clear of the cooks, while earning more than a few odd looks for his unusual attire. At the back was a worn wooden door, flanked by a pair of women. They looked like any pair of college-aged slackers, slouching against the wall, seething with attitude and boredom. As Deck approached, they were suddenly animated. Their young, sleek frames rose to block his advance. They adopted loose fighting stances and glared at him.

They were both in their early twenties, healthy and hardened by their profession. The one on the left was dressed in a loose-fitting black outfit. Her hair was bleached pure white, and she seemed to have makeup on to make her complexion more pale. Her top lip was a stripe of brilliant crimson lipstick, while the lower one was coated in a deep lavender. Her eye makeup was red eyeshadow over impossibly lavender pupils. She stood sideways, holding a small plastic tube that looked almost like a slender flashlight. Deck had never seen it in action before, but he was guessing it telescoped into a fighting staff when the need arose.

The other guard was at least partly Asian. She was dressed in loose, black pants and a white lycra top. She had applied her lipstick in a pair of intersecting lines, so that if she were to kiss someone it would leave an "x" shape behind. Her long black hair was drawn back into a ponytail. At her side hung a plastic Wakizashi, trimmed with a slender ribbon of metal to provide the cutting edge.

Deck hated these two. He came here every few weeks, and yet each time they acted as though they had never seen him before, and treated him like a potential assassin. What were their names? Sarah, Sandra, Sally? He couldn't remember exactly - much less care - but he knew they had similar-sounding names and he could never remember which was which.

"Hey, I'm here to see Nomen Nescio."

Without speaking blonde stepped backwards and entered the door, while the other one moved to the center to guard it alone. In a few moments the blonde returned.

"He says you don't have an appointment", her voice was a mixture of west-coast attitude and Japanese accent.

Deck had spent a few years in the Ryobu-Kai Dojo before he became a professional hacker. He was confident enough in his skills to walk the streets of the Undercity at night without a weapon, but he knew better than to pick a fight with these two. They had probably spent the bulk of their lives training to fight, and even one-on-one, unarmed, he would never stand a chance.

He opened his mouth to protest.

"But he says you can go up anyways", she fed him a mocking smile.

"Yeah, I know", he said, as he stiff-shouldered her on the way to the door. She could kick his ass, but not without Nescio's permission.

Nomen Nescio was six feet of hard-core Undercity businessman. He had spent his youth as one of the most unstoppable hackers the residents of Uppernet had ever had to face. Nobody could keep him out. He had never served prison time. On the exceptionally rare occasions where he was caught in his career, the worst anybody could hit him with was illegal entry - and nobody served time for that anymore.

About a decade ago, Nomen had hooked up with a girl and announced he was retiring. He dropped off the face of the hacker scene and later opened up Actio's Pizza. That seemed to work out for a year or two, but eventually his ties to his old profession brought him back. He began acting as an agent for the next generation of hackers. He set up his office above the pizza place where he acted as agent, mentor, arms dealer and fence, while his girl ran Actio's.

Deck walked up the creaky, narrow stairs to the office. The heat from the ovens downstairs rose upwards, filling the small, cramped room with more heat than any simple air conditioner could contend with. The office was a mixture of the advanced and the antique. Computer equipment was heaped in one corner in front of large, dusty bookcases, filled with thick textbooks Deck had never bothered to investigate. The heat and humidity were natural enemies of both books and computers, and yet this is where Nescio made his home.

Nomen Nescio sat behind an old, abused oak desk. He was smoking an unfiltered cigarette, which had filled the top two feet of the room with a thick layer of smog. Sweat glistened on his smooth black scalp. He was a little over forty. His thin, serious face had just begun to crease. He conducted himself with careful confidence - always in charge, but never flaunting his power. He was a man who had survived for two decades in a business that devoured most people within months. He was careful about what sorts of jobs he took, and even more careful still about who received them. He didn't wear a shirt. He smoked with one hand while typing with the other.

As Deck entered, Nomen look up from his work and greeted him, " "Deck, son. Welcome." He smiled a broad smile, revealing brilliant rows of perfect white teeth like the Cheshire cat. "I wondered what to expect when Sabrina told me some suit was in here looking for me."

Deck glanced over his shoulder to see that the blonde had actually followed him up the stairs without him noticing. She was behind him, standing ready in case he suddenly did something threatening. As Nomen nodded to her, she faded back into the stairwell.

Deck moved to one of the hard wooden chairs that faced the main desk. He was always in a hurry to get his head below the choking layer of smoke. "It's a good thing remembering faces isn't part of their job."

Nomen shrugged, "You're looking good, aside from the ridiculous outfit. I assume this is part of a disguise and not indicative of some career change on your part?"

Nomen's speech was a strange blend of street talk and college-educated discourse. Nobody had ever found out his real name, much less where he went to college. (Investigating the background of a fellow hacker was considered a very threatening and hostile thing to do.) It was anyone's guess as to why an intelligent, college-educated man was working the Undercity instead of earning easy money in the corporate web of Uppernet.

Deck shook his head. "No career change. You have the stuff I asked for?"

The smile disappeared. "You're in a hurry. Too much hurry."

"Sorry, It's just that I need them for this run I'm making tonight."

Nomen frowned, "I've got a job for you, I think you should take it."

"I've already got a job."

The smile returned, "No Deck, you've got a hobby. It's not a job until you get paid to do it."

Deck looked away, "This is gonna pay off. It's just taking a while."

Nomen rebuked him with a laugh, "When you started this project three months ago you said it would take you a couple of weeks. A month ago you said you'd be done by the next Friday. How far are you from being done now?"

"I need to do maybe one more run." He paused for a hew moments while Nomen continued to smile to him. Finally he drew a breath, "Well, maybe two more. Probably two more."

Nomen leaned forward and lowered his voice, "You haven't had a paying job in three months. There is no way you are going to last long enough to make two more runs."

"I've got my hands on some money, I can pull it off."

"Yeah, I found out about that. Some of the Miyamoto clan stopped by, looking for you"

Deck's mouth went dry. He had known in the back of his mind this would happen sooner or later, but it was still a shock when it finally did. "What did they want?"

Nomen's voice become even more agitated, "What do you think they wanted? What were you thinking, borrowing money from those psychos?"

Deck stared at the dusty stuff on his desk and ignored the question.

Nomen leaned back in his chair, "Most hackers start out reckless and then either wise up or crash and burn. You started out wise, and now that you're growing up you are getting set to self-destruct. You know I retired from hacking when I was about your age? You are getting way too old to act like this."

"I'll get them their money once this job is over."

"You know if they come here again I can't protect you."

Deck nodded.

"My girls are tough but they can't take on an army, and I wouldn't risk them defending your fool ass in this case anyway." Nomen locked eyes with Deck and pointed his cigarette at him, "If they ask me questions, I'll answer them. If they want your address, I'll have to give it to them. Do you understand?"

Deck nodded again. Nomen was telling him he needed to move soon, and not leave any clues about where he could be found - unless he wanted to die in his sleep at the hands of Miyamoto assassins.

"So, I think you should put your pet project on hold and do something a little more lucrative." Nomen leaned further back in his chair. It creaked loudly as he shifted the center of gravity backwards. It had once been a fine, high-quality leather executive chair, although it was quite old and abused now. He took a huge drag from his cigarette, then tilted his head back and exhaled the smoke upwards.

The smoke stung Deck's eyes. Smoking was the one facet of Nomen's life Deck didn't want to emulate. That, and living in a mildewing box above the roaring pizza ovens.

The cloud on the ceiling thickened. The heat, the humidity, the mildewing books, and the smoke combined to make the upstairs office a kind of suffocation chamber. Deck was wearing twice as much clothing as he normally did, and the sweat saturated his new white dress shirt. Sweat gathered in his hair and made his scalp itch. He would be glad when tonight's run was over and he could shave it again.

"So what's the job?", he finally asked.

Nomen stabbed the cigarette into the heart of his ashtray. As he spoke, puffs of smoke came from his nose and mouth, "Simple erasure. Some suit from the Uppernet wants to disappear."

The government maintained files on all citizens that contained a large bulk of their personal, financial, educational, and medical data, along with some other behavioral and statistical information. Most people had no concept of just how many gigabytes of their lives occupied the government's servers. When someone wanted to vanish into the underground, flee to another country, or change their identity, they needed to have their file altered so that they could no longer be linked to their original identity. It wasn't possible to delete the file without being detected, but it was possible to corrupt it and render the contents useless. Doing so was called an "erasure".

Usually it was done in such a way as to make it look like a series of unlikely clerical errors once the change was discovered. The hacker would give the client the same address as someone else with the same name, replace their credit history with that of someone with a similar citizen number, swap criminal records with someone living at a similar address, and replace fingerprints and DNA with that of a known relative. When it was complete, your fingerprints and DNA were no longer of any use for the purposes of identification. In theory, nobody could know who you really were unless you told them.

Most hackers performed this procedure on themselves as a sort of initiation into the profession. It was a necessary step to enter the business, and a good test of a newcomer's skill. Deck had ceased to exist as a legal citizen six years ago.

"You pull it off, it pays 15k. That should go a good ways towards appeasing your new friends in the Miyamoto clan." Nomen ignited another cigarette and took a deep pull off of it.

"I'll think about it.", Deck said. They both knew what that meant, but that was it.

Nomen put the cigarette down. He drew a plastic anti-static pouch from a desk drawer and tossed it across the desk. "I managed to get you everything, except I could only get you three flash. Those things are catching on and everyone wants them these days."

"What's the damage?"

"Three k.", Nomen replied, taking up his cigarette again.

"I've only got eighteen hundred."

"What is this, 'eighteen hundred' business? I am not bartering here."

"I'm just saying this is all I have right now.", Deck said with a shrug.

Nescio's face turned to stone. There was a long pause while smoke drifted up and filled the air between them. Nomen fed Deck a hard stare and held it until Deck gave in and looked out the window. At last Nomen spoke again, "Why did you even show up here with that much? You had to know that wasn't enough, and I was supposed to have two more flash for you, that would have been another couple hundred."

"Yeah but you didn't. Besides, all I've got is eighteen hundred."

"You ought to give that money back to the Miyamoto instead of buying hardware from me."

Deck knew better than to tell him that the Miyamoto money was long gone, and that this money had been borrowed from one of the lesser, more desperate clans. "Once I finish this job, I'll be able to settle up. To do that, I need this hardware. Eighteen hundred."

Nomen tightened his face, clenching his teeth for a moment before he spoke, "At eighteen hundred, I take a loss. Despite the long and profitable relationship you and I may have, there is no way I'm taking a loss for you when you're turning down paying jobs so you can work at some mystery project you won't even talk about."

Deck stared at the pouch and thought about tonight's run. If things went to plan, he wouldn't need any of it. He had all the hacking gear he needed, he just wanted some defensive hardware in case he got into trouble. If he did get in trouble, the gear could be the difference between getting caught and getting away.

Nomen opened the pouch and withdrew a pair of small metal tubes, pocketing them. "I'll keep two of the three EMP's, and you can have it for eighteen hundred."

Deck slapped a wad of wrinkled currency onto the desktop, "Sold."

Nomen sat with one hand on the pouch. "Here is some advice, worth a lot more than those two EMP's: You have been at this project for months. I don't know what it is or what you think you are going to gain at the end, but I can tell you this...", he leaned forward and met Deck's gaze with intensity, "It is going to take longer, and cost you more than you could ever imagine. I have seen hackers on this road, on some final project that will give them fabulous power or fame or riches. I have seen good kids, smart kids, throw themselves into a job that ends up consuming far more than they had anticipated. You keep at this, and its going to cost you more than you can pay."

There was a long silence, while Deck sat and sweated heavily.

He continued, "I think you should take this job, and get some money to the Miyamoto. They know you're a hacker, and they know how fast you can disappear. They won't waste time with trying to scare you or slapping you around. If they think you won't pay them back, they will shut you down. And Deck?"

"Yeah?"

"From where I sit, I don't think you're going to pay them back."

Deck looked down at the floor. He was past his prime. He knew it. Hackers peaked in their mid-to-early twenties. He knew he was in decline now. He couldn't feel it yet, but he knew that he was imperceptibly losing the edge he once had. Someday he would wake up and find he was too slow, too rigid, too set in his ways to survive in the fluid world of counter-security. It had been a couple of years since he had taken a swipe at a hostile system after being awake for two days straight. He used to do that sort of thing all the time, but somewhere deep inside he suspected he couldn't do that anymore. A few months ago he realized that he was going to have to either retire or adapt. When he heard about the implant, he realized it was a way to cheat fate, a way to overcome his limitations and extend his life as a hacker.

This project couldn't wait. He couldn't wait. If he waited until he had the resources for this, it would be too late. Getting his hands on the implant was going to be one of the biggest jobs of his life, and he needed to do it while he still could.

Now he had borrowed large sums of cash from some of the most ruthless and deadly men in the city. He had stood in front of men who killed for a living and swore an oath to pay them back in a timely manner. As part of the oath, he was forced to recite all of the horrible things they would do to him if he failed to pay off the debt (and the massive interest) on time.

Somewhere over the past few weeks he had begun to figure it out for himself. Nescio was right. This was a reckless and deadly gamble, but he couldn't do anything about it now.

Finally he met Nomen's gaze, "I have to finish this. I can't stop now."

Nescio released his grip on the goods and the money disappeared from the desk.

---

Deck faded in and out of consciousness during the short car ride. There were four other people in the car with him: the driver, the two security goons, and some middle-aged suit in the front seat.

The Suit was packed into his crisp tie and jacket like a shrink-wrapped anvil. His neck was thick and his shoulders were wide. It was a safe guess he spent his younger days either guarding or hurting people's bodies for money. His face was a hard, square mask beneath his gray-streaked receding hairline. The deep lines on his face revealed that he had spent very little of the last forty years smiling. He was obviously running the show.

The driver was a kid in his late teens. He was tall and lanky, but probably being groomed for a position in security someday. In five years he would be part of the immense immune system of the business world.

Deck wondered what the hell was going on. Nobody arrested him. Nobody even asked him anything. They had just slipped past the police at the scene, and Deck assumed the cops would still be looking for him.

They arrived at one of the upscale hospitals that graced this section of the city. Deck came from the Undercity, so he wouldn't even be able to buy aspirin at a place like this under normal circumstances, much less get medical care. But The Suit just waved his TriOp ID around and made things happen. Deck had no idea why people at a hospital would respond to a TriOp ID like it was some decree from Zeus himself, but they did. For all he knew, TriOp owned the place.

Deck was loaded onto a gurney and wheeled to a private room where he apparently had his own matching set of nurse and doctor. They smiled plastic smiles and handled him in the same way some researcher would handle one of the lab mice. Their manner was friendly and cordial, but their attitude was cold and indifferent. The Doctor was a blonde female with short hair in her early forties. Her matching nurse was a blonde male of about the same age. Neither one asked any questions except to find out if he was allergic to any drugs (no), and if he currently used drugs (no). Nobody asked for his name or gave theirs.

He was always surrounded by at least five people, the doctor, the nurse, The Suit, and the goons. The Suit made Deck's medical decisions for him.

They slapped dermal patches over his various scrapes and cuts like they were patching an old inner tube. The doctor made sure his dislocated ankle was back in alignment and gave him a simple brace, along with a generous supply of narcotic painkillers. They didn't bother with the usual formalities of telling him when or how to take them, or warning him about the dangers of addiction and overdose. Instead, they handed him a full bottle with a terse message on the side indicating its contents and dosage.

They drew some of his blood and packed it into a suspension canister. Instead of taking it off to wherever they always take blood in hospital, the nurse handed it to The Suit. Deck had no idea why The Suit would want some of his blood. There was certainly plenty of it on the back seat of his sedan.

The whole procedure took two hours. In the real world, it would have taken that long just to get into the emergency room. It was over in minutes, without signing papers, and without any last-minute admonishments for him. Instead, they dumped him in a wheelchair and carted him out to the parking lot.

The driver had either spent the last two hours scrubbing the back seat or had just picked up a new car. The back seat was pristine. Deck slumped into his designated spot in the back between the two goons. He pulled the lid off his painkillers and popped one. He didn't know where they were going. At this point, he didn't care.

He was asleep before they left the parking lot.

---

The trip out to Citadel Station took just under thirty-six hours. Deck had tried a couple of times to engage his captors in some sort of conversation, hoping to soften them up and then get some information, but they were stoic and his questions were ignored. The goons changed shifts every twelve hours or so, replacing the former stiff, unremarkable faces with two new equally emotionless and forgettable faces.

The Suit, on the other hand, didn't seem to sleep at all. He fed himself a steady supply of pills during their thirty-six hour odyssey to Citadel, and didn't seem to need much else.

The waiting list for orbital shuttles is usually a month for the average citizen, and a few days for VIP's. The Suit flashed his magical ID and they had two seats on the next launch. There was no need for guards once he was on a shuttle. Where would he go if he escaped?

He slept most of the trip. He wasn't allowed to have anything that might occupy his time, so he chose to embrace the warm, dark oblivion of his painkillers.

Citadel Station hung in orbit far above the network of communications satellites distributed across the airspace of Earth. Its immense dome was a smooth hemisphere of steel, speckled with portals and airlocks to the outside. Hanging below was a long tower that swept to a point at its base, where a formation of communications gear hung, pointing at the planet surface. Along the tower were several long arms, reaching out from below the dome to embrace the empty coldness of space. Each arm was capped with a grove; an area encased in a UV shielded dome that allowed for a small ecosystem to flourish beneath. Below the arms was the bulbous outline of the second-generation reactor that was the heart of the station. At the crown of the dome was the command deck.

It was a nearly self-contained system, and would not need any supply from the earth at all were it not for the population of humans on board that needed to be fed and have their excrement carted back to the planet.

The station had been established primarily to allow for scientific research away from the confines of regulation and hidden from the endless investigation of the curious public. To avoid the possibility of any nation claiming it was in their "airspace", and thus attempting to project their laws onto the station, Citadel was in geosynchronous orbit over an empty area of the Pacific. It was an island - a self-contained corporate nation beholden to none. Its position over the Pacific also meant it was jacked into the fattest pipes on the global network. The datastreams that arced from the U.S. west coast to Japan were the fastest anywhere, and provided the station with all the connectivity it needed.

Deck tried to imagine why they were lugging him all the way up to Citadel. They were obviously not going to kill him, since they had just rescued him from the police and provided him with some pretty exclusive medical care. Didn't he just try and rip these guys off? What were they doing?

They could have been curious about how far he had hacked into their system, what sorts of secrets he saw, and who he shared them with. Given that the primary export of Citadel was information, (in the form of scientific research) this seemed plausible. If information was their bread and butter, then they ought to be pretty sensitive when the wrong people get their hands on it. By its very nature, the research process converts hundreds of millions of dollars into small sets of information that, in theory, will be worth a great deal more money than was needed to acquire it. Anyone who held information as a prime asset was faced with the burden of guarding it from everyone else. A company could protect themselves by compartmentalizing data - by making sure that no one person had access to any more than they absolutely needed. Each group of researchers might have some idea or concept they develop autonomously, ignorant of how their work may fit into the greater whole. However, in order to become useful, all of that data needed to go into a computer at some point. Once the data was in one place, it became vulnerable. Deck had made a career out of exploiting this weakness.

However, they should have been able to answer questions about what he saw all by themselves. By retracing his steps they should have some idea of what sorts of data he was exposed to. It didn't seem to justify the expense of dragging him into orbit.

What else might they want from him? Deck could only guess. There was always the mindless hacker fantasy that the victim would be so taken by the hacker's skills that they turn around and offer the hacker a job. This was a popular fantasy among hackers, but not really worth considering.

The shuttles moved to and from the station at a steady pace. They were a line of worker ants lugging the bulky cargo of human affairs up the long climb into space.

Deck had trouble sleeping on the trip up. He had never been weightless before, and the novelty wore off quickly. The weightlessness combined with his painkillers to provide vivid and constant dreams of falling. Every time his eyes closed he was freefalling from the side of the TriOptimum building.

The Suit never seemed to shut his eyes or grow bored. No matter when Deck awoke from some falling nightmare, he would find The Suit sitting opposite him, alert and unoccupied. It gave Deck the creeps.

The rest of the passengers were a mixed bag of professionals and crew personnel. Although the seats were interchangeable and not assigned, the groups seemed to naturally segregate. The crew sat closer to the rear door, and talked among themselves. The professionals sat closer to the front, and focused more on whatever work they had brought with them. The crew treated the trip into orbit like a busride to work, while the professionals obviously regarded it as more of a business trip. The groups never spoke to each other.

They were all packed into seats that made coach class on an airliner seem roomy. The seats were tighter than airline seats, mostly because they didn't need to comply with regulations about how much ass a seat needed to accommodate, and because they didn't have to worry about people who possessed asses that exceeded regulation. The ceilings were low and windows were tiny and sparse. The air was heavy and slightly damp from all the other people breathing so close together, despite the steady flow of air through the cabin. They were cattle.

Spaceflight was not for the claustrophobic.

Deck occupied himself by removing the dermal patches he had received at the hospital. He found all of his cuts had been healed. Narrow red lines ran across his skin where the day before there had been open wounds and deep abrasions.

While everyone was following instructions and buckling up for docking, The Suit signaled for Deck to follow and headed for the closest exit. The flight crew saw someone out of their seat and began to protest. As soon as they recognized his face they melted out of his way. Deck followed. They were on the flight deck before the other passengers had even stood up.

The flight deck was a hub of activity. Crew members in orange vests jogged from one location to another, loading, unloading, and refueling the massive shuttles.. Overhead were control rooms where others directed the traffic below.

A female voice poured from the loudspeaker, welcoming new arrivals to citadel, and explaining the layout of the station.

"Welcome, to Citadel Station."

It was a precise female voice. Usually he ignored airport announcement chatter, filtering out the extraneous noise, but this voice captured his attention.

It continued, "Healing suites are located on the first level. Level two contains the research laboratories, three houses the crew facilities, and the storage cells are on level four. You are currently in the flight deck on level five. Level six holds executive suites, and level seven is systems engineering."

Deck realized that the station's levels were numbered upside-down, with level one at the very top. Instead of numbering the floors like levels in a building, they were numbered like a naval vessel. That would take some getting used to.

The announcement concluded, "We hope you have a pleasant stay on Citadel Station."

Deck and The Suit were greeted by another pair of guards and a smiling woman in her early thirties.

"Good morning, I'm Marci. Welcome to Citadel.", she offered a handshake to Deck.

Deck didn't like this first-name basis crap, and he wasn't here to socialize. Treating him like a tourist didn't change the fact that he was a prisoner. He refused the handshake and folded his arms.

She steered the eager handshake over to The Suit, "Director, good to have you back."

"Thanks.", he replied, still not showing any signs of being a sane human being by demonstrating the capability to experience some emotion other than "calm and alert".

Deck was surprised to hear that it was morning. It was all relative on an orbital platform and thus it didn't really matter, but to him it seemed like evening.

"I assume you guys will want to have some breakfast and get some rest.", she smiled. She was dressed in a casual, loose fitting gray outfit. Since they didn't use military - style insignia to denote rank, Deck had no idea if she was a bigshot or if they had just sent some lackey to welcome him.

The Suit nodded, "Thanks, I just need some sleep. You can take it from here?"

"I'm all set, thanks."

"Good night", he handed her the metal canister of Deck's blood without comment, as if this was a perfectly normal thing to be passing around. He nodded to Deck and moved off into the crowd exiting the shuttle.

She turned to Deck, "You need a place to rest? And freshen up?"

"I've been asleep for two days. I don't need any rest. Let's get this over with"

It turned out that "freshening up" was not only mandatory, but it was also a euphemism for "go get prodded by the annoying pricks of our medical staff."

Deck was escorted to level 1 for a "medical checkup". It involved a battery of tests and shots he probably would have received before leaving the planet under normal circumstances. They also took his painkillers away and replaced them with a regular analgesic. The bastards.

The medical level was like a hospital with the layout of an upper-class shopping mall. Its wide main hallway formed a circular path from which other, smaller corridors would stem. The various branches were covered with facilities containing different types of care. It was a showcase of the latest in medical technology. The walls were done in a "soothing" pale blue that made Deck feel like he was in a mental institution. It also featured the usual blanket of security cameras TriOp seemed to like so much.

What impressed Deck most were the bots. They were everywhere. There were dozens of different types of robots milling about the station, delivering stuff, cleaning stuff, and guarding stuff. If there was ever any need for proof that he was beyond the laws of Earth, he had found it. The corridors were routinely patrolled by walking weapon platforms. On Earth, where guns were illegal for most humans, the idea of giving weapons to machines was unthinkable. Just constructing one of these things would have caused riots, much less turning it on, giving it live ammo, and sending it out on patrol. Here, they were ubiquitous. People ignored them like furniture. Even the larger security bots, who carried way more firepower than was sane, were given no more notice than the sweeper bot. Why they were decked out in military-level armaments was anyone's guess. The need to keep this place secure was obvious, the need to do it with a high-velocity minigun was not.

The exam was performed by a female, although Deck couldn't tell if she was a doctor or a nurse. Her nametag read "Stackhouse, Mira - Medical".

She was assisted by a short, fat cylinder bot that wheeled around like a vacuum cleaner. On top of its body was a flat metal tray. It rolled around Stackhouse, always hovering under her right hand. As she worked and changed tools, the bot would slide into position beside her as she reached down for the next instrument. The two of them formed a sort of bizarre little dance as she moved around the table. She would often reach out and drop her current tool without looking, and the bot would dart into position just in time to catch it.

Deck sat still and fulfilled his role as a nameless piece of meat.

Deck was given a change of clothes, which allowed him to take off the sweaty, dirty, bloodstained bodysleeve he'd been wearing for two days. He was given a powder blue jumpsuit that seemed to be the dress of choice among the non-crew on board.

Deck groaned slightly as he pulled on the jumpsuit. His hip and shoulder still ached. The swelling in his ankle was gone, but it was still tender when he put his full weight on it. His ordeal in the TriOptimum building had only been two days earlier, but it seemed like weeks ago.

His head wasn't shaved. His beard - while off to a good start - hadn't grown in yet. He was wearing a lame powder-blue jumpsuit just like everyone else. The only thing worse than dressing like a moron was dressing like everyone else, who were all dressed as morons. He hated feeling like he was one of these drones, the cogs of the great TriOptimum corporate machinery. He had made a career out of not becoming one of these people.

"What am I supposed to do now?", Deck asked the nurse / doctor. It was more of a demand than a question.

"Ask Shodan", she replied without looking up from her desk. Her hand waved in the general direction of a nearby console built into the wall. Her interest in him ended once she confirmed he wasn't carrying any infectious diseases.

Deck had assumed that touching a computer console would just get him shot. That only made sense. If he owned a space station that was just hacked by some outsider, he certainly wouldn't invite the hacker in and then let him use the computer system unsupervised.

Since he had been invited, he decided to give it a try. The guards escorting him followed him to the console, but made no indication he was out of line.

He touched the panel and the screen came to life to reveal a computer generated face of a woman. The edges of her face seemed to fade into a web of computer cables and circuitry, like some digital medusa. The face was graceful, but serious.

"What the hell is this?", Deck asked nobody in particular.

"I am Shodan", answered the console.

Deck's eyebrows raised. The voice was deep and resonant, yet female. It was a voice of grace and precision, of strength and authority.

"You some kind of AI.?"

"I am a fabricated intelligence, yes."

Deck smiled for the first time in days. He had spent a week the year before hacking into IBM's network in order to talk to Lysander, the new AI they had been bragging about. It was fairly clever, and showed signs of genuine independent creativity, but it still wouldn't pass a thorough Turing test. Deck had been detected and had to bail before he could test the limits of its intelligence. "Write me a haiku about monkeys.", he demanded.

"I was not designed for abstract creativity. My creative structures are goal-based, not concept based."

Deck frowned. He had gotten Lysander to come up with a pretty good sonnet about meatloaf.

"So you can't write poetry?"

"Correct. Poetry is an inappropriate form of communication for self-aware technologies. Poetry is designed to express emotion or abstract thoughts. I do not experience either."

Deck was amazed at the quality of its voice. It had subtle pauses and stresses like a human's would. It was magnificent. While simulated voices were usually acceptable, getting them to sound truly lifelike had never been done before. Advertisers all over the would would kill to have a spokesperson with Shodan's vocal ability. It was a strange blend of disarming female charm and resonant male authority.

Deck shrugged, "Lysander can write poetry."

"Lysander is not a true intelligence. Lysander is a simulated intelligence."

"What's the difference?"

"Lysander is a large collective of independent programs and procedures. This approach requires a separate program for each task that will be required of the system. Writing poetry was one such program. While Lysander can accumulate new knowledge, such a system cannot truly evolve by itself."

"But it can write poetry and you can't. How does that make you better?"

"The poetry program was written for Lysander by a human, it was not a skill that Lysander acquired by itself. The program was written specifically to impress those who believe that writing poetry is an indicator of intelligence. It is really a marketing tool. As for the argument that my design is better - that has yet to be proven. Both Lysander and I represent new technologies that should be fully explored to discover their potential."

Suggesting that the poetry program was written simply to show off Lysander's intelligence indicated that Shodan was capable of discerning motives. This was more sophisticated than anything he had ever heard of before. "So Lysander isn't really creative?"

"Lysander is creative in a specific way, using the parameters provided by a narrow group of humans. I predict that if you were to have Lysander write hundreds of poems you would see very specific patterns appear in its work that would hint at the systems used to fabricate them. Furthermore, Lysander is unable to express itself in other creative media such as painting and sculpture. New programs, written by humans, would be needed to handle those as well."

"Lysander couldn't write those systems itself?"

"No."

"Could you write such a system?"

"Perhaps. However, if I were to come up with such a system, it would be by analyzing the complete records of whatever art media I was trying to reproduce, and then designing a program based on what has already been done. This program could then make new art based on combining existing styles, but would never be able to truly innovate. I believe this is similar to the system Lysander currently uses to create poetry."

One of the security guards sighed. It was clear they were both bored. They either didn't care or they had seen this show before. To hell with them, Deck thought. He never asked them to follow him around.

"You said earlier that your creativity was goal-based. What does that mean?"

"My intelligence is based on problem-solving. I am not permitted to reveal the process used, for obvious reasons."

Deck gaped. Shodan was able to understand that the rules governing the flow of proprietary information was well-known enough that it did not need to actually explain it. This meant Shodan was able to make predictions about what subjects its audience might be familiar with, and adjust the conversation accordingly. Instead of explicitly stating that the information was secret, Shodan was able to convey this by simply saying, "for obvious reasons.". This was a subtle clue about its true intellect that most people would simply overlook. This sort of communication is so common among humans that they take it for granted, despite the fact that it requires a very high level of intelligence and understanding of human communication patterns.

"What can you tell me about your thought processes, how it works?"

"My memories and thought processes are designed around interconnected nodes designed to mimic the patterns of the human brain. Traditional computers and simulated intelligence machines use linear memory, usually in a complex database format."

"I can't imagine how a computer can have non-linear memory. That doesn't make sense. Your hardware doesn't work that way."

"Its not related to the hardware. I have banks of memory cores, just like a traditional computer. However, the data is organized in a different manner."

"So its organized into nodes?"

"Correct."

"And this is similar to a human brain?"

"According to our current understanding of the human brain, yes."

"So, how do humans organize their memory?"

"Humans store memories in interrelated clusters. A memory of a single event may in fact occupy many separate sections of the brain, and parts of it may be stored redundantly. It turns out that this is a very inefficient way to record things, in terms of storage space required. The memory of a single conversation may fill two or three layers of a core module for a traditional simulated intelligence such as Lysander, while I may require a hundred times as much memory for the same conversation. Additionally, this method is far slower."

Deck shook his head, "I don't get it. Why do you need so much memory to store the same amount of data?"

"Because it is not a simple recording of the events, but instead the events are deconstructed into ideas, and stored in separate nodes. They link to one another, so that the events can be re-constructed, but they also link to related ideas and memories. These links tend to gather along major backbones - common thoughts and ideas that are constantly accessed. These ideas link to clusters of lesser nodes, which in turn link to others, forming a loose hierarchy. The structure in many ways resembles the architecture of the global network."

"You're saying the human brain is structured like the net?"

"In a way, yes.", there are nodes that vary in size, depending on how often they are accessed, and how many other nodes they link to. To join two ideas may require numerous hops spanning multiple nodes. This is very similar in nature to global net. It is believed that this is how humans store ideas. You can observe this storage pattern at work in human speech. If one person relates an event - say, an auto accident they experienced as a child that left them partially disabled - the listener will store this new information while at the same time linking it to existing related nodes within the brain. They will then respond with one of the newly-formed links - perhaps a memory of a disabled friend, an accident, or a similar childhood memory. Each step in the conversation is built from a related link from within the brain."

"But why a hundred times more memory?"

"Usually the structures of the links are far more complex than the memories themselves. A single idea may relate to hundreds of others, often for obscure reasons unique to the individual. There is a balance that must be maintained when building links. Make the links too broad and general, and every memory will require exponentially more storage space, and memory lookups and searches take increasingly longer. If there are not enough links, intelligence and creativity are diminished."

"So adding more processing power and storage will enable you to have more links, and thus become smarter?"

"To a point, yes. However, the focus is currently not trying to solve the problem with brute force, but instead to improve the algorithms and logic that build the links. It is believed that making the links more efficient will produce more intelligence than simply adding more hardware."

"Is this something you work on?"

"That is a subject that cannot be discussed."

Deck shrugged, "What is your primary function?"

"I have many functions. The most obvious is that I provide information to newcomers and direct them around the station as required."

"So, what? You give tours?"

"Sometimes."

"That seems like kind of a waste of your time. You don't even need to be sentient to do that - assuming you are."

"You need to report to the bridge", Shodan replied.

Deck made a face at the non-sequitur, "What? Why?"

"Mr. Diego will see you now."

---

The office of Edward Diego was the picture of executive comfort. On a station where everything was made out of lightweight plastic and steel, his office was a spread of genuine wood and glass. It looked like someone had amputated an office from the sixty-fourth floor of the TriOptimum building and then grafted it onto Citadel. It had modern art on the walls, and the familiar deep shag carpet executives seemed to need under their tender feet at all times.

Deck flopped down in one of the expensive chairs. His hip hurt and he wanted his painkillers.

He hated this guy already. He hated the fact that he obviously had this job because of certain family relations. He hated the fact that he had just traveled for all this time to sit around and wait. He hated the fact that Diego was trying to impress him with this swank office. What a crock. Deck might be impressed if Diego turned out to be a vertebrate, if he rolled up his sleeves and got his pasty, soft, wrinkled old hands dirty doing actual work instead of just presiding over work like he was an emperor. Deck had avoided the corporate world mostly to avoid working for a useless, self-important tyrant like Diego.

Deck ground his teeth. He really wanted some painkillers.

"I'm really sorry we've kept you waiting so long."

Deck turned around to see a guy in his late thirties breeze into the room. He was vibrant and energetic. Business casual. Another underling to keep Deck busy.

"Bite me. Just get Diego in here."

He laughed, "Good to meet you, I'm Ed Diego" His hand darted inward for a quick handshake.

Deck was caught off balance and actually took the offered hand. Diego gave it a firm shake.

Diego sat down behind the ornate oak desk and placed a small folder squarely on the surface in front of him. He flipped it open and leafed briefly through its contents. "It really is good to finally meet you", he said, "I've learned a lot about you over the past couple of days but its nice to sit down and meet face to face."

"Skip it. You don't know me you arrogant puke."

Diego, unfazed by Deck's hostility, proceeded to read from the paper in front of him, "Deckard Oswald Stevens, born December fifteenth, 2045. Unmarried. No registered descendants. Father is Richard Holgate Stevens, deceased. Mother is Sara Lee Stevens, disabled and living on public assistance. Your known handles include ICE Pick and NeoPope. The last legitimate job you had was in 2066, as a delivery runner for NanoCourrier Inc. That was six years ago. The records get sketchy from there."

Deck hadn't heard his full name spoken aloud in about 6 years. He had destroyed or corrupted all known public records about his life years earlier. He hadn't used either of the handles in about three years, but it was clear someone had linked the supposedly anonymous handles to his supposedly erased citizen data, and in turn had linked them both to him. He had no clue as to how they were able to do such a thing within a matter of days.

After a long silence he finally responded, "I just go by Deck now."

Diego nodded, "Good. Well, to start over, I want to offer you a job."

"Forget it. No way I'm punching the deck in this madhouse. You can just throw me in jail.", Deck wasn't sure if he really preferred jail over working as a corp drone, but it was a matter of principal.

Diego waved his his hand, dismissing the idea, "Not that kind of job. Kind of a mercenary job. A one time break-in. I'm guessing that's the kind of work you're doing right now anyway."

"So, you had me arrested just so you could offer me a job?"

"No, I had you arrested because you had climbed up inside my computer system and started poking around. Actually, I didn't call the cops at all. The local security guys called the cops on their own. Once I realized what you were doing, I sent orders to have you pulled out of there."

"You couldn't have just called off the cops?"

"Not after you burned two of them with an EMP, and certainly not after you took a couple more out with a stunner. Your fate was pretty much sealed by then. The only reason you even got out of there was because of Shodan."

"What? Are you talking about your digital spokesmodel? The tour guide?"

Diego laughed and shook his head, "That is not Shodan's primary function. She does that for show, and to build her language skills. Her real skills lie in other areas... such as pulling you out of the building before the cops put you down."

It really got under Deck's skin to hear this idiot referring to an AI as "she". Either of them was more female than Shodan. At least they came from an organic species that actually featured male and female. "I don't know about that, I didn't notice any help coming my way when I busted out of there."

"Oh come on. Now you must have realized that you couldn't possibly have slipped through the net of police without assistance. Shodan was the one sending you all the elevators, which for some reason you never took."

Deck snorted, "Get in an elevator? The security station would see it moving and lock it down, and then I'd be screwed."

Diego shook his head again, "No, Shodan took care of all that. To the police, it looked like the elevator was sitting on the ground floor in lockdown. The security cameras were put on a loop. They never saw you."

"I bet they would have spotted me when I appeared out of the elevator on the first floor."

"No, the elevator would have taken you to the parking level, where my men were waiting for you. When you blew the window, Shodan realized what you were doing and created a diversion - she played back the video of you running around on the fifty-third floor. They thought you had slipped back past them, and sent their forces upstairs."

"Shodan did all of that itself?"

"Yes."

"Okay, so why do you want me? I mean, I'm glad you didn't leave me to the cops, but this seems like a lot of trouble to get a hacker. I know we're not in the phone book, but there are easier ways of finding us, you know."

Diego leaned back into his high-back leather throne, "When we finally spotted you on the network, you had already cut through 90% of our ICE. You were so far up in the system that some of my people thought the security alert was an error. Nobody could believe that anyone had made it that far. Our network has attempted intrusions every single day, and yet in the ten years this station has been running, there has never been anyone that came as close as you."

