Page 54 of Neon Flux

Across the room, Vex, one of the new recruits, was still thrashing around in his VR headset, yelling obscenities as he battled his virtual foe. The others were either engrossed in their own games or passed out in various corners of the basement. It smelled like stale energy drinks, burnt circuits, and sweat.

A loud crash jolted me, followed by Vex’s triumphant shout. “That’s right! You can’t beat me, you corpo fuck!”

I rolled my eyes and tried to focus on anything else. “DITA, do me a favor and run a scan on the local network. Let me know if anyone’s been snooping.”

“Of course, E,” DITA replied. Her avatar disappeared, leaving me alone with the cacophony of the anarchist hideout.

I’d been here two days, and I was already sick of it. I hated it. Hated the noise, the chaos, the constant feeling that any second, someone might decide I wasn’t worth the trouble. I hated knowing that right now, this was my best option. That I should stay still. I could already feel the walls closing in around me.

A low beep signaled DITA’s return. “No unusual activity detected. You can likely access cyberspace without risking exposure.”

The real world had walls—tangible and suffocating. The digital world had doors. I always had the key.

I sank into the data stream like slipping beneath warm water, the poorly lit warehouse fading into a black expanse filled with shifting lattices of code. Here, I wasn’t just Eon. I wasn’t the sex worker, or really even the cyberrunner. I wasn’t what somebody else needed from me. Here, I was free.

DITA materialized beside me, her avatar the deep purple of my personal code.

“What’s the search?”

“Just keeping tabs on a friend.”

It was too easy to pull up data from the city’s wireless network towers. Public infrastructure always had technology that was years, if not decades, outdated—and their code was no exception. With barely any effort, DITA had the history of every individual Vysor ping off the towers from the night of the explosion.

“Search for IDs that pinged off the tower near The Blackout around 11:35 p.m., but then didn’t ping off any of the surrounding towers in the next three hours.”

Cy had been there, and then I’d fried his Vysor. I’d never had him in one place before. This presented a unique opportunity.

“Search complete. 237 IDs match.”

“Now cross-reference those IDs with pings off the tower near POM Headquarters in the three previous days.”

“Forty-seven IDs remain.”

“Use triangulation to show me the approximate geolocation and map of those devices for the previous week.”

A small pause, and DITA threw up forty-seven unique maps, all overlaid with the paths of those Vysors for the week before the explosion. I swiped through, eliminating any that mostly just traced to the office and back to one specific location—their home. Standard corpos, just sleepwalking through life.

Seven IDs remained.

“DITA, add three more weeks of history to each of these IDs.”

These people went more places, but with a month of data, you could see the patterns. The office, the gym, the grocery store, maybe a few bars, other residences. Only one was different. A man who was busy running all over the city, doing POM’s dirty work. But I had to confirm.

“DITA, save this ID. Remove all filters and compare this location history with all other IDs that pinged off The Blackout tower. Give me the results with the closest match.”

She overlaid the maps. Often together at POM Headquarters, and often together in the most unlawful parts of the city. Not always, but now I had no doubt. It was Cy and Maddox. I looked at their total hours at POM Headquarters and it was ridiculous. Did these guys ever sleep?

Cy didn’t seem to spend many nights in the same place, but there was one he did frequent more often. A residential tower on the edge of the Blue District.

“Is that his home?” DITA asked.

“If monsters have homes.”

“Why did you want to find it?”

“If he can hunt me in the real world, I can hunt him in mine.” He’d gotten a new device, a new ID. I couldn’t keep tabs on him, but at least I knew where he slept—where he was most vulnerable.

The lights in cyberspace shifted, and I shut everything down.