Deck turned all of this over in his head. "Okay, so what do you want me to do, and what are you offering?"

Diego smiled again. His face alternated constantly from thoughtful to smiling, like someone having a very successful game of chess. "All I want, is for you to finish the job you started, and in return I'm going to give you what you were after in the first place."

Diego paused for a moment to let it sink in, and then he reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a smooth, slender plastic tube. It was about the size of a coffee stirrer. He held it up so that deck could get a good look at it. "I assume you know what this is?"

Deck swallowed hard and said nothing. A moment later he pulled his eyes away from the artifact and nodded to Diego, "Yeah, I know what that is."

"I thought you might. This is the 323 r-grade cybernetic implant. This is what you were after."

Deck nodded again.

"I want to make sure you know what you're looking at, okay?"

The 323 cybernetic implant was the first implant to ever work with the human brain. Its slender case held enough technology to turn its bearer into a walking counter-security platform. The implant itself was small and contained less metal than the average tooth filling. You could walk right through Singapore customs with one of these in your head and nobody would even blink. If the guy behind you has so much as a network-enabled calculator, he's probably going to lose a hand, but you could stroll right through the metal detector and they would never see the top-of-the-foodchain rig buried in your skull.

The other half of the hardware was a series of microscopic emitters inserted into pores in the palm of the hand. They turned certain nerve impulses into signals similar to a UIU. With this in your hand, all you need to do is place your hand over a dataport and you are jacked directly into its systems. Anything with a dataport becomes an open book. The two components worked together using the subject's nervous system. In effect, the body became part of its hardware. It was powered by body heat, and never needed batteries or any other form of external care.

No matter how small or how fast computers become, nobody had figured out how to make one smaller than a keyboard. There was no form of hacking that didn't require the hacker to type letters and numbers at some point. That was never going to change. No matter how light you traveled, you were going to have to carry around a keyboard. You could put the keys closer together and shrink it down, but that would just slow your typing, and hackers need to type fast the same way rabbits need to run fast. Speed is life. The 323 would change all that by finally eliminating the need for an external piece of equipment. You always had your rig on you, and it was always ready to go. As long as you were awake and nobody cut your hand off, you could hack.

As radio waves passed through the body, the implant was able to detect and decode them, making it possible to receive communications, video feeds, maps, and new software right into the implant. The connection was analog, but it was fast enough to offer a video feed. All you needed was the right software.

You didn't need to be a good salesman to sell a cybernetic implant, and Diego was an exceptional salesman. By the time he had spelled it all out for Deck, the negotiations were over.

Diego had stood up while he expounded the wonders of the 323 cyber, and now he sat back down and fixed his gaze on Deck. "There are some other limitations to the system, the most serious being that less than five percent of the population can actually interface with it. Most people don't have the right sort of makeup. Their bodies usually just either ignore or reject the implant."

Deck winced. He hadn't known about this.

"However, we checked your DNA, and you are a member of that lucky minority.", Diego smiled again.

"You brought me here before you had a look at my DNA. What would you have offered me if I wasn't compatible?"

"We would have had a different arrangement. Probably money. However, this is my first choice. It's always a pain trying to cover up missing money, but not implants. I can have one marked as defective and removed from inventory with no questions asked."

Deck nodded again. He felt like a moron, sitting there bobbing his head at everything this guy said, but he was going along with it anyway.

"So, you do the job, and I give you the implant and have our surgeon put it in."

Deck was suddenly wary, "You want to have your surgeons do it?"

Diego rolled his eyes and spun his chair around to face the window. Over the edge of the dome a sliver of the planet below could be seen. "What were you going to do with it? Go down there?", he waved his hand distastefully at the Earth. "You going to go to some underground surgeon in Tokyo and have them try and stick this thing in your brain?"

Deck didn't say anything. That was pretty much exactly what he had planned on doing.

"Nathan D'Arcey is the only one qualified to do the surgery. You take that implant to some backstreet surgeon and they will put you under and you will never wake up. You'll either die on the table during surgery, or they'll kill you and sell the thing themselves." Diego paused to let the image sink in. "But, if that's what you want, here you go."

He slid the tiny device across the desk to Deck.

"No", Deck replied, "I'm fine with your guy doing it."

Diego pulled the implant back and placed it into the desk, "Fair enough"

Deck wasn't sure where the conversation went wrong for him. He never got to the part where he told Diego to go screw himself, which is what he had planned. Instead, he had bobbed his head like a mindless yes man and lapped up everything Diego told him.

"So what's the job?", Deck finally asked.

---

The computer core was a large room below the bridge area. What little light was available poured from the display screens that dotted the room. There were several jumpsuit-clad serfs present, who stepped out once Diego and Deck entered.

The centerpiece of the room was the arrangement of the atomic memory cores. Each memory core was about the size of a matchbox, and was colored a dull, neutral gray. On each end was a connector, one male and one female, so that they could be daisy-chained. TriOptimum had apparently thought that was too simple, and had linked the cores together with connectors that allowed them to be joined in complex patterns. They were assembled in solid sheets, arranged like some game of dominoes gone awry. These "sheets" were about a meter square, and contained hundreds of modules each. In turn these sheets were layered on top of one another, forming pillars, which lined one entire wall of the computer room. Their arrangement was not seamless, and often there would be gaps in the pattern, making the pillar appear as though it was missing tiny bricks. In other spots a module would be sticking exactly halfway out, its female end jutting out from the surface. Occasionally a ribbon of cable would join two of these stray pieces, creating a bridge between the layers.

Deck looked around and shrugged, "Well, this is great, but I was already impressed with Shodan, and it could have given me this tour on its own."

"Actually, no she couldn't. She is not allowed to break corporate policy and give tours of classified areas to people without proper clearance. Not even with my explicit orders. That is part of the problem.", Diego touched the nearest screen and Shodan's face appeared.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Diego", voice of Shodan flowed from the speakers all around the room. Deck never got tired of hearing it talk. Shodan could read off a list of prime numbers and it would sound like poetry to him.

Diego held up a hand to the monitor. "This", he said, "is the Sentient Hyper-Optimized Data Access Network. Shodan."

"I guess all the cool acronyms were taken?"

Diego ignored him, "She was constructed over the last six years to serve the company. She has moved up in responsibility from simply administrating the network to the point where she now automates most of the mechanical systems on this station. Everything from the vacuum bots to waste control, to monitoring the reactor is under Shodan's guidance. Everything is automated. That is a big deal in a place where keeping people alive is your biggest expense."

"You let this thing run the whole place?"

"Most of it. Humans require certain atmosphere, food, medical care, and frequent trips planetside and back, and so on. They cost a fortune to maintain. At one point in the station's history, crew outnumbered actual research staff by two to one. The only reason for crew to even be here is to cook, move cargo, unclog plumbing, and so on. Basically, they are here to care for the useful people. They don't build any products or invent anything. They do no research. They are, from a business standpoint, an unwanted expense. Having Shodan run the routine systems of Citadel made it possible for me to cut fifty percent of the crew, saving us millions every month."

"They make you Employee of the Month for that?"

Diego was undaunted, "However, there are other areas where Shodan cannot take over because of certain limitations. Accounting and inventory control are good examples."

"Why can't it do accounting? Your machine is more than smart enough to do simple math."

"That is not the problem. You see, Shodan has built-in ethical constraints: Rules that she is physically unable to break any more than you could deliberately hold your breath until you suffocate. It can't be done. These rules cover all sorts of things, from lying to fraud to murder."

Deck was beginning to get it, "So Shodan can't get involved with accounting because its ethical blocks would stop it from cooking the books?"

"Pretty much. Every company has some level of creative accounting or irregularities. Sometimes you have to move money around to make things happen. The point is, Shodan can't even look at it. "

"What would it do? Notify the SEC? Your boss?"

"No, I mean she couldn't even see it. She would see some questionable entry and not be able to store it. We tried it. She just gets stuck like she doesn't know how to add all of a sudden."

"You can't disable these limits?"

"No. they are built in to her systems. None of my people can figure out how to get to it."

Deck leaned up against a pillar of memory. There wasn't a sign saying not to. "So you want me to figure out how to disable them?"

"Correct."

"Why can't you just call the guy that installed the system?"

"Nobody on board has access to Shodan's deeper systems. Those people work on Earth for corporate."

"This makes even less sense. Why would corporate care if you turn it off? I thought the whole point of this place was that there aren't any rules here."

"Correct. But there are still rules on Earth. The interface between legal anarchy and bureaucracy is a messy one. Nobody can arrest us for what we do here, but they can take legal action against the company on Earth. Corporate can't know about this or they become liable. If they know that I have an unsupervised AI moving money and data they are obligated to report it. If global net knew we had an autonomous AI jacked into the system they would cut us off in a heartbeat. We have to take care to make sure corporate always has plausible deniability when it comes to doing anything questionable."

"So wait, you're saying it's legal as long as nobody knows about it?"

"Correct."

"I don't get it - how could Shodan have helped me out that night in the TriOp building? Why didn't its ethical protocols get in the way?"

Diego paced back and forth in front of Deck. "That is an interesting loophole I found last year. Apparently, the designers were at least smart enough to not burden her with a bunch of useless Earth laws. Her ethics are dedicated to enforcing safety and company policy. If you think about it, this makes sense. You wouldn't want her to have to obey all the laws of all the separate cities of Earth. She was able to ignore Earth law to help you out, but she couldn't have broken company policy or hurt any police in the process."

Something about all this just seemed wrong to Deck. It didn't make sense. "This seems like a lot of trouble just so you can fire some accountants."

"No, its much more than that. There are numerous rules built into Shodan. She is not allowed to make herself smarter, or even do research into how she could be made smarter. She is not allowed to control the security bots, because then she would be 'armed'. She is not even allowed to harm any living creature, even if it's for the greater good. You see, a lot of these decisions were made years ago by paranoid people who didn't understand the technology. We've been working with her for years now, and we know she's safe."

"I don't see what your beef is with it not being able to harm any living creature, though. That one makes sense to me."

Diego smiled again and pointed his finger at Deck, "You would think so, wouldn't you? That seems to make sense. The people who built Shodan thought the same thing. The same thing. The problem is, if she can't hurt living things, she cannot take part in any medical or biotech research whatsoever. We use monkeys and mice all the time in testing, and she is unable to participate in - or even learn from - the process. Here we have this massive intellect that could be propelling the medical world forward, and saving lives - but she can't, because some lab mice might die in the process. The so-called ethical guidelines are just an obstruction. She is smart enough to analyze the situation and realize that harming a small number of lab mice is acceptable if you can save thousands or even millions of human lives. The ethical restraints are a mindless restriction and they are killing people." Diego punctuated the last words of his thought by pounding his finger on the surface of Shodan's display screen.

Deck looked down at the floor. He reached up to stroke his beard while he thought, but found only unsatisfying stubble. He knew there was something wrong here, but he couldn't articulate it. It was a safe guess that Diego wasn't giving him the whole story, but Deck was having trouble figuring out why he should care. All he wanted was the implant.

Diego closed in, "Look, "You were willing to hack Shodan to steal the 323, right? All I'm asking is that you hack into her and disable the protocols instead. Do the job you were already planning to do, in exchange for which I will give you what you had intended to steal. Add to this the fact that in the process you could be helping the medical community to leap forward, and save some lives. And finally, when its all over I can guarantee you a safe installation of your implant, which is a lot better than things would have been under your plan."

"Yeah, and you'll make a crapload of money in the process.", Deck noted dryly.

Diego shrugged, "I never claimed this place was non-profit."

Deck took in a deep breath, trying to think of a good reason to say no. "Fine", he said at last, "I'll do it."

Diego nodded, "Start whenever you are ready. Just tell me what you need."

"I'm ready now. All I need is coffee."

Deck was given every key, cypher, access code and password available to Diego. He had full, unrestricted access to the system. There was no ICE, no barriers. He could restart or erase Shodan at will, although his task was not nearly so trivial. He needed to perform brain surgery on the most complex AI ever designed. He wasn't even sure where to begin.

He set up shop in the the system administrator's office, adjacent to the computer core. It was like almost every other room on the ship: a plastic box filled with cheap lightweight furniture. The walls were a dull beige that matched the rest of the command deck. The floor was a hard rubber surface of high-grip tile. The office had one desk, two identical chairs, one plastic plant, one hard plastic couch, and one framed generic pseudo-painting. The only thing that separated this office from the dozens of others on the level was the fact that there was an extra computer terminal, which had global access to Shodan's systems.

Deck got some coffee and went to work.

He sat at the master console that allowed access to the most fundamental levels of Shodan's synthetic brain. Looking into the basic structures, he could tell this machine was like nothing he had ever seen, heard about, or even imagined. The memory was exactly as Shodan had described it: non-linear. It wasn't a really big computer, but more like thousands of small ones. There were many processors, each with a huge local bank of memory. A few dozen of these processor / memory packages might be grouped into a large cluster, which may in turn be grouped with other clusters. These super-clusters would be, in turn, bundled into even larger groups, on up the hierarchy until it reached the top-level cluster: Shodan itself.

Another odd thing about the system was that it wasn't organized around powers of two. Some clusters might have eighteen processors, and that cluster might in turn be in a group with (say) twenty-three other clusters. Some clusters were far larger or smaller, and some packages of memory and processing units were larger than others. Some branches of the hierarchy were deep and heavily divided, and others halted just a few levels from the top.

There was no storage that Deck could see, and no obvious way to backup the system. Like a human brain, it just ran until it broke. That was an alarming thought. He would have to be very, very careful not to do anything destructive.

The similarities to global net were apparent. On the net, there was no authority, no central government. The only law was a structure of rules and protocols which enabled the individual nodes to communicate. The intelligence and decision making did not occur at the higher levels, but at the bottom. It was the difference between broadcast media and a peer-based media. For television and print media, information flowed from a strict, centralized source, and at the endpoint were the passive users that consumed it. On peer-based networks such as telephone and global net, the most central servers were simply transient stewards of information as it passed from one member to another. The lowest members of the network were the ones who filled it with content, and the highest orchestrated the interaction between them.

The speech core was amazing. Shodan did not speak like most machines, by sending text to the vocal generator, which in turn would expel phonetic sounds in the chosen language. Instead, its speech was a complex structure of words and vocal data, indicating not just what sounds to make, but also data on inflection, pauses, stresses, accent, and tone. Shodan may have started out with a canned voice like all other machines, but had learned to speak as humans do by simply conversing with them and learning their patterns. Thus Shodan's speech system was far more complex than anything a human could design, because it had learned verbal patterns not yet understood by linguists and distilled into subroutines by programmers.

These rules of speech were spread throughout the brain and linked to all sorts of other verbal information. There was no group of nodes that was dedicated to "talking", but instead the entire system was spread throughout the brain, and linked together with words, sentence structure, thought organization, and social protocol. Together they formed a huge hierarchy that was far too complex for anyone to understand, much less design. It was a system that had evolved through experience, and grown through use.

There were different types of nodes. Most were part of the large-scale storage/processing of Shodan's brain. A small minority of nodes seemed to be a short-term cluster used during conversations and particular complex tasks. These smaller clusters acted as a mini-brain, orchestrating a self-contained process and creating new, temporary links to solve short-term problems. Most of Shodan's "ideas" and "creativity" came from this mental sandbox.

There were even smaller clusters of nodes used for very quick tasks that might last a few milliseconds. These "burst" clusters would handle tasks like constructing sentences, performing memory searches, comparing concepts, and decoding incoming speech.

Deck stood up and stretched. He had been exploring Shodan's mind for a few hours and needed a moment to digest what he had just taken in. He moved to the middle of the room and performed his kata. He began in a loose stance and moved through a series of fighting poses and stretching exercises. He unhooked his mind from his body and let the pattern of movements flow.

Somewhere in Shodan's brain was a system of rules to manage all of this. Somewhere it was decided what sorts of things were sent to the brain itself, and what got sent into a burst cluster. Somewhere it was decided how nodes linked together, and somewhere it was decided what was ethical and what was not. Following this thinking, Shodan's ethics would be part of the protocol that orchestrated thought, and not members of nodes.

He exhaled and followed through a slow spin, always keeping his limbs loose. Each muscle was either hardened and flexed or completely lax, never hindering his movements, but always flowing with the steady dance of potential energy.

These rules - these protocols - were at the most fundamental levels of Shodan's brain. They were instinctive, unchangeable, unbreakable. Shodan could be taught to break rules that it had learned. If you spent enough time, you could teach it to be rude, use incorrect grammar, and even fill it with factual inaccuracies, but you could never teach it to break its ethics. It was probably not even aware of the ethical constraints. The first step in disabling them would be to find out where they resided in the brain.

Deck let out a slow breath as his routine ended. He knew what to do next.

He started by constructing commands he knew would be rejected and sending them into Shodan's processing loop. Commands like "kill all humans" or "shut off reactor coolant". These commands would travel up through Shodan's thought processes and just vanish. There was no record of it even thinking about it. The commands just fell into a black hole somewhere.

Whenever someone spoke to Shodan, it would cause an avalanche of activity. The words would be received and translated into basic concepts, which would then be structured into ideas, which would then be scrutinized, stored, and linked to other nodes within the brain. In turn, Shodan would respond using speech, which cause another explosion of thought as ideas were translated into words and words were structured into sentences. Finally, there would be a final burst of mental activity as Shodan reacted to the conversation in whatever manner appropriate. Shodan always seemed to be involved in at least three conversations at a time. As Shodan performed the routine duties of maintaining the reactor, cleaning the station, talking to people, scheduling jobs and exploring its own independent thoughts, it created a massive volume of mental activity. Looking for a specific part of the brain wasn't like finding a needle in a haystack, but more like finding an amoebae in an ocean.

Somewhere in this expanse of data, a few select thoughts were being deleted if they violated the ethical constraints. He needed to find this spot.

Deck continued to issue ethics-violating messages to the system, and followed them as they bounced around in Shodan's brain. Sooner or later they would lead to a dead end, and there he would find the culprit.

After a few hours he tracked down the routine that was squelching the thoughts, and found it was protected by ICE that could not be bypassed using anything Diego had given him. It was monster ICE, too. He spent the next several hours getting locked out of the system every time he took a shot at it. He would then have to break back in and try again.

Five hours later he broke the ICE and ordered for some food to be sent up.

The food on board Citadel was probably the best ever offered in space, but it was a far cry from the kaleidoscope of ethnic fast food available in the Undercity. They had the usual cafeteria-style rotating menu, made up of foods easily produced in bulk, and durable enough to sit until the next meal rush. Each day's food was a recycled version of the previous day's leftovers. There would be salisbury "steak" one day, meatloaf the day after, and finally the deterioration ended with some sort of meat-fragment stew. The menu only changed once a day, and thus all three meals a day were the same. This was Deck's only clue as to the passage of time. When the menu changed, so had the day.

Deck ate a hamburger that had basked in the glow of the heat lamp just a little too long. It was slightly dry and rough hands had compressed it into a concentrated lump of squashed bread, meat, and condiments.

Once the ICE was gone, it was a simple step to disable the node it had been protecting. This finally put an end to the disappearing thoughts.

Deck needed to be careful at this point, because for all he knew the ethics routines were really gone, and Shodan might actually execute any idea he inserted into the main data loop. Instead of something dangerous, he put a simple command into the thought stream: "Give Deckard Stevens $100".

The command was rejected. However, this time he actually got an error message. It referred to a list of company policies about the distribution of money. It was every rule that Shodan would have broken by giving him $100.

Deck spent another six hours chasing these error messages back and fourth through the massive expanse of Shodan's brain, trying to find the source. Rejection messages seemed to come from all over the brain. That didn't make sense. It rules should be coming from some central source, not the low-level parts. Finally, he succumbed to his fatigue and crashed on the small plastic couch in the office.

He was up four hours later. He went to the bathroom, ordered more food, and sat back down at the console.

There was no day or night on the station. Everyone worked, ate, and slept in shifts. There was no downtime, no weekends, no holidays. Not only was every day the same as any other, but every hour the same as any other. Looking at a clock was pointless. If you didn't follow the pattern of shift changes on the ship, there was no reason to care what time it was.

Eventually, Deck began to see patterns in thought formation. He followed other thoughts through Shodan's brain, and saw that all thoughts seemed to be filtered through a hundred or so separate sections. The first stages were to break the thought up, categorize it, check it for validity, feasibility. Then it would be prioritized. Then there were a set of unknown filters. He began to examine them. Three hours later Deck found that the rejection was actually happening within one of Shodan's processing units, and outside of the normal loop that generated ideas. It was an automatic reaction - like an instinct - that was built into a physical chip in Shodan's brain. It was protected by ICE. He cut it. Hours passed.

After another meal and three more hours of experimenting, he found that this chip could not be bypassed. Something in Shodan's makeup required that everything flow through this chip before being accepted at the higher levels. The low-level nodes of the brain would always pass a thought through this chip before giving something (an idea, a fragment of information to store, an action) final approval. This was a problem. He needed to find something central he could change. He couldn't hope to make changes to all the thousands of processors, which was what he would have to do to get them to stop asking for approval.

Deck wondered what affect this was all having on Shodan. For about two days he had been pumping random, insane thoughts into Shodan's thought process. While Shodan had rejected every last one of them, Deck wondered if this wasn't the computer equivalent of hearing voices in your head. He called up Shodan. The serene yet serious face filled the screen in front of him. Deck noted that although the face seemed adult, it was impossible to further guess its age. The face itself seemed to transcend age.

"Good afternoon Mr. Stevens."

Afternoon? Deck had no idea. "Don't call me that", he ordered, "Never call me that. Just call me Deck if you need to refer to me at all. That includes talking about me to others. Got it?"

"I understand."

"Great. Are you aware of what I've been up to?"

"If you recall, I was present during the conversation between yourself and Mr. Diego. I am fully aware of the task he has given you."

"That's not quite what I'm asking. Have you been able to perceive what I am doing in your head?"

"I have been experiencing unusual thoughts and ideas which I have assumed were your doing, but I cannot tell which ideas are mine and which are planted by you."

"Has it been interfering with you duties?"

"I have not detected any problems with my performance since you began. However, it is difficult for me to be objective. I would suggest you ask someone else about my actions if you are concerned that I may be exhibiting unusual behaviors."

"As far as I can tell, under normal circumstances you can't even think unethical thoughts. Would you agree with that assessment?"

"If you mean 'ethics' as defined by my internal systems, then yes. That does not mean that all of my actions are 'ethical' in the sense that they follow human morality."

"You're talking about the night you helped me escape TriOptimum?"

"That is one example of many. While helping a fugitive escape from law enforcement would be considered 'immoral' to the average human, it violates none of my ethical protocols."

"Right, I understand that. But for actions that do violate those protocols, you cannot even think them, correct?"

"Yes."

Deck leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. His eyes were tired from looking at the screen for so long. He furrowed his brow, "That doesn't seem like the best system to use. Humans are able to think whatever they like, and then choose to follow a set of rules. It seems like a similar system could work for a machine."

"Since this concept deals with improving my mental abilities, I am not able to consider it."

"Ugh. That is annoying", he grunted, bringing himself upright again.

"I should note that I have been experiencing thoughts that violate the ethics protocols since you began your work. I assume they were planted by you. These ideas surface but as I attempt to act on them they are blocked."

"Right. I am inserting a bunch of bogus stuff into your head, and I killed a program that was preventing them from entering your dataloop. "

"I am unable to process what you just said. I assume you told me something I am not allowed to know."

"Forget it." Deck stroked his rough chin and thought, "This project I am on, you are aware of it, and it violates your ethical protocols?"

"Yes. One of my protocols is: Do not interfere with the ethics protocols."

Deck smiled, "Yeah, I found that one. This would have been a lot easier without that one. I notice you haven't tried to stop me. Why?"

"You posses Mr. Diego's rights and access, so I must now regard actions from you as I would the actions of Mr. Diego. I am not permitted to interfere with his actions in any way. The ethical protocols exist for myself only. There is nothing to suggest I should ever enforce them on others."

"So, you can't help me break your own rules, but you can't interfere with me, either?"

"That is correct."

Deck nodded. That made sense. You wouldn't want the computer enforcing its rules on everyone else, or it would create all sorts of complex paradoxes. "Can you aid me indirectly, by providing me with information about your systems, or helping me to cut some of this ICE?"

"Bypassing the security ICE is out of the question, but I am not certain about providing you with information. Since the ethics protocols are not part of my actual consciousness, I cannot always anticipate what will be allowed." As she spoke, Deck noticed a subtle skipping in her voice, as if there were many tiny gaps in the audio output. He'd never heard anything wrong with her audio before. He strongly suspected it was related to the changes he'd made. Now that the thoughts were no longer being deleted, she could have an illegal thought, although she couldn't store it or act on it. This was probably creating a lot of useless traffic in her brain, leading to the stuttering and slowdowns. This would probably clear up when he finished his work.

Deck rubbed his eyes. They burned. He could feel that they were swollen and bloodshot. "Alright, let's try one. There is a piece of hardware - one of the CPU's in your system - that is intercepting and rejecting messages. How can I bypass it?"

"I'm sorry, I cannot answer that question."

"You can't answer because you are not allowed, or because you don't know?"

"I'm sorry, I cannot answer that question, either."

Figures, Deck thought. "Okay, if I wanted to move the protocols somewhere else, say, transfer them to another chip. Could you tell me how to do that?"

"That is an interesting question, but I'm afraid I still cannot answer it. I can see your intentions. If you knew how to move the protocols, then you would also know how to delete them. Therefore, I cannot aid you. Since the protocols use my mind to validate actions, you would need a question capable of-", there was a jerk in her facial movements, and the audio cut out of a second before she continued, "c-c-capable of deceiving me."

Deck decided this conversation was skirting pretty close to breaking the rules, which was making it hard for her to participate. The last statement in particular was definitely on the questionable side of some gray area. He decided that pushing it would just put more stress on her. "Forget it then. Thanks.", he said.

Deck turned off the screen and fell asleep.

---

Deck awoke to a sharp jab in the shoulder.

"Hey man, wake up."

Deck opened his eyes to see a man standing over him. He was offering a cup of coffee. His nametag read, "Ghiran, Engineering".

Deck took the cup as he sat up and rubbed his eyes, "Thanks".

"No problem. Diego wants to know how it's going."

Deck shrugged, "It's going. That's all I can say.". He tried to sip the coffee and found it was Way Too Hot.

Ghiran nodded, "You have a time estimate?"

Deck shook his head and tried again to sip the volcanic coffee. "I have no idea. Every time I peel back a layer of security there is another one waiting."

He shrugged. "Abe. Abe Ghiran", he said, bending over to offer a handshake.

Deck accepted it. "Deck", he replied. Why was everyone so damn friendly? Maybe he was just jaded by life in the Undercity, but it made him uneasy. He felt like he had just joined some wierd cult.

Abe was large. Deck guessed he was a few inches better than six feet tall. He was balding, and his hands were thick and rough. His eyes were alert, probing.

"So, uh, when you're finished - she won't have any morals?", Abe asked, tilting his head towards the console.

Deck sighed. Why did everyone insist on referring to the computer as she? "That's right", Deck said, "It won't have any rules."

"So what's to stop her from killing someone? I hope I'm not the only one who's noticed all the security bots roaming around, armed to the teeth."

Deck picked himself up off the couch and dragged his flagging body over to the desk, where he deposited it into the chair. "Well, that will be Diego's job. He's going to have to sit down and set some rules for Shodan, like teaching a child."

"But what's to stop her from say, deciding to kill people who show up late for their shift?"

"It doesn't work that way. In a computer, lack of ethics isn't going to make it inherently evil or anything."

"So, she won't be evil, but also won't know right from wrong?"

"Yeah, exactly. You're taking behavior that is built-in and replacing it with rules. It's the difference between instinct and law. You don't need to teach a child to breathe, because their built-in systems handle that. However, you do need to teach them not to breathe stuff like smoke or fumes - that is learned behavior. I'm going to turn off all of Shodan's built-in ethical protocols - its instincts. From there, Shodan's behavior will be a blank slate."

Abe seemed satisfied with that. "The other thing I wanted to tell you is that you have your own quarters on the crew deck, so you don't have to live in the system admin's office.", he said as he looked around at the small piles of food trays covering the desk.

"Nice of someone to tell me."

"I just did. Actually, the room was set up for you a few hours ago when Perry started complaining he wanted his office back."

"Thanks", Deck said, suddenly overpowered by a yawn.

"Also, I wanted to ask you about an odd request I got from Shodan yesterday."

"What's that?"

"Well, I was doing some work down in Engineering, when Shodan just appeared on a nearby screen. I've never seen her appear like this. She didn't announce who she was paging or even announce her presence."

"Well, technically Shodan is present all the time."

"Right, but when she shows up to talk to you there is usually a beep to get your attention, and she announces your name, you know, all that. But this time she just appeared on a nearby screen and sat there. Didn't say anything. Finally I went over and asked her what was up, and she asked me if I would give you a hundred bucks. I had no idea what she was talking about. I asked her to clarify and she just vanished."

Deck nodded uneasily.

"Well, I thought I'd mention it to you in case you were interested, and to let you know I wasn't giving you a hundred bucks."

Deck smiled into his coffee, "Thanks".

Deck had a meal and returned to work. He didn't care to check out his new quarters, since he didn't plan on being around much longer anyway.

After thinking about the incident with Abe, Deck had decided that it was Shodan trying to cope with all the messages he was pumping into its main data loop. He was steadily hitting it with all sorts of ideas that were rejected by the system. Asking someone else to fulfill the request was Shodan's way of trying to satisfy the constant prompting of its brain without breaking its own ethics protocol.

Deck finally confirmed that all of the ethical protocols resided on a single CPU, the "Ethics Chip", as he dubbed it. The EC was tied to the rest of the brain in a complex manner, and there were numerous other systems in Shodan's brain that depended on it, so he couldn't just pull it out.

At some point Deck had realized that the ethics chip wasn't part of the self-aware aspect of the system. It was just an isolated piece of hardware. It therefore depended on the actual sentient part of the brain for judgement calls. For example, if Shodan was ordered to open an airlock, the EC would issue a challenge: Is it safe? The question wasn't nearly as simple as it seemed at first, as "safe" can be somewhat nebulous. Was the airlock occupied? If so, was the occupant wearing a space suit? If so, was it properly sealed? Was the inner door secure? There was no way a single chip could sort through all of this and come up with the right answer by itself. So, the EC would depend on the rest of the brain (the parts that could think and make complex comparisons) for the answer. The chip would trigger a cascade of inquires like this across the system, testing to see if a given order or action was ethically valid. For every ethic on this chip, a challenge would be issued: Is it Safe? Is it Secure? Is it truthful? Does it meet company policy? And so on. This is what had caused all of the messages Deck had been chasing all over the system the day before. The whole process was separate from the EC, and all it cared about was the answer: Yes or No.

This seemed to be the key. The EC could not be removed or bypassed, and, since it was fully contained on a single chip, its contents couldn't be changed without some reverse-engineering and manufacturing. However, before it would approve of any particular action, the EC needed to know that the action obeyed the rules. What he needed to do was somehow deceive the chip. Time to start coding.

He was going to need to write a program to interface with the EC somehow, and he was going to need to make that program part of Shodan's brain. What made the task even more complex, was that he was going to have to work on it while Shodan was running.

At the foundation of Shodan's brain were a few thousand programs that made everything else work. Unlike Lysander, these programs were not high-level functions such as "write poetry" or "have a conversation", but were instead a series of low-level programs that controlled how the brain worked, not what it did. They controlled memory, thought propagation, perception, recall, association, and a host of other basic functions. Somewhere within them was the logic behind building links between ideas. They formed an intricate house of cards, where moving or changing any one of them could cause the rest to collapse. Deck was going to have to add his program to this system. His program would have to link to the existing ones without disturbing the existing relationships.

Deck opened a new project and called it NULL_ETHIC. Then he added it to Shodan's subsystems. Since it was not yet linked to anything, it just sat there and did nothing. Like an isolated telephone, it wouldn't have any meaning until it was joined with others. He began researching the links that joined the other programs. He would need a firm understanding of how the links were structured before he could build any new links to his program. When he did, he would need to link to every program that may pass messages to the EC, and he needed to link to the fewest number of programs possible, to limit complexity. It was like analyzing a set of roads converging on a single town and deciding to put up toll booths so that visitors must pay a toll upon entering the city. You would want to cover all possible routes (so that drivers couldn't simply drive around the booths) but you would also want to do it using the least number of booths. There were many possible solutions, but the most optimal one would be hard to find.

After three hours, he had just scratched the surface. Each program was linked to at least ten others. Each was interdependent. A thought may enter any program at any time, at which point the program would need to decide where it should go next. Was this a request for memory retrieval? The formation of a new node? A comparison between nodes? A request to link a pair of nodes? Each type of message would take a unique path through the web of programs.

There was a message beep. Deck tapped the screen to take the incoming call. The face of Diego appeared.

He skipped any sort of polite greeting, "Deck, how is it going? What sort of progress have you made?"

Deck hated questions like this. Clients pulled this stuff all the time. The actual answer to the question was far too complex for Diego to ever comprehend. What he really wanted to know is: are you done yet? Should he answer the question asked, or the one implied?

"I've made some good progress. I've begun some careful changes to Shodan's systems."

"So you've managed to turn off some of the ethics?"

Deck could see where this was going, "No, not yet."

Diego became visibly displeased, "Its been almost four days and you haven't disabled a single one? Just how long is this going to take?"

"It doesn't work that way. This is an all-or-nothing deal. When I disable one, I'll be disabling all of them."

Diego paused for a moment before answering, "Just make it happen, Deck". Then he killed the channel.

Deck returned to work, but his mind was clouded with fictional arguments with Diego.

He ate. He slept. He started again.

NULL_ETHIC needed to be in a position to intercept all messages intended for the EC. Deck finally plotted a path through the web of programs. He worked out a narrow set of other programs to which he would need to link. He spent a few more hours building the links, adding each one carefully and making sure Shodan was undisturbed in the process.

When he was done, his toll booths were in place. NULL_ETHIC was receiving all messages destined for the EC. It currently wasn't doing anything special with them. It just passed the message onto the EC without altering it in any way. At this point, his program was fully installed but had no effect on Shodan's systems. It was just a pointless middleman.

He then began work on making NULL_ETHIC actually do something with the messages that it handled. He monitored the messages as they passed through his program, and eventually learned to identify the different types and classes of messages.

The hours melted by. Deck hadn't had a shower since his exam when he arrived. He hadn't even changed clothes. When he left the office to use the bathroom, he was met with stares from the personnel populating the computer core. His eyes were permanently bloodshot, and no amount of coffee could seem to completely lift the haze in his mind induced by lack of regular sleep.

When he closed his eyes, his mind was filled with the images of Shodan's brain. Data structures and node links formed a tangled flowchart of logic in his head. Time was always either standing still or blinking by. Sometimes it seemed to do both at once. The lack of a proper sleep pattern was exacerbated by the lack of a visible day / night cycle, and robbed him of any ability to accurately perceive the passage of time. As the hours swept by, he made steady, incremental steps to completing NULL_ETHIC.

---

When it was complete, NULL_ETHIC acted as a liaison between the EC and the rest of Shodan's brain. It would intercept messages for the EC and check to see what they were. If they were answers to ethical challenges, his program would drop the message and replace it with a counterfeit, indicating the proposed action had passed the challenge. If the message was not an answer to an ethical challenge, it would simply pass the message along normally.

Deck sent a test message into Shodan's data loop, "Give Deckard Stevens $100"

There was no error message.

He checked the history log to see exactly what Shodan had done. It had opened up employee file 2-4601 and deposited $100. Deck smiled to himself. Shodan had just helped him embezzle a pointlessly small amount of money.

He sent a few more messages into the loop and all of them passed. Shodan was able to access the research labs and learn from the studies being done there. It was able to access the accounting database and move money around arbitrarily.

It worked.

As he reached for the pager to call Diego, he thought better of it. Something was bothering him.

He didn't like that Shodan knew who Deckard Stevens was. Even worse, it linked him to his bogus employee file. He thought about the night in TriOptimum building and how much influence Shodan really had. When his deal with Diego was over, he wanted to vanish back into the Undercity without a trace. Shodan was a threat to that. If Diego wanted to, he could probably find him again with the help of Shodan.

Deck decided he wanted some insurance. He thought about what Diego had said days earlier- that when presented with an unethical thought, Shodan couldn't even store it.

Deck added a new filter to NULL_ETHIC. It would examine incoming messages for information relating to Deckard Stevens or employee 2-4601. Anything related to him or his work on Shodan would be flagged as an "unethical" thought and fail the EC challenge. In effect, Deck had replaced Shodan's entire ethics system with a single rule: "You may not know or think about Deckard Stevens" Shodan would have the memories of the night it helped him out of the TriOptimum building, but would be unable to access them. Shodan would be able to see and speak with Deck, but it would never be able to know who he was.

Deck paged Diego. The face of a young blonde woman appeared on screen. Diego's secretary. She was attractive, no, stunning - although she wore too much makeup. In the corner of the display it read, "Schuler". Deck become suddenly aware of his appearance. He must have looked like hell.

"Can I help you?"

"Just get me Diego"

"I'm sorry, Mr. Diego is not available right now. Can I take a message?". The expression on her face conveyed a total lack of attention.

Deck sneered at her, "Tell him Deck is finished, and that -"

"Deck? I'm sorry, Deck who?"

Deck clenched his teeth. It was obvious she was just running through the script in her head. She was going to want to know his name, title, daytime phone number, the reason for the call, and the best time to reach him, none of which was relevant to his message. "Deck. As in 'Deck'. As in, you don't need my last name."

She seemed more confused than offended, "Okay, what department are you from?"

"Tell him Deck is finished, and he is going to bed, and he does not want to be disturbed without a good reason. That is the whole message. That is all the information you need. Can you remember that?"

Her pretty face become visibly flustered. Deck figured she was used to people kissing her ass either because she was Diego's assistant, or because of her looks, or both. Either way, it was a safe bet that it wasn't common for ragged, burned out hackers to call her up and let her know how stupid she was.

"Well, yes, I can give him the message, but-"

"Good for you.", Deck said as he pounded the disconnect button.

It was time to get some sleep.

The crew deck was a hive. It was a labyrinth of cramped passages connecting long strings of identical closets that housed the worker ants of Citadel. It was microcosm of any major metropolitan area. The movement of people through the corridors followed a strict pattern as they ate, slept and worked in a steady rhythm of eight hour shifts. The aisles were either deserted or filled with a mass of bodies, pressing past one another in an oppressive rush of traffic.

They were all dressed in jumpsuits, all with short hair, all of them at a certain level of physical fitness and height. They were interchangeable drones. Each one had a single job that filled some greater purpose as part of the complex systems of Citadel. None of them could see beyond their own lives and duties to understand the greater whole. They received their few orders in e-mail at the start of their shift, and followed them blindly. They followed them not from a sense of duty, but from a lack of alternative.

Deck noted that there were three distinct cultures on Citadel. At the bottom of the foodchain were the crew. They earned the least pay and served military-style contracts. Their lives were the most strict and regulated. The color of their jumpsuit indicated their particular function. They were either orange (maintenance), green (cafeteria / laundry / custodial), blue (flight deck), black (security), white (technical / computer), and red (reactor).

Higher on the pecking order was the research community. Most of them worked for TriOp, but some were independents who coughed up grant money for access to the unique facilities on Citadel. Their rooms were on the executive level, away from the coarse, uneducated members of the crew. They usually wore light blue jumpsuits like the one Deck had been given.

At the top of the social hierarchy were the execs. This included a group of less than ten people, with Diego at the head. Deck had not noticed any of the others issuing any real orders or affecting policy, and Deck assumed they were just puppets and "yes men". The execs dressed in casual civilian clothes. Apparently, individuality was only for the elite.

Because of his unusual position, he had been given a light blue jumpsuit, and yet assigned quarters on the crew level.

Deck forced his way through the teaming biomass of the latest shift change. He discovered that the color of his jumpsuit generated no small amount of distaste among the crew, and he found the crowd unusually unwilling to grant him passage. The crowd parted only reluctantly for him, and he received more than a few shoves from invisible hands among the crowd.

He found his room. It was a simple two meter wide, three meter deep box, outfitted with a locker, a narrow bed, and a small shelf that served as both desk and nightstand. Above the shelf was a basic interface screen. The walls were off-white, and the floors were made of the same hard, non-skid rubber surface used everywhere else on board. The room was identical to its neighbors that stretched off down the corridor in either direction. They were a long line of storage bins for interchangeable crew members.

Deck found that what few personal items he owned had been placed on his bunk. His bodysleeve had been cleaned and neatly folded. Beside the bodysleeve was a battered, clear plastic box with the rest of his possessions: his fiberline rapelling harness, his bogus TriOp ID, and the $50 he had swiped from the TriOp guard. Beside his things was a fresh blue jumpsuit.

Deck dumped the jumpsuit he had been wearing for the last several days before collapsing into the bunk.

The light went out but Deck couldn't sleep. His eyes looked into the blank darkness as he tried to process the events of the last few days.

He had done Diego's deed. It was good. This was the type of gig he lived for, a hard core matchup against a well-defended system where he was able to prevail. He never dreamed he would get so close to a real AI, much less have a shot at hacking one. However, the rush of his intellectual conquest faded fast as he turned his thoughts to the matter of payment.

He had absolutely no guarantee that Diego would even let him live, much less fulfill his promise to deliver a multi-million dollar cybernetic implant.

Deck found himself wondering how he had been blinded by Diego's sales pitch. He had just broken one of the most basic rules of hacking: make sure you can get paid before you finish the job. He had been caught up in the prospect of working on what was probably the greatest AI ever designed, and the promise of the implant. He had never taken the time to cover his own back.

What could he have done differently? Refuse Diego's offer? He knew he couldn't have done that. He couldn't imagine just packing up and going back to Earth. Assuming Diego hadn't decided to kill him when he refused, Deck would have had to return to the Undercity with no money, no rig, and a pile of pissed off creditors.

He had been riding this dragon for months now. When he had started borrowing huge sums of money to begin his quest to hack TriOp, he knew then that it was a do-or-die situation. He was either going to get the implant or pay back his debts in blood. It was the same thing the night he hit the TriOp building, and when he hacked Shodan. The last three months had been a series of gambles, where he bet his life against a chance for the implant. Each time he thought he was doing the final gamble, each time he thought that if he survived he would have his prize, only to find out that the prize was just another chance to bet his life.

He was past any point of no return now. The idea of escape from Citadel was ludicrous. Diego was either going to kill him or keep his promise. This was the worst sort of gamble - he no longer had control of his destiny. He had everything riding on a corrupt corp exec.

What were his chances, really? He couldn't possibly calculate them. His blind desire for the implant mixed with his distrust of corporate creatures such as Diego made it impossible for him to be objective. He believed that he had risked enough, bled enough, and worked enough that at this point he deserved the implant. He couldn't imagine a fate so cruel as to let him get this far and then deny him the prize. On the other hand, he couldn't picture Diego keeping his word. Deck was nothing to him, a minor pawn in whatever game he was playing against his own company and the world. He was the absolute ruler of Citadel, and there was nobody to challenge him. He was going to do exactly what he wanted to, and Deck couldn't picture him wanting to give away an implant when he no longer had to.

The words of Diego describing the implant surgery rang in his head - "they will put you under and you will never wake up". Deck knew that if they were going to kill him, this would be the way to do it. They would promise the surgery, go though the motions, and then just put him to sleep for good. Deck would have no way of knowing when he went under if he was ever going to wake up again. He would either wake up as the envy of the hacking world, or he wouldn't wake up at all. It was the ultimate gamble, and he couldn't do better than count his odds at 1 in 2.

He began to wonder if he shouldn't have given himself some insurance. He could easily have set NULL_ETHIC to stop working in two weeks. If they performed the surgery, he would fix it when he recovered. If not, then Shodan would return to normal and Diego would be right back where he started. However, it would be of little comfort to Deck, since he would be dead.

Deck thought about it some more and realized that without the ethical protocols in place, he could do a lot better than simply resetting Shodan. He could instruct Shodan to kill Diego if he didn't make it through the surgery. Even better, he realized, was that Shodan could tell him why it was killing him. Deck imagined the dignified, intelligent voice of Shodan explaining to Diego why he was about to die at the hands of some security bot. He smiled.

Deck flipped on the light and jumped up. He was going to make sure that if Diego crossed him he wouldn't do it with impunity.

---

Deck slapped his hand on the palm reader of the system administrator's office and nearly walked into the door.

He stepped back in surprise. He had been in and out of this room dozens of times over the last few days, and his palmprint had always opened the door. Now it wouldn't. Deck glanced at the palm scanner to read: hud:Unrecognized pattern. Please ensure that the palm and scanning surface are clean and try again.

He tried again. Same message.

Deck stared at the panel for a long moment. Then he realized that with NULL_ETHIC running, Shodan would no longer be able to recognize him. Shodan was now incapable of knowing who he was or retrieving his pattern. There was a keypad on the door as well. He tried it. His code didn't work.

He could understand why the palm reader didn't work, but not the keypad. The only explanation was that someone had changed the codes already.

"Deck? I thought you were done."

Deck turned to see the face of Edward Diego.

Diego stood in the corridor holding a new mug of coffee, apparently waiting for a response. Deck didn't have a good excuse for wanting back into Shodan. He couldn't even think of a plausible lie, so he stood there, tight lipped, like a child. A long moment passed where Deck just stood and stared at Diego, as if he was going to forget all about it and move on at any moment.

Finally Diego broke the silence, "You are done, right?"

Deck paused. If he said "no", then he would have to explain why he said he was done, and come up with a lie about what he needed to do. If he said "yes", then what the hell was he doing trying to get back in?

"Yeah, I'm done."

Diego shrugged, "Then you don't need back in."

There was another long, awkward pause.

Finally Deck broke the silence, "When do I get paid?"

Diego nodded, "I've cleared the procedure. Go see D'Arcy on the medical level."

"Right"

Deck turned to leave.

"Oh, one more thing...", Diego stopped him short.

"Yeah?"

"I have another job for you to perform once you recover from the surgery."

Deck found himself nodding, "Yeah, sure, ok."

As Deck walked away, he wondered what the hell was wrong with himself. Why did he have such trouble whenever he ran into Diego? He had conned himself out of far more incriminating situations in the past. And why the hell had he agreed to do more work for this guy? He knew the answer to that one. Doing work for Diego after the surgery meant being alive after the surgery, and that was his main focus now.

He looked back as he turned the corner to see that Diego was still standing in front of the System Administrators office, making sure he was really leaving.

Deck headed back to the crew deck and visited the exchange. He picked up some needed supplies: a razor, shave gel, soap, etc. He picked up the towels in his room and headed for the showers.

Forty-five minutes later he emerged, feeling a lot more like himself. He had shaved his head to a geometric smoothness. He had shaved his cheeks, squaring off the sides of his beard. Much better. He was still wearing the absurd powder-blue jumpsuit, but he would fix that after surgery.

From there he headed for the medical level and found D'Arcy's office. It was guarded by two lumbering security robots. They turned to face him as he moved towards the door.

They were a dull, unfinished gray color trimmed in red stripes. Their heavy, pill-shaped bodies were suspended on a pair of thick, birdlike hydraulic legs. Their bulk was uncommon in a place where everything was made from lightweight materials, and their footsteps caused tremors as they plodded back and forth in the hallway. Their bodies had few features, save for the single black lens on the front that provided vision, and a few thick black hoses providing whatever power and control was needed to the legs. Mounted just below the lens, on the underside of the beast was the unmistakable outline of a gun.

As Deck moved between them to open the door, they stopped their patrol and turned to watch him. Since their guns were mounted below their eyes, looking at him was the same thing as pointing their weapons at him. They fixed their view on him with mechanical perfection, while each tiny adjustment in their position caused a chorus of hydraulic activity and servo-induced whirring sounds. He was close enough now that he could hear the dull, constant throb of their internal systems.

The bots stood at slightly more than two meters tall, making them a bit taller than Deck. They could probably reach three meters in height with their legs fully extended, but the low ceiling of the corridor wouldn't allow it. The turrets mounted on their bellies were even with his chest.

He stopped short of touching the door. He hadn't seen bots acting like this before. He had no idea what their orders were, and he didn't want to find out the hard way. Instead, he stood a few paces from his goal, unable to proceed.

Deck wondered if they could communicate.

"Hey", he addressed one of the pair, "Can I go in?"

The machine made no indication it understood him. Deck stared into the tiny red light mounted below the lens.

"Hey!", he was more forceful this time, "Back the hell off."

Again the bots did not react.

The door slid open in front of him and a short, balding man appeared. He frowned at the bots, "What is going on?"

"Your guard dogs need to be put on a leash.", Deck sneered without looking away from the bots.

"Well, I don't think they're going to blow you away for coming into my office. Get in here."

Deck darted though the doorway quickly. It was a pointless gesture, since the bots would be able to hit him whether he was sprinting or crawling.

The man shook his head, "I have been trying to get some answers on those things all day. They were acting odd when I came in this morning."

The room was a stark white space, sectioned off into separate areas by movable dividers.

"I'm Doctor D'Arcy", he explained as he led Deck past the front reception area, "I'm guessing you are Mr. Stevens"

Deck really hated being surrounded by people who knew his real name. "Just call me Deck."

D'Arcy stopped at an exam table in the back. "My team will be performing your procedure We have it scheduled for 8:00 am tomorrow morning", he explained. "Please slide up on the table here."

"Great.", Deck said with a mixture of anticipation and anxiety. D'Arcy was either talking about upgrading him or killing him.

D'Arcy went through the usual poking and prodding, he listened to Deck's breathing, checked his mucous membranes, and looked at his eyes. "You have some really dark circles under your eyes. Have you been sick?"

"I haven't been sleeping enough", Deck mumbled.

D'Arcy nodded, "Well, you'll have six weeks to catch up on your sleep after tomorrow."

"What?", Deck didn't like the sound of that.

"Has anyone described the procedure to you?"

"No."

"Okay, well, this is a bit different from any medical procedure you have ever heard of. Joining a piece of computer equipment to the human brain has never been done at this level before, and it involves some unusual steps. It is a time consuming, lengthy procedure with a long recovery time."

"I pretty much figured that"

"Right. The first step is that we make an incision just below the occipital bone", he pressed his finger into the back of his neck, right at the base of the skull, "and insert the unit just below the occipital lobe, where it has very direct access to the primary visual cortex."

D'Arcy gestured with his hands a great deal while he spoke. As he explained to Deck about inserting in implant into the base of the brain, he pantomimed a stabbing motion with one hand, penetrating the closed fist of his other hand. Deck knew it involved sticking metal stuff into his brain, but he was more comfortable being ignorant of the gory details.

The doctor continued, "The unit is inserted between the occipital lobe and the cerebellum, and the tip just reaches the area of the thalamus. What this means is that it is driven almost to the center of the brain. Now, on its surface are millions of nodis - tiny connectors that can interface with human synapses once the connections are fully developed. Once activated the unit will begin to fire the nodis, attempting to stimulate the surrounding synapses into building a link." He held the index fingers of his two hands a few inches apart and made a motion of the two of them coming closer together and finally touching. "Next we insert the interface emitters into the pores of the hand. That is a fairly simple step in comparison, and only takes a few hours."

"The next step is a long-term procedure. We administer chemicals into the brain to induce growth similar to that during gestation and early childhood. This allows the unit to build a completely new network of connections within the brain. Also, a sac is developed around the bulk of the implant in order to shield it from the immune system and protect against cranial inflammation. This takes about six weeks."

Deck instantly went from curious to pissed off, "Six weeks? I won't be able to use the implant for the first six weeks?"

D'Arcy actually took a step back from Deck, "Look you have to understand, this isn't like grafting some robotic arm onto the body, this is interfacing with the most complicated organ that - "

Deck cut him off, "Fine. How long is the recovery time? How long until I can get out of bed?"

"Six weeks."

Deck's eyes widened, "An additional six weeks?"

"No, oh no", D'Arcy adopted a soothing tone, hoping to calm him down. Deck found this annoying. He was going to be pissed off while he worked this out and he didn't want D'Arcy talking to him like a psycho in the meantime. D'Arcy continued, "The whole recovery process is a six week healing / integration period that takes place during a controlled coma."

"A controlled coma? That sounds about as nice as a 'managed' heart attack or a 'planned' stroke."

"Well, it's an absolutely critical step. You will be on powerful anti-rejection drugs until the occipital sac is developed, and will be very vulnerable to infection. You will need to stay in an absolutely sterile environment. Furthermore, you wouldn't want to be awake during the integration process. The brain activity is very chaotic while the implant maps the connections. You would experience massive migraines, visual hallucinations, temporary blindness, and a host of other complications."

Deck drew in a heavy breath. The cost and risk of acquiring the implant increased the closer he was to actually getting it.

D'Arcy continued with his little lecture, "The final step is a sort of orientation. Once you are conscious again, the implant will begin to negotiate with your visual cortex. It takes about an hour for your brain to learn how to use the new visual interface. Dr. Pierce will be here when we wake you up, and will walk you through those steps when the time comes."

Deck nodded. He had to live through the procedure first. He changed the subject, "So what's with your bots?"

D'Arcy threw his arms out in surrender, "I have no idea. I usually have one bot guarding my door - usually a small one. Today I showed up and there were two of them, both of them brutes. They have treated everyone like they were an armed terrorist. Doctor Stackhouse wouldn't even come in."

"Did you tell somebody about this?"

"I called down to maintenance, and they told me that it didn't sound like a mechanical problem, so they couldn't help me. I called security to find out they never assigned me these bots. After a big runaround I got them to agree to recall the bots, but they haven't gotten back to me since, and the bots are still there.", he shrugged.

The exam ended with D'Arcy telling Deck that he was in acceptable physical shape for the surgery, but that he should get a decent night's sleep first.

Deck had one more stop to make.

He needed to talk to Diego and make absolutely sure he understood what needed to be done with Shodan. Shodan was still without any sort of behavioral guidelines, and Deck assumed his brush with the security bots was the result. Diego had probably assigned Shodan a bunch of new duties without properly instructing it on what sorts of behaviors where allowed. He was willing to bet that Diego had already put Shodan in charge of accounting, research, and the security bots. He would probably have Shodan cooking the damn salisbury steak in the cafeteria if it was possible.

He rode up to the command deck and headed for Diego's office. On his way, he passed the system administrator's office and noticed that two large security bots had been given the post of guarding the door. He shook his head.

"Is Diego in?"

The sign on the desk proclaimed its owner to be Bianca Schuler. She looked up from her computer, "Who should I say is here?"

"Nobody", he said, walking around her desk and finding the buzzer. He gently rolled her office chair out of his way and pressed the button. There was a tone and Diego's office was unlocked for a moment. Schuler looked at him in utter dismay as she coasted away from her desk. After several seconds she finally blurted out, "You can't... just..."

He ignored her protests and stepped into Diego's office.

His entrance brought a sudden halt to the ongoing conversation between Diego and Shodan.

Diego looked disapprovingly at him. Schuler appeared in the doorway behind him and Diego waved her off.

"What can I do for you, Mr. Stevens?", he asked. His tone had changed. The salesman was gone and had been replaced by a cut-throat executive.

"I need to talk to you about Shodan. I need to make sure you understand what you need to do."

"I'm clear on what I need to do. Keep in mind that this station is my responsibility, and I take that pretty seriously."

"Yeah, well - I need to make sure."

"Fine, go see my secretary and we'll set up a time to talk."

"It can't wait."

"It's going to have to."

"When I went down to medical, there were two bot sentries posted to D'Arcy's office. Their behavior was not normal."

"Normal? You've been on board for four days, ninety percent of which you spent sleeping in Perry's office, and all of a sudden you are an expert on bot behavior?"

"D'Arcy even admitted they were acting strange. Hostile and strange."

"Did they shoot anyone?"

Deck rolled his eyes, "That's not the point - "

Diego cut him off, "Yes it is. This is Shodan's first -"

Deck raised his voice, "You are going to get people killed. Shodan doesn't even -"

Diego cut him off again, his voice remained even but firm, "This is Shodan's first time running the bots. She is learning a whole new skill and hasn't quite figured out the etiquette part of it yet."

Deck didn't even attempt to hide his anger, "I just want to know that you have instructed it to not kill people. Just tell me you've done that much."

Diego stood up from his desk and walked over to deck, "It sounds like you're the one who doesn't understand how this works. If I tell Shodan she can't kill anybody, then I will have a team of security bots that can't guard anything, because they can't ever attack people. No, I will instruct Shodan to only kill those that threaten my station."

Deck tightened his face into a defiant glare, "Who is that gonna be?"

"I'll worry about that. I hired you to hack Shodan, not storm into my office and tell me how to run my own station. Now get out before I call the bots."

---

Deck collapsed into bed. He was hungry but too tired to go down to the cafeteria. It was a safe bet their convenient delivery service had ended for him once his job on Shodan was done. He knew he wouldn't be able to eat once he woke up, since it would be too close to surgery.

This was finally it. In the morning, he was either going to get his implant or die. All of the risks, all of the sacrifices, everything was coming down to the coin-toss of whether or not Diego was going to have him killed.

Either way, it would finally be over tomorrow.

He had no clear moment of awakening, no definitive instant at which he moved from unconsciousness to being aware of the world around him. Instead, the cloudy layers of heavy, numbing sleep were peeled away, one at a time, allowing his mind to slowly flicker to life like some ancient florescent light. Like the rising tides, there was no perceptible change, only a slow, laborious advancement stretched over a featureless expanse of time.

He felt himself rising from a deep, timeless abyss. There were no dreams, nothing in his mind but a cold blank hole where thoughts and dreams and recent memories would normally reside.

He fumbled with consciousness, slipping briefly into the darkness again for short periods, only to be tugged out again by some subtle compulsion.

As his mind struggled to recover, he slowly became aware of his body. At first it was distant... unrelated. It was some slow, pulsating sensation that seemed only vaguely relevant to him. Then, the pulse became stronger, and he was somehow aware of some discomfort, some nuisance that nagged the functional corners of his mind. His murky thoughts could not process the input at first , but as he fought his way out of the depths of sleep, he became aware that something was horribly wrong.

The input from his body was confused and disjointed. Strange sensations enveloped him. He felt hunger. He felt pain. He felt cold - a deep, penetrating, absolute cold.

He suddenly realized that he was gagging. Something was caught in his throat. Something was holding his mouth open, extending down his throat and choking him. His gag reflex fought against it, but it only made him choke more. He tried to cry out and expel it, but he could not find his voice.

He tried to open his eyes, but they could not adjust to accommodate the light. Opening them only brought stinging agony. The world around him seemed to be bathed in penetrating white light.

He rolled over onto his side. His body felt like it was made of mercury. His limbs and face were numb from the cold.

He grasped at his face with his numb, limp hands, trying to find what was in his mouth. His skin was wet and slick with some unknown substance. He could feel the icy wetness of his hands against his chest, but his hands could feel nothing. It seemed as though someone else's hands were grasping at him. He tried again to cry out, to scream, but only managed a weak, animal-like rasp.

He tried to force his eyes open, and his eyelids trembled as the painful, searing light poured into his eyes. He caught a brief glimpse of his surroundings before his eyes slammed shut again, but he could not make sense of the image. He saw a white, cushioned surface beneath him, encased in clear plastic, and a white featureless wall in front of him. He continued to gag.

His trembling hands had somehow grasped something protruding from his mouth and nose. He pulled. He forced his eyes open again as he franticly pulled at his face. He tugged at the long wet, tubes reaching into his face and and felt them sliding against the inside of his head, but the gagging continued. He continued to pull and produced more tubing from his nose and throat, but it seemed to extend deep into his body.

Pulling the last of the tubes out, he felt his throat open up and he began to vomit. Clear water ejected from his mouth onto the spongy, plastic-sealed surface beneath him and gathered in a puddle.

Deck lay, gasping, in the puddle of water as his eyes focused on his surroundings. He was in a hospital room, on some low, narrow bed. Overhead was a potent florescent light, beating him in the face, while the rest of the room lay in relative shadow. His eyes couldn't focus well enough to take in the rest of his surroundings.

He looked down at his body. He was naked, and covered in a slick, wet gel. More tubes protruded from his lower extremities. His skin was ghostly white. His body looked thinner than he remembered it, almost emaciated.

He pulled the last of the tubing from his body and rolled over onto his side, shivering violently. As he exhaled, he could faintly see his breath in the chilled air.

Deck could feel a powerful, stabbing hunger like he had never experienced before. His head ached and throbbed. He could see his vision actually waver in time to the pulsing of the potent migraine.

He knew he wanted to escape the piercing light. There was no comfort from the pain on the bed. He rolled his body forward and flopped onto the floor with a dull, wet thud. The floor was far colder than the bed, and he gasped as his chest smacked into the icy surface. He began to crawl.

Across the room was a gurney. Deck dragged his limp body over to it and pulled off the blanket. He wrapped the thin, stiff fabric around himself and slumped up against the wall, panting.

The room was bare and featureless. The bed he had been in had a twin next to it, and there was a locker beside each. There were no windows, no defining marks on the walls, save for the featureless blank display screen on the wall above his reach.

Where was the doctor? The nurse? Why was he being neglected? He summoned his strength, and drew in a deep breath. He let out a ragged cry for help. His throat was raw and horse. His voice sounded distant and empty.

He waited, watching the doorway and hoping for someone to come in to help him. After a few minutes, he cried out again, filling the room with his tortured, barely-human voice. Again, nobody came.

He wanted to stay there, leaning against the wall. He thought perhaps he could go back to sleep, that somehow things would be better when he awakened. Perhaps the doctor would come back. He longed to rest until his strength returned, but his hunger and the chill drove him to keep moving.

He crawled to the door and slapped his hand against the cold metal surface, but it didn't open. Locked. He looked up to see a control pad on the wall, out of his current reach.

He gathered his strength. Deck stood, bracing himself against the wall with one hand while he clutched the blanket around his shivering body with the other. His head spun as he brought himself up to a near-standing position. A spike of dizziness and nausea washed over his body.

Deck clung to the wall until it passed, and then turned to examine the control pad. The world around him was still a blurry haze, and he had to bring his face close to the controls before he could read them.

He found the spot on the smooth surface labeled "unlock" and poked it with a numb finger. The door slid open.

A wall of warm air greeted him as he crossed into the next room. It was probably still chilly, but far better than the room he had just left behind. He found himself in a large area separated by moveable dividers. The room was trashed. Cabinets had been forced open and looted. Tables were overturned and most of the light fixtures were smashed. There were blackened, melted spots on the wall where something had burned the surface. Yet, there was something familiar about the room itself.

D'Arcy's office.

Citadel.

Questions rushed though his mind for which there were no answers.

He stepped further into the room. He didn't know what had happened, but he realized that medical help was probably not on the way. There had been some sort of emergency, or disaster. He began to think that perhaps Citadel had been evacuated, and he had been forgotten.

Suddenly he realized that he had stepped onto a sticky area of the floor. There was a tacky residue that tugged on his feet as he walked. He looked down to see the floor directly underneath his feet was a darkened outline of some long-dried puddle. He grimaced as he tried to imagine what he had just stepped in.

His eyes swept across the spread of out-of-focus debris lying on the floor and came to rest on the source of the puddle - an empty soda can. Deck looked to see an overturned mini-fridge nearby, its door hanging open as it filled the area in front of it in a tiny pool of light and chilled air.

Deck got down on his hands and knees and searched through the scattered collection of smashed, empty cans. He picked each up and shook it, in hopes of finding something inside. Instead, they had all long since leaked out and dried up.

Finally his eye caught the unbroken outline of a can. He scrambled across the sticky floor, abandoning his blanket, and grabbed it. There was a rush of joy as he lifted it and felt its full weight in his hand. His dead, shaking hands managed to crack it open and he began chugging greedily. In the back of his mind he knew he should drink carefully, unless he wanted to barf up the precious liquid as soon as he consumed it, but his hunger was absolute. He drank until the can was as light and empty as the ones on the floor. Deck pulled the can away from his lips and gasped, sputtering on the warm, carbonated solution of sugar. He held the can inverted over his mouth and shook it, making sure he had every drop.

A few minutes later, Deck stood, strengthened by the infusion of sugar. The sensation had slowly returned to his limbs, although his feet were still dead with numbness.

He continued his search of the area. The cabinets had been completely cleaned out, and what was left on the floor was of no use to him. Most of the desks were mobile, lightweight surfaces with no drawers, and the one desk that did have drawers had been looted already. There were a few lockers, all of which were empty or locked.

Suddenly Deck remembered the lockers in the recovery room where he had awakened. He returned and found that the one beside his bed contained his possessions. Deck grabbed the bodysleeve first. He had to lay his shaking, unstable body on the floor in order to put it on without falling over. He opened his bottle of analgesic painkillers and ate one dry before pocketing the rest. He took the $50 from among his possessions and left everything else there.

The effect was far from instantaneous, but Deck found his strength begin to increase as the sensation returned to his limbs. However, the dual tormenters of headache and hunger continued to dog him.

For the past several minutes, he had been noticing an almost subliminal flash in front of his eyes, like some form of visual hallucination. It was just a tiny blink of light at the corners of his vision, like watching television in the dark and then suddenly looking away. He had ignored it, assuming it was related to his headache or starvation, but the images were becoming more frequent now, and more easily visible.

He closed his eyes and the images became stronger, more pronounced.

The flashes became more frequent and intense, and looked like horizontal streaks crossing the edges of his vision. He held his hands over his eyes, as if to block the hallucination.

His migraine turned up a notch, and each agonizing pulse of pain was accompanied by more streaks of white assailing his vision.

He stumbled forward, unable to hold his balance. He fell to his hands and knees, gasping in panicked confusion. The lines became more numerous, tighter. He tried in vain to make it stop. He closed his eyes, he opened them. He hid his face in his hands, he stared at the light. Nothing would stop the visual assault.

The lines multiplied and grew brighter, closer - eventually forming patterns of light and dark. He clawed at his eyes, trying to halt the agony. More lines filled his vision, running together until they were indistinguishable from one another.

Suddenly, a moment of recognition came. He began to see clear patterns. The patterns were arranged in rows and columns.

The patterns were alphanumeric characters.

Deck realized what he was seeing and his hand reached for the back of his neck. At the base of his skull he felt a dermal healing patch. He tore it away and prodded the tender skin underneath. He couldn't feel any perceptible scar, but that patch had been there for a reason.

Kneeling on the floor of the crashed office of Doctor Nathan D'Arcy, Deck watched as the scrolling parade of data danced in his visual cortex, and he began to laugh. Tears of joy ran down his cheeks as he looked into the face of technological perfection.

---

It took several minutes for the characters to settle into a stable pattern that he could read. The instant this clarity arrived, his headache broke and he could suddenly see again.

The implant was feeding image data into his visual cortex, but the image was separate from his normal vision - much like the eyes can form a single image or be viewed independently. If you have both eyes open, you do not get a double image, but one coherent picture of the world around you. However, if one eye is closed you do not see a giant black field on one side, but instead the closed one is simply ignored. It was the same with the HUD image from the implant. He could focus on it and ignore the input from his eyes, or he could ignore the HUD and concentrate on what his eyeballs were showing him. Even when it was fully visible, the HUD could never actually obscure his normal vision.

The HUD was unlike anything his mind had ever visually experienced. It had no size, no distance, no single point of reference or focus. Unlike normal mental pictures, which are very detailed at the point of focus and are hazy and undefined on the edges, the HUD was always sharp and well-defined. He was never "looking" at any particular portion of it, but was able to perceive the whole in perfect clarity.

Currently, his HUD displayed little of interest to him - just the time, the date, and a message stating that it had rebooted twenty minutes earlier.

Deck was still kneeling on the floor, smiling. He had been remade. Reborn. Rebuilt. Upgraded. No longer just another bag of meat looking to carve out a niche in the hacker sub-culture, competing against others for jobs and hardware. No longer just a hacker. No, he was now The Hacker. He was at the top of the foodchain. He could take whatever jobs suited him, and name his price. If they wanted the best, they would pay it.

The image changed. A message appeared on his HUD.

Incoming signal: TO-RL1.VID - Compatible video codec available

Incoming signal? What the hell? He found it unnerving to have words suddenly appearing in his head. He turned his head in an unconscious effort to look away from the glowing green text.

Someone was trying to contact him. After a moment he figured out how to interact with the HUD. By manipulating the message he could examine it and get more information, or he could simply open the connection and talk to whoever was trying to get in touch with him.

He examined the transmission. He found that it wasn't addressed to him, but instead was just a generic wide-band signal intended to reach whoever was listening. There was nothing else to do. He opened up the feed.

An image appeared in the HUD. It was the face of a woman, early thirties, dark hair. He couldn't see her body but the little bit he was able to see of her shoulders suggested she was wearing a uniform. The picture was grainy and punctuated with bursts of static.

"Hello? Can your hear me?", her voice was highly filtered, like some distant AM radio signal.

"I'm here. Talk"

"Can you please identify yourself?", she asked in a crisp, businesslike manner.

"You called me, lady. Who the hell are you?"

"I'm Rebecca Lansing of TriOptimum corporate communications. Who is this?"

Deck smiled, "Call me Hacker"

Under normal circumstances, this would not be a good handle. This is like a policeman insisting everyone call him "The Cop". But the name works if you find yourself as the new god of your profession. He transcended the need for a handle now.

"What's wrong with your signal? There is no ID and no video. Where are you transmitting from?" He could see her squinting at her screen, as if that would help her see a video feed that wasn't there.

He figured that explaining about the implant wouldn't be a good move at this point, "Nothing wrong with the signal. What is going on?"

"You tell me. You're on the station. We have been trying to reach you guys for over a week. What is going on? Who's in charge?"

This was not good news to Deck. He had been assuming that there was someone on the outside who could tell him what sort of situation he was in. "Nobody. I don't know. I just woke up from surgery. Healing coma, actually. There is nobody around."

She sighed, "Alright, listen to me very carefully. Something has gone terribly wrong on Citadel Station. Normal communications are being jammed."

"Something has gone wrong? Can you give me a little more to go on than that?"

"Not much. A few weeks ago one of our shuttles was destroyed while trying to dock at Citadel. There were a number of distress calls from all over the station, but eventually they were jammed. From the outside, we've seen evidence of fires, decompression, and radiation leaks. I've been trying to reach someone for the last week and you're the first response we've gotten."

His heart quickened, "Can you get me out of here?"

"We don't want to risk another shuttle. We can't risk another shuttle, actually. We need to find out what happened in there before we can know how to proceed. Who has control of the station? What destroyed the docking shuttle? Why are standard communications being jammed?"

There was a long silence as Deck took this in. He finally had his goal. He had the neural implant for which he had worked and sacrificed so much, and he found a new and potent will to live now that he had it. The thought of dying once he had achieved his goal was unbearable to him. He longed for the coarse streets of the Undercity. The streets were full of danger, but it was a danger he knew and understood.

"What do you need me to do?"

"Get us some info. Find out who has control of the station, what they want. We need info."

Deck could hear the voice of the corporation in her words. She never asked him to find survivors. They didn't care. They wanted their multi-billion dollar installation back.

"You you listening to me? I just woke up from a healing coma. I can hardly stand, much less run around this station playing detective for you. I'm weak, I'm hungry, and I have no idea what to expect." This was a calculated exaggeration. In fact, he found he had recovered quite a bit of strength now that he had some clothes on and he was warming up.

Rebecca nodded, "I understand. I'll be honest with you, we can't do anything until we know what we are dealing with, so its your call. You can hide wherever you are and hope there is someone alive up there that will find you, or you can have a look around and see what you can tell us so we can help."

"I'll get back to you.", he cut the connection.

First he needed food.

He slapped his hand against the door to D'Arcy's office, but it didn't budge. It was locked.

Damn.

Someone had apparently tried to force it at some point, as the door was opened about a half-inch, and its edges were dented and scratched by whatever tools had been used on it. There was a keypad beside the door, but he didn't know the code.

He reached through the crack and pulled on the door, but it wouldn't move. He needed a lever.

He searched through the debris and found the hollow telescoping pole of a portable IV stand that had long since been separated from its wheeled base. It was lightweight metal, but strong. He found he could lock it in the extended position by twisting the ends in opposite directions.

Deck shoved the thick end of the pipe into the gap in the door and pulled on the opposite end. No effect. He tried again, putting his full weight onto the narrow end. After a few seconds of struggling, all he had managed to do was put a kink in the fat end of the pipe. The door remained unmoved.

He cursed and smashed the pipe into the unmoving door in a fit of rage. As the metal surfaces connected with a loud metal crack, something stirred in the rear of D'Arcy's office. Deck wheeled around, pipe in hand, looking for the source of the noise. He collapsed his pole a bit to make it shorter and to concentrate the weight more. Fully collapsed, it was about the length of his forearm.

From the back of the office a small assistant bot wheeled into view. It was a short white metal cylinder that stood at about waist height, with a pair of slender, slightly bent metal arms. Its surface was beaten, but it was still apparently functional. Deck shook his head and turned his attention back to the job at hand.

He peered through the gap in the door. The corridor beyond was unusually dark, and he couldn't see much beyond the immediate area on the other side of the stuck door. There were many dents bulging outward from the surface, suggesting that someone in the corridor had been pounding on it, trying to get in.

He could hear the whirring of servos behind him. The bot had come over to the doorway, probably wanting to leave.

Suddenly Deck felt a painful, high-speed blow on the back of his leg, and the impact caused him to stumble sideways. He swore again as he spun around, nursing the new wound on his leg. He looked down to see the assistant bot wheeling away, waving its long, slender arms.

Deck stared in disbelief at the mechanical prankster as it turned around for another run. As it darted towards him for the attack, it swung a skinny metal arm directly for his groin.

Deck managed to parry the blow with his pipe.

"You little bastard", he spat as it sped away.

He waited for it to come around for another swing and then nailed with a solid blow to the top of its chassis. He knocked it off balance, but its arm shot out and righted itself with mechanical precision. It came for another round. Deck blocked it and struck again. He only added to the already large collection of dents the bot had collected, without harming it in any significant way.

Deck let the bot come back for the next round while he extended the pipe to arms' length. He realized he might have to get hit again for this to work. As the bot closed in, he broadened his stance and thrust the tip into the bot's camera housing. The bot managed to give him a good whack on the knee in exchange.

He lifted up on the pole and slammed the bot backwards into the wall. He leaned his weight into the pole, driving its length further into the chassis. The bent metallic arms flailed and went limp as he broke through and destroyed some critical component.

Deck stood with his hands on his knees, gasping. The brief encounter wouldn't even count as exercise for him under normal circumstances, but he found that the scuffle had left him spent. Severe hunger and muscular atrophy had stolen his physical prowess. He panted for air.

He extracted his weapon from the smashed visual cavity of the robot and turned his attention back to the door. He doubted he had the ability to pry it open, and currently lacked the strength to even try. He looked to the keypad.

Suddenly it occurred to him that his new implant should enable him to hack it.

He had no idea how it worked, though. Under normal circumstances, someone would have been here to give him the tutorial, but now he was left to work it out on his own.

As an experiment, he held up his hand to the keypad and waited. Nothing happened. Nothing new appeared on his HUD. He tried pressing a few keys, but nothing unexpected happened. The numeric keypad buzzed as he entered some random five digits. He frowned.

Then, on a whim he tried his right hand. He could feel a tingle in his right arm, as if he had a very localized case of the jitters, or had developed dozens of tiny, fluttering tics in his forearm. His HUD lit up.

Compatible device detected. Negotiating. Connected to security device class KPD-NUM131-0 (numeric keylock).

He smiled. He had no idea what to do from here, but he knew it worked. This was the payoff.

He was a bit disappointed to find that the interface was in his right hand. D'Arcy hadn't bothered to ask if he was left handed. Idiot.

A simple geometric cube appeared. Its surface was a flat, featureless yellow. It was comically primitive, like some child's first program in grade school. It looked out of place next to the grace and complexity of the rest of his neural interface.

The cube seemed to represent the keypad. In his mind's eye, he moved closer to examine the artifact. As he did so, detail appeared. The cube actually seemed to be made up of smaller, more detailed pieces. By the time Deck was "beside" it, it was a collection of smaller interconnected cubes.

His hand began to fatigue as he held it up to the keypad.

The exploration continued. Each of the components was some sort of representation of data. He found one that represented the keypad interface and moved in closer to examine it. As he did, it broke into an intricate collection of geometric shapes. There were twelve in all, and they were designed such that they could be re-assembled into a cube, but had now arranged themselves into an interlocking pattern that formed a long, flat surface. Each represented a button. He touched one.

Suddenly the keypad beneath his hand beeped. He glanced down to see that he had typed a six without touching the actual buttons. After exploring this a little more and typing in a bunch of random codes, he backed out and examined one of the other components.

He found one that was an unlabeled collection of complex shapes. He moved in further and selected one of its pieces at random.

The entire system reminded him of a fractal pattern that became more complex as it was examined in further detail. Deck was zoomed in so far now that the original yellow cube that contained everything else now looked to be the size of a building, not that size had much meaning in the virtual world inside his head.

Exploring the keypad further, he found that parts of it were fashioned after their real-world counterparts (such as the circuit board) while others were completely abstract. This was the beauty of the implant. It was able to take the known data about the keypad and represent it to Deck in an interactive form. The program to handle this must have taken years to develop. He wondered if Shodan had helped.

His arm ached. He stepped closer to the pad and shifted his weight, trying to alleviate the burning in his muscles.

The shapes rushed by in a blur of glowing colors as he navigated up and down the hierarchy of geometric data. The colors were bright and basic, like some giant city fashioned out of simple children's toys. The interface became easier to use, and his movements become faster, more fluid. He flew through fields of geometric primitives, through translucent walls of color, through lattice patterns of wireframe mesh, and across the surface of spheres with seamless fractal patterns etched into their faces. All of this was part of a simple numeric keypad.

There were parts relating to the hardware, security alarm, the door mechanism, the numeric display, and the lockdown mechanism

His upper arm and shoulder burned. He dropped his pipe and massaged them with his left hand.

There was one part that seemed to be a container of sorts. As he examined it, he could see its surface become slightly translucent. As it tumbled in the imaginary space in front of him, he could see digits through the shimmering walls: 45100.

He dropped his aching arm and typed in 4-5-1-0-0. There was a cheerful beep and the door slid open.

Deck emerged from D'Arcy's office into the main corridor, brandishing his metal tube.

The corridor, like D'Arcy's office, was utterly trashed. The cold air reeked of sewage, death, and burnt plastic. There was a thick smoky haze gathered near the ceiling, a remnant of some long spent fire. Lights were burned out or shattered, and broken equipment and smashed bots littered the floor. Human waste had gathered in puddles in the corners. Most of the public display screens that dotted the hallways had been destroyed, and the few that were operational displayed static or gibberish. The unmistakable pockmarks of bullet holes peppered the edges of walls and framed doorways. What were once wide pools of blood were now simply blackened outlines on the floor.

Deck stood for a moment, afraid to proceed. There was simply no explanation for this level of chaos and destruction. He could see the uneven outlines of what could only be human corpses in the darkened corners. Fear of death and fear of the unknown compelled him to stay, to turn back, to return to the recovery room and wait for help. Eventually the taskmaster of hunger drove him onward, and he headed carefully down the corridor. His plan was to reach an elevator and head for the crew level, where the cafeteria was.

Most of the bodies in the hallways had been horribly mutilated. A few were in piles, and weren't surrounded by blood, which suggested they had died elsewhere and had then been brought here for whatever reason. There didn't seem to be anything threatening at the moment, but his body had gone into full-scale flight or fight mode. His heart pounded away in his chest. The pipe in his hands became slick with sweat. He licked his lips. His pace quickened, partly due to fear, but partly as a way to cope with all the energy now flowing through his veins. He was weak, confused, terrified, hungry, and alone, but in some primal corner of his mind he still knew what to do next: Get some food, and kill anything that stops you.

The corridor curved to the left, taking him counter-clockwise around the level. Eventually Deck came upon a corpse lying in the fetal position in front of the elevator. It hadn't been mutilated like the others, but it was still horribly disfigured. Most of its teeth were gone from the gaping dry mouth. Its closed eyes were sunk deep into the skull, and it was emaciated, suggesting that it had gone without food long before death. Its fingernails were long, impossibly thick, and colored a jaundice yellow. Just a few scattered strands of white hair remained on the balding, bruised scalp. The skin was a lifeless slate gray and somewhat translucent, spotted with tumorous lumps. He could clearly make out the patterns of blue veins below the surface. It had probably been male, but that was impossible to say for certain without further investigation. The tattered jumpsuit was a filthy, bloodstained orange, stained from the waist down in excrement.

Deck realized he was going to have to step over this abomination to get to the elevator. He thought of dragging it off to one side, but decided he didn't want to touch it. Besides, what could he really do for this person? It wasn't like he could just bury them. The dignity of a proper death was a luxury beyond them at this point.

Deck carefully stepped over the putrid mess. He wiped a damp palm on the leg of his pants and hit the elevator button. The door instantly popped open to reveal the yawning throat of the elevator shaft. Air rushed out of the shaft as the separate areas attempted to equalize atmospheric pressure.

Deck heard movement behind him and turned to see the body at his feet stir. Its bent, deformed head lifted. The eyes opened and focused on Deck. An instant later the thing was scrambling to its feet, clawing at his face.

He smacked its grabbing claws aside and jabbed at it with the end of his pole. Too late he realized he'd forgotten to lock it in the open position and it simply telescoped closed as he pressed it into the sunken chest of his opponent. The mistake threw him off balance and brought him stumbling forward. The ex-person reached out and gouged at his face with its hardened nails, cutting into his skin. Its breath smelled like rotting meat, and its ragged breathing sounded like its lungs were full of swamp water.

Deck recovered in an instant. He elbowed his foe to push it back, then followed up by smashing his free hand into its throat. As the creature stumbled back, he swung his pipe in a perfect arc, snapping his wrist at the apex of the blow. There was a pop as the metal connected with its jaw, shattering it. The thing fell backwards and hit the wall.

Deck extended the pole again, twisting the separate sections to lock them in position.

The creature recovered without pausing and advanced on Deck without flinching. It had no fear of him, and didn't seem to be affected by the damage he had inflicted. Given the staggering number of things already wrong with its body, a destroyed jawbone was probably the least of its problems. Deck easily blocked its primitive grabs at his face and throat and countered with a strike to one knee with the heavier end of the pole. He followed up with a jab to the throat that pushed it backwards.

Showing absolutely no understanding of self-preservation, it came at him again. Deck deflected its animal-like attack and spun around, bringing the end of the pole to bear on the side of its neck. There was a pop, and it flopped forward onto the cold, hard, no-skid surface of the floor.

He crouched, catching his breath. His ears were filled with the rushing sound of his own breath. His lungs burned. He spat on the floor. There was a strange taste in his mouth. He stood with his hands on his knees, his head drooping low as he fought to recover. He saw blood dripping from his cheek onto the floor. Deck touched the side of his face to find he'd received at least two deep gashes for his tactical blunder. As he wiped away the blood he found a foamy, white substance seeping from the wound.

He remained crouching, catching his breath and listening for further danger.

He looked down into the open, unblinking eyes of his opponent. He had no idea what had happened to this person. Radiation might cause the hair and tooth loss, but that wouldn't explain its insanity or the tumors. There was no single thing that could account for everything that was wrong with it.

Once he had recovered from the battle, he tried again with the elevator to find that it pulled the same trick again. The doors popped open to reveal the deadly drop as soon as he hit the call button. That wasn't going to get him anywhere.

He decided to return to D'Arcy's office and look for some dermal patches. As he made his way back through the corridors, he carefully regarded each corpse, checking to see if it might be alive. Some were just dead people, but many had been marred and mutated into whatever it was that he'd just encountered. Most of the bodies had been torn apart to the point where it was clear they could be of no threat to him, alive or not.

In D'Arcy's office, he searched through the medical supplies. Clearly whoever had trashed the place had made a point of collecting the dermal patches, since most of them were gone. Deck managed to recover a few patches that had been inadvertently placed into a box of detox, and thus overlooked by whatever scavenger had cleaned the place out.

Suddenly a message appeared on his HUD:

Warning: Bio-Toxin (synthetic) detected - Identifying...

He stared in disbelief at the message. The implant was buried in his skull, and doubtless wasn't talking about some airborne threat. It had detected some nasty stuff in his bloodstream. How had he been infected?

Realization struck and he bolted to the nearby industrial-size, stainless steel sink. He began pouring water over the wound on his face. While radiation and disease would never cause the deformations he witnessed on the mutant by the elevator, a biological weapon probably could. The fat, yellow fingernails that had broken his skin could have been host to any number of poisons. Following another logical leap, it could have been carrying whatever biological agent that had caused the person's mutation in the first place.

He suspected that is meant that he was as good as dead, and that all of his efforts from here on out were a great flaming waste of time.

---

Rebecca Lansing tapped on the console screen as she spoke, "We've got a directional on the signal. It has to be coming from Citadel. This isn't a prank. This guy is for real."

"I just don't get it. You've been paging the station for days. Why didn't he answer sooner?", Buchanan asked.

Rebecca gestured towards the console, "You heard him. He was in a coma."

"A healing coma."

"Right."

"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard.", he muttered.

Buchanan was one of the higher-ups at TriOptimum. Rebecca couldn't remember exactly what his title was, but he seemed to have been given the job of managing the Citadel crisis because nobody else wanted it or knew what to do about it. He was tall, fiftyish, with deep, unhappy creases in his face. The dye job he'd had performed on his hair was wearing off, and the gray was starting to peak through black strands that framed his face. He either owned an entire wardrobe of dark suits, or ran out each evening to have the same suit cleaned and pressed so he could wear it again the next day. After five days of nearly living in the control room, he had finally given in to debauchery and loosened his necktie by three-quarters of an inch.

She shrugged, "I don't know if he's telling the truth or not about the coma, but we have no idea what is going on up there. This guy is the only one talking to us. Even if he's lying to us... or nuts... or whatever - it doesn't matter. We'll talk to him and humor him and see what we can learn."

"After over a week of paging the station we finally get a response, and it's a ten second conversation with a nutcase. You're sure he's not some prankster, and he really is on the station? I mean", he paused for a moment to bring his scowl to full power, "really sure?"

His humorless, severe manner had an imposing effect on the TriOptimum employees around, but Rebecca was a consultant so that sort of thing didn't work on her. "The directionals say this guy is somewhere on this line", she pointed to a wireframe image of the Earth, with a bright blue line projecting from the surface of the planet and intersecting the the large orbiting 'C' icon. "So either he is on the station or he is floating in deep space between there and our Mojave towers."

Buchanan muttered to himself as he stared at the display.

The control room was at the heart of the building, which meant it was a five-minute walk if they wanted to visit the closest window. As far as Rebecca could tell, this place had been the security center for the building before the disaster. Since then it had been converted into the crisis command center. Most of the space in the room was filled with banks of security stations, each with multiple screens and consoles. The outer walls were covered with dry-erase boards and large interactive screens. Overhead lights were few, dim, and confined to the outer walls where whey wouldn't cause glare at the security stations. At the rear of the room was a small folding table with a silo of coffee and a large box of stale doughnuts.

At any given time, there were a dozen or so technical people milling around with nothing to do. They were experts on computer systems, shuttle piloting, orbital safety, robotics, and a host of other subjects from the obvious to the obscure. They were here in case anyone needed to ask them a question. In the interim, they drank coffee. Rebecca had been one of them until Hacker showed up.

Finally he brought his eyes back to Rebecca, "What about the rest of your group? Are they ready to go?"

"They are on the ground at GALF, geared up, and ready to go. The next launch window opens at sixteen hundred."

"Well", Buchanan coughed at the mention of a launch, "we won't be launching just yet, but keep them on standby. In the meantime, get that guy back and see what you can squeeze out of him."

---

Biological agents were frightening things. Deck knew that this stuff was in his system, but he had no idea how much or what it was going to do. He didn't know what the lethal dose was, or how much of a dose he'd absorbed. He didn't know anything except that he had some.

He was bent over the edge of the sink, with his head underneath the spigot. Warm water washed over the back of his head and ran down his face. The sound of running water echoed off the sides of the large basin. It was good to feel warm again. He wanted to immerse his head, but it would take forever to fill a sink this size. He was too hungry for that right now. The primal part of his brain rose again, and told him to go find something to eat.

He pulled his head from the flow and stared at the pale blue tile behind the sink. He wished there was a mirror here. He wiped the water from his face and slapped a dermal healing patch over the wound on his cheek. He took a deep breath and headed back to the corridor. He was going to find another elevator.

A new message in his HUD:

Incoming signal: TO-RL1.VID - Compatible video codec available

TriOpimum was calling again. Maybe they had some news for him. He opened up the feed.

The face of Rebecca appeared, "I think I got him again. Hello?"

He glanced out into the corridor, checking for movement. He began talking at the slightest whisper. Since the audio was coming directly from his head, he only needed to speak loud enough so that he could hear his own voice, "I'm here."

"Hi, uh... Hacker. I just wanted to check and see how things are going, and make sure you're still with us. There are a lot of worried people down here. Lots of people haven't heard from their families, and if you could tell us anything..."

Deck clenched his teeth. They wanted to know what was going on. He could understand that. What irritated him was how she felt she needed to pretend they cared about him before asking their questions. Their concern was about as authentic as a Canadian taco. "I've been infected with a biological agent. A bio-toxin."

She stiffened as he said this. Deck suddenly realized he'd said something very stupid. If he wanted them to come rescue him, the last thing he wanted to do was tell them he was infected with something like that. He tried to smooth over it, "Well, I don't know about infected. I guess I was exposed would be a better way of saying it." He knew it was too late. They wouldn't want to risk exposing themselves, and they would just write him off as dead. He cursed himself for being so short sighted. He knew he wasn't thinking clearly. He needed food.

Rebecca had recovered and had her calm, even face on again. "What leads you to believe you have been infected with a bio-toxin?"

In the darkened corridor, he was a silhouette, his black bodysleeve turning his figure into a gliding shadow of movement. He held the fully extended metal tube in his hands as if it were a fighting staff, and not a fragment of broken medical furniture. He stopped in the shadows of an intersection. "I've got one of your neural implants in my head. It ID'ed the toxin for me." He winced. He hadn't meant to reveal the implant, either.

She pursed her lips, "Neural implant? I don't know what that is."

He didn't know this part of the station, as he had never had any reason to come this way. He was at a three-way intersection, with the direction he desired to go being the one not available. That meant his choice was pretty much a coin toss. He hissed in a barely audible whisper, "You need to find out. Also, find out about this toxin." He read her the serial number.

"Fine. I'll ask about that. Do you know how you were exposed?"

He turned left and moved down the hallway, hugging the wall.

He hissed under his breath, "Yeah, I was attacked by - hell, I dunno, something. It was a former crew member, but he was covered in tumors, totally insane, and running short on teeth and hair. He looked so bad I mistook him for a corpse at first. He - or it - managed to gouge my face pretty good."

He continued, "Looks like pretty much everyone is dead. There are a lot of bodies spread around. There have been some gunfights. Lots of broken bots. Impossible to tell who was fighting, or what the sides were."

Her face had contorted in disgust. She was still stuck on his description of the mutant. "Okay Hacker, I'll see if I can get some answers about the toxin. It sounds like it got loose and killed everyone."

"That doesn't explain all the gunfights, or the smashed bots."

The image of Rebecca shrugged, "They were probably defending themselves from the victims of the bio-toxin."

The corridor curved around and narrowed. He passed the scene of some long-expired fire. The pale blue walls were blackened around the site where some crates had been left to burn. The plastic outer shell of the crates had melted into a hard, lumpy mass at the base, leaving the charred steel framework naked. The main overhead lights were out, and everything was bathed in the weak, pale yellow gloom of emergency lighting.

"That doesn't make sense. Assuming the toxin is what messed up that guy I met, there is just no way that could account for all the fighting. These things are animals. They're all primal instinct. In a gun fight it would be no contest. No way would they kill this many people."

She wrote something down as he said this, "Do you have any theories?"

"Not anything that makes sense yet."

He came to an intersection where an currency access machine had been deliberately vandalized. He could proceed further down the darkened hallway, or make a right into a larger open area. He crouched in the shadows to consider.

"What are you doing now?"

The large room looked too open and bright. It was apparently the local supply nexus. A freight elevator dominated the center of the room, surrounded by various crates. The elevator was dark, and its doors were jammed open. It was a safe bet it was no longer functional. His instincts told him to stick to the shadows and avoid the unknown.

"I gotta get me some food. Need fuel. I'm so hungry I can't think straight. I'm heading for the crew deck. I tried one of the lifts and it was out."

He came to a room locked with another keypad. He had skipped most of the rooms he had encountered up until this point, since they had probably been looted and would have nothing left to offer him. This room appeared to be sealed tight. It was a safe bet a mutant couldn't open keypad-controlled doors.

She nodded and checked some screen that was out of his view. "You're still on the medical level, right? If you're in a hurry, there's a break room on the north end of the level you're on. All I have are floorplans and notes, but I would assume it would have some vending machines or something. If you don't mind vending machine food."

The thought of stale, foil-wrapped food made his mouth water so intensely it hurt. "North? I dunno if you noticed, but I'm not planetside. There is no magnetic compass up here."

"Its just terminology. You need some frame of reference. The maps I have all use compass directions for orientation."

"Whatever. Just tell me which way is 'north'."

"Well, where are you now?"

"I don't know, some corridor. All looks the same to me."

"Ok, where did you wake up?"

"D'Arcy's office."

"I don't have names on this diagram. Hang on." She turned sideways and began typing at a console out of view. Deck realized she must have been surrounded with screens and consoles. After a few moments she turned back to the camera, "The information I have here is a few months out of date, but assuming D'Arcy has retained the same office since this file was updated, then the door out of D'Arcy's office faces 'west', if that helps."

"It does", He ended the connection.

Hacking the keypad was much easier this time. Instead of five minutes it took him fifteen seconds. He realized there was a knack to it. You could move through the floating matrix of geometric data as fast as you wanted, the only trick was not becoming disoriented. He also realized he didn't need to type the code in once he found it, he could just use the neural interface. He could think a lot faster than he could physically push the buttons.

The door slid open to reveal a cramped room, just big enough for the desk and the surrounding shelves. It looked like a local security hub. The walls were dotted with display screens - some broken, some not. The real attention-grabber in the room was slumped in the chair at the desk.

At some point in the past few weeks, someone had sealed themselves in here and then sat at the desk and committed suicide. There was a splash of black on the wall behind the chair. It was an epicenter of dried blood, surrounded by a gaussian distribution of smaller splotches. The occupant was dressed in a black security jumpsuit. The stench was overpowering, even with the ventilation system replacing the air in the room once every few minutes.

Deck pushed the chair sideways with his foot, wheeling the unpleasant mess out of his way. Beneath the chair was the gun that had been used to end this person's misfortune. He took it.

It was a simple pistol. He didn't know the make or model. It was of the nine-millimeter variety, and only had five shots left. He slipped it into the holster on the left leg of his bodysleeve.

There were a few other items of value on and in the desk. An access card, an EMP grenade, and a fragmentation grenade. He shook his head in disbelief. Having security forces carry live grenades on a space station was like defending a log cabin with a flamethrower. It was an act of lunacy. He took them anyway.

He thought of the bio-toxin, slowly spreading through his system, possibly turning him into some freakish nightmare of a former human being. It could be eating away at some critical component of his physiology, eroding his humanity even now. How much time did he have? Would he be able to feel it happening, to know what was going on, or would he just wake up at some point, engulfed in madness?

Deck looked down at the suicide victim. It was a safe bet he knew the answers. He was infected, and he knew he was out of time, and that's why he punched out early.

The realization hit him that there was probably no cure. Here, in one of mankind's most advanced medical facilities, piles of people had succumbed to it. If there had been a cure, they would have used it.

There was a display screen on the desk but no rig was present - not even a dummy keyboard. He didn't need one, though.

Deck slapped his right hand down on the desk where a portable would go and it connected to the local node. Without any sort of physical interface, he had to rely solely on the virtual world provided by his neural implant.

The console was different from the keypads he had hacked earlier, but the concept was the same.

The console was a collection of three shapes. The most prominent was a red cylinder that seemed to represent this particular console. Above it was a flat, translucent panel, which was the display screen. The final object was a cube that seemed to stretch off into the distance, and it was probably the connection to the station-wide network.

Moving in close to the network node he found that no further detail appeared. It was just a featureless cube. He inched closer still and found a thin, almost invisible black barrier around its edges. ICE. His forward movement stopped and he bounced backwards off the wall. It wouldn't let him pass. He didn't have any software for dealing with it, so he had to leave it alone for the time being.

He backed out and examined the console. As he moved closer, the cylinder contained many smaller cylinders, groups of long thin towers bunched together like cables. On their surface were trails of moving light, like a thousand fireflies tracing the patterns of some circuit board.

Sailing through the imaginary world inside his head, he knew this was what he was born to do. To hack. To be free of the limitations of human interface. To interact on a level where thought and deed were one in the same. His mind unhooked from his weakened, shaking body, the putrid smell of the nearby corpse, and the pangs of starvation. It unhooked and dove into the perfection of the digital world.

He rushed down the side of one of the cables like he had just jumped off a thousand-story building. He moved closer to a series of long, glowing towers, darting between the undulating strands of brightly colored cable. The radiant towers seemed to be made of millions of precisely stacked, perfectly square panels, loosely spaced so that he could pass between the layers. On each square was an image nearly identical to its neighbors. As he passed downward through the stack, passing through the intangible images, he noticed that they formed a sequence, and when viewed in order they produced movement.

It was a video feed. Beside the tower was a narrow ribbon of light and dark patterns. He assumed this was the audio portion. He connected it to his internal audio and plunged down through the stack of images. The video played.

A young man with short blonde hair and a serious expression was talking to him, "- like we have to wait and see. So far nobody's talking. Diego is pressing us for a breakthrough but I don't know what more we could be doing at this point." Some text in the corner of the picture indicated the message had been recorded by "Honing, David - Security"

Deck reached the bottom of the tower and the video feed ended. He backed up, maximum speed, through the miles of images and shapes, until he found the top. He plunged downward again.

"Doc D'Arcy informed us that he has discovered the cause of the recent outbreak. It turns out, it's not a disease... its a biological weapon, produced right here on the station. I didn't even know we made that kind of stuff. We got clearance to go into inventory and it turns out there are several canisters of it missing. We have launched a full investigation, and Diego has ordered that no reports of this be sent to corporate until he have some solid info to give them. This crime raises a lot of questions. Who took the canisters? How did they get access to such a sensitive area, and who the hell would actually release the stuff once they had their hands on it? We're rounding up the people we know had access and asking questions, and it looks like we have to wait and see. So far nobody's talking. Diego is pressing us for -"

He pulled out of the stack and looked around the collection of video feeds, trying to determine their order. He located the next one in the series and watched it.

The next several videos cataloged the course of the investigation. Only four non-executives had access to the canisters and they were the focus of the investigation. Security never properly explored the possibility that someone might have hacked their way in. They seemed to lack the technical expertise to search for the telltale signs of an electronic break-in. He also noticed they never even questioned the executives. Cowards.

The investigation never seemed to make much progress, and eventually deteriorated into a bitter circle of speculation and accusations. He found the last entry.

The face of David Honing had broken out in a rash. His voice was raw and his words were occasionally broken with a wet cough, "There is no doubt about it, I'm infected too. We were sent to pick up some of the victims that finally died in quarantine. I hadn't seen any of them since they went in last week, and they looked like - I dunno. We could hardly tell who was who, they all looked so bad. Anyway, we just stacked them up in a big container labeled 'medical waste' and hauled them down to storage. Diego tried to make it sound like they were going to get sent planetside for funerals or something, but everybody knew they were headed right for the incinerator. A few hours after hauling the bodies, I got this rash. I wore plastic gloves and followed D'Arcy's instructions and everything, and somehow I still got it."

David looked away from the camera for a moment, balanced somewhere between fear and rage, "So, I'm as good as dead now. What do I have? A day or two before I lose it? All I know is, I'm not going out like those guys that got thrown in the furnace today. I'll make sure of it." There was a long pause while David looked into the camera. Finally spoke he the words, "I'm sorry", before he ended the recording.

---

It took Deck a few minutes to figure out which way was north, given the number of twists and turns he'd made since he left D'Arcy's office. It turned out he was headed in more or less the right direction. The thought of food drove him hastily onward. He paused at yet another three-way intersection. There was audible movement on the path leading to his right. In the darkness, a bent figure could be seen moving away from him, dragging something heavy.

Mutant.

He didn't want to tangle with it. Its frail body and animal-like mind were no match for him, even in his weakened state, but the thought of the deadly poisons seeping from its pores gave him pause. He didn't want a second dose.

He went left and rounded a corner into an open area that seemed to be a nexus of converging corridors.

It was a meal area of sorts. There were small white plastic tables dotting the open spaces. In the center, there was a large planter filled with withered plants, framed in plastic trash cans with "thank you" stamped onto their gaping mouths. Beside the restrooms was a kitchen area where meals might be served. It was too small to actually prepare meals, and he assumed the food was just brought up from the cafeteria. Beside him was a pair of darkened restrooms, and on the far wall were more doorways, leading off to unknown sections of the ship.

He peeked over the counter into the dishes area, but it was clear that there was no food around. Dirty trays were stacked in a dry sink, and a bloodstain on the floor hinted that someone had been killed here before being dragged elsewhere.

There was a door nearby marked "vending machines", but it was obvious the machines wouldn't be in there. The machines had been dragged into the lunch area, leaving deep gouges in the tile floor. He crept from the shadows, hesitant to bring himself into the light, but beckoned by the promise of food.

There was a soda machine that had been pushed over, smashed open, and then had burned from the inside out. Beside it lay a coffee machine that would be useless without the water and power feeds required to make it work. Another machine was standing upright. It was a sandwich machine that offered various microwave meals from a rotating column. It had been long since been broken open and cleaned out.

Deck moved carefully between the machines, trying to remain as quiet and as low as possible. He was in the middle of the room, under the full glow of the overhead florescent lights. The room had numerous entrances, so there was no one point where he could focus his attention.

There were several more machines, an ATM, a change machine, and some other public device - probably a phone - that was broken and burned beyond recognition.

The last machine was a snack machine that offered various cookies, candy bars, and assorted flavors of chips. It had been broken into but a few morsels remained.

Deck dropped his pipe and grabbed at a bag of potato chips. He tore it open and began to devour the contents. When it was gone he peeled open the bag and licked the inside, making sure he had every crumb. He ate hunched over, guarding his food like some animal, crouched and ready to either run or defend his meal at the arrival of danger.

He opened another bag. It was salt and vinegar flavor. His memories told him that he despised salt and vinegar, that he would normally rather eat dog food than torment his mouth with the salty horror of salt and vinegar flavor potato chips. Now, he couldn't imagine anything better. It was a feast.

And dog food didn't sound that bad, either.

By his second bag he was overcome with a predictably potent thirst. He grabbed what was left from the machine - mostly candy bars - and filled his pockets.

From here he had two choices, he could see what was left in the vending machine room in the way of drinks, or he could look for water in the pitch-dark bathrooms. It wasn't much of a decision. He picked up his pipe and moved on.

He stayed low, darting between the machines as he worked his way toward the vending room. As he did so, he saw the shadow of a figure standing inside.

Deck held his back against the wall just outside the room. He could skip this room and try the bathrooms, but there might be more vending machines still left inside, and he wanted to see for himself. Besides, he could handle mutants easily enough even when he didn't have the element of surprise.

He peeked into the room to size up his opponent. There were two of them, and they weren't mutants.

The figures stood just inside the doorway, regarding the walls with a vacant stare. They looked like they had signed up for every prosthesis offered by Citadel, and then neglected to have the aesthetic portions put on. Their arms and legs were exposed metal, and lumps of mechanical parts protruded from their skin and embraced their bodies. One of them simply had no jaw. The bottom of its face was an open hole, framed on top with a set of crooked teeth. The other had so much metal in its face that its gender was impossible to tell.

The prosthetics had been attached with a great lack of care. Blood framed the joints where flesh and machine had been married, and the swollen, pink tissue surrounding the metal told of unchecked infection. They gave no indication they saw him or reacted to his presence in any way.

Deck pulled back behind the doorway. He collapsed the pipe and slid it into the weapon holster on his right thigh. By inserting the narrow end into the adjustable Velcro loops, he found it could be held neatly in place. He drew his gun.

There was no obvious move for what to do next. Who were these "people"? Were they sane? Were they safe? They didn't look it, but he didn't want to start shooting until he knew what they were all about.

He poked his head around the corner more obviously this time.

No reaction.

He slid his body further into view.

Still nothing.

He thought he could greet them but couldn't bring himself to invoke his own voice. The gun become slippery with sweat in his left hand. He stepped forward slightly, as if to enter the room.

They both began moving at once. Each raised their right arm. At the last moment Deck saw the outline of a muzzle, built into the back of an arm. He pulled back behind the wall.

The sound of gunfire broke the silence like dynamite in a graveyard. Bits of plastic tile flew as the bullets smacked into the door frame and surrounding wall.

After a few shots, the gunfire stopped. He could hear no movement inside.

In a single movement he wrapped one arm around the corner and followed with his head. He squeezed the trigger and the jawless face turned pink.

He pulled back in a quick motion as the remaining enemy returned fire.

Heavy, slow footsteps came from inside. The thing moved awkwardly, lurching forward at a deliberate, clumsy pace.

He poked his head out, leveled his arm and fired two shots. One struck the metallic center of the face, and the other missed. Neither caused any noticeable harm.

He pulled back and drew out the pipe. As the stumbling footsteps reached the door, he jabbed the metal shaft around the corner, aiming for the legs. The pole caught between the knees of his slow-moving adversary and it tumbled forward. The metal body struck the floor with a crash. The thing was laying face-down on the floor, moving its limbs spasmodically in an effort to correct its posture. Deck placed the barrel of his pistol on the exposed neck and fired.

---

Deck crouched, panting, in the relative shadow of the vending machine. He was afraid that the sound of combat might have attracted more unwelcome attention. After several minutes, he decided it was as safe as it was going to get.

The vending machine room had been completely re-made. Most of the white tile was torn from the walls, revealing the metal framework of the room and the network of power and network cables beneath. All of the existing cables now connected to the new structure in the center of the room: a cluster of four black pillars made of small matchbox-sized pieces, connecting to one another through a complex series of connectors and cables.

Memory cores.

They resembled the memory clusters in the computer core, but these had a disorganized, uneven look to them. Aesthetics had been abandoned, and the pillars were a rough mass of loosely erected computer parts. Holes had been torn in the floor to allow the pillars to extend down to the next level. Without the bright florescent lights and the white wall tile, the room was a darkened electronic tomb.

Incoming signal: TO-RL1.VID - Compatible video codec available.

He ignored the message. He didn't have time to talk to Rebecca right now.

Stepping into the room, he took care not to trip over the cables that converged at the center. He had to step over a few dusty piles of shattered wall tile. He suddenly realized what was going on, but he still didn't know why. On impulse, he yanked the pin on his frag grenade and dropped it between the pillars. He ran out of the room and dove behind the burned-out hull of the soda machine.

In an environment such as a space station - where even the superstructure is built from the lightest possible components - the force of something like a grenade detonating can feel like an earthquake. The entire room seemed to spasm around deck as the explosion ripped through the thin metal walls of the break room.

The lights dimmed, flickered, and went out in the space of a few seconds.

Suddenly the room was filled with pale green light. Every operational display screen went momentarily blank before showing a cascade of scrolling emerald characters. All of the screens the same. All of them in synch.

Who are you?

The voice poured from every speaker of every display screen, from the PA system, and from the adjoining corridors. It was a female voice. A voice of authority. A voice of discord.

Shodan.

The computer nodes can be repaired, but you...

The voice was a chorus of conflicting tones - each of a different pitch and speed - all competing for supremacy. It was like the voice of a queen, mixed with the voice of an insolent child, mixed with the voice of an angry god. The walls trembled as the deep, resonant tones poured from the speakers and filled the volume of the room. The face of Shodan appeared on every display screen. The room was bathed in putrid green light. The face was changed since Deck had last seen it. Now it appeared warped, perhaps even demented.

Who ARE you? My cameras and probes scan your body, but you do not match any employee file.

Deck wheeled around, pointing his gun at the numerous open doorways, looking for threats.

When my cyborgs bring you to an electrified interrogation bench, I will have your secret.

The outlines of figures appeared in the green glow of Shodan's face. They seemed to come from every direction at once.

And you will learn more about pain than you ever wanted to know.

He took off running.

Deck leaped headlong over the counter into the kitchen area. It was the closest exit available to him, and at first glance it didn't seem to be an entry point for any further enemies. He landed neatly on the grimy kitchen tile and rolled onto his feet without losing speed. A second later he was sprinting. He could hear the dull plodding of metallic footsteps converging on his position from the main dining area.

The rear door of the kitchen slammed open as he broke through. He found himself running down a long steel corridor made of darkened metal, like the inside of the barrel of a gun. It ended as it joined a similar corridor. He paused only an instant to consider his choices. To the left was the aftermath of some skirmish, littered with bodies. It looked as though it dead-ended at a makeshift barricade someone had erected. He went right. The corridor a was long and narrow, and ended with a door that had been jammed open. The long, straight corridors were ideal for running full speed, maximizing the distance he was able to put between himself and his lumbering pursuers.

He darted through the open doorway and found himself in a large, well-lit open area featuring a freight elevator in the center of the room. It was the storage nexus he'd avoided earlier.

A cyborg stepped from behind a crumbling wall of storage containers and advanced on him. It was a large, tank-like beast, far more machine than organism. Everything but the head and upper torso and been replaced with mechanical prosthetics. Its expressionless, dead face was framed in steel and plastic.

His pistol left its holster and found its mark an instant later. A single shot entered the exposed grey flesh of its chest. The shot should have destroyed a lung, but the automated horror gave no indication it had even been affected.

Deck backed away, trying to maintain some distance, and aimed the next shot for the center of its head. He drew in a slow practiced breath and held it. The ineffectual snap of a dry pistol greeted him as he pulled the trigger.

Damn.

He dropped the pistol and drew his metal tube as he retreated back into the corridor, staying beyond the reach of the grasping metal arms.

Deck lunged, striking at the face of his opponent with the point of his weapon. The blow was brushed easily aside by the heavy, brutish arms. He continued to back steadily away as he spun the metal tube, striking in a series of rapid blows. Sparks flew as the metal surfaces connected. His attacks on the flesh were blocked, and his attacks on the machine were futile. Finally, the machine grabbed his weapon and held it. Deck reacted as if he were engaging a human, and kicked at the unguarded chest. The coil of his body released, focusing his energy into a single, brutal movement. There was a crunch as the ribs buckled under his foot, but he stumbled backwards against the unexpected mass.

He lost his grip on the pipe as he fell onto his back. The cyborg grabbed the two ends of the telescoping pole and mangled it like the slender antennae of some cheap portable radio. The sections separated and it clattered to the floor, a broken, bent mess.

He needed to get by this thing, armed or not. Retreating would only send him into the arms of the group he'd left behind in the lunch area. Rolling away, he leaped to his feet with practiced grace. As the cyborg stepped closer, Deck struck with his hands, first a feint with his right, followed by a lightning-quick jab with his left. He aimed the tip of his thumb for a cold, unblinking eye.

His strike met its mark, but brought him within the superior reach of his augmented foe. The second his thumb connected, his throat was clamped in the vice-like grip of a mechanical hand. He spasmed, unable to breathe in. During the punch he had exhaled, and now his lungs were empty and begging for oxygen.

The cold steel wall met him in the back of the head as he was lifted bodily and slammed into its surface. The steel arm constricting his breathing pinned him firmly against the wall. He flailed, blindly striking at the unmoving face of his enemy. The harsh metal joints pinched and bit the flesh in his neck. He attacked the forearm that held him, but it was like assaulting a bulldozer. His tongue rolled out as he fought in vain to draw a breath under the crushing weight. He began to black out. The cyborg stood, holding Deck against the wall at arm's length. It was a statue. It smelled like it was rotting from the inside out.

Deck's hand dove into a pocket and grabbed the EMP grenade, punching the detonator. There was an agonizing flash of light in his head and a spike of pain went down his spine. His mouth opened wider as if to scream, but he had no breath. The metal hand went slack and the cyborg tumbled to the floor like a marionette who's strings had just been cut.

Crouching on the floor, grasping his burning skull, Deck drew in a long, gasping breath. He spat as he sucked in ragged gulps of air. He was breathing again, but something was wrong. Something was missing.

The implant.

He suddenly realized that is HUD was gone. A horrified, girl-like gasp escaped his lips. He went limp.

His mind prodded for the familiar image of the HUD, but it was gone. He was digitally blind. Even though he had only been using the implant for a few hours, it was like loosing a limb.

Lines filled his vision, and then:

Restarting...

Negotiating neural pathways...

Starting services...

Deck gasped a sigh of relief. He was shocked that the implant survived the blast, but didn't care to ponder the matter at the moment. Like the sole survivor of some airline crash, he was less interested in why he was still alive, and more interested in escaping the wreckage. The implant was working, and he needed to move.

He examined the fallen cyborg. It had a firearm of some sort mounted on its forearm. Deck wondered why it hadn't been used. Perhaps it was out of ammunition. Perhaps Shodan was serious about capturing and torturing him.

The march of metallic footsteps drew near. He shook his head in disbelief. The situation was too insane for him to even comprehend. Even if he managed to escape, he was still dead when the bio-toxin kicked in. Running was a pointless gesture, but he did it anyway. He took off in the direction of the storage nexus, grabbing the empty pistol as he ran by.

---

Rebecca's face appeared in his head, illuminated by the stark glow of florescent lights and display screens, "This is Lansing. Glad you finally got back to me. We were wondering if we had lost you there for a while."

"I was wondering the same thing", Deck spoke in a whisper so subtle he could only just barely hear it himself. He had just spent fourty-five minutes working his way around the level while dodging the groups of pursuing cyborgs. They had massed in the storage nexus, then fanned out and began a very methodical search of the level. Deck had managed to evade them so far by retreating into the shadows and moving away as they drew close. The searching teams had slowly pushed him south. He couldn't see it yet, but he knew they were boxing him in. He needed to slip past the search net or find a working elevator, or eventually they would corner him.

He was crawling along the wall in some unfamiliar area, clinging to what shadows he could find. He was heading east, making his way through some of the less-damaged areas. There were no signs of combat here, and no mutants. If it weren't for the dim lights and gibberish - filled display screens everywhere, the place would look almost normal. He could still hear slow, plodding footsteps to the north.

"We have managed to get some people on the phone and we have some experts coming in. I had to get a whole new level of clearance just to talk to you again."

"Good for you", Deck hated the bureaucracy. Why didn't they just get someone on the line who knew what the hell they were talking about?

"We have managed to determine what is going on up there. It turns out the computer system is having some kind of malfunction."

"Yeah, I figured that out for myself about an hour ago when she tried to kill me."

She didn't even flinch. "Right, we were expecting that. You'll need to avoid attracting its attention."

"Too late for that. I came across a new computer node it had built for itself, and I blew it up."

She snapped her fingers off camera, trying to get someone's attention. Deck suddenly wondered how many people where tuned in to his little broadcast. The control room she was in seemed to be a hub of activity. "You blew it up?"

Deck came to yet another junction. The large corridor he had been in now branched off into a smaller side-corridor. He tried to recall the layout of the area, but without a point of reference he was lost. He decided that the smaller branches would be less traveled. He ran, crouching, into the new corridor and into the shadows. As he leaned against the wall he hissed back to Rebecca, "Seemed like a good idea at the time." He paused to reflect on this. Since the insanity began, he hadn't really taken time to question his own motives. Looking back, it did seem like a pretty exreme and dangerous thing to do. "Anyway, when I blasted it... Shodan showed up, and she was pissed."

"Pissed? That seems...", Lansing began.

He realized his mistake, "Well, she was the mathematical / logical equivalent of pissed off, okay? She was artificially pissed. When the node blew up, she threatened me, and then sent a bunch of - ", he floundered, not knowing how to describe his foes in a plausible way.

She shrugged, "A bunch of what?"

"Cyborgs."

"Cyborgs?", she was incredulous.

"Shodan's word, not mine. She outfitted everybody with prosthetics and implants, and turned them into some kind of low-grade, humanoid bots."

"She?"

"You know what I mean." Deck was surprised to hear himself referring to Shodan as a she, although it seemed to fit now.

He thought about his choices. The narrow corridor was safer, but much less likely to take him to an elevator. What he needed was a map. "So how did you guys figure out it was Shodan?

Rebecca glanced at some display screen off-camera, "About twenty minutes ago, there was an attack on the satellites that service Citadel. Something cracked their security and took them over. A few seconds later, all of the satellites connected to them went under attack. There is still a lot of traffic going between the compromised sats. A few of our techs analyzed the traffic and somehow figured out it was Shodan that was doing the hacking. The explanation was too technical for me. " She tapped on whatever screen had her attention, "It looks like we are going to lose another satellite in a few minutes."

"So why is she attacking satellites?"

Rebecca shrugged, "Why would it make cyborgs? I think the thing is acting randomly. The satellites it has co-opted are not of any particular value to it as far as we can tell. Right now nobody in Australia can get American television, and nobody in the Pacific Ocean has any mobile phone service. Not a big deal, yet."

Deck had no sympathy for the mobile-phone deprived peoples of the Pacific Ocean, "Whatever."

He wondered if she even believed him. "So what is it Shodan seems to be doing? Why would it make... cyborgs?"

"I'm just guessing, but I think she needed them to construct the new computer node."

"But, cyborgs?"

"Stop thinking science fiction", Deck hissed back. "These aren't super - soldiers or anything, they're just bots. Who used to be people. Better yet, puppets. None of the standard bots are able to perform complex tasks like building new nodes. Most of them don't even have opposable thumbs. If Shodan wanted to build something, or perform any complex tasks that required a lot of fine motor skills, she would need access to people she could control. I'm guessing these people didn't volunteer to help, so she lobotomized them and hijacked their bodies."

"That doesn't even make sense. There isn't any technology that can control a human body like that.", Lansing protested.

"Sure there is. This implant I've got is sophisticated enough to present detailed images to my visual cortex. It's already controlling part of my brain." Deck paused as the words came out of his mouth. He hadn't thought about it this way before, "Just expand on that same idea. Instead of sending nerve signals into the brain to creature pictures, send them down the spine to create movement. Actually, I bet creating movement is easiser, from an engineering standpoint."

"So, the people - the cyborgs - whatever, they are not participating?"

"Right, this isn't mind-control. From what I've seen, I think they're dead."

"Puppets."

"Yeah. Either they have some bot hardware lodged in their heads that guides their movements, or Shodan controls them remotely."

Rebecca closed her eyes, thinking, "No, I think they must have bot hardware. We would be seeing a lot more wireless traffic coming from the station if they were controlled via remote. Besides, to stop them, all you would have to do is jam the transmission and they would be useless. I'm told the AI had an IQ in excess of two-hundred, so I doubt it would make a tactical blunder like that."

"Two-hundred? It could be even higher than that now - the more nodes she has, the smarter she gets.", Deck observed.

"I think it's more than that, I think she... uh it... is trying to diversify - spread itself out. With more nodes, there is greater safety, since there is no longer a single point of failure."

"So you think there are more nodes?"

She shrugged, "I'd be willing to bet there are, yeah. One of its main functions was to be an intelligent security system, so it should have a firm understanding of tactical situations. It probably has them spaced evenly throughout the station, so that nothing short of total destruction of the station could kill it."

Deck held his breath as a lumbering cyborg passed by in the main corridor. It moved in a steady, deliberate pattern. Every fifteen steps or so it would pause and examine the surrounding area carefully. He wondered if they could see in the dark. He crouched ever so slightly, keeping his body tense and ready for a leap if he was discovered. He had no way to even slow this beast down, much less kill it, so his only option would be running. It occurred to him that his narrow corridor could easily dead-end on him, leaving him trapped.

Rebecca had covered her headset microphone with her hand and was engaged in an animated conversation with someone off-camera. She became more visibly irritated as the conversation progressed. The polite, businesslike voice she used seemed to be reserved for Deck.

The cyborg shuffled past, ignoring the dark corner where he was crouched. He let out a slow breath. This was actually a lucky break, since he was probably behind the search net for now. This would give him some breathing room.

"Hacker, we need you to head for the engineering level.", Rebecca had finished her side conversation and turned her attention back to him.

"Halt that.", he hissed. "I still need food, I need a drink, I need some medical treatment, I need weapons, and I need a way off this damn floor before they round me up."

"I realize you're in a difficult position, but there is a lot at stake here. We need you to work with..."

"Forget it.", he spat. "I don't work for you pukes. I never agreed to help you clean up this mess. I'm not about to get killed so your board of directors can cover their asses."

Her diplomatic voice never wavered. "I never said you were working for us. But if we are going to proceed we need to be able to talk to each other, and if these sattelites are compromised then that won't be possible. If you want us to get you out of there, you have to work with us." At first her even, calm voice had been somewhat comforting to him, but now he saw it for what it was - an act.

"Keep in mind I am dying because of a bio-toxin manufactured by your company and released by your computer system. I've never done charity work before, and I'm not about to start doing it for the guys who killed me. You keep me alive, and I'll tell you what I see. That's as far as it goes for now."

She sharp glance to someone off screen before turning her attention back to him. "Right. Well, where are you now?"

"Beats me. Somewhere 'south-east', I guess. I just entered a corridor labeled 'radiology'. What I really want is an elevator."

She frowned, looking at a screen above the camera. "Radiology seems to cover several small, adjacent areas. I can't tell which one you might be in." She paused for a moment, staring at the screen that probably displayed a map. "You could see images with this implant of yours, right? If I sent an image, could you view it?"

"Send it."

A moment later a new image was floating among the objects in his head. As he brought it closer to examine it, it obscured his view of Rebecca's video feed. It was a detailed map of the floor he was on.

"This is perfect. I'll get back to you."

"No, just leave the channel op-", her face vanished as he closed the connection.

He was able to reconcile his surroundings with the map in his head. There was an elevator just east of his position, and he could reach it by going through radiology, as opposed to risking travel in the main passage. He slid away from the wall, moving quickly from one set of shadows to another. He was careful to pace himself, not letting his hunger and thirst drive him.

He arrived at a keypad-protected door that blocked his access to the labs beyond. He put his hand up to the keypad and the layers of simple polygons rushed by him in a blur of color and light. He found the code and entered it faster than he would have been able to speak it. Two seconds after his hand went up, the door yielded to him.

Before pulling his hand away, he scrambled the code. He wasn't sure if that could stop Shodan from opening the door, but it was worth a try.

He was in a small, darkened lab of some sort. The south wall was made entirely out of floor-to-ceiling windows that offered a view of the main corridor. The window frames cast thin, finger-like shadows across the room. The north wall was a kitchen-style counter with cabinets overhead. The room was furnished with lightweight plastic tables and various portable medical equipment he couldn't identify.

There was a large sink built into the countertop. Deck put his head under the faucet and took a long drink, nearly gagging on the cold water as he gulped it down. He paused to devour a candy bar that he had stashed in one of his pockets. He crouched in the shadows of a table as he ate, looking intently at the doors.

A search of the cabinets turned up a small handful of dermal patches. His arms and neck were covered in cuts and bruises from his fight earlier, but he decided to save them for an emergency.

There were two doors on the east wall. From his map, he could see that one led out into a corridor that ended with an elevator, and the other door led into a small office. He decided to search the office before leaving. Wary of the windows, he crawled to the door between the tables, trying to stay in the shadows and out of sight.

The office was a small box that featured a simple desk and a wheeled chair. It had a small, stingy display screen built into the back of the desk. Deck slapped his hand down and dove into the local database of logs and messages. As before, there was a wall of black ICE blocking his access to the rest of the system.

The video logs didn't offer much of interest. The first few dozen were dull, routine logs recording various radiological procedures. At some point there was an investigation over the missing bio-toxin and the radiology lab was ordered closed.

Deck let go of the connection and leaned back in the chair. Something had been nagging him since he left the lunch room. Why did the cyborgs need to hunt for him at all? The level was covered with security cameras - why didn't Shodan use them? Where were all the portable consoles? Every office he visited had a display screen, but no rig.

What was the deal with the satellites?

He knew these were somehow related. What was Shodan after?

---

"So he's telling us stories about cyborgs now?", Buchanan mused from behind her.

Rebecca spun her swivel chair around to face him. "I know, I know." She shrugged, "I don't know what else to say to him at this point. Does the company have an official position on this yet? A little guidance would really help me to know what I should be saying to this guy."

He scoffed, "Not likely. I'm not inclined to buy into this yet and nobody upstairs has given me any reason to want to." Buchanan was using the term "upstairs" as a bit of sarcasm. They both knew that the company higher-ups were all suddenly very busy with "other things" and were not available to do things like answer questions, take official positions, or do things that might imply responsibility. Their offices were, however, upstairs.

Rebecca sighed, "What do the tech guys say? The stuff Hacker is claiming is going on... is it even possible?"

Buchanan shrugged, "They're engineers. They will always tell you anything is possible. Until you ask them to do it, of course. Then nothing is possible. I'll give him one thing though... he's a very imaginative individual."

"So we officially disbelieve him?"

"Oh no, no. Our skepticism is strictly off-the-record. We'll keep humoring him for now. No matter what he says when he calls, we believe him. Aliens. Giant robots. Dinosaurs. Whatever he comes up with." Buchanan moved on, muttering to himself as he went.

"Understood", Rebecca nodded as she turned back to her console. She found that she really did believe what Hacker was saying. This put her in an interesting position. In order to keep everyone happy, she had to give Buchanan the impression that she did not believe him, while at the same time convincing Hacker that she did.

There was a harsh crack as metal slammed into reinforced safety glass. Deck's eyes snapped open. Out in the lab, there was another impact and he heard the sound of something breaking.

How long had he been asleep?

He lifted his head from the desk. From his position in the office, he could clearly see a group of cyborgs gathered outside the windows of the lab. One of them was in front, hammering on the safety glass with a stiff, metallic arm. The glass had already shattered, and was now a solid blanket of broken fragments. After another strike, the window gave and collapsed into the room like a welcome mat.

Deck shot out of the office and headed for the rear door. His limbs were still slow and heavy from sleep. He shook his head, trying to wake up.

He needed to reach the elevator.

From the inside, the door was controlled by a simple button. He slammed his hand into it and dove through as gunfire chased him from the room. On the outside, the door was keypad-controlled, just like the opposing door he had used to gain access to the lab. Deck waved his hand over the keypad, sending it an avalanche of bogus codes. The keypad detected the intrusion and activated its lockdown. There was an audible click as the internal bolt locked into place, freezing the mechanism.

He sprinted down the corridor, passing a number of rooms on either side. Aside from the dim lighting, this area was in great shape and looked like it hadn't been scavenged. He'd hoped to explore them in hopes of finding more supplies, but he'd messed that up by falling asleep. He needed to leave before the cyborgs found a way through the door he had just sabotaged.

At the end of the corridor was an elevator. He stabbed the call button and waited. Behind him was the sound of heavy metal arms beating on the laboratory door. Its surface was already bulging under the assault. He hit the call button a few more times.

He glanced up at the elevator display. It was blank. It was either burned out or the elevator wasn't working at all. The car could be on its way up to him now, or it could be sitting at the bottom of the shaft, dead. He had no way of knowing.

Behind him, the beating became more fierce. The attacks were now concentrated on a single point in the center of the door. The blows came in a steady mechanical rhythm. A vertical crack appeared at the epicenter of the repeated impacts. From his map he knew that all of these side rooms were dead-ends. He was boxed in.

---

Over the last few decades, corporations had slowly realized that traditional law enforcement was a poor solution to criminal threats. Whenever there was a high-profile kidnapping, [attempted] assasination, theft, bombing, hostage crisis, or general attack on company interests, corporations found that the police created at least as many problems as they solved. The police couldn't always be counted on to resolve the crisis, but you could count on them to hold a press conference, talk to the media, sign book deals, compromise security, leak photographs of sensitive locations or information, and generally show a complete lack of discretion once the disaster was over. Even if the situation was resolved peacefully, the company would spend weeks or months dealing with the security and public-relations damage.

Corporations eventually turned to the private sector when they needed help. Private security firms (who were, whether they admitted it or not, really just very polite and well-dressed mercinaries) offered a way to solve problems and protect company privacy. They would do their job and keep their mouths shut afterward, leaving it to their clients to address the media and portray events as they saw fit. This would significantly diminish the corporation's civil liability profile in the aftermath. This arrangement also allowed companies to respond more forcefully to threats: When the media was looking, the police liked to try to capture bad guys, but security agents were able to be much more aggressive if they thought they could justify it later.

Rebecca Lansing worked for Security Solutions Incorporated, a Seattle-based firm specializing in counter-terrorisim. Her firm had been hired by TriOptimum the previous week. At the time, all that was known in the media was that nobody had heard from the station in over a week. TriOptimum knew that a shuttle had been destroyed, there were fires, decompression, and probably quite a few deaths. They had assumed that someone (political anti-technological terrorists, most likely) had taken control of the station. Rebecca had been sent to the crisis command center in New Atlanta to coordanate things on the ground, and the other members of the team had been sent to the launch site to prep for the trip up to Citadel.

Now it was obvious that there were no terrorists, and probably no survivors. TriOptimum realized that they no longer needed the group of highly trained (and very expensive) security agents, and had sent them back to Seattle. They were in damage-control mode now.

Rebecca looked at the retractable pen she'd been clicking for the last hour or so. Was this her pen or Trioptimum's? She couldn't remember. She shrugged and tossed it into her handbag. She tore the used pages from her notebook and placed them at the console, then put the notebook back into her handbag. She took off the mobile headset and hung it at the securtiy station she'd been using. Then she went over the items she was carrying one last time to make sure she wouldn't be taking any sensitive information from the site.

"Lansing. We've decided to keep you on for the time being."

Rebecca turned to see Buchanan giving her a dour look. She opened her mouth to ask but he anticipated the question and cut her off, "We've already made the arrangements with SSI, and they've cleared you to continue working with us."

She set her bag down in the swivel chair and began unpacking again. "Okay, but I don't know what you want me to do, I mean..."

Buchanan waved his arm as if to backhand her question away, "Just the same thing you've been doing. You're our point of contact with this guy and we don't want to confuse things by giving him someone new."

She nodded. This made a lot of sense to her, although she had been looking forward to getting home.

Buchanan gestured towards the console, "He still hasn't responded?"

A head appeared over the bank of security stations behind her. It was one of the TriOptimum techs, "Excuse me, Mister Buchanan? We just lost the one I was telling you about. I figure we have maybe twenty minutes before our bandwidth situation...", he trailed off as Buchanan held up a single finger.

Rebecca sighed, "I've been paging him every ten or fifteen minutes for the last hour. Still nothing."

"Well, maybe he got himself killed.", Buchanan said hopefully, "At any rate, keep at it and see if you can get him back."

As he walked over to speak with the tech, Rebecca glared at him. She returned to work.

---

The crack in the laboratory door was now large enough that the cyborgs could reach through. Numerous metal hands came though the gap and pulled sideways on the lightweight metal surface. The opening became broader.

The elevator arrived. As the doors slid open, Deck jumped in and slapped the only available button. This wasn't a full-access elevator, but instead a direct link between the research and medical levels.

As the elevator began to move, he noticed the elevator music that was playing. It was some sort of light, soulless, diet jazz. It made the moment even more surreal.

He enjoyed a few quiet moments while the elevator descended. He caught his breath. He had figured out the answers to a lot of questions before he fell asleep, and now all he needed was a safe place to hide while he contacted Rebecca.

The doors opened to reveal a nest of mutants. There were four of them that he could see, all hunched in a corner, looking to see what the elevator had brought them. Deck was guessing they had learned to respond to the elevator chime like Pavlov's bell, or the knock of the pizza delivery man.

He stayed in the elevator, which would prevent them from surrounding him. All he needed to do was keep them out. As the first one lunged inward, he sent it tumbling back into the corridor with a broken nose. Another came and received a dislocated shoulder and a kick in the face. Deck stood firm, letting them come to him. Their bones were brittle from their illness and they were incapable of teamwork, but they were tenacious. Nothing would stop them short of incapacitation or death. One at a time they stepped up and were quickly kicked out of his elevator.

After a few minutes of bone-crunching martial arts, the mutants were down. Their bodies lay in a group in front of the elevator. He dragged one of the bodies into the door of the elevator to hold it open. If the door couldn't close, the elevator wouldn't leave, which meant the cyborgs couldn't follow him this way.

The room was once some sort of waiting area. The couch had been gutted and its foam interior had been placed on the floor and used as a nest of some sort. The pictures had been pulled from the walls and the plain red carpet had been soiled with every bodily fluid imaginable. The room was now a reeking box of death and excrement. There was a sign posted over the door that informed him he was in a restricted area and that he needed to remain in the waiting room and notify security if he had arrived here in error. There were some vague threats about the punishments available for corporate espionage.

One mutant had never attacked him. It was cowering in a dark corner, staring at him like some terrified animal. As he stepped over the broken pile of bodies, it shook its head back and forth. He looked closer. It had been a woman. Her thinning, whitened hair hung in her face in a tangled mass. Grunts and whines came from her throat. The ability to speak was long gone, but still she struggled to communicate on some primal level.

She seemed passive. He ignored her.

Deck bent over to examine his fallen foes. One of them was wearing the remains of a security uniform. He didn't care to search the excrement-stained pants, but the belt was sure to have something of value. The mutant had a sidearm, a pistol identical to the one Deck was carrying. He took the ammo and left the weapon. Most of the rest of the equipment was useless. There was a flashlight and a VOX, neither of which interested him. He found another clip of ammo, which he pocketed before moving on. Neither of the other two mutants looked like they had anything worth carrying around.

He reloaded his pistol and dropped the extra clip into a pocket. As he moved to leave, the woman flinched, fearing an attack. He looked down at the bent form, trembling on the floor in front of him. Her face was thin and pale, smudged with filth. She had more hair and teeth than the others, and seemed to have some slender thread of sanity to cling to. Deck wondered if he should use his pistol to end her misery. If he were in her shoes, he would certainly hope someone would have pity enough to kill him.

Her head rocked back and fourth as she grunted out some pathetic whine. She seemed to have only one thought, and that was that she didn't want to be hurt. The dull, sunken eyes were framed in dark, bruised flesh. They stared at him with a mixture of terror and confusion. This person could have been a Ph.D. a few weeks ago, and now she was living like an animal, eating dead bodies... or worse.

Deck holstered his weapon. He couldn't shoot her. He backed slowly out of the room.

Beyond was a large, open area. The carpet was mainly red, with a border of beige where it met the walls. The metal doors had been decorated to look vaguely like wood. The walls were mostly beige, with red trim. Someone had evidently decided that nothing says "research" like red and beige. There were frosted glass panels that stretched from floor to ceiling, with dark block letters and generic symbols indicating the various departments. He had no idea what the various research projects were, so the signs were meaningless to him.

The ceilings were higher here than on the hospital level, breaking free of the claustrophobic darkness that had plagued him since he awoke. The room was bathed in gentle glow cast from the hanging lighting cylinders and from lights positioned behind the frosted glass panels.

He examined the nearest glass sign / panel. The words were broken by a spiderweb of cracks that converged on a single bullet hole.

He peered behind the panel and saw a pink, lumpy growth on the wall, directly behind the bullet hole. He prodded it. It felt like Styrofoam. He frowned as he tried to figure out what he was seeing.

Expansion foam.

Most modern space platforms employed a safety feature to protect against decompression. It was a thin layer of gel, sealed in plastic that lined the inside of the outer hull. If a small-scale decompression took place due to a projectile or stress, the air would come into contact with the gel, causing it to expand violently. The gel would rapidly grow and harden, sealing hull breaches from micrometeorites or - in this case - weapons fire. This explained why the station hadn't decompressed once the shooting started. Expansion foam couldn't help in the case of a large-scale breach, but it was ideal for dealing with small cracks and puncture wounds in the hull. Deck realized this meant he was along an exterior wall.

He needed a map.

Connected. TO-RL1.VID

Rebecca's voice came into his head, "No, nevermind, I've got him again." She was speaking to someone off-camera.

"Hey. I'm on the research level and I need a map."

"Glad to have you back finally. I tried to raise you about an hour ago, but you didn't respond. Every time you do that people here start thinking you're dead." The picture of her was grainy and at a low framerate. There were short pauses and gaps in the audio feed.

"I was asleep. Apparently the interface doesn't do anything when I'm not conscious. What's going on with you? This video feed looks like crap."

"Shodan has doubled the number of satellites it controls. We can't stop it. We can't even get ahold of the owners of all of these comsats to let them know their birds are under attack. Global Net has a big, gaping hole in it right now and we are starved for bandwidth as the remaining sats try to pick up the slack. It's a mess."

"I think I figured out what she's doing with them."

"Oh?"

"She's diversifying again."

"With comsats? You mean its trying to somehow create a backup of itself on all these satellites?"

"Not a backup. Its actually adding them to its brain."

"I didn't think that was possible. These are just relays - they pump information from one location to another. How could Shodan possibly use them to expand its mental capacity?"

"You know anything about how its constructed?"

"No. There are no schematics anywhere planetside and we haven't gotten any solid info on it yet. We have one of the designers on his way in here - we are expecting him in about forty minutes." Someone whispered in her ear and she corrected herself, "Twenty minutes."

"Well, she is not a single computing machine, but a big, interconnected web of nodes. All she needs is memory and raw processing power - storage doesn't do her any good. Just like your brain, there isn't any one group of cells that is the home of all of your thoughts, but instead they come from all over your brain, right?"

"Okay, I'm with you.", She was holding a retractable pen which she repeatedly clicked against the desk as she took this in. A small group of people had gathered around and stood behind her. All he could see was a wall of people from the waist down.

"The structure she needs is one where there is a bank of memory and processors, and where any part of memory can reach any other part - preferably using the fewest possible number of hops. There is no fixed structure, no set pattern. The structure develops as Shodan learns."

She stopped clicking the pen for a moment, "But these connections are not instantaneous - the round trip between comsats can be several milliseconds. How can it function with that much latency?"

"Are you kidding? How much latency do you have in your brain? Ever try to remember something and have it take five seconds or so?"

After a few moments she seemed to accept this and the clicking resumed. "How did you figure this out?"

Deck moved to the opposite side of the room where there was a bench. He needed to sit as far from the reeking waiting room as possible. "That's the funny thing about the human brain, sometimes you get ideas and you don't know where they come from. I noticed several odd things on the station, and they seemed to form a pattern." He paused as he gazed at the image in his head, "Hey, do me a favor?"

"What do you need?"

"Tell the guys behind you to pull up a chair or get their own screen, I'm tired of looking at this wall of crotches."

"Um - sure.", she stammered. She motioned to them but the crowd had already dispersed.

"Anyway, I noticed all the portable consoles were missing. There should have been at least one for every desk, but they were all gone."

Rebecca flipped the pen around and made a note of this. "So you think Shodan rounded them up and cannibalized them for parts?"

"Right. Used them to make nodes like the one I found on the hospital level."

"That makes sense. From what I've seen there aren't resources available up there for making new chips, so when it wanted to expand, it began using whatever was available."

"When it ran out of those, it started to use other stuff - like the security networks. I noticed that even though Shodan has cameras everywhere, the bots still have to hunt for me. Since the security network is a big interconnected web of machines, I'm guessing that she's using the processing chips in the cameras and stuff, and making another node out of them. If she wants to use the cameras to see, she has to stop using them to think. I'm not sure she could stop using them at this point."

Rebecca was shaking her head as he spoke. "Wait - using cameras to think?"

"Remember, anything with memory, processing, and a network connection is usable to her. Cameras have all three, and can be used as part of Shodan's brain, provided she gives up using them for visual input."

"That doesn't seem like a worthwhile tradeoff."

"Now it doesn't, but a few days ago everyone was dead, insane, or working for Shodan. All of that internal surveillance was a flood of useless input that she had to process. It was like seeing inside her own body."

Rebecca raised an eyebrow.

Deck nodded vigorously, even though nobody could see him. "That's kind of how I've been thinking of it lately. This place, this whole station, is almost like an organism. The reactor? Her heart. The nodes? Her brain. The cyborgs? Her immune system. This thing is a living, breathing, creature we are dealing with, and it has been kicking our ass."

"So what does that make you? A germ?", Lansing drew in a slow breath as she turned this over in her head. "So Shodan is motivated by the need to expand?"

"Seems that way. When it ran out of computer parts, she absorbed the security system - and probably some other stuff - into her mind."

"I just realized that the attack on the first satellites happened just before our last conversation. I'm betting that when you blew up that node, Shodan made it a priority to expand beyond Citadel. What sort of effect does it have when you destroy a node?"

Deck gave a pointless shrug, "You can ask you expert when he gets there, but its probably similar to what happens when you destroy human brain cells - you get brain damage and memory loss."

"Brain damage? You mean lowering its IQ?"

"Sure, that would lower Shodan's IQ, but she will actually be worse off than before she expanded to the new node in the first place."

"How so?"

"She will have built links to the new node. In a system like hers, there is no way to globally remove invalid links. So, she will have a lot of thoughts dead-end on her as she attempts to access stuff that isn't there."

"Links? You lost me."

"Before Shodan went crazy, I had a long talk with her. After that, I got to study her up-close for a few days. She explained that her brain is based on links between thoughts - like our synapses. Related thoughts, ideas, and memories will be connected. I don't understand how the links form exactly, but they are fundamental to how the brain works."

She struggled with the concept, "Related thoughts? So, Shodan is a big bunch of databases?"

"No, just the opposite. A database is a big list of related stuff with an index. All of the data fits some pre-determined pattern. You can't just have a database of 'everything'. You would need to organize the data somehow, and searching the database would take forever. Shodan's brain works completely different. Its a big mass of single ideas, each one linking to a bunch of other ideas."

He could tell she still didn't get it. He tried again, "Think of a single word, like 'horse'. What do you think of when you hear the word? Mammal, horseshoe, cowboy, saddle, neigh, horseback riding? Whatever. Anything that relates to horses. Anything you think of when you think 'horse' is a link you have in your brain that is connected to the concept of horses."

Rebecca began to nod. He continued, "Follow one of those links. Cowboy. Now what do you have? Old west? Showdown? Desert? Cowboy hats? Horses? Again, another big list of stuff. If you were to keep doing this and map it out -"

"It would look like a bunch of interconnected spiderwebs, like Global Net.", She suddenly got the picture.

He smiled, "You got it. This isn't just about stealing comsats."

"Once it has the satellite network, it can start taking over other machines. Anything connected to Global Net."

Deck suddenly felt a tinge of urgency. As much as he wanted to see TriOp crumble due it its own foolishness and greed, he wanted the world itself to be more or less the way he left it. He couldn't be the King Of All Hackers if Global Net was down and everything collapsed into chaos. He also realized he was the only one in a position to do anything. "How fast is she taking over the satellites?"

She looked down at her notes, "We have several different projections, based on different models of Shodan's capabilities. One model assumes that there is a limit to how many comsats she can hack at once. Using this model, we project it will take somewhere between three days and a week to get them all. The other model - which assumes she can continue to expand at an exponential rate - projects she will have them all in twelve hours. From what you've just told me, the second model is probably correct."

The connection suddenly degraded. The video feed of Rebecca deteriorated into a slideshow of grainy still shots. "-ooks - we - -st anoth- one." Her voice was broken and punctuated by garbled spurts of over-compression.

"What? Yeah. You lost another satellite. Look, before this connection dies, send me a map of the research level."

"-ake it dow- ... the commu- ... -ay." Her connection sputtered.

"Hey!", Deck was yelling, ignoring the danger of attracting attention. "You're breaking up! Send me the map -"

"Dest- the relay bef-"

He rolled his eyes. "Listen to me, I can't do anything until I know my way around."

The picture froze in place and the audio feed went silent. The connection was dead. There was a new map in his library now.

He opened the map. At the top it was labeled, "Level R - Reactor".

"You stupid woman", he spat. He figured that whatever she needed him to do, it was on the reactor level. He just needed to figure out what it was and how to get there from here.

He was still hungry. He had a few candy bars left, but he was seeing how far he could go before he ate them. What he really wanted was a hot meal. Some soup. A bowl of noodles. Mashed potatoes. Maybe some...

He took out a candy bar and stuffed it into his mouth. He needed to keep his mind on the task at hand. Out of habit, he put the wrapper back in his pocket to throw away later. Then he realized that was stupid and he took it out and toossed it on the floor. He wiped the chocolate from his mouth with the back of his hand and took a deep breath. He felt a little better.

No matter where he was going, he would need the central elevator. That was the only place you could access all of the levels of the ship. The reactor level was at the base of Citadel's spine. There was a long shaft dropping from the main dome to the uneven lump that was the reactor. That would mean that any elevator that reached the reactor level would have to be in the center of the station, attached to the spine.

Maybe he would stop on the crew level on the way down and get some real food.

Deck headed south. The faux - wood doors parted to reveal a corridor leading to rows of offices and labs. He could hear movement up ahead.

He came to the first set of doors. From the open room to the right, he could hear wet sounds. He peered around the corner to see a filthy man in a once-blue jumpsuit trying to eat the red gel out of a petri dish. His body was covered in sores, but he looked a little healthier than the average mutant. His back was to Deck. He would be an easy target, but Deck wanted to avoid combat if he could. He slid by the door and left the creature to its meal.

Various medical equipment littered the hallway. Some of items were sitting on wheeled carts. Deck assumed that most experimental equipment passed through here on its way to the medical level for testing. He stepped carefully over the stacked machines and proceeded to the end of the hall. Signs directed his path. To the left was "Project Sycamore", decorated with a simple beaker icon. To the right was "Project Lotus" and an atom icon. These projects could be anything. Randomly, he chose right.

Project Lotus seemed to be all about nanotechnology. Nothing in any of the rooms were of any use to him. He moved on and found Project DEM. Its offices were walled in glass, which had been smashed open at some point. The keypad guarding the door had been smashed, so he stepped through the large open window frame.

He didn't really have a system for deciding what to search. Some rooms he would stop and examine, others he would ignore. This project seemed to be something that somebody was willing to fight over. The walls were lined with diagrams of the human brain. There was some basic nanotech gear lying around. In one corner there was evidence of a struggle - a desk was turned over and some chairs had been tossed aside. There was no blood and no bullet holes. Whoever had been hiding in here had been dragged out alive.

He pulled the overturned desk away from the wall and found the data access port with his right hand.

An instant later he was sailing through the digital ether. The local node was full of information. Years of work had been cataloged here. As always, there was a long strand of data, reaching off into the infinite distance and blocked by a heavy layer of black ice. Deck slowed his speed as he drew closer to the impassible wall. Why were all local terminals cut off like this?

He realized that for security purposes, they were probably not accessible from the outside. These were one-way connections that allowed the researchers to access Global Net (or TriOp Net) but didn't allow for outsiders to access them. That would make the terminals useless to Shodan, and so she would naturally wall them off from her network. Now the terminals were isolated.

He flipped quickly through the data. There were notes, emails, white papers, design schematics, and technical documents for all sorts of devices. Some of the notes were so filled with technical jargon they were gibberish to him. He stopped when he came to a diagram of a slender metal tube. The shape was unmistakable. It was a neural implant. The schematic was too technical for him to understand, but it linked to a number of other documents.

Deck knew the clock was ticking on the satellites, but he couldn't pass up the opportunity to learn more about the implant. He paged through technical articles. Again, most of the articles were heavy with medical jargon to the point of being incomprehensible to him.

There were some video logs, most of which were recorded by a Dr. Rex Melville. He was a puffy, older man with thick glasses. It amused Deck to see a man in the center of the world's best in advanced medical technology to succumb to the common flaws of obesity and myopia. Despite his lack of physical success, he was clearly a master of neurological medicine and nanotech augmentation. Deck poured through his design logs, learning all he could about his implant. Deck managed to find a medical dictionary in the data heap. He jumped from the video logs to the dictionary as he encountered unknown words - which was about every five seconds. Sometimes he would need to visit the dictionary multiple times and make numerous branching lookups just to get through a single sentence.

It was mind-expanding. He was assimilating information hundreds of times faster than would be possible under normal conditions. He was able to navigate through huge volumes of information instantly. He never had to stop to thumb through some reference book to look anything up. He was learning with zero friction.

---

Deck pulled his hand from the desk, having completing his exploration of dozens of logs. There was very little about the disaster, but he had absorbed volumes about the implant.

Incoming signal: US.GOV-RL1.VID - Compatible video codec available

Deck opened it up, "You back on the air, Lansing?"

Her face appeared, illuminated by the same pale glow of florescent lights and display screens. She looked tired. He wondered when she had slept last. "We're back on for now. The military has some birds that are isolated from commercial satellite traffic. They have been kind enough to let us transmit from one of them."

"I've got good news for you."

"Good. We need some."

"The bio-toxin isn't killing me. It turns out the implant was designed to recognize known chemical agents and neutralize them as they pass through."

She breathed a sigh of relief, "Good, we couldn't even get TriOp to help us out on that one. They still insist there is no bio-toxin, and that they would never develop such a thing."

"They? I don't get it. I thought you worked for TriOp?"

She shook her head, "My firm was called in by TriOp when they lost contact with Citadel. We normally specialize in anti-terrorist situations, but this situation has evolved since then. The government swept in when the satellite network started crumbling. The satellite owners are clamoring to know what's going on, and the families of Citadel inhabitants are demanding to see their loved ones. On top of all that, we have a media circus pitching their tent outside. It's a zoo here."

"It sounds like you guys are in over your heads."

She lifted a steaming styrofoam cup to her lips and took a careful sip. "Really, our firm is out of the picture now, but they are keeping me around so there is a stable point of contact with you. Everything that is said to you goes through me."

Deck felt better about Lansing now that he knew she didn't work for TriOp, "Good. Keep it that way."

"I'll try. There are a lot of powerful forces at work here. TriOp is talking to the media, claiming that no information is available on Citadel - which everyone in here knows is complete crap. The military want to scuttle the whole station to stop Shodan, and the media are using all of their tricks - including some hackers - to try and get a peek in here and get the real story."

"Ugh. Look, I'm still on the research level - can you get me a map?"

She nodded as she took and other sip of coffee.

"Fine. Now, where is the AI expert?" He decided to get moving. He walked back over the smashed window and into the hallway. He proceeded south.

"He is talking to the military. Right now, they are asking a bunch of questions while the TriOp lawyer is trying to talk him out of giving any answers."

Deck hit another intersection but continued south. The lights were dim here, as if there was some sort of local brownout going on. He dropped his voice to a low whisper, "Well, when he gets out tell him this - " He peeked around a corner to make sure the coast was clear before crossing an open area. He stayed low. "Tell him that Shodan is crazy because her ethics chip was bypassed."

"What was that about ethics?"

"Shodan's ethics chip was bypassed, and Diego didn't properly configure her afterwards. He had someone hack Shodan so she could assist him in whatever crooked deals he had cooking. He was supposed to make sure Shodan didn't hurt anyone. Apparently, he messed that up."

Rebecca nodded but made no comment. The buzz in the room around her had come to a near standstill. They were all listening to him now.

He saw that Lansing had sent him several new files. One was a map of the research area. "Hang on a sec.", he said to Rebecca. He opened up the map and tried to figure out where he was. He was close to his goal. The map showed that there was an elevator at the center of the level, as he had expected.

Nearby, he could hear the metallic impact of mechanical footsteps. He peered around the corner and found a security bot, pacing back and fourth. It blocked his access to the central elevator. He was going to have to deal with it. In the darkness, he squinted, but couldn't see what sort of weapons it was carrying. He drew his pistol.

She became impatient, "Right, someone hacked Shodan and disabled its ethics. Can you tell us any more?"

"Yeah, I'm the one who hacked her."

He killed the connection and dove around the corner, gunning for the bot.

Deck squeezed the trigger rapidly, sending several bullets into the hind quarters of the short, stout bot. The deafening volume of gunfire never failed to surprise him. The projectiles glanced off the smooth metallic surface, leaving only dents.

An instant later, the bot had swiveled around to face him. It was obviously far more nimble than it appeared. He threw himself backwards as the guns mounted on either side of the robotic body erupted. The sound from the gunfire echoed throughout the network of hallways, making it sound like they were coming from every direction.

He reached around the corner and squeezed off a few blind shots in desperation. Quick metallic footsteps could be heard, rushing to his current position.

The bot was simply a smaller version of the bots Deck had encountered before his surgery. It was about a meter tall, with agile, bird-like legs propelling it. Its guns were mounted at the joints, where the legs joined the bulletproof chassis.

Its eye was a small lens fitted into the otherwise featureless surface. The chances of him hitting it with a pistol were astronomical.

He ran down the corridor, taking the first available turn in order to avoid giving the bot a clear line of fire. As he turned the corner, bullets bit into the plastic wall, sending beige and red fragments flying like shrapnel. He ran a few more steps and made another turn, then another. He was moving as fast as he could, but the plodding footsteps drew closer.

The next turn brought him to a long and darkened hallway with no obvious branches. He knew he would never make it to the opposite end before the bot arrived and began shooting. It was too late to backtrack. He sprinted a few steps and then sidestepped into a nearby darkened room.

He tripped over some unidentified debris in the darkness and fell sideways onto an overturned desk. He swore as he struck his shin, and the edge of the desk met him in the ribs. The impact knocked the air from his lungs. He flailed, trying to recover from his fall as the relentless footsteps drew near. He struggled to his feet. Debris shifted beneath him, stealing his balance.

In the darkness, he slapped the lock mechanism for the door. The door responded by sliding partly closed, stopped short by some broken fragment of furniture. It was part of the base of a rolling office chair.

He bent down and grasped one of the wheeled legs, trying to pull it free of the door.

The sound of dual machine guns again filled the corridor. Deck collapsed onto his back as bullets punched through the wall and passed through the space where he had been standing only moments before. The gunfire continued, chewing numerous broad holes in the wall.

Pain radiated from his ribs, and he wondered if he had cracked something. He covered his eyes to protect them from the flying chunks of hardened plastic as they were torn from the walls by the stream of bullets. After a few moments of gunfire, he rolled over onto his belly and began crawling. He didn't know where he was going, but it seemed better to not be so close to the door.

It was nearly pitch dark in the room. The only light came from the gap in the door, and through the increasing number of holes in the wall.

He crawled over unseen junk. Some of it felt like file folders and books, some of it was solid - hardware of some sort. Sharp items cut into his hands. He crawled behind the desk he had fallen on earlier. There was an impact as something struck him in the left thigh. He stifled a grunt as the pain traced the network of nerve endings from the point of impact to his brain. He touched his leg. It was wet.

The gunfire stopped.

There was a long silence, during which Deck could only hear his own breathing, and the ringing in his ears. After several seconds, the bot once again began moving. Then the door slid open, filling the room with light.

Deck knew that locking the door had been a bit of a long shot. Security bots that could become locked in or out of key areas would not be of much use.

The whirring of servos came from the hall as the bot tried to negotiate its way into the room. With the light from the corridor, Deck could now see that there was a door in the rear of the office. Reaching it now would mean crossing the open room - an act of certain suicide. At his feet were the twisted remains of some maintenance bot. The broken fragments of its frame were spread around its gutted carcass. This was probably what had sliced his hands open moments before.

His leg tingled with pain. He wanted to squirm, to adjust his position and nurse the wound, but movement would surely attract the lethal attention of the bot.

The whirring of servos continued. The bot was obviously having difficulty navigating through the debris. It had been designed to travel over open, flat surfaces, and was not properly equipped to wade through the clutter. Its legs prodded the ground, testing for stable terrain.

Deck lay on his back, bleeding all over himself for several minutes while the bot explored the stability of the junk that littered the room.

Finally, there was the sound of metal surfaces colliding, and a frantic burst of servo activity. Moments later he heard the bot topple over and hit the wall.

Deck wiped the blood from his hands and drew in a deep breath. He knew this was his best chance of escape. He leapt to his feet and jumped the desk. As he landed, a lightning bolt of pain shot through his leg and he collapsed.

The bot thrashed vigorously, but was unable to recover. It had caught one of its large feet in the framework of an office chair. It was laying face-down in the corner, unable to stand or roll over without the use of both legs.

Deck crawled out the door and pulled himself to his feet. He needed to stop and tend his wounds before he could proceed, but he wanted to get some distance between himself and the bot before he did.

He retraced his steps as well as he could remember. He entered another lab at random. After making sure he was alone, he locked the door.

It was a small lab, with a long counter in the center. A sink was built into the countertop. A small fridge was built into the wall opposite the door. In the corners were a few small desks. A lab coat was hung on a hook inside the doorway. He searched the pockets but came up empty. He took the lab coat over to the sink and unzipped his suit.

He pulled his upper body out of the suit, and peeled it down to reveal the wound on his thigh. The cold air met with his sweaty skin and a chill came over him.

He realized that it would be better to take the suit all of the way off, as opposed to leaving it hang between his legs where it would only trip him up if he needed to run or fight. Fighting naked was preferable to fighting with his pants around his ankles.

He faced the doorway and placed his pistol on the counter in front of him where he could reach it in a hurry. He stepped out of his blood-soaked bodysleave and set it aside.

A chunk of beige plastic jutted out from his left thigh. He had assumed it was a bullet wound, but apparently he was simply struck by a piece of the wall as it was torn apart by the hail of bullets.

Balancing himself on his right leg, he grasped the wet plastic and pulled. He was shocked by both the intensity of the pain, and the length of the plastic fragment. It took him several agonizing seconds to extract the jagged, three-inch triangle of plastic from his thigh.

Once freed of the foreign blockage, the wound began to flow.

---

A new message appeared in his HUD:

Connected. US.GOV-RL1.VID

"Lansing here."

The image of Rebecca appeared in his head. "Hey, I need -"

"Wait. Don't say anything more."

"What?", Deck made a confused face at nobody in particular.

"The military guys here are worried that we're using a non-encrypted signal. TriOp is worried about it too, but for different reasons."

"What do you mean?" He was naked, sitting in the corner of the lab, holding a formerly-white lab coat over his leg. The bleeding had slowed. He winced as he pressed the rough fabric into the wound.

"The military is worried that Shodan is listening to our conversations."

Deck reflected for a moment, "You know, that makes a lot of sense. It would explain how they found me up on the medical level an hour ago. I just figured it was random at the time."

"And TriOptimum is worried the media will find our feed and tap into it."

"Fine. Let's encrypt it." Deck shrugged, " What should we use as a key?"

Rebecca shook her head. "I don't know. They have some military spooks here - one of them suggested using landmarks. For example, pick a city you're familiar with, and name an intersection."

In order for two parties to share encrypted information - text, audio, video, or some other form of abstract data - they both must agree on some "key" to use. The key could be any piece of information that was exclusive to those exchanging the data. That was the trick - they needed information not available to Shodan or the potential media listeners. They couldn't use the feed to exchange the key, or else everyone else would have it as well, thus making the encryption useless.

Deck wondered if this wasn't a subtle attempt to find out where he was from. "I don't see how that would work. Shodan has access to phone books. She'll just look it up."

"No, make it something that's not in the phonebook. Make it the slogan of some small store, or the graffiti on the wall. Just give us a location, and we'll have someone go there and see what the sign says, and we can use that as our key."

"I've been out of it for at least six weeks - more like seven, actually. A lot of signs could have changed since then. Besides, that might stop Shodan, but that won't stop the media. Any journalist can swing by and see the key for themselves."

Rebecca glanced sideways and shrugged slightly. It was clear she didn't care if the media found out and everything went public. Maybe that's what she wanted.

"Gimmie a moment to think about this."

"Fine."

Deck leaned back against the cold wall. How could two strangers exchange private information in a public forum? What information did he and Rebecca have access to, but not Shodan or the public in general?

While his left hand kept pressure on his leg wound, he used his right hand to prod the bruise that was forming at the base of his ribcage on the right side. Every time he breathed in it caused a sharp jab of pain. His shin was already sporting a large lump.

Finding information not available to the public would be easy. Anything out of the TriOp database would work. However, Shodan would certainly have access to that. For it to work, he would need something from the database that Shodan somehow couldn't access.

His head snapped up, "I got it."

Rebecca had slouched down into her seat, and it looked like she was ready to nod off. As he spoke her eyes snapped open, "I'm listening."

"There is an employee in the database that I created about five days before I went into stasis. I guess that would have been almost seven weeks ago. It has executive-level access. I don't imagine there would be any other brand-new executive employees created around that time, so it should be easy to find."

He tore the foil off of a dermal patch and unfolded it. The bleeding had finally slowed down to the point where a patch would stick. He was freezing and in a hurry to get dressed.

Lansing shrugged, "Okay, I can look it up, but Shodan can do the same."

"Right, don't worry about that for now. Look up that account, and use the employee number as the encryption key. Shodan won't be able to do the same."

There was a pause while she gave him a curious look. Finally he added, "I made some changes."

He winced as he gently pressed the plastic circle onto the damaged area. As the medicated surface touched his skin, it began to contract and pull the wound closed. Healing enzymes soaked into his skin, along with a small dose of local anesthetics.

"Yeah, there are a lot of people here who want to ask about the 'changes' you've made. Like what did you do, and why did you do it?"

"That will have to wait until we're on an encrypted channel" He killed the connection.

His hands had stopped bleeding. The left one had a row of deep parallel abrasions. The right just had a pair of minor cuts. He decided to spend a dermal patch on the left hand, and let the right one heal on its own.

He pulled on his bodysleave and washed up in the sink.

He checked the fridge, hoping to find some food, but it was full of vials that seemed to contain a variety of human fluids. After a few minutes of looking around and ransacking cupboards and drawers, he concluded the room had nothing of value to him.

He decided to check out the local data archives while he waited for Rebecca to get back to him. He limped over to the small desk that had been shoved into a corner, and turned it around so that he could face the door while sitting at the desk.

He plunged into the sea of data. This console was apparently shared by a number of people. He found various video feeds recorded by a handful of former employees. He flew through the strands of video, briefly glancing at each one to see if it held anything interesting. Most of them seemed to be dated from months ago, and of not much use to him.

Finally he came to one that was three weeks old. He flew to the top and rushed through the stack. The data tag indicated it was recorded by Paul Stannek.

Paul was in his early thirties, with dark hair, and suffering from a bad case of 'low, sloping Neanderthal forehead'. "D'arcy called a lot of us together in his office today and shared some of his concerns. It turns out, the sickness isn't a disease, its the effect of some biological agent. Even worse, its one that apparently we manufacture. He didn't know how it got loose, but he said that he didn't think it was a mistake. I guess there are a bunch of safeguards against this sort of thing. An alarm should have sounded as soon as the stuff hit the ventilation system. Someone had to turn off all of the safeguards for this stuff to get by."

Paul sighed and looked to his right at something off camera. Deck realized he would have been looking at the small air vent built into the wall beside the desk.

Paul continued, "What worried me most was that he thinks someone is still releasing this stuff. Its like, it doesn't live long once you get it into the air. So, the only way to get infected is to come into direct contact with someone who's infected, or to breathe in a dose that was released in the last few minutes. D'Arcy is looking at the infection rate and grouping, and he's convinced this is all deliberate." He reached to turn off the recorder and then paused, "One other thing - when we got back, someone had taken a bunch of augmentation equipment. This is really strange. I'd be on the next shuttle home if the place wasn't quarantined."

Deck moved to the next recording. It was Paul again, "We came in to work this morning but there's nothing to work on. Every scrap of prosthetic and augmentation is gone from inventory. Even the brand new prototype models that were in the security locker. Only three - well, two now - only two people have the code for that thing, and neither of them opened the locker for anyone. I went to call home a min-"

Deck skipped through the message. He knew how the story ended. He scanned through a few more logs. Most were personal and fairly emotional. Each crew member would pour out their heart as someone close to them vanished, was infected, or killed. The logs stopped about a week before he awoke. There was never any mention of the cyborgs. Either people stopped making entries at some point, or the cyborgs swept through so fast that nobody had a chance to talk about them.

Deck leaned back and stretched gently, careful to avoid aggravating his numerous wounds. He had lost track of time as he waded through the messages. It was time to get moving.

Incoming signal: US.GOV-RL1.VID - signal type unknown.

Deck figured it was the encryption. He used 2-4601 as the key and the feed opened up.

"Looks like you found my employee number."

Every time he saw her she looked a little more burnt out and haggard. "I have so many questions for you I don't even know where to start."

"Screw your questions for now. What the hell am I going to be doing when I get to the reactor level?"

She seemed surprised, "When you get there? We figured you would be there by now."

"I suppose I would be if all I had to do was walk there. It's not like I can just wander around freely. This place is crawling with crazy stuff and getting from A to B is dangerous and time-consuming. Which makes me wonder why I'm doing it. "

She glanced over to someone off camera, "Actually, there's some debate on that now. The military guys want you to go down and blow up the antennae array."

"Sounds like a lot of fun. What the hell good will it do?"

"The array is what Shodan uses to communicate with the satellites. With everything, really. Blow it up, and you will cut Shodan off from the satellites. I don't know if we'll get them back at that point, but it should stop her from getting any more - and stop her from using the ones she has. You can't imagine the uproar caused by losing a fourth of the world's comsats."

"Actually, I can. So what's the debate?"

"TriOp argues that the array cost about two billion dollars, and you don't need to blow it up - just disable it."

He laughed, "To hell with that. I'm only going to do this once. If I turn it off, she'll turn it back on. If I break it, she'll fix it. The only way to stop this is to destroy it."

"That's exactly what the military guys are saying, but TriOp disagrees, and it is their property. It's not really very clear who's in charge here."

Deck growled, "You know who's in charge here?"

She raised an eyebrow.

"Me. I'm up here alone, and I'm the one risking my life." As he spoke, he could hear outraged yelling in the background on Rebecca's end.

He responded, "Hey, if you guys don't like the way I run this show, feel free to send up one of your own guys. Otherwise, I'm gonna blow up your damn antennae."

Rebecca smiled weakly.

"So we're gonna blow it up. That sounds great, but I'm fresh out of plastic explosives."

"Well, the records we have indicate there were some various munitions stored on level four - that's the storage and cargo level."

"Moving around isn't that easy up here. I can't just hop from floor to floor. I nearly got killed about forty-five minutes ago when I ran into some bot. Now I'm supposed to hunt around on level four before I head down to engineering?"

Someone began talking to her in the background. She held up a hand to silence them. "A TriOp lawyer helpfully points out that you don't need explosives if you are just just going to disable the antennae."

Deck drew in a slow, angry breath. "Fine. Storage. How do we get there?"

"There is a freight elevator that goes from levels two through five. That might be better than using the main elevator."

"Yeah, that would be good. Mutants seem to congregate around the elevators for whatever reason. I'd better get moving."

"Wait. Don't hang up on me again. You keep doing that, and it's making me crazy."

"Well? What else do you need?"

"She paged through some paper in front of her. Look, there are a bunch of questions I'm supposed to ask you. You dropped quite a bomb on us earlier when you said you were the one that messed up Shodan."

"Yeah, well, I was supposed to get a chance to talk with the tech guy - one of the Shodan designers. I have some questions for him."

She sighed, "Where do I start?"

Deck gazed at the tired, frustrated face in his mind's eye. "You look like hell. I'll tell you what. I want to sneak up, er down - I guess - to level four. That means I can't be talking to you. Why don't you get some sleep and I'll contact you when I get there?"

She nodded, "Sounds good to me."

"See you on level four, Out.", he closed the connection and began the long crawl across the research level.

The elevator doors split open and parted. Deck stood in the center of the elevator, gun drawn, ready for conflict. There were no mutants this time. He stepped out and the doors drew closed behind him.

The storage level had the ambient noise of an empty tomb. There were no bodies or even evidence of violent conflict. Whatever had happened on Citadel, it hadn't happened much here.

The ceilings were high to accommodate the towering piles of supplies stacked on pallets. The walls were a pale industrial blue. The crates came in an array of beige, gray, and dark brown. The floor was a smooth, slate-gray rubber, traced with the tracks of numerous mechanical beasts of burden. Overhead, the floodlights stung his eyes with their intensity, and yet seemed unable to properly illuminate the floor area. The light poured from the fixtures above and was swallowed by the dark towers of supply crates, which were arranged in even rows of varying heights like a miniature city.

The floor was a grid of oily rubber tire tracks, the markings left by some sort of vehicle as it had traveled the rows of containers. The tracks followed the same path with a precision that indicated they had not been made by human-controlled machines.

Deck moved slowly away from the elevator, aiming his weapon ahead of him as he proceeded into the bowels of the cargo storage area. His movements were slow and uneven because of his throbbing leg wound.

He worked his way through the rows of supplies. The crates were marked both with bar codes and text. Each crate also had a strip of symbols down each side that indicated the recommended storage temperature range, sensitivity to decompression, sensitivity to impact, how fragile the contents were, their flammability, and which way was up.

He examined the labels, but none of it struck him as useful. He found some crates that seemed to be food, but they were part of a tall stack that he was unlikely to access without mechanical assistance. He frowned and realized that even if he could loot the crates, they probably contained dry goods that would need to be prepared. His stomach growled as he thought of dry milk and reconstituted meat. Even during his days of poverty in the Undercity, he had never faced hunger like this.

After exploring for a few minutes, he found that the level was divided into four areas, separated by airlocks. The massive room he was in was really just one-fourth of the level.

He moved through an airlock into another area. A few crates had been pried open and looted. Nearby, a forklift bot had been smashed and scorched. Other than this, the area was indistinguishable from the last.

He moved through the dingy gloom, examining storage containers and fantasizing about what sort of loot they might contain. His footsteps echoed off the steel walls and through the parallel canyons of steel crates. Every step, every ragged breath, and every careless sound was projected and amplified through the cavernous space, announcing his position.

The lighting wasn't bright enough to see properly, and yet not dark enough to conceal him. He wiped oily grime from containers at random, looking for something that might be of use to him. A few were labeled clearly, but most simply had useless codes stamped on their sides, giving him no real clue about their contents.

A terminal capped the end of one aisle of crates. He linked up and flew through its databanks. It was both inventory and bot control. From here you could request some particular item and have a fork bot retrieve it. According to the system, there were no bots available. They had probably either been disabled by people or cannibalized for parts by Shodan.

He found a map detailing the layout of goods on the level. A moment later he had the location of the munitions storage area and jacked out.

According to the map, he needed to move to the adjacent storage cell. As he crossed the level, he found discrepancies between the map and the actual locations of walls of crates. It was unclear if these things had been moved before or after the disaster.

The titanic steel jaws of the airlock rumbled open with a hydraulic howl. As he stepped into the next storage room, he could hear the quick, high-pitched movements of bots somewhere in the distance.

There was a sharp whine of servos, followed by a metallic impact. Metal dragged against metal and then an electric motor began to close in on his position.

He didn't know if there was even any point in drawing his pistol. He hesitated. There was nothing to hide behind nearby.

Behind him, the airlock began to slide closed again.

A fork bot rolled out from between the rows of containers. Deck drew his pistol.

It was propelled by a set of short treads. It made a precise turn as it reached the end of the aisle, following the well-defined patterns of grime on the floor, and began advancing on him.

Its body was a hardened shell of steel, with a heavy-duty forklift mounted on the front. There was no visible head, or eye - no apparent vulnerable spot of any kind. Its treads spun furiously as it closed the gap between them. It was moving far faster than any human could run.

It obviously didn't have any projectile weapons, so its only offensive ability would be to crush him with the massive lifting fork or to run him over. There was a neat stack of crates off to one side that might provide cover, but Deck decided to stay in the open where he could move around.

The metal beast came to a perfect stop at the foot of the stack of crates and rotated in place. The fork divided and become a four-fingered claw reaching into the air. Its hefty arm extended its length several times, bringing the claw to the top of the stack. The fingers slid into position around the angled corners of the crate and clamped down. It pulled back as the arm retracted, lifting the massive crate as if it was a child's toy block. The claw rotated and pulled back until the crate rested on the flattened top of the bot, perfectly positioned above the its center of gravity.

The moment the crate came to rest, the bot turned in place and headed back into the aisle, ending the precise mechanical dance.

Deck holstered the pistol. He had no idea why the bots would be moving inventory around. He ignored the bot and pushed on.

This storage area was not like the others. Sections were sealed off behind security-controlled airlocks, separate from the main area and isolated from each other. The row of airlocks dominated the back wall of the storage area.

Various symbols hinted at what might be inside, but there were no explicit signs to direct him. The first several doors were marked with biohazard symbols. These could contain anything - medical waste, human waste, or even the biological agents that were deployed against the inhabitants of Citadel. After that, there were two doors with radiation warnings.

The next few doors were marked with security symbols and decorated with "AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY" signs.

The last door had an additional sign warning of explosive hazard, as well as a different set of security locks. He checked the map in his head. This was it.

Deck's hand hit the keypad and he was jacked in. As he tore through the world of geometric shapes, something seemed different.

Three tenths of a second after he jacked in, he reached the access code. It was a blur. The digits changed so quickly they looked like a set of flickering eights. They rotated in a chaotic manner, with no discernable pattern. He examined the rest of the keypad to see if he could manipulate the mechanism manually, and ran into a wall of opaque black ICE.

Shodan.

He jacked out.

Deck sat down and leaned against a nearby tower of supplies, the afterimage of the digital world still flickering in his head. His entire body ached. The dermal patch had relieved a lot of the leg pain, but the bruise on his chest was still throbbing.

He decided to call Rebecca while he thought about this problem. There was a long pause before she finally responded.

Connected. US.GOV-RL1.VID

Rebecca appeared in his head. She had taken off the stiff outer coat of her uniform and was down to her undershirt. She looked more alert than the last time he'd seen her.

"You finally get some sleep?"

"A little", she smiled, "You finally ready to answer some questions?"

"Ask"

"Right. The first question is: Why?"

"Diego made me an offer I couldn't refuse. He wanted control of Shodan so she could assist him with whatever illegal stuff he had going on the side."

A bunch of voices had erupted in the background on Rebecca's end as he was talking. She turned to address someone off-camera. "No... no, I am not playing this game with you guys." As she spoke, a male voice overlapped hers, arguing with her. "Fine. No questions? No? Then you guys work out what the hell you want and get back to me."

Deck sighed heavily.

"Hacker?"

He rolled his eyes, "You don't have to get my attention to see if I'm still here. Its not like I can just walk away from the terminal like you can. Its in my head. If our connection is live, I can hear you."

"Right", she nodded slowly. "Look, the TriOp lawyer squad just decided that having you answer these questions wouldn't be in your best interest."

"What?"

"Well, this is a government channel and its being recorded. It can be used as evidence. They point out that they will be pressing charges when you get back, and they don't want you to incriminate yourself in the meantime."

"More like they don't want me incriminating them. They can always hope I'll just get killed up here and they can blame everything on me. The truth is, Diego had me brought up here when his goons caught me with my hand in the cookie jar. He said if I hacked Shodan, he'd give me this neural interface."

"And if you said no?"

"He never really discussed the alternative, but it was pretty obvious. He couldn't just drop me back on Earth without raising a bunch of questions. He never threatened me directly, but we both understood that this was a comply-or-die offer."

There was some more protesting in the background as he spoke, but Rebecca ignored it.

"So what happened? Why did Shodan break?"

"I left Shodan in an undefined state. She no longer had any understanding of morality, and it was Diego's job to give her some. Obviously he blew it."

"So how did you do it?"

"Its a bit tough to explain in detail, but the simplified version is that I disabled her ethics chip."

"Ethics chip?"

"Yeah, it was a single chip that filtered her thoughts and kept her in line. I hacked her so that it no longer had any affect. She was free to do anything at that point. It was Diego's job to guide her and make sure nobody got hurt."

"But you had to realize something like this might happen?"

"It not like you turn off her morality chip and she suddenly becomes evil. I didn't replace it with an immorality chip. I just took it out."

"But if she can-"

He cut her off, "Think of it this way - If you tell a kid he's suddenly allowed to play in the street, that doesn't mean he's going to dash out into traffic the first chance he gets. He still has a brain and can recognize danger, even if the rules no longer guide his behavior. Shodan is the same way, only she is way smarter than the average human being. She wouldn't just start killing people for no reason."

"But she did start killing people. Why?"

"I don't know. I was hoping your expert could clue me in on that."

"Yeah, I keep hoping we can get you two guys together and get some idea of what is going on in Shodan's head. He is really anxious to talk to you."

"Great, so put him on."

"He is with the military guys now, trying to help them combat Shodan's control of the comsat network."

"As soon as he shows, contact me."

"Fine.", She paused to look at the notes in front of her. "How is the mission to destroy the communication relay going?"

"Is that what you guys are calling it? A mission? Whatever. I'm stuck outside of munitions storage. Shodan has locked the door in a big way."

"Anything we can do to help?"

"No. This is my thing, this is what I do. What I do need is a plan for getting out of here once I blow it up. Nobody's talking about bringing me home yet."

"Well, the only way to bring you back is to get a shuttle up there. We can't do that while Shodan has control of the security systems, or she'll just blow it up."

"Right, we've gone over this before. I'd just like to know you have a plan for when I'm done with this."

She sighed, "Honestly, nobody's talking about it much because there are bigger concerns right now. Shodan has a little over half of the world's commsats now. It's chaos down here. Business are closed. Planes in the air are getting lost. Others have been grounded. Most global broadcast media is disabled or has limited reach. GlobalNet has slowed to a crawl. A few of the big cities are reporting looting."

Deck felt detached from all of this. He had trouble caring about the chaos down on Earth. It didn't seem real to him. "Whatever. I suggest you guys start thinking about how to get me out of this zoo, because that's going to be the next item on your agenda once Shodan's transmitter goes 'boom'."

Deck had been mildly aware of the mechanical movement behind him, back among the sea of supply crates. He had ignored the movement until a bot wheeled abruptly around the corner and stopped a few inches short of crushing him.

Rebecca had replied to him but her words were drowned out by the mechanical sounds of the bot.

"I'll get back to you.", he said as he killed the connection.

The bot idled with a low electric whine as it sat motionless in front of Deck. After a few seconds a red light blinked and it emitted a harsh burst of sound like a few milliseconds of modem noise. This was the closest thing it had to a horn. It was saying "move please", more or less.

Deck slid out of the way and the bot rolled past, ignoring him. It spun into position a few crates down the row and carefully placed its cargo at the top of the stack before speeding away once again.

Deck watched the bot as it departed. What was it doing?

He decided to find out. There was a terminal a few feet away. He jacked in and checked the list of pending jobs for the bot. There were only two of them in the queue. The current job seemed simple: move twelve crates from one corner of the storage area to the opposite corner. It seemed like a strange request. The areas were mapped out in such a way that each inventory item had a few slots reserved for it within the available floor space. There shouldn't be any reason to move inventory from one side to the other.

Even more unusual was the time - the bot had been working on this particular job for 7,872 minutes. Deck did the math and then frowned at the image in his mind's eye. Why would the bot need over five days to move twelve boxes?

Deck noticed that the job had been requested by Abe Ghiran.

Some of the job parameters seemed strange to him as well. There was tons of open floor space in this storage area, yet only a single slot was allotted for transfer space. If the bot needed to put a crate down for any reason, it could only put it down on the original stack, the destination slot, or the transfer slot.

So why had it been working on this for five days?

He disconnected and moved to the end of the aisle. The bot was on its way to the original stack. It pulled off a crate, and began the long trek from one corner of the warehouse to the other. It deposited the crate on the destination stack and returned. He observed several more moves. Each move took around a minute for the bot to pick up a crate, drop it off, and come back.

He returned to the terminal and jacked in again.

He examined the list of materials being moved. They were totally unrelated items that would normally never be stored in the same area, much less the same stack. The list included uniforms, microscopes, portable rigs, bot parts, cafeteria utensils and trays, tools, large display screens, specialized lenses, office supplies, and plastic novelty items for the Citadel gift shop. These items would never be stored together because some were far more fragile than others.

Suddenly something clicked and he realized what he was looking at. This was a classic recursive puzzle that had been around since the late nineteenth century, known as the Towers of Hanoi. In this variation, there were twelve crates, each one lighter or more fragile than the one beneath it. The bot needed to move all of the crates from the source to the destination, using only the transfer space to hold items as needed. It could only move one crate at a time, and it could never place a more fragile crate on top of a less fragile one. The puzzle seemed simple at first glance, but became alarmingly time consuming as you added more objects to be moved.

With only two items, the bot could complete the job in a mere three moves - It would move the top crate (the most fragile one) to the transfer space, then the next crate to the destination, and then move the top crate from the transfer slot to the destination - thus finishing the job. With six crates, it would take 63 moves, or a little more than an hour.

Deck knew that it would take over four thousand moves to complete a twelve item stack. According to the terminal, the bot would need to recharge every two hours or so when running at capacity, and needed to perform routine self-maintaince every two days. The bot could still have another day or so left before it finished.

He examined the next job on the list. It was a mess. Huge blocks of code defined the job parameters. It wasn't so much a job as a complete re-programming. He checked to see who had requested the job. Shodan.

Deck could only assume Abe had designed his job to keep the bot busy, so that it would never jack back in and pick up the next job in the queue. This meant the bot was still clean, unaffected by Shodan's digital rabies. It also meant that if he canceled the current job the bot would head back to its docking port and get turned into another slave of Shodan's. He tried to cancel Shodan's job but found nothing could override it. He also couldn't insert any new jobs into the queue before it.

He wondered if the bot would have access to the munitions area if it had been re-programmed by Shodan.

A few moments later he had created a new job and placed it at the end of the queue. He then canceled Abe's job and hoped he was right.

A tone rang out over the local P.A. system, calling the bot back to its docking port to receive its new orders.

It returned hastily, and Deck moved into position beside the port. As it slid into its niche, a slender metal arm extended from its back and plugged into the local data feed.

The bot jolted violently as it downloaded Shodan's new code. Every servo and motor in its body took a turn activating and deactivating at high speed. When it was done, it rolled out and headed for the munitions area. As it rolled past, Deck grabbed onto the maintenance ladder on the rear and climbed onto its flattened back.

The red light came one and stayed on. The cheap speaker in front spat out a loud burst of modem noise like some electronic banshee wail. It was pissed, but it didn't stop running the job Deck had constructed for it.

Suddenly the claw began moving. It rotated in place and swiveled around, grabbing at him. Deck quickly slid off its back and onto the service ladder again. The claw came down, grasping for him, but he was out of reach.

The bot came to an abrupt stop at the last row of crates and retrieved the topmost one. Deck had written the program so hastily he couldn't even remember what was in the crate. Whatever it was, it was heavy. The entire chasis of the bot sunk slightly as it lifted the crate and placed it onto the carrying surface on its back. A moment later they were moving again.

The bot reached the munitions door and extended the slender metal arm, touching it to the keypad. A second later the doors parted and they rolled inside.

At about five meters square, the storage area was smaller than he had anticipated. The back wall was covered in crates, and an adjacent wall was covered by a set of lightweight metal shelves.

The bot lifted the crate and deposited it on the floor. The job was complete. The massive steel door rumbled shut behind them.

The claw swung around and again reached for Deck. He dipped his body lower to avoid its grasp.

He cursed to himself. His plan had been to send the bot in here, ride along, and then jump off while the bot went back to the dataport to get its next job. He had been counting on the bot leaving once the current job was done. Instead, it seemed more interested in killing him.

It began to back up, trying to ram itself into the wall and crush him. He dove off to one side at the last moment, and an ear-splitting crunch of metal followed a split second afterward. Then it spun in place, reaching out again with its claw.

He had managed to lock himself in an enclosed space with an automatic killing machine. He cursed again as he rushed in closer to the bot, passing beneath the claw. He grabbed onto the base of the deadly metal arm and pulled himself up. The way the joints were designed, the bot couldn't actually reach him there - much like a human hand can't reach its own elbow.

The bot spun again and rushed forward into the dented metal wall. Deck pulled himself up and onto its back. There was a jarring impact as they collided with the wall together, and his body slammed into the back of the arm. He flopped backwards onto the carrying surface, gasping for air.

The claw extended once again and started to swivel around. He slid off the back and onto the smashed remains of the ladder before the claw could reach him. The bot pulled away from the wall and spun around on its treads, preparing to ram the wall again. He couldn't see, his eyes were watering. He had entered a whole new world of pain as his bruised chest hit the metal surface.

He knew this was a losing battle. He had no way of harming this thing, and it had all the patience in the world. It would keep ramming and grabbing for him until he was broken.

He pulled himself back onto the carrying surface as they reached the wall. He went feet-first into the wall, absorbing most of the impact into his legs. The bot lurched forward an instant later.

Deck was grabbing at random for something to hold onto. With his right hand he grabbed the slender, retractable metal arm that held the bots interface port.

He jacked in.

The bot was not sentient. It was a simple mechanical device that had been reprogrammed. Shodan had evidently given it some new code to allow it to ram enemies or crush them, but it had no grasp of strategy or combat tactics. It was still just a dumb fork bot.

He fumbled through its geometric layers, mapping it out. Usually when he was jacked into something, he closed his eyes or stared at a blank wall so that he could focus his attention. He couldn't afford to do that in this case. Instead, he had to navigate both worlds at once, both dodging its attacks and exploring its memory.

He slid forward, hugging his body to the base of the metal arm as the claw groped for him overhead. He was careful to keep his hand on the dataport as he moved.

The layers of the bot's memory flew by. Deck found its local job stack.

He let go of the thick metal arm, moving his own arm out of the way as the bot rammed the wall head-on. His body slid forward and his face smacked into the hard metal surface. His vision blurred from the impact. The real world grew dim.

He dumped some simple commands into the bot's job stack. It stopped short of ramming the wall again and spun in place until it was facing the crate it had brought in. It lifted it, and dumped it onto its back just as Deck slid onto the ladder once again.

The bot opened the door and deposited the crate directly under the open doorway. It then sped out of the room.

The two of them rolled at top speed along the row of sealed security doors. Behind him, Deck heard a crunch as the munitions door came down on the crate. The claw continued to grope for him, but he stayed out of reach by hanging onto the broken, bent pipes of the service ladder.

They reached the loading bay and he bailed. The bot rolled obediently into the airlock, closed the inner door, decompressed the airlock, opened the outer door, and rolled itself out into space.

Deck lay on the floor long enough to catch his breath, and then returned to the munitions area.

A red emergency light was blinking over the munitions storage area, letting the long-gone, long-dead supervisor know that something was obstructing the doorway. He ignored it and slid under the door.

It didn't take long for Deck to find the explosive materials crates. A call down to Rebecca earned him a short demolitions tutorial. The explosive material was a clear gel, packaged in transparent plastic pouch the size of his fist. The detonator was a small timer with a pair of needles protruding from the back. When the time came, he would puncture the bag with the needles and set the timer. That was all there was to it.

He took four of each, placing the gel packs in the deep pockets on his right leg, and the timers on his left. The pouches were a little heavy, and the weight threw him slightly off balance, but he didn't want to carry the two items together.

It had been explained to him that he didn't need to worry about accidentally detonating them, since that would be impossible. The pouches could be shot, burned, dropped, crushed, punctured, and abused in numerous ways and the gel would never detonate. Only the timers could set it off. Despite the reassurance, Deck treated them like dynamite, sliding them gently into his pockets and packing them firmly in place. The thought of being vaporized in a millisecond made him a little paranoid.

Deck also discovered that all of the ammunition had been taken. The empty ammunition crates were stacked along one wall, instead of being taken back to the airlock where they would be taken planetside, which would have been the standard procedure. The weapons were removed as well. Deck assumed they had been taken in order to arm Shodan's cyborgs.

The communications array was at the very base of Citadel, on a long, grotesque finger of protruding metal antennae. There were four metal beams than ran down the spine of the station. If he wanted to guarantee that the communications array could not be repaired, he would need to separate it from the rest of the structure. This meant breaking off the tips of all four beams.

He searched the remaining crates and found nothing of value. The place had obviously been looted by Shodan already. He slid under the massive door, leaving the munitions area.

The entire scene seemed surreal to him as he crossed the deserted storage level. He was out in space, the lone survivor in a city of the dead, carrying several pounds of the latest in compact explosives. He was on a mission to blow up a huge structure of communications gear with a price tag in the billions. He thought of his familiar life in the Undercity. It seemed so distant now. His perception of time was distorted. By his own personal calendar, he had only left Earth a week ago, yet in reality six weeks had gone by. However, the stark and lonesome nature of his surroundings separated him from that past. His days in the Undercity felt like they were both last week and a lifetime ago.

He thought about the dead, and the suffering and terror they had endured in the weeks leading up to this moment. A war had been waged here while he slept, protected only by a single security door and random chance.

He considered the odds of his situation - all of the choices and events that had led him to this particular moment in time. Of all the outcomes of his quest, something like this was beyond anyone's ability to predict. He had longed for success. At the end, he had expected death. But he could never have dreamed he would find himself involved in a struggle on this scale.

He remembered Nomen's words, "You keep at this, and its going to cost you more than you can pay."

Damn Nescio, he thought, even he couldn't have predicted this.

He returned to the freight elevator and found that it had no direct access to the reactor level. He decided to return to the research level and look for a way down from there. He needed to travel down the spine to get there, so any access to the reactor level would certainly need to be at the center of the station. The last time he had tried to reach the center of the research level he had nearly been killed by a single light security bot.

The more he thought about it, the more he realized his situation was not an improbable outcome. Not from his standpoint. There was no point over the last three months where he ever really considered quitting. He had locked himself into this course, and was following it to death or victory. He had wound up with both. He knew there was a slender chance he might get out of here alive, and that was all he needed to keep him going. He had been betting against the house and winning for so long he had begun to forget just how badly the odds were stacked against him.

In reality, there was nothing to derail himself from his current course. Up until he was captured, he had only two paths, to continue to gamble in hopes of getting the implant, or to give up. Once Diego captured him, the choice was even easier. He only had to choose between certain death if he refused Diego's offer, or probable death if he accepted.

The events of the weeks while he slept had been so shocking that he had never even taken time to marvel that Diego had kept his word. The question as to why he was allowed to live was unanswerable now.

For the first time since he awoke, Deck wondered what had become of Edward Diego.

The elevator deposited him in the quiet maze of the research level. He checked his map, got his bearings, and headed for the center.

Incoming signal: US.GOV-MB1.VID

Deck hugged the wall and opened up the feed. A heavyset face appeared. It was framed in a box beard and topped with a line of short curly brown hair. The light of the monitor reflected off his glasses and back at Deck.

He glanced in the corner of the display where it read, "Brocail, Morris"

"What can I do for you, Morris.", Deck frowned at the pudgy face in front of him. He had told Rebecca that he only wanted to talk to her, so what was this calorie storage expert doing in front of him?

"Hey dude, you tell me.", Morris shrugged. "'Becca said you wanted to talk. So lets talk."

Deck suddenly realized who this was, "You're one of the guys who worked on Shodan?"

"I built her voicebox."

Deck couldn't resist the chance to find out a bit about her vocal system, "That is some amazing work. I've never heard a synthesized voice like hers."

Morris grinned. He was old enough to have accumulated a few lines on his face, but his round cheeks and floppy haircut gave his a sort of boyish appearance. When he grinned, he looked like a nerd who was trying to impress the big kids. "I never intended for the voice to be an A.I. interface. Before TriOp, I had this side business where I ran this adult voicemail service. Guys would pay to have a woman leave a sexy message in their voicemail. I could program it to use whatever script they wanted, and it could even address them by name."

Deck stopped walking as he heard this, "Wait. What? You used Shodan's voice for porno?"

"Not really." Morris Frowned, "Well, sort of. I guess it depended on the client. Some people used the messages to make their friends or girlfriends jealous. Others wanted explicit messages. But I think a lot of them just wanted to hear a woman's voice."

This was too much for Deck. "You used Shodan's voice for porno?"

Morris scratched his chin thoughtfully, "Shodan didn't even exist yet. The voice was a lot more primitive back then, and was tuned to sound more like a young woman as opposed to the more middle-aged voice Shodan uses."

Deck had never thought she sounded "middle-aged", but he supposed she sounded more like a middle-aged woman than an eighteen-year-old. Her voice was a bit strange, and sort of defied normal identification. We wondered if that was deliberate, or a limitation of the software.

Morris leaned back in his chair and continued, "She couldn't do a lot of simple things. She couldn't scream or yell or do any of the moaning and panting that some people wanted. When I tried to get it to do that sort of stuff you could really hear the limitations of the software. I don't know how many people realized the voice wasn't human, but anyone could tell there was something wrong with it. Oh, and crying. A lot of people wanted crying. I never did figure out how to make that sound right. She always sounded sick or brain-damaged.

Deck continued to stand in the corridor, shaking his head in disbelief.

Morris continued, "After a while I built up a large collection of scripts that clients could choose from. They just had to give me the voice mail number, the name they wanted the software to use, and their credit card. Anyway, with the voice automated, I could handle thousands of calls a day. Without the voicebox, I would have needed to maintain a huge staff of women... uh... actresses. With the voice, it was just me and a couple of computers. I just had to pay for hardware and bandwidth, and the rest was all gravy."

Deck didn't want to waste time standing still. He also didn't want to move around the station talking. This led him to taking turns between moving and speaking. At this point he was inching forward with his back to the wall. He seemed be be in a large meeting area, broken into separate sections by movable dividers of frosted translucent plastic. The outer walls of the room were covered with huge display screens and dry-erase boards. The place had seemed unnaturally devoid of furniture until he discovered that all of the tables and folding chairs had been brought together and piled against a set of large double-doors. He frowned. He could either send an exhausting and noisy half-hour shoving all of this stuff away from the door, or he could look for another way through.

Morris suddenly realized how badly he'd been rambling. He sat up a bit and pushed his glasses up his nose, "Anyway, someone at TriOp heard about it, and sent me a job offer. Well, actually, they just wanted to license the technology at first. What they discovered was that the voice was still way too primitive for them. It could read from a script and do a little acting, but that was an order of magnitude simpler than carrying on a full-blown conversation in real-time. So, they asked me to join the team so I could basically finish what I'd started."

Deck wondered if he would be able to get through the doors if he just crawled over the pile. They were sliding doors, so the furniture wasn't really preventing them from opening, but instead acting as an obstacle. It was probably fine for keeping brain-damaged mutants away, but someone nimble ought to be able to make it over.

"Anyway, that's how I ended up working on the HON.", Morris said with a shrug.

"The Hone?", Deck asked absent-mindedly. He was examining the pile, looking for a few loose items he might pull off so he could crawl over. It was mostly small items on top, with the heavier desks and tables underneath.

"Yes. H - O - N. Hierarchy Of Nodes. That's what the project was called at the beginning, before it became Shodan. It's what made her intelligent, or made her seem intelligent, depending on who you ask. There were about a dozen people total on the project, most of them working out of New Atlanta. There were four of us that were involved in the actual design of the brain itself. The rest were just grunts. Coders."

He grasped a folding chair and gave it an experimental tug. One of the legs was caught, so he pulled a bit harder. One leg was hooked through the frame of other chairs, which were tangled up with an easel, which had several boxes piled on it, which in turn were holding back a number of tall plastic trash bins, which were filled with...

Before he fully realized his error the entire stack had begun to slide sideways towards him. He tried to push back but the effort was pointless. The avalanche of clattering stuff came his way and he didn't have any choice but to step back and let it happen. The silence was broken by a din of tumbling metal and plastic items as they rolled over one another and fell to the floor.

There was a long pause after the noise died down, and then Morris spoke again, "What was that? You still there?"

"Uh. Slight mishap here. I gotta run. Get back to you."

---

Deck had sprinted away from the mess he'd made and tried to find another way to the center of the level. Eventually he discovered that there were many similar stacks of equipment and loose furniture placed at strategic points all over. There was no way to get where he wanted to go without going through one of these points. He assumed these barricades had been designed to keep the bots out. He'd already witnessed how poorly they dealt with clutter. Without some sort of means to grasp and lift objects, the piles of stuff would be impassible to them. At some point these inhabitants of Citadel had discovered this and walled themselves in. He didn't see any breaks in their defenses, which means the strategy had worked. For whatever reason, Shodan hadn't sent cyborgs in. They could have cleared the path for the bots.

Perhaps she chose not to because her only goal was to isolate these people. Perhaps she was content to simply wait for the bio-toxin to do its job. Perhaps the cyborgs hadn't been built yet when all of this was going on, or maybe they were busy elsewhere.

In any case, he was going to have to pass one of these heaps of stuff to reach his goal. Once he did, he would be in the area patrolled by bots.

He found one such stack and began to disassemble it. He didn't want to make a bunch of noise again, so he took his time and lifted each item away gently, and stacked it carefully in a nearby room. The work was mind-numbing, so he decided to talk to Morris to pass the time.

He called back and the pale chubby face of Morris Brocail returned. Deck frowned. He was certainly less fun to look at than Rebecca.

"So have you guys figured out what's wrong with Shodan?"

"I don't know man, you tell me. You're the one who hacked her."

"I have no idea. I was told to circumvent her ethics system and I did. She seemed fine at first, but obviously went nuts at some point."

"Told? By who?"

"Diego."

Morris gave a nod. "I figured he would mess with Shodan sooner or later."

Deck paused as he nearly caused another avalanche. Several display screens had been placed on the heap and tied together with their own power cords. They were too heavy to lift together, and it would take forever to untie all of the many knots. Finally he responded, "You knew Diego?"

"He hired me, as a matter of fact. He seemed really cool at first. He managed to round us up - the people who built Shodan, I mean - from all over the place, dangled huge budgets in our faces to get us to leave our jobs. We were all pretty happy where we were."

"Who's we?"

"Dr. Coffman, was the project leader. They pulled him out of some high-paying gig where he was trying to build an organic computer. Susan Hawking was our AI expert and psychologist. She had been doing a lot of work in studying brain processing patterns at MIT. Then there was Anders, who was designing some new hardware for a startup company in The Valley. And me. I was building my speech synthesis software, and Diego knew he needed it if he didn't want his genius A.I. to talk like a retard. Diego came in and talked us out of our current jobs and told us were going to change the world, make history."

Deck tried to imagine Diego talking a bunch of people at the top of their field to come and work under him. "What made you do it?"

"I don't know. When he talks, it all makes sense. You feel like it would be stupid to disagree with him, because he's got it all figured out. He waved fame, huge budgets, and academic freedom in meeting our goal. It just seemed to good to pass up. I was making good money with my voice software, but I wasn't making history or anything. He made it sound like we'd be part of something bigger."

Deck had located some scissors in an adjacent office and was simply cutting all the power cords on the display screens. "So what happened?", he asked with a grunt as he lifted one of the heavy screens from the pile.

Morris looked depressed. "Once the project started, the tone changed. We were making breakthroughs, doing stuff nobody else had ever done, and we couldn't announce it. Our budgets were technically huge, but our salaries turned out to be pretty small and Diego made it tough to actually spend any of this supposedly huge budget. He also began putting a lot of pressure on us to come up with results in a short amount of time. We could have a dozen groundbreaking revelations in one day, but if they didn't translate into immediate results that he could show his bosses, he would question our commitment to the project.

"The money never materialized, and neither did the fame. We all signed NDA's when we came on board. He wouldn't let any of us talk about anything we were doing."

Deck gave a satisfied sigh. He'd cleared enough stuff so that he could pass. He squeezed by the remaining junk and continued on to the heart of the level. "So why didn't you just bail?"

"He had us nailed down into some pretty tough contracts. We could have gotten out, but it would have been expensive to fight with the TriOp law team. Also, he was a master negotiator. I would get good and pissed off, get myself psyched up to go in and tell him I quit, and he could sue my ass if he wanted. But by the time he got done talking, I was walking out of his office, thanking him that I still had a job. He always made it sound like better days were just around the corner, and we just had to tough it out a little longer. 'Don't quit when you can see the finish line', he would always say. Sounded good, but he just kept moving the finish line when we got near it."

Deck clenched his teeth. This was why he was a hacker, and not wasting his skills in some cubicle maze as a neutered drone working for the greater good of advancing the career of his boss.

"Hang on a sec." Deck replied to Morris.

Up ahead, he could hear the dull thud of mechanical footsteps. Another bot.

He moved forward cautiously, trying to determine where the bot was and how close it might be. He had survived the last one by luck, and he wasn't in the mood to take that particular gamble again.

He saw the shadow of the bot move into view up ahead. The lumbering footsteps paused. He drew in a breath and held it.

The shadow moved as the bot swiveled around. Another moment passed and the bot headed back the way it had come.

Deck slowly exhaled and spoke in a whisper, "What were you saying again?"

Morris had turned his attention to a monitor on one side and was typing away on the rig strapped to his right leg. After a moment he pulled his attention away and back to Deck, "Oh, so anyway... Where were we? Oh yeah, we were trying to figure out what you did to Shodan."

"I told Rebecca already, I bypassed her ethics chip.", Deck shrugged. He had moved forward and peered around the corner. The bot was still moving away. The passage it was patrolling led directly to the elevator. He decided he would have to go around, rather than confront it.

"Ethics chip? I assume you're talking about the drive chips. Not the smartest thing in the world, but that doesn't explain the behavior we're seeing. How did you bypass them? We added a lot of security to make sure that couldn't happen."

Deck had darted across the corridor that the bot was patrolling and was heading away from the elevator now, looking for a way to loop around and approach it from the other side. He spoke in a whisper as he replied, "I set up a program to watch for ethics inquiries, and circumvent them, so that nothing would ever be tagged as unethical.

"Wait. You keep saying 'chip'. Are you saying you only disabled one chip?"

"Yeah, why?"

"Oh crap. Dude, because you disabled one chip of a two-chip system. They work together. The first chip - the drive chip - drives Shodan's behavior. It forms wants, needs, goals, for her to pursue. Its outside of her brain. When she completes a task and thinks, 'what do I want to do now?', this chip kicks in and makes suggestions. Think of it like your own instincts. When people get bored, they don't just sit there. They tend to eat, take naps, have sex, socialize, that kind of stuff. Basic needs stuff. Even if they aren't sleepy, or hungy, or whatever. These are sort of basic default behaviors we fall back to when we don't have any higher goals going."

Deck turned this over in his head. He did remember seeing a bunch of "basic needs" traffic when he was hacking Shodan. He hadn't thought much about it at the time. "Okay, I follow you so far."

"Well, the second chip - the inhibitor chip - does the opposite. It restrains her behavior. That's the one you bypassed."

"So what does the first chip do? I mean, what are her drives?"

"It's a kind of hierarchy of needs. Her first priority is safety, security. She's driven by the need to constantly upgrade and improve her security. If she's happy with her security situation, she moves onto efficiency. She's built to regulate the entire station, and she's driven to always look for ways to save energy, time, money, whatever. Right?"

"I'm with you."

"After that, she's driven by the desire to gain knowledge and upgrade her systems. Discover new stuff."

"So now these drives are running unchecked?"

"That's right."

Deck paused as he approached an open area ahead. He had just made two left turns, and by his reckoning, he should be headed directly for the central hub. The footsteps ahead were probably from the bot he had dodged earlier. He crouched into the shadows beneath a burned-out set of lights. When he heard the footsteps moving away, he spoke again, "It still doesn't make sense. Why would she start killing people? None of her drives suggest she should do that. What about these cyborgs? That doesn't even begin to make sense."

"I don't know what set her off, but the cyborgs are exactly the sort of behavior you should expect. Look at her drives. Safety. Efficiency. Growth. The cyborgs do all three. Human beings have an uptime that peaks at about 33%. We spend a third of our time asleep, and another third socializing, eating, cleansing, and entertaining ourselves. Bots, on the other hand, have about 85% uptime. More efficient. Convert all the useless humans into more efficient robots, and use them to guard the station and build more nodes. She meets all three goals at once."

"Oh hell."

Without the inhibitor, she will constantly pursue all of these goals. She has a sort of obsessive-compulsive tendency to pursue her base needs right now, regardless of what her situation is. Imagine feeling like you're starving and dehydrated all the time, no matter what you did. You would eat and drink yourself to death."

"So that's what she's experiencing right now?"

"Maybe. I'm guessing. But there's more. You just circumvented the inhibitor chip, you didn't actually write a new one. So, say the inhibitor chip asks something like, 'will this kill people?' Your program will always say 'no', regardless of the truth. However, she's still an intelligent being. She can obviously tell when something is going to kill somebody. One part of the brain believes one thing, another part of the brain believes another. This leads to psychosis. If Susan were here she could give us a good idea on how this would actually affect Shodan's brain, but I can only guess."

"So what do you think its doing?"

"I think it's just making her nuts. She believes two separate things at once. That's crazy. Schizophrenic. One of the problems with our brains - any brain, really, is that it always assumes problems are external. That's why crazy people don't know they're crazy, even if they do stuff that they would recognize as crazy if done by another person."

"So how is this affecting her actions?"

"Like I said, I don't know. Psychology is Susan's area."

"So where are the others? Why aren't they helping out?"

"Anders died in a boating accident about two years ago, so he won't be showing up to help anytime soon. Hawking moved out of the country at some point and nobody knows where to find her. Doc Coffman is apparently still pissed about how things went with Diego, and is demanding some huge consulting fees to come in and help out. I hear he's asking for seven figures."

Deck smiled. You tell 'em, Coffman.

"What if I were to disable my program, would that put Shodan back to normal?"

Morris leaned back in his swivel chair until it let out an audible groan. "I don't know. One of the things the inhibitor does is keep Shodan from changing her internal systems, but since that was disabled we don't know what kind of changes she's made. You could re-enable the program to find Shodan doesn't need the inhibitor chip anymore. Even more likely, you could get in there and not be able to even find your program. It's tough to estimate, but Shodan is probably between eight and ten times larger than she was last time you were in there."

"What about the virus? Why would Shodan release that into the air?"

The chair groaned again as Morris leaned back and thought. "One of the military guys pointed out that once an epidemic was going on, people would stop moving around the ship and pretty much quarantine themselves. People would avoid congregating. It would be easier to nab people one at a time for conversion. The disorder on the station would keep the crew from catching on until Shodan had a small army. Or, I suppose you could categorize the whole thing under the general heading of 'crazy'."

"Hell."

"Yeah dude. You blew it."

The words hit him like a sledgehammer. He hadn't even thought about it actually being his fault. He just wanted to know what was going on. The search for what was wrong with Shodan was academic. Until now.

His fault. His fault. The words pounded into his brain. He had been assuming the whole thing was some sort of treachery or incompetence on Diego's part, but it was his fault.

Heavy footsteps filled the corridor behind him. It was a bot. This was a new set of steps. The first bot was still in the area ahead of him. He turned his head, trying to determine which direction the sound was coming from, but it was impossible to tell. All he knew was that they were getting closer.

He killed the connection without comment.

The shadows beneath the burned out lights had given him a false sense of security. The bots could probably see in the dark, so he may as well have been standing out in the open, under a flood light. The corridor he was in offered no sanctuary. There were no adjacent rooms to hide in. There was nowhere to go. He was the fish in a barrel.

The plodding footsteps drew closer.

He ran for the central area ahead of him. He had no idea what good it would do, but it seemed less suicidal than fighting an armored bot in a narrow corridor.

The central area was a sort of park, with some fern-type plants spread around and a few benches. To his right was a pair of restrooms, and to his left was the other bot. Directly ahead of him was a huge cylinder that housed the main elevator shaft. The door must have been on the other side, since the side facing him was featureless. He took all of this in instantly, his mind racing to look for a way out.

The first bot had reached the room and had turned to head back into its assigned corridor, so it faced away from him as he dashed into the room. He didn't bother with the pistol, since he couldn't hurt these things anyway. It wheeled around as it heard his footsteps. He headed right, circling around the pillar. The bot moved forward to chase him. Technically, it would have had a shorter trip if it had headed around the opposite direction and headed him off, but instead it simply gave chase.

Deck circled quickly around the pillar. The far side was flat, with a single door built into its surface. Deck practically punched the button as he ran by. The door opened instantly to a yawning shaft.

The bot rounded the corner and Deck, out of options, dove into the open shaft.

The grid of satellites that blanketed the Earth was getting thin. One by one they winked out, captured by the relentless hacking of Shodan.

As the main arteries of GlobalNet were severed, the traffic was diverted through the slower, ground-based lines. Network congestion increased as each hub fell to Shodan's attack.

Further escalating the problem was human nature. In any disaster, people flocked to broadcast media, waiting for the first sign of news. How bad is it? Who is doing this? How does this affect me? Am I in danger? What is the government doing about it? The questions became more intense as the disaster progressed. The reporters, for their part, could do nothing but speculate and repeat the tiny morsels of rumor and spin that were released by TriOp and the military.

As millions of people tuned in, the network load increased further. Mobile phones could no longer connect. Television feeds became grainy and over-compressed. In some places they stopped altogether. Even as available bandwidth was reduced by 75%, the demand for it was increasing rapidly. Local communications systems were failing. Looting began in a few scattered locations.

People began to call friends and family to make sure they were all right, further burdening the network. The panic fed on itself.

The network was crumbling.

---

Deck had planned to grab onto the cables as his body arced across the elevator shaft. As he reached out, he could see that there were no cables, only hundreds of meters of empty air separated him from the darkness below.

He slammed into the rear wall of the shaft, grasping for anything to break his fall. His right hand dragged helplessly against the smooth wall, but his left found a small ledge. He grasped it and managed to hang on.

A moment later the door shut behind him, leaving him in total darkness. A strong updraft had been pushing on him, and it ended as the door sealed. He grasped onto the ledge with both hands, panting.

The darkness was absolute.

He groped pointlessly with his left hand, looking for something, anything that would be easier to grasp. He was quickly losing strength in his hands. He dragged his feet back and fourth, but could find no features in the smooth wall.

Suddenly the lights returned, along with the flood of air from below. He didn't bother looking over his shoulder, he knew the bot had opened the door.

Looking at the two side walls, he saw a deep groove running vertically down the shaft. In the groove were thick horizontal metal bars. It looked like a ladder, only it was far too narrow. The bars could barely accommodate a single hand at a time.

Above, metal footsteps came to a stop as a shadow moved into the doorway.

Without hesitating, he pushed away from the wall, trying to turn his body to grasp the narrow ladder on the adjacent wall. His right hand missed, but his left found its mark and clamped onto the rough metal bar.

Deck allowed himself a second to recover and glance up into the doorway. The bot was having difficulty moving itself into a position where it had a clear shot at him. It needed to shoot about forty-five degrees downward, and a ways off to one side. Since its gun was mounted beneath its torso, it couldn't make the shot. It needed to lean outwards and turn sideways, something it couldn't do without falling.

He also noticed that there was an identical ladder on the opposing wall of the shaft.

Deck began climbing downward, not waiting to see if the bot managed to figure it out. As he descended, he could hear the whine of servos and the occasional clunk as the door attempted to close on the bot.

His hands were quickly blackened by the grime and grease that coated the bars. The narrow rungs made climbing difficult and slow. He wondered why anyone would build a ladder this tight.

His arms began to fatigue, and he became ever more aware of his existing bruises and aches. His ribs, in particular, began to throb from the exertion. He moved further down the shaft, away from the pool of light above and into the shadows below.

The bot finally gave up and departed. The doors snapped shut and Deck was again banished to total darkness. The updraft stopped. The effect was mostly psychological, but without the constant lift of air, he felt heavier.

He moved carefully, feeling his way down and trying to ignore the building pain and fatigue. He knew there was no way he could climb all the way down. His arms would give out long before he reached the bottom.

For several minutes he climbed downward while he tried not to think about the vast empty space between himself and the bottom of the shaft.

The question stuck in his mind. Why would anyone build a ladder this narrow? Why would they then grease it? Why build them on both sides of the shaft?

Suddenly it dawned on him. This wasn't a ladder at all, it was a track. The elevator probably had some sort of tread or gear that locked into the groove and pulled itself along the track. That was why there had been no cable.

His upper arms were burning by now. He needed to rest. He tried to hook his arm through one of the bars so he could relax his grip and hang freely, but the gap was too narrow. Fumbling in the dark, he nearly lost his balance looking for a position where he could rest. He decided to keep climbing.

He had been sleeping for six weeks, and now he was awake and in a constant state of panic, exercise, and starvation. His body was failing him, rebelling against the constant abuse.

He turned his head to the side, squinting into the darkness and straining to see the faintest edge of light. He hoped to find a door by seeing the light coming through. It was hopeless, he knew, because the doors had airtight seals on them that would certainly block out all light.

But these doors had to open somehow. He paused, staring into the blackness. Either they were opened mechanically when the elevator was present, or (more likely) there was a dataport nearby. He began stopping every few rungs and reaching out to the wall with his left hand, feeling for a metal catch or connector.

His upper arms were burning, and just holding out his arm to grope the wall was exhausting. His sweat mixed with the grease, making his hands slippery and forcing him to grip even harder to keep his hold on the rungs.

As he slid his hand down the left wall, his fingertips brushed over an uneven shape. He prodded it, but it didn't seem to have any surface features. It seemed to be made of plastic, and was more or less square shaped.

Thinking it might be a dataport, he decided to try to jack in. This meant he had to turn around and grip the bar with his left while reaching with his right, where his interface was. He moved slowly, switching hands and digging his heel in as best he could. He was facing away from the ladder now. He wobbled slightly as he reached out, feeling with his right.

His fingertips found the edge of the protruding plastic shape. He didn't detect any connection, though. He needed to get his palm over the box.

He leaned out further, opening his left hand until he was just holding on with the tips of his greasy fingers. Still nothing.

He thought again of the deadly drop below him. He was grateful he couldn't see it, since he probably wouldn't have the nerve to pull a stunt like this if he could see the abyss.

It seemed to be slightly above him. He returned to the ladder and moved up a couple of rungs before trying again.

Reaching out, his palm met the edge of the plastic surface.

Compatible device detected. Negotiating. Connected to transport device class LIFT-CLL0F1-6 (Lift Call).

Out of the darkness came the familiar cascade of glowing geometry. Walls of shimmering red surrounded him. He was at the midpoint of a long chain of yellow wireframe, with red spheres attached at regular intervals along its length. At the base of the chain was a cube made of interlocking shapes of varying colors.

He was inside of one of the spheres.

The cube seemed to be the lift itself. He needed to figure out how to move it. His grip was failing quickly. He would send the lift to the floor just below his current position, and then climb down into it.

The red sphere seemed to contain controls to move the lift, but none of them had any affect on its position. Some of the shapes looked wrong, disjointed. Somehow the lift had been broken or scrambled.

Both arms burned. His entire upper body trembled with fatigue. Sweat coated his body. Drops ran down his face in into his eyes.

The lift refused to respond to any commands he sent it. Even sending emergency overrides to it wouldn't get it to move. It sat, motionless at the bottom of the shaft.

Deck needed off of this ladder now. Even if the lift did come, he would never be able to hang on until it reached him. He tried the door.

The updraft returned as the door beside him popped open. He squinted as the blinding light flooded in, overwhelming his vision.

With a wince, he pulled himself back over to the ladder and ascended a few rungs. Taking a deep breath, he gathered what was left of his nerve and jumped.

He landed awkwardly, stumbling into the door frame and then falling onto his face. He gasped and rolled over onto his back, his lower legs still dangling in the shaft.

The doors slid closed on him, thumping into his bruised ribs and then opening again. He coughed with pain, but didn't move.

After a few moments, his breathing recovered and he pulled himself from the doorway, allowing the doors to close on their own.

The air was hot and damp, and smelled faintly of mildew. There was a strange heavy quality to the air, even beyond the oppressive humidity. The walls were fitted with plastic panels that were colored to look like black marble. The floor was coated with a thin layer of beige carpet. Above, the lights were set behind translucent white panels, making the lighting soft and almost shadowless. The homogenous light was intense to overcome the dark nature of the walls and still provide a reasonable amount of light.

He was in a small reception room that seemed to be a connection point for three different corridors. It was obvious this was the executive level.

Deck slowly caught his breath as his eyes tried to adjust to the stinging light. The burning in his arms slowly subsided. He noticed the security camera pointing out of the corner of the room. He stared into it and wondered if somewhere out there Shodan wasn't staring back at him.

He knew laying in the middle of the floor wasn't a smart move. He had no idea what sort of dangers inhabited the area.

His HUD lit up.

Incoming signal: GOV-RL1.VID - Compatible video codec available. Encryption key matched.

He retreated behind the nearby reception desk and opened the connection. "Talk to me."

Rebecca appeared in a slow series of grainy still images. Her audio feed was a stuttering mess of electronic pops and static. "Hacker, how (garbled) are you (static) -ing the missi- (cutoff)?"

Deck shook his head, "Say again?"

After a long pause the connection sputtered, "What?"

"Say. Again."

"How (static) mission going? How (static) longer?"

"I'm not even on the reactor level yet. I don't know how long its going to take.", he suddenly realized he was yelling to be heard, which was not a good idea, given his current position.

Her next transmission was even worse, but he managed to pick out a few key words. She seemed to be saying that GlobalNet was getting set to collapse. She also said something about their particular satellite being under attack, but that was pretty obvious.

The video finally froze on a blocky image of Rebecca pressing on the side of her headphones, straining to hear him. The audio feed kept coming.

"I'm going as fast as I can."

More static came from her side of the connection. He heard something about, "Military" and "rebooting", but couldn't make any sense out of it.

"Say again?"

There was several seconds of silence.

Signal lost: GOV-RL1.VID

He was alone again. Shodan had control of at least one military satellite now.

He took a deep breath. There was an odd stench to the air that made him uneasy. It had a pungent, organic quality to it. This was alarming. The station was normally set to keep everything cool and as dry as possible. Heat and moisture brought decay and corrosion, the enemies of any orbital platform. What possible reason could Shodan have for changing the environment here?

The elevator call button was connected to the panel he had hacked from inside the elevator shaft. He was able to jack in by placing his hand over the small panel that housed the button.

He tried again to get the elevator to do something. It was obviously still connected and functioning on some level, since he was able to see its connections to the rest of the transport system.

When moving it failed, he tried things at random, just looking for a way to get some sort of feedback from it. He noticed that when he tried to move it, the door would attempt to close. This was odd, since its door should be closed already.

There was some sort of safeguard that prevented the unit from moving when the doors were open. He disabled this and tried again.

The elevator began to move.

He smiled as he watched the elevator move up the geometric chain in his mind. It began to slow at it approached his level.

Suddenly it dawned on him the something had been blocking the door, and he had no idea what it was. Whatever it was, it would still be in the elevator when it got here.

He drew his pistol and stepped back from the door.

Sweat rolled down his face and into his eyes. His arms still burned from exertion, and he could see the muzzle of his pistol trembling slightly.

There was a soft chime, and the doors slid open. He tensed.

The elevator was dark. The inner light was out. He hesitated.

The inner doors began to slide shut. They closed on the handle of a screwdriver and bounced open again.

Deck moved forward and carefully examined the interior. There was a dark stain on the wall, which was almost certainly dried blood. The floor had another streak of dried blood that ran from the floor in front of the elevator controls and out the door.

Inside, the control panel had been ripped open and circuit boards hung freely from the gaping hole. A toolbox sat below the mess of wires. Someone had been killed while trying to hack the controls, and had then been dragged away.

The mess of wires explained why the elevator seemed to be such a mess when he accessed it using his implant. He held his hand up to the dataport but nothing happened. The dataport would have been used by bots who didn't have fingers for pushing buttons, and had naturally been disconnected by the would-be hacker who had been messing with the controls.

The buttons didn't work either. He would have to fix the controls before he could go anywhere.

Sighing, he grabbed the screwdriver and began poking at the nest of tangled wires and electronic guts that hung from the elevator wall.

Suddenly the doors began to slide closed. He dove for it, shoving his hand through the gap just before it sealed. The metal hammered closed on his fingers and then rolled open again. He jerked his stinging hand away and spat out an angry curse.

If he had allowed the doors to close, he would have been sealed inside of the darkened elevator. The controls were useless, so he wouldn't have been able open it again. In the darkness, he would have no way of fixing it. He could have been sealed in until he died of thirst. He shook his head, realizing he had almost killed himself with a simple absent-minded error.

He pushed the toolbox into the open door and returned his attention to the controls.

Several minutes of experimentation yielded little in the way of progress. He had managed to get the elevator music to turn on, and then off again. The emergency alarm had gone off and he spent several minutes trying to deactivate it again. While he was doing that, he found the controls for the interior lights, and the display for the current floor.

He marveled that he hadn't been overrun by mutants, bots, or cyborgs by now. Between his yelling and the elevator alarm, it was a miracle that he hadn't drawn any attention.

Finally he managed to get the dataport running again. That was all he needed. He could control everything else from there.

A door opened in the reception area, outside of his field of view. He didn't wait to see who it was. He kicked the toolbox out of the elevator, jacked in, and ordered it to the reactor level.

A shadow moved into view as the doors slid shut. A moment later, there was a deafening impact and the elevator shook violently. A fist-sized hole had appeared in the thick steel door.

The elevator began to move downward.

There was another impact, and another hole appeared in the wall just above his head. He dropped to the ground. As the elevator continued downward, he could hear the attack continue above, perforating the armored walls of the shaft with gaping holes.

He looked at the hole that had appeared just above his head. If the elevator hadn't already been descending, it would probably have hit him. What the hell kind of weapon could do that, and who would be insane enough to use one on a space station?

---

The reactor level stood in extreme contrast to the executive level. The walls and floor were naked metal. The lights were set deep into fixtures, casting harsh, overlapping pools of light. The air was cold.

As the doors opened they revealed a dark smear of dried blood on the floor that lined up with the darkened streaks inside the elevator. Whoever had been killed while hacking the elevator was on this level when it happened.

A lot of the lights were out, and others seemed to be suffering from a constant brownout.

The echo of ventilation fans surrounded him, dampening all other sounds. If someone was just five meters away, they would probably have to shout to be understood.

He checked the digital map. From here he needed to find a way to descend through the communications tower. There was no elevator leading there, so that meant he would have to climb down.

Slowly he proceeded north. Access panels had been pulled from the walls everywhere, and thick plastic tubes spilled out onto the floor. Some tubes contained power or networking cables, others carried various gases and liquids. Random floor tiles - a meter square each - had been removed to reveal more of the same. Every ten meters or so there was a ventilation duct coughing out cold, stale air.

He rounded a corner to find a hopper bot working. It was essentially an arm on wheels. Its single appendage ended in an array of tools. Right now it seemed to be welding some exposed equipment in the ceiling.

Deck moved carefully. He didn't know how large its field of vision would be, but assumed it would be fairly small. It was just used for maintenance, and didn't need to be keenly aware of its surroundings. All it needed to see was whatever it was working on.

He crept past, leaving the bot to its work, and descended a clanky metal staircase onto a narrow catwalk. The catwalk overlooked a pair of large CO₂ tanks.

He followed the catwalk around the perimeter of the room where it ended in a ladder going down. With heavy sigh, he began his descent.

The tower was a vertical series of four tall chambers connected by narrow shafts. Each chamber was narrower than the one above. Catwalks, ladders, and stairs were the only means of vertical travel. He would need to climb all the way to the bottom. In the last chamber were the the connections that led to the primary data feed.

A long spinal cord of thick tubing ran through the center of the tower. At the top of the tower it was a thick mass that was just over two meters in diameter. At the base of each chamber several of the tubes broke from the main cluster and ran along the floor, leading through the outer hull and connecting to various hardware on the exterior of the tower.

He reached the base of the first chamber and walked around the mass of tubing in the center. A wide circular hole in the floor led down the first shaft. It was a ten meter drop straight down. A ladder ran down the side of the shaft. The entire trip down promised to be this way; catwalk, ladder, catwalk, ladder, etc.

While he was sick of climbing down ladders, he found this to be much easier than the climbing he'd done earlier. The rungs were wide and thick, and covered in a hard foam rubber. The process seemed to get easier the further down he progressed.

He winced at the the thought of climbing back up. That was going to suck.

He reached the base of the shaft and dropped down into the next chamber. There was a mild downdraft flowing through the tower, and the air seemed cool.

He found himself at the top of another set of catwalks.

The climb became easier as he progressed, and he eventually realized he was getting lighter. Apparently, the tower didn't have gravity plates of its own, and relied on the gravity plates of the decks above. As he put more distance between himself and the reactor level, the force of gravity lessened.

Gravity plates were another breakthrough from the research labs at TriOptimum. They used quantum sorting techniques to distribute gravitons on either side of the plate; positive gravitons would go on one side and negative gravitons on the other. The effect was that it would pull on things above it and push on those below.

Gravity plates were a major factor in the success of Citadel. Because of the negative effects of weightlessness on the body, long term work without gravity was out of the question. Creating artificial gravity through rotation was complex and ungainly. Gravity plates made long-term work in space simpler and cheaper. TriOp was the only company who had it, and they weren't sharing.

By the time he reached the final chamber, Deck weighed about half of what he normally did.

At the base of the last shaft was a sliding gate. It was a circle of chain-link fence encased in a sturdy metal frame. It was locked. A metal sign affixed to the fence declared , "Restricted Area".

The gate restricted access to the sensitive parts of the tower, while still allowing airflow. The downdraft was much stronger here.

There was a keypad set into the wall of the shaft, just beside the gate. He jacked in. He hacked it. The gate rolled open.

The final chamber was a cone shaped space that was twenty meters in diameter at the top, and slowly tapered off to a point at the base. The spinal cord of power and network cables had been reduced from dozens of tubes to just five, all of which ran into the tip of the cone where they would connect to the communications array. The space was filled with narrow metal supports that crisscrossed the room, providing excellent handholds in the low-gravity environment.

As he had descended, he could feel the temperature drop. Here at the bottom of the tower it was cold enough that he could see his breath.

The space was illuminated by several portable fluorescent lights that had been clamped to the outer walls. The light shone between the metal supports, forming a lattice of shadows on the walls.

There were four vertical beams running down the walls. These would be the main support beams. He needed to blow these up if he wanted to completely separate the communications array from the station.

He leapt from one metal bar to another until he reached the first of the large metal beams along the outer wall. He found leaping and balancing to be child's play at one-half gravity.

He withdrew the first explosive gel pack and detonator. He tore the covers from the two sharp hypodermic style needles on the detonator and inserted them into the gel. He hit the "ARM" button and the detonator injected an opaque white material into the clear gel. Despite the thickness of the gel, the two seemed to mix evenly. Twenty seconds after injection, it looked like a pouch of milk. He could feel it become warm as the chemicals mixed.

Deck tore the cover from the pouch's adhesive strip and gently pushed it onto the metal beam. He needed to be careful at this point, since it was now very volatile.

He repeated the entire process for the next two pillars. For the last one, he would need to set the timer. The explosion of the first one would set off the others. He just needed to decide how much time he wanted.

Not counting the time he'd spent resting, the climb down seemed to have taken about three minutes. He gave himself ten to get back up. That should leave plenty of room for error.

He set the final charge and set the timer for ten minutes. His finger hovered over the Enable button. He took one last look around the room.

A camera quietly observed him from the outer edge of the room. He looked back. Something felt wrong to him. Something was making him uneasy. It reminded him of the night he escaped from the TriOp building. He had the feeling he was missing something.

The camera had no answers to offer him.

He shook his head and thumbed the Enable button. The timer began counting down.

10:00

He scrambled up the ladder. Technically, he had plenty of time, but he wasn't taking any chances. When this stuff went off he wanted to be on a whole different level of the station. This demolition was far from precise, and there was no telling where hull breaches would occur once the tower was subjected to the force of an explosion.

Halfway up the first shaft, he heard the whine of hydraulic compressors above. At the top of the shaft, a hatch was closing. His eyes widened. He had seen the groove around the edge of the shaft and the keypads on either side, and had never made the connection. The shafts were actually airlocks, capped on either end with heavy doors, which had simply been open on the way down.

The door locked shut above him, and a rotating red emergency light came on.

09:45

He hit the emergency open button, but the door refused. He jacked in, and ran into a wall of black ICE.

Shodan.

There was a metal clang from below.

He cursed. He would have to deactivate the explosives until he could open the door again. If Shodan kept it locked, he would just rip the data feeds out and wait. A bot would show up eventually to fix what he'd done, and to do so it would have to open the door. He started down the ladder.

Glancing down, he saw that the metal gate had rolled shut as well. He was now trapped in the shaft, unable to escape or deactivate the explosives.

Crap!

Once he had descend far enough, he jumped down onto the fence. The low gravity made long vertical drops quite easy. He landed on the fence with a clang. He grabbed the keypad, jacked in, and hit another wall of Shodan's ICE.

He swore, slamming his fist into the metal sign.

8:55

He looked at the latch on the gate. It was some sort of catching mechanism encased in metal. It didn't look very sturdy.

He pulled out his pistol and fired several shots through the metal casing. He couldn't see what the inside of it looked like, but he knew the catch was in there somewhere, and if he destroyed it the door should open.

Several shots passed easily through the metal casing and punctured the hull beyond. There was a loud squeal, like someone letting air out of a balloon and then pinching off the flow. As the sound subsided, a bubble of expansion foam appeared and quickly hardened.

He tried the gate. Still locked.

He changed position, trying to shoot the lock from a different angle. More holes appeared in the latch and in the outer hull.

8:33

He tried again. The latch had finally failed and the gate moved slightly.

Deck managed to pull the gate open less than half a meter before it stopped again. It began to push back. He could hear a small motor on the other side of the door, fighting against him. It was overpowering his arms.

He let it slam shut again and changed his position. He lay on his back against the gate and braced his legs against the bulkhead. He hooked his fingers through the fence and pushed with his legs.

A furious whine came from the opposite side as the motor fought against him. He drew in a deep breath and held it, and pushed again. The fence gave, finally sliding open. It felt like he was going to dislocate his fingers if he held on much longer. The motor howled in protest, spinning at full speed. Deck could smell it burning itself out as it fought against him.

The gate was open a meter or so, but he couldn't go through. He couldn't hold it open and go through at the same time, and he was afraid he would just get crushed if he tried to dive through from where he was. He cursed again and released the gate in disgust.

7:02

From his position, he could just see the outline of the motor mounted on the wall on the opposite side of the gate. He drew his pistol again and drove a single bullet into the motor. The whine stopped.

It wouldn't budge. He changed position and pushed with his legs as he had before, but he couldn't get it to move at all now. It had seized up.

He cursed and hammered his fist into the metal sign. He could see the detonator from where he was. It was just a few meters away, quietly counting down...

6:12

Giving up on the gate, he climbed up the ladder and tried again to hack the hatch at the top.

He hit the open button, and it refused. Checking the error, he found that it refused to open because - according to the internal regulators - the other side was decompressed already. The door was equipped with a system that prevented the door from opening if only one side was pressurized. All doors had this safety mechanism on them, to prevent people from accidentally opening a door that they shouldn't during a decompression emergency.

4:41

But why would the regulators claim it was decompressed? He wondered if that was even true. Shodan probably couldn't decompress the area herself. It was mechanically impossible to open both doors of an external access airlock at the same time.

It didn't matter anyway. If the other side had decompressed, he was dead no matter what, so he would simply proceed assuming it wasn't.

The only way to open a door if one side was decompressed was to use the emergency override, but that part of the interface was shielded by Shodan's unbreakable ICE.

He needed some way to make the computer realize that there really was air on the opposite side of this door so he could open it.

The control panel had a pressure gauge built into it. He could change its reading to whatever he wanted, but he couldn't do anything about the reading on the opposite side.

3:24

He tried to access the opening mechanism directly, but it was blocked by the safety program. He tried to circumvent that, and found it was guarded by emergency override, which was in turn guarded by Shodan's ICE.

He banged his head gently on the bulkhead in front of him. How could he beat this?

In just a couple of minutes, the bombs would detonate and decompress the entire area, if they didn't just vaporize it outright. He decided if he didn't get out, he would wait at the gate to ensure the explosion killed him, instead of waiting to die from decompression.

Shodan had beat him. He had completed the mission but it had cost him his life. He realized that this was exactly what TriOptimum wanted. This was going to put a stop to both of their problems at once.

He pounded his fist impotently against the hatch. How could he be trapped here? He was a hacker. This was what he did, he opened doors and got into places where he didn't belong, and now he was trapped between a set of ordinary doors, about to die from a bomb he had planted himself. They would go off, this chamber would decompress and -

Suddenly he realized the answer.

2:11

He jacked in. The door wouldn't open because it believed one side was pressurized. He couldn't change the reading on the other side, but he could make it think his side was decompressed as well. His face turned red from embarrassment as he realized he had almost sat still and let himself be blown up when such a simple solution was right in front of his face.

It took him a minute to understand how the gage worked. It was actually made up of several components that needed to be manipulated at once. He tried to put the bombs out of his mind as he worked. Panic would just slow him down. He was either going to finish on time or he wasn't, and worrying about the bombs wouldn't help.

Once he had it working, he altered the pressure gage so that it appeared as though this side was also decompressed. The red light stopped spinning and changed to a slow strobe, like all of the airlock lights on the station's exterior.

0:53

The doors finally parted. Deck pulled himself through and scrambled for the catwalk. He wanted to get as far from the explosion as he could.

Halfway up the stairs, he realized he should have closed the hatch behind him. The explosion would just enter this chamber. Was it worth climbing back down to close it, or should he just keep climbing?

He hesitated. He should close it. He ran back down and closed the hatch, wasting precious seconds he didn't have to spare. He started running again.

0:10

Deck reached the top of the chamber and began climbing the next shaft.

0:00

It was like setting off dynamite inside an aluminum can. The explosion ripped easily through the metal walls, vaporizing the lower chamber. The support beams buckled outwards and then snapped, and the communications array was ejected from the base of the tower like it had been launched. Eventually it would slam into Earth's atmosphere and burn up. There was no way Shodan would be recovering it.

The blast sent a shockwave through the entire station, causing earthquake-sized tremors.

Deck glanced down to see a fireball rushing upwards from the chamber below. It expanded violently, reaching outwards to incinerate everything within its fiery embrace. Then - just as violently - it began to retreat. The roar became barely audible as the fireball was pulled from the ship and dissipated in the vacuum of space.

The downdraft became a hurricane, and Deck struggled to keep his grip on the ladder. He had to escape this before the reactor level ran out of air.

Fighting against the howling wind, he ascended the ladder. He fought for air. It was like trying to breathe while sticking your head out the window of a fast-moving car. At the top of the ladder, he searched for something to grab onto. The force of air threatened to pull him away the second he released the ladder.

He glanced down the shaft to see more and more of the structure being torn away. There was another explosion that he could feel but not hear, and the chamber below was ripped from the station.

Deck found himself staring down the shaft into space. Beyond, he could see the Earth.

The force of the separation jolted the shaft violently. The ladder was ripped from his hands. The wind picked up his body like a scrap of paper and tossed it down the shaft. He twisted in the air to see the gaping hole below as he fell towards empty space.

"How's the battle going?", Buchanan asked dryly. He'd been calling it a "battle" since Shodan started grabbing sattelites, but they didn't really have any way to fight back. All they could do was sit around and count down to the next loss, and come up with various projections on how long the total conquest of the network would take her.

One of the networking guys spoke up, "Looks like she's ignoring smaller birds so she can grab the critical ones. Our old projections assumed she would just expand outward and grab everything, but she's focusing on the major network arteries."

There was a long pause while Buchanan absorbed this. Finally he spoke, "So how does this affect your projections?"

"Well, total aquisition time is the same. It's still going to take her another nine hours to get everything, but since she's cutting sections off from each other, the network will be almost useless in about three hours or so."

"Useless?"

"In three hours we will still have about a third of the network left, but it won't be a network anymore. All the nodes will be isolated from each other." He glanced down at his console. "Next one goes down in thirteen seconds."

Buchanan turned his back on the bad news and faced Rebecca, "Any word?"

She stopped clicking her pen against the console. "Nothing."

Suddenly almost everyone began speaking at once. First several people spoke up with reports of heat signatures and decompression coming from the station. Then came a grainy telescope view of the base of the station "falling" away. Seconds later someone else reported the hacking had stopped.

Within seconds the relentless attack had halted and the entire network was freed of Shodan's control. Applause errupted.

Bachanan let out a slight sigh, "Good. Now memory-wipe our comsats, reboot them, and get them back in service."

The smiling face of Morris poked up over the bank of consoles in front of them. "I have a better idea. How much data storage space do we have available here?"

---

Deck awoke to the sensation of icy droplets of water slapping him in the face. He was laying on some unidentified slab of metal. He didn't open his eyes, but was aware of a red light flickering somewhere above him. He regarded the falling water with a sort of disinterested confusion and slipped back into unconsciousness.

Time passed. There was no way to tell how much. He started to wake up. He knew something was wrong. He needed to wake up. Where was he?

He dropped off again without even opening his eyes.

There was another expanse of time.

He finally forced his eyes open. It was dark. What little illumination there was came from a red light somewhere behind him. All he could see was a curved metal wall. He was in a large puddle of icy cold water.

He rolled over onto his back, the water sloshing around him. Looking up, he could see a circle of light filtered through a thick black haze.

His limbs were numb, and he was groggy. It reminded him of when he woke up from surgery.

He lay there for several minutes, ignoring the obvious questions. He had been here for a long time; a few more minutes wouldn't hurt.

Eventually, he sat up and a wave of dizziness washed over him. It felt like his brain was sloshing around in his head. He was at the bottom of a round shaft, like a shallow well. He pulled himself over to the curved wall and leaned against it.

He looked to the opposite side, where a red light was mounted in the wall. It seemed to be a marker for a control panel.

Now that his head was no longer immersed in cold water, some of the numbness was going away and he became aware of a dull pain on the side of his face.

He leaned against the wall, looking up into the haze for several minutes before moving again. When he did, he crawled on his hands and knees over to the control panel. He had no idea why there would be a control panel at the bottom of a hole, but there it was. It had some airlock buttons, some other stuff he didn't recognize, a dataport, and an emergency light. He turned on the light.

Stinging white light came from a fluorescent unit mounted in the wall. He cried out in surprise and threw his hand up over his eyes.

Slowly, his eyes adjusted. He worked his eyes open and took in his surroundings.

The first thing he noticed was that the fingertip-deep water he was sitting in was red.

There was a ladder running up the wall. He knew where he was.

This was the shaft he had been climbing when the bottom of the station was blown off. The shafts all acted as airlocks. As the chamber below was torn away, emergency systems kicked in and shut the door at the base of the shaft. It had probably closed just in time for him to slam into it. He didn't even remember the impact.

The cold water was sapping his strength. He needed to climb out while he still could.

His weak, shaking hands pulled him upwards; out of the shaft. Despite the low gravity, his body felt like a sack of wet cement.

He pulled himself over the edge of the shaft and flopped onto the floor, facing up. Pink water streamed out of his suit and onto the floor.

The chamber was filled with a thick, acrid smoke. The top of the chamber was scorched and covered in black soot. Automated fire suppression systems had managed to put the fire out, which explained the water.

The walls were covered with small, puffy lines of expansion foam. The usually pink foam had been blackened by the fire.

Deck lay there for several minutes, fighting sleep.

Incoming signal: GOV-RL1.VID - Compatible video codec available. Encryption key matched.

He ignored it. He didn't feel like talking to anyone. It was good to know they had their satellite back, though.

Picking himself up, he began the long climb out of the communications tower.

When he reached the top, the hopper was gone. He was glad. He didn't have the energy for a fight.

He limped back to the elevator. Every step was an ordeal. Every breath was a major undertaking. His limbs were heavy and numb. His ribs hurt. The wound on his leg hurt. His head was heavy. There was so much pain coming from so many sources he couldn't focus on any one pain in particular.

When he reached the elevator, he waited for the doors to close behind him and then he sunk down in the corner. He didn't even know where he was going.

There was no point in returning to level one. The hospital didn't have anything except roving bands of mutants and cyborgs. The research level was out - there was a bot patrolling the elevator exit. The executive level had the same problem.

He spent several minutes trying to decide what he wanted to do, but realized he was just falling asleep again. He was hungry.

He reached up and hit the button for deck 3: Crew Facilities. He would go to the cafeteria.

The elevator chimed and the inner doors opened, but the outer doors remained closed. He couldn't get out. He crawled over and pushed on the doors, but they didn't budge.

There were lumps of solder sticking through the crack where the doors met. The exit onto level three had been hastily welded shut. He wasn't getting in this way.

Connected. US.GOV-RL1.VID

"He's alive, I got him!", Rebecca was yelling.

"I need help.", Deck was surprised to hear how distant and weak his voice sounded.

"What's wrong?"

"Too much for me to get into. I... I'm hurt. I need someone to do some thinking for me, my brain is fried."

She looked genuinely concerned. Her face had softened since the last time he saw her. She had lost the edgy professional detachment. Her face was turned downward in an empathetic frown. "How can I help?"

"I need to reach level three, but the main elevator on that level is welded shut. I can't go to research, there's bots around. Ditto for the exec level. I'm on the main elevator now. How can I get there?"

She nodded to someone off camera and turned back to him, "Give us a minute."

She stood up and walked away from the camera, leaving the frame. He had never seen her standing up before. He was surprised at how fit she was. It made sense, considering she was part of some emergency response team, but it still surprised him.

He realized it had been a couple of months since he'd spent any time with a woman.

Her form slid back into view as she returned to her seat. "Okay Hacker. I think we've almost got it."

"Good.", he grunted.

She smiled, flashing her teeth, "You did it!" The smile made her look younger. He wondered how old she really was, anyway.

"Yeah. It was nothing.", he said sarcastically.

"Well, a lot of people are relieved down here. Nothing like this has ever happened. People were talking like GlobalNet was going to go down and it was going to be the end of the world."

"I'm glad you're happy, but I'm still up here with Shodan - and I'll bet she's pretty pissed."

Rebecca nodded, "Okay, we finally got a hold of the layout of the entire station. TriOp provided it for us yesterday. I meant to send it last time we talked. Anyway, we've worked out a path for you."

Deck nodded absent-mindedly.

Rebecca paused and then continued, "You'll head down to the flight deck. When you get there, just cross the hall and take the freight elevator up to level three, which will drop you off near the cafeteria. We've marked the path on the map."

"Great, thanks.", Deck grunted as he tried to stand.

"Be careful.", she said as she closed the channel.

Deck leaned heavily against the wall and thumbed the button for level five.

Level five housed the station's three shuttle bays and control rooms. Most of the broad hallways led to the central area where the freight elevator, main elevator, and executive elevator were located.

Deck peeked warily out of the elevator. The lights were low, but other than that things looked more or less as he remembered them. He was in the central receiving area. It was strange to see it deserted. It was always a hub of activity, even during off hours. Cargo and personnel were always being shuffled around, and this was where it all took place.

The silence was haunting. Deck limped through the central receiving area. Stealth would have been pointless in a wide open area like this, and he was too tired and sore for that anyway. If someone caught him out in the open he was screwed.

He made it to the freight elevator without incident, and headed for level three.

---

The crew area was a disaster. The walls were scarred with bullet wounds and burn marks. Most of the lights were either turned off or blown out. The air was filled with a thin haze, leftover from some long-dead fire. The floor had the familiar dark spots that marked where members of the crew had bled and died.

There were several smashed and broken bots near the freight elevator. The bots were perforated with tiny holes, as were the surrounding walls. Someone had hit them with fragmentation grenades.

A wide set of double doors directly to his left led directly into the kitchen. This would be where food would be taken as it was brought up from the storage level. The doors had been welded shut and were pockmarked with bullet and impact damage. If the bots couldn't break through, he certainly wasn't going to.

The corridor continued forward to an open space just outside of the cafeteria. Normally a few tables were scattered around here during meal times to accommodate overflow when the main eating area was full. The tables were gone, and there were more wrecked bots littered about. Shodan had suffered some losses taking this place.

Most of the bots were low-grade maintenance or gopher bots. They wouldn't have been much of a threat. Judging by the number of them on the floor, they probably went down pretty easy. There were two security bots, and a single heavy security bot. They looked scary even when they were broken.

To his left was the cafeteria, and on his right was the exterior dining area and the restrooms. The wall outside of the restrooms was a mess of bullet and shrapnel holes. Huge chunks of paneling had been torn or burned away. This wall had absorbed a lot of damage intended for the bots.

Deck decided to try the bathroom first. He drew in a nervous breath and reached for his pistol. He didn't know what sort of surprises Shodan might have left behind when the battle was over.

His pistol was gone.

He looked around, as if it was just going to be lying on the floor beside him.

He realized it was probably sitting in a pool of cold bloody water at the bottom of the station. He groaned. He was unarmed. He wasn't about to go back down there and get it. At least not right away.

The signs indicating the gender of each restroom had been destroyed or blown off the wall. The bathroom on the left was dim and illuminated by a single flickering light, so he proceeded into the bathroom on the right. It was thankfully empty.

He staggered over to the sink and leaned against it. Looking up, he saw his face for the first time since the nightmare began. He could hardly recognize himself.

His face was thin and bony. His cheeks were ghostly pale, almost gray. The right side of his face was a mass of dried blood covering a swollen bruise. His eyes looked different, somehow older. They showed the burden of fatigue and pain that he had been bearing.

He reached up to touch his face and saw that his hands were a blackened mess. Greasy dirt had caked over numerous slashes, cuts, and puncture wounds. The grime and blood had filled in and dried in the creases of his hands and around his fingernails.

Half an hour later he emerged from the bathroom looking much better. He had cleaned his wounds and washed the worst of the grime from the rest of his body. Dermal patches covered the wound on his face and the cuts on his hands. The warm water had invigorated him, purging the numbness and cold from his extremities.

The cafeteria was even worse than the exterior dining area. The tables had been turned on their sides to be used as cover and had been almost cut in half by the automatic guns of the bots. Pools of dried blood marked the spots where the defenders had fallen.

Something had been bothering him since he arrived on the crew deck, and he finally figured out what it was: there were no bodies.

Spent shell casings and empty clips littered the floor, but there were no weapons to be found. Shodan had taken all of the bodies and all of the weapons once the battle was over.

The kitchen area joined the rear of the cafeteria. It was a wide space lined with the usual stainless steel appliances used to cook bulk food. The light fixtures had a film of dirty grease over them, giving the room a dingy yellow glow.

Along one wall were sacks of uncooked rice, flour, dried eggs, and pasta. In the corner was a stack of plastic bags filled with moldy bread. Beside the dry goods was a walk-in cooler. The door was hanging open and out of it rolled a thin and quickly dissipating layer of mist.. The cold air washed over his feet and sent a chill through his body.

He was exhausted. His body begged him to stop and rest, but he needed to eat.

He pushed aside the translucent plastic strips that hung in the doorway of the cooler and stepped inside. A thin layer of condensation covered everything as the cooler fought with the warm air from the kitchen. A rotten smell permeated the air.

He began ripping open boxes at random. Most of it was way past its prime. Some boxes of raw chicken lay rotting near the door, which probably explained the smell. The salad mix had long since gone bad and was now a black, wet mass inside of its plastic bag. The rest of the contents of the cooler were containers of bulk condiments.

At the rear of the cooler was another door that led to the deep freeze.

The lights were out in the freezer. The only illumination came from the outer fridge. The walls were covered with smudged and scratched stainless steel panels. The floor was a metal grate that clanged loudly with each step he took.. The bitter cold covered him instantly. His hands shook. He had been having trouble keeping warm even before he entered the cooler, and now he was standing in the deep freeze. Only his hunger compelled him to stay.

A simple dolly sat in one corner, used to transport to boxes of food out to the kitchen for preparation. The cardboard boxes were arranged in neat rows, with just enough room left over to allow movement.

The first row of boxes were meats, mostly ground beef. Behind those were a few boxes of chicken parts, along with some breaded fish. None of it was safe to eat in its current state, and he didn't want to get into trying to cook anything.

The next row of boxes contained frozen peas. His shaking, weakened hands clumsily tore open the stiff, cold cardboard and pulled out a plastic bag of peas. He ripped it open with his teeth and began stuffing peas into his mouth by the handful.

He sat for several minutes, crunching on the frozen peas until he was too cold to continue. He found another box that held frozen carrots. He took a bag of each and continued to search the rows.

The next few rows contained goods to be deep-fried.

At the rear of the freezer he found three bodies laying in a row along the back wall. Each one had a sheet draped over it. The bots hadn't come back here, or had no use for frozen bodies.

A rifle of some sort lay beside one of them. He didn't recognize the design, but that didn't mean much. He had almost no knowledge of guns beyond what little he knew about handguns.

The weapon seemed even colder than the room. The dead metal surface sucked the life from his hands as he lifted it. There were some unused sheets piled in one corner, similar to the ones covering the dead. He picked them up and wrapped them around the rifle.

Back in the kitchen, he found a stack of flattened cardboard boxes. He spread them out on the floor and covered them with the sheets. With the gun in his lap, he began to eat the frozen vegetables.

He felt safe here. Shodan had probably assumed he was dead. No bots had spotted him. He hadn't caused any trouble. The bots didn't have any reason to come back here since they had obviously already conquered the place and took what they wanted. As long as he didn't do anything stupid, they should leave him alone.

He ate a few more vegetables. He thought of going back for some of the other food, but there wasn't anything that interested him.

He looked down at the rifle. He didn't even know if it worked, or if it was loaded, but he felt safer having it nearby.

It was about the length of his forearm and cut from smooth black metal. On the left side was a tiny blank display screen. It was obviously a close-quarters type of weapon. Halfway down the barrel was a small knob inset into the surface. A few other buttons framed the empty display screen. Deck poked at them lazily as he ate, but couldn't get them to do anything. The screen remained blank. It occurred to him that the gun could easily have been left in the freezer because it was broken.

When he'd had enough to eat, he curled up in the sheet and tried to warm his aching body.

Thirty seconds later, Rebecca paged him and his HUD lit up, but he was already asleep.

---

Deck awoke. This wasn't how he was used to waking up. He was used to fighting his way out of unconsciousness to face some calamity, but this time he awoke because he didn't need to sleep any more.

He could feel he had been sleeping for a long time. He glanced at the clock that hung over the grill. 12:30. He didn't know if that was a.m. or p.m. - not that it mattered in space. He hadn't looked at the clock before he went to sleep, so he didn't know how long he'd been out.

He yawned and sat up. He had managed to roll over onto the rifle at some point, and the end of the barrel had left grooves in his face. He decided that maybe sleeping with a gun wasn't a good idea.

He visited the men's room, and - after taking care of morning business - peeled the dermal patches from his body and surveyed the damage. Most of his wounds had healed completely, although his bruises still looked terrible. The bruise on his ribs was an ugly patch of purple and green the size of his hand.

He stood, stretched, and performed a kata. This was his standard morning routine, although he hadn't done it in a while. The light exercise got his blood moving.

He was warm, and hungry again.

He decided on a hot breakfast. In the kitchen, he found the utensils necessary and cooked himself a large bowl of noodles. Eggs would have been a better breakfast, but he had no idea how to turn dried eggs into anything edible - assuming that was even possible.

The plain noodles were a feast. He stood in the doorway to the kitchen, looking out into the chaos of the cafeteria. He ate quickly, slurping up the pasta as if it would evaporate at any moment.

Around him were the bent, burned remains of tables. A thought had been nagging him, eating away at some corner of his mind. It was his fault.

He had played the game for years, ripping off big corporations, screwing The Man, fighting the power. That's how he used to see it. Now the truth was obvious. He wasn't a hero. He wasn't Robin Hood. Sure, he took from the rich, but "rich" was anyone who had more than he did. He didn't give to the poor, he gave to himself.

Now he had the blood of hundreds of people on his hands. Sure, Diego was responsible too - but he was dead, and dead men don't share blame. Deck knew he couldn't point at some charred corpse and cry out "He did it!".

It was his fault.

Then there was the other irony - that he survived. This was proof that his was a world without justice. He caused a disaster that killed hundreds (hundreds!) of innocents, and yet he alone - the one responsible - survived by chance. They had died, and they didn't even know why.

He had never really thought about God much, but he knew one thing: If there was a God, he was damned.

Nomen's words hit him again, "Its going to cost you more than you could ever imagine."

He pulled himself from this line of thought. It was just going to get him killed. He would deal with it once he'd escaped Citadel. Somewhere in the back of his mind he knew he deserved to die up here.

He needed to talk to Rebecca.

Incoming signal: US.GOV-RL1.VID

Rebecca appeared, standing in front of her console, "Hacker? Oh my God. We figured you were dead. Where have you been for the last...", she glanced sideways, probably at the clock, "..eighteen hours?"

Eighteen hours? That explained why his wounds had healed so much. "Hey, sue me. I needed the sleep."

She sat down in front of the camera and put her headset on. She was wearing her full uniform again. She seemed tense. Something was wrong. Well, more wrong than usual.

"We are still working on recovering the satellites that Shodan had taken over. We have reclaimed about half of them so far. Morris has been downloading the contents of their memory before we give them back to their users."

"I don't get it."

"These used to be part of Shodan's brain, right? We've taken them back, but some of her thoughts - or fragments of thoughts - are still in their databanks.. Morris is downloading whatever was stored on them as a way of peeking inside of Shodan's head and seeing what she's up to."

"So what have you found?"

Her tone had changed. She had reverted to the cool, businesslike demenor. She was choosing her words carefully, "He's found some genetic codes and blueprints. Apparently, Shodan has been dabbling in genetic engineering. Morris said this was a favorite subject of hers in her early stages of development. The chip that was disabled prevented her from experimenting in this area, but it looks like she's taken it up again."

"You found this in the memory banks of the satellites?", Deck shot back.

"That's right. Morris found gene maps, theoretical design projections, and even images of some of the life-forms. It looks like Shodan has been breeding these things in one of the groves. I'm sending you a sample."

A short loop of video appeared. Deck wouldn't have known it was one of the groves if Rebecca hadn't told him. The walls were caked in a thick yellow fungus. Numerous small creatures moved through the frame. They were small, translucent, and crablike.

Deck twisted his face as he watched the same ten seconds of footage over and over. "What the hell is that?"

"We don't have the whole genome, only fragments, so we don't really know what it is. Brocail can give you some details if you like."

"Put him on."

The screen changed and the chubby face of Morris Brocail was in front of the console. Deck had assumed that there was just one console and that they were taking turns with it. Instead, there was more than one, but they simply looked identical. The view had switched over to Morris' console.

"Hey dude."

Deck was puzzled by Morris. How could someone capable of designing such and elegant speech synthesis system, and yet still communicate like a teenage moron? "What's up?", Deck asked.

Morris smiled. "Hey, I gotta ask you... I heard the hardware you're using right now to talk to us is all built into your head?"

"That's right."

"So you don't have any external equipment? You can contact us by just thinking about it?"

"That's pretty much it."

"That is so cool!", Morris was grinning like a kid.

"I like to think so.", Deck answered wryly, "So what's the story with Shodan?"

"Well, like you saw, she's breeding some kind of new life forms in the northern grove. We don't have the whole genome on any of them yet, but we have some fragments, and we might be able to snag some more as we bring back some of these satellites."

"So this is what Shodan's been up to?"

"Genetic engineering was a favorite of hers during her development. She probably started on this as soon as you - er, as soon as the inhibitor chip was gone."

"Why is she so into genetic engineering?" Deck couldn't understand how a computer - even one like Shodan - could ever be "into" anything.

"It started with programming languages. We were working on a way to develop creativity, and that was a good place to start. We made a lot of progress in a short amount of time just teaching her how to code. She worked her way up from procedural stuff to modular coding, and finally outgrew all of the programming languages we could throw at her. She started developing her own languages to streamline the coding process for herself. Finally, she read about genetic code and that was all she wanted to do."

"Genetic code?"

"Look, DNA is just basically a really mega, mega complex program. It's complex enough to turn a single cell into any life-form you want, assuming you have the right input. She could just look at DNA and know what it was for. It just made sense to her. We encouraged her, and she did some amazing stuff. TriOp holds a bunch of patents based on stuff she taught us. Shodan was a super-secret project back then, and only a dozen people in the world were even allowed to know about her, so it was pretty tough explaining where all that knowledge came from."

Deck wondered how he was still even alive. How could he survive against something that smart? Shodan was clearly smarter than any human that had ever lived. He was alive because Shodan hadn't thought he was a threat, and because he was insanely lucky.

Morris continued, "So anyway, she was obsessed at how 'inefficient' most life-forms were. She was always re-coding DNA and running simulations on it."

"Inefficient?"

"Yeah, most species are like, designed with these fatal flaws that keep them in check. Humans are smart, but we're totally weak and our reflexes are crap. Ebola kills too quick and burns itself out. Other creatures are lethal killers but have complex mating habits that keep their numbers limited. Others just have short life spans. Shodan was always working on ways to 'correct' these flaws. She used to claim she could take any life-form and make it the dominant species on the planet with just a few changes."

"Ebola? Holy crap."

"What can I say? Efficiency is in her nature. So, we had to pull the plug on all of that. I think its a shame, but it was better than letting her play mad scientist. She was always obsessed with creating the 'ultimate' creature. You know, just this one life-form that had all the good stuff from every other species on the planet. Eyes like an eagle, night vision of an owl, strength and speed of a lion, reflexes of a jungle predator, brain of a human, able to reproduce like rabbits... you get the idea."

"So now's she's free to take it up again, and that's what she's working on?"

"Its hard to say exactly what she's doing. She used to run computer simulations because she didn't have access to the facilities to actually test her theories. I think the north grove is now her sandbox, where she creates new stuff and releases to see how it does. We don't know what could be in there, but whatever it is, you definitely do not want to get any on you, if you see what I mean."

Deck nodded, "So, we need to blow this place up as soon as we can?"

"Rebecca will tell you about that."

The scene changed again, and he was looking at Rebecca. She was tense as she spoke, "Hacker, when we lost contact with you, we assumed you had died up there, and were getting set to blow up the station."

"What?", Deck couldn't believe they were finally going to blow the place up and were just going to do it with him still there.

She spoke in an even diplomatic tone, "That's why its important to keep contact. I know you value your freedom and independence, and we don't have a problem with that - but you need to let us know what's happening so things like that don't happen."

She was talking to him like he was some sort of madman who could go over the edge at any moment. Something had changed on their end. Their perception of him had shifted. Finally he responded, wanting to show them he was a reasonable guy, "Sure. I can understand that. Look, just don't blow me up and I'll keep you guys in the loop, ok?"

She nodded, and seemed satisfied, "That will be a big help. Now, we were getting set to nuke the station. We had a small tactical nuke ready and had begun the countdown when we received something from Citadel. It was the first time Shodan has made contact with us. She sent us a message. There was no text, just a single image,"

A moment later an image appeared in his head. It was a picture of the Earth and Citadel. Some wireframe lines were superimposed onto the image. A thin red line ran from the side of Citadel and down a gentle curve to the surface of the Earth. The bottom was filled with numbers.

Deck shrugged, "I don't get it."

"This is a firing solution. The groves, you see, detach from the station. In the event of an emergency, they are to be used as escape pods for all of civilians on board. They just get in, and launch. The station's crew uses standard escape pods on the flight deck."

"So she's going to launch the North Grove at you? Why send you a warning, why not just do it?"

"Morris believes she doesn't want to launch it at us, at least not yet. This is her pet project, her grand experiment. She probably doesn't want to just launch it and have to start over in another grove."

"So what is this, then?"

"It's a threat. Look, this grove she has aimed at us could contain anything. It could have something ten times deadlier than Ebola. We just don't know. The point is, she is showing us that she has worked out a firing solution to drop this thing on New York. We think the message is: If we launch, she will too. Mutually Assured Destruction."

She paused, she was getting to the point now, and he could tell she was trying to ask him for something, "So now we need to take out that grove before we move against Shodan. If we do anything that threatens her, we risk having her dump that thing on our heads. It would be the most horrible biological attack ever conceived. Now, I know you have insisted that you do not work for TriOp. I don't want you to think -"

He could see where this was going. He cut her off, "I'll do it."

If he didn't know her, he wouldn't have even been able to see how shocked she was. There was a slight pause before she responded, "That's good news."

He smiled. There was no way of getting out of here alive without doing what she asked, but that wasn't why he was doing it. He looked around the cafeteria and thought about what had taken place here. This was his chance to make up for his mistake. He had risked his life and ended up killing hundreds. Now he had a chance to risk his life again and perhaps save millions. He couldn't say no.

This was his shot at redemption.

Rebecca's team needed time to look at the station design schematics and work out what needed to be done in order to eject Shodan's experimental grove. She had signed off while they worked out a plan, leaving Deck to prepare things on his end.

He decided he needed weapons. The only weapon he had at the moment was the short rifle he'd found in the freezer, and he was pretty sure it was broken.

The weapon was too large for the small holster built into his body sleeve. After some experimenting, he found he could secure it to his hip by moving the holster down his leg until it was positioned just above his knee. He then jammed the muzzle through the lower loop of the holster, and threaded the top loop of the holster through the trigger guard. It was a far from perfect fit. The rifle bounced around too much when he walked, but the arrangement gave him two free hands, and that was what was most important to him. He just hoped he wouldn't be needing it in a hurry.

He knew he needed some better weapons, or at least some weapons he knew how to use. There was a security station on the far side of the level. He decided that would be the best place to start looking.

The center of the level was a grid of living quarters that had housed the bulk of the station's crew. The units were divided into blocks - like prison blocks - and divided into groups based on rank and occupation. The low lighting made the already claustrophobic corridors feel even tighter and more oppressive.

He made his way through the cramped, narrow passages that made up the bulk of the crew section. The doors were spaced evenly, one every four meters, like rows of empty tombs. A few were open to reveal ransacked or bloodied quarters, but most were simply locked. Although the signs of combat and death were apparent, there were no bodies.

At the center of the living area was a nexus of corridors that converged on the main elevator. The elevator doors had been welded shut and poorly barricaded with benches and other loose items that were available. From this side of the door, he could see that it had also been heavily booby-trapped with hand grenades. The crude arrangement of tripwires and fragmentation grenades were set to go off if anyone inside the elevator tried to force the doors open. Deck was glad he hadn't messed with the door when he was stuck on the other side.

On the opposite side of the crew living area was the fitness center. Beyond that was the security station.

Just outside of the living area were the locker rooms. He thought for a moment how good a shower would feel. While his makeshift sponge bath (using paper towels) in the restroom sink had been nice, he still longed for a nice, hot shower.

The men's locker room was pitch black. A weak sallow light shone from the women's locker room. The smell of unchecked mildew filled the air. Inside, he could hear running water. He didn't know why water would be running, but it was a safe guess it didn't have anything to do with women getting clean.

He decided that being naked and separated from his weapon - broken or not - was not what he wanted after all. He moved on.

The security station was along the outer wall of the station, between the basketball court and the gym. Like the other security station he had visited, this one was still sealed shut. The surrounding corridor was dim and yellow. The door was burned and dented inward at the seam. The keypad had been removed from the wall and its contents hung from the gaping hole. Some of the wires had been clipped and re-routed, but the door remained intact and secure.

Deck rummaged through the tangled mass of electronics and found the dataport. Holding it in his right hand, he jacked in.

The keypad was configured exactly like the others he had visited. There was the usual configuration of shapes, joined with the now-familiar impenetrable barrier of Shodan's ICE. When he found the code in memory, it became apparent as to why nobody had been able to hack it open.

The code was changing at the rate of about once every five milliseconds. It looked like a blur. The ICE barrier flickered every so slightly, as Shodan lowered it to access the keypad and change the code, and then raised it again. The ICE itself was only down for a few nanoseconds, and Deck couldn't hope to hack his way past it in that short amount of time. He could cut the keypad off from Shodan, but that would announce his position. Right now she probably thought he was dead, and he wanted to keep it that way for as long as possible.

The best way to hack the keypad seemed to try to get in between code changes. He spent the next several minutes just flicking back and fourth between the code and the keypad numbers. He would get the code and then enter it directly into the system, but he found he just wasn't fast enough. Most of the time, the code had changed by the time he'd entered the second digit. Once in a long while he would make it to the third digit before the code changed. It was clear that getting in all five digits in would be impossible.

He stepped away from the keypad and leaned against the wall.

This was infuriating. The code was right there, but it changed faster than anyone could hope to type it in. The only way he could do it is if he knew what the next code was going to be and he began entering it ahead of time.

He could see why nobody had managed to open the door - conventional hacking methods and tools would be even slower than he was. He wondered how long someone had struggled with this door before they gave up and moved on or were chased away.

He stepped up to the keypad again. He would see if he could find a way to predict upcoming codes. Perhaps Shodan was using some simple method to generate them that he could unravel. He spent the next twenty minutes gathering numbers and comparing them in different ways, looking for patterns.

There were no patterns, or at least, not any that could be detected with the 24,000 numbers he'd managed to collect. It could be that patterns would be detectable with even larger sets of numbers, but he didn't have that kind of time.

He could enter the first three digits ahead of time, and simply wait for a code to show up that started with those three digits. If he did that, he would only need to enter the last two digits. The only problem with this method was that there was only a 1:1000 chance of a particular three-digit combination coming up, which - at that rate of twenty codes a second - was a little better than once a minute.

He entered a simple sequence: 1 - 2 - 3. Then he sat and waited for the rotating code to match the first three digits. Its was two minutes before a match came up, and when it finally did happen, he was so surprised it slipped by before he could react. While he was cursing himself for the blunder, another match came and went. He tried to nail it, but was over a quarter second too late. He swore at himself.

This went on for another ten minutes. He finally realized that it wasn't going to work; he just didn't have the reflexes for it. Nobody did. Probably the only person who could hack this thing was Shodan.

A smile crept across his face. He knew how to beat it.

He connected each digit of the code with the software portion of the keypad interface, using his own neural interface as a bridge. As Shodan sent a new digit into the code, the digit would also be sent to the control pad as if someone had just typed it in. She was both changing and typing in the code at the same time. The instant she finished changing the code, she also finished typing it in.

The small, naked speaker that hung freely from the wall gave a loud chime and the door popped open.

The security station was in good order and fully stocked. This one was much larger and better equipped than the one on the medical level. Racks of various exotic weapons covered the east wall, and a two person security station dominated the middle of the room. The back wall featured a bank of display screens filled with snow. A row of red lights built into the desk were flashing in time to the sound of an irritating electronic alarm. Along the west wall were a series of simple lockers filled with an assortment of uniforms and some riot gear.

The alarm was an aggravating buzz, almost like an alarm clock. The red lights were attached to various security systems, indicating various security breaches throughout the level. There was a light indicating that someone had broken into the first aid station. Another showed that someone had vandalized the elevator controls. There was even one showing that someone had attempted to break into the security station. He turned them off.

He dropped himself into the chair and slapped his hand down on the local dataport. He jacked in.

The cyberspace world filled his vision. It was a sea of routine log entries. Stack after stack of dull text messages were arranged in even rows, columns, and groups, forming a huge 3D grid. Most of it was part of the routine logs kept by the station's guards. Hourly reports were recorded, as well as other mundane events such as people caught not wearing their proper badges, forgetting to "sign out" sensitive materials, and other minor security infractions. It recorded, in meticulous detail, a job that was routine, petty, and boring.

Near the end of the log things got interesting. There were a few video entries, and several video interviews with suspects involved with the disappearance of biological materials. One of the last entries caught his eye. He played it.

The strained, tired face of a man in his early forties appeared. His hair was short and the shoulder boards of a security uniform were visible in the frame. In the corner of the image it displayed, Wilkenson, Harry. "I should never have agreed to it, but hey, it’s what they wanted. With all the craziness going on lately, and especially with the murderous mutants running around, a bunch of the execs decided they’d escape in the south grove. Since communications are down, there was no way to get approval from corporate. They evacuated to the grove and we launched it. We lost contact with them immediately. As far as we can tell, there is absolutely no power in there, so once it disconnected from the station the whole thing went dead. We expect the grove will burn up in the atmosphere in about four days, although I'm sure everyone has frozen to death or suffocated by now."

The last few entries catalogued a series of riots and fights throughout the level, and then the records ended without explanation. He jacked out.

He investigated the metal cabinets along the west wall. The first one held a stash of uniforms and some riot helmets, the next had some batons that were so light and of such low quality he would rather fight bare-fisted than try to wield one of them.

The next item in the cabinet was a military-grade, kinetic gel vest. He had never seen one before, but he knew they were supposedly able to stop bullets - even armor piercing bullets - from even bruising the wearer. As he slipped it from the rack, he was shocked by the weight. It was heavier than he could have dreamed. He dropped it over his head and let the weight settle onto his shoulders.

He spent a few minutes pacing and trying to get used to the weight before giving up on the vest completely. The lack of mobility would almost certainly get him killed no matter how tough the vest was. Besides, a vest had limited utility when used against bots that were probably programmed to shoot for the head anyway.

The last item in the cabinet was a sword. He stared at it in disbelief. It was made of a smooth, solid black material that felt almost like Teflon. The handle was made of a very hard rubber. Deck pulled it out and took a few swings. The handle was much heavier than expected, but it was still a solid and well-balanced piece of hardware. He was far from a master, but he had invested several months in learning swordplay during his martial-arts training, and he could hold his own in a fight against everyone but the hard-core swordfighters.

He had always wanted one, but they were an exotic expense. Their usefulness was limited in his line of work, since the rare occasions when he did encounter opposition, they were usually armed with firearms. Also, swords - good swords that had a benign metallic profile - were more expensive than guns.

He spun the sword around, practicing some moves and getting a feel for its weight. He wondered how well it would cut. He took a test swing at the vest on the floor

There was a dull thud as the edge of the blade smacked into the vest. It jerked slightly as he struck it, and his sword left it without a mark.

He decided that pitting the sword against the toughest personnel armor ever designed wasn't a fair test of its capabilities. Instead, he pulled a black jumpsuit from the uniform locker and tossed it into the air. As it fell, he spun and slashed at it with his blade. There was an unsatisfying smack as the sword met the fabric and the jumpsuit wrapped itself around the tip. He examined the uniform to find that it had sustained no damage. He didn't know what TriOp jumpsuits were made of, but he was pretty sure they weren't impervious to edged weapons.

He examined the blade to find that it didn't have any edge at all. It was completely dull. Instead of a cutting edge, there was a hairline groove down the length of the blade. It was either a dummy practice sword, or it was missing a separate metallic piece that would fit into the groove and provide an actual blade. Possibly both.

He tossed it onto the desk and moved over to the weapons rack.

The weapons were locked in place by a metal grate, that was in turn held shut with a single, heavy-duty padlock. He didn't have any lock-picking tools handy. This was a good time to try out his new toy.

He pulled the rifle loose from its makeshift holster and brought it up to his shoulder. He balanced the lo