Page 25

EON

T aos’ job had gone off without any issues.

This had apparently put me back in the good graces of Deacon.

I’d ditched my apartment, just in case Cy somehow managed to figure out who I was.

I was almost as hard to track down as he was, but he had corp backing, so I couldn’t be too careful.

Where better to hide out than with some anti-corp anarchists who were hiding from the same thing?

Apparently, being a terrorist could be really fucking boring sometimes. They’d thrown me a few odd jobs, but with Taos’ payout from the last one, I wasn’t desperate for money. Not yet, at least.

I worked on a worm and a few other programs for a small job they were running that evening, but it had taken me less than an hour, and now I was just trapped in this dank basement. Unfortunately, I wasn’t alone.

Some of the others had also gone to ground and were a constant grating presence—always playing loud music and getting too physical playing some VR game. Right now, they thought they were showing off against some poor virtual fighter.

I’d mostly tried to tuck myself away in a corner, keeping to myself, surfing around cyberspace. No new news on the data center hit, even on the sites not controlled by the corps. Everything was just talking about the destruction done by terrorists and the harm it had caused everyday citizens.

“DITA, any updates?” I asked.

“No one has been by the apartment, and there have been no attempted cyber intrusions. I wiped what I could of your personal server, but I couldn’t physically destroy it, for obvious reasons.”

“Thank you, DITA. Yeah, I’ll have to come by at some point and do that.”

Her avatar’s face lit up. “Wonderful! I miss you, E.”

“DITA, you’re an AI. Seeing me here is no different to you than seeing me at home.”

“I know…” Her avatar blushed. “It’s just nice, having you here. I worry about you when you aren’t under my sensors.”

“No need to worry about me, DITA. I’m just fine. Hey, can you still connect me through to the POM network?”

“Yes, the credentials you have are still valid.”

“Do it.” Idiots. I can’t believe this still works. They need to up their internal IT surveillance. As always, the weakest part of any cybersecurity system was the human element.

“What are you looking for this time?” DITA asked.

Proof that he’s looking for me. “Looking for their internal audit on the data center explosion.”

A few chirps and DITA had me logged in. I flipped through Roger’s recent emails and almost called it quits right there.

A whole thread on the background color of some slide deck, and another on the font used.

How anything got done was beyond me. I closed out, and my eyes caught on a file on his main dashboard labeled Until Next Time .

I opened it immediately, and a short text message popped up.

I stared at the words, my pulse hammering in my ears. The text was simple, but I knew better. It was a warning. A promise.

You can’t hide forever.

“What does this mean, E?” DITA’s voice chimed, her digital avatar leaning forward with an expression of exaggerated concern.

I didn’t respond to her. Instead, I immediately typed my response:

Catch me if you can.

I logged out of POM’s network and leaned back in the dingy couch, letting out a slow breath. So he’d figured out I’d sent the memo. Not bad. I mean, that was his job, after all.

It was risky to respond, but it wasn’t like he didn’t already know I was out here.

It would’ve been smarter to ignore it—much smarter.

But I couldn’t ignore the racing of my heart, the rush of dopamine that came with the chase.

I knew I wanted more, no matter what it cost me, and that was the most dangerous thing of all.

An addict’s mind, an addict’s habits—and I’d found my new drug.

“Was that wise, E?” DITA asked cautiously.

“Probably not,” I admitted. “But I’m not letting him think he’s got the upper hand.”

“You are playing a dangerous game.”

The only kind worth playing.

The tension in my shoulders wouldn’t ease, no matter how hard I tried to let it go.

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.

A shadow loomed over me, and I glanced up to see Vex standing there, his VR headset pushed up onto his forehead. His smirk was as greasy as his unwashed hair.

“Hey,” he said, leaning against the wall beside me. “You’re always so serious. Relax a little. We’ve got time to kill. Might as well have a little fun.”

“Not interested,” I said flatly, turning back to my screen.

“Come on, Eon. You’re stuck down here just like the rest of us. Don’t you ever get bored?”

“Not bored enough to entertain you.”

“Aww, I’m not half bad. We could have some fun, right? Me and the boys are getting pent up being trapped down here.”

It always came back to that. The transaction. My body, their needs. “Not my problem.”

His smirk faltered, replaced by an irritated scowl. “You think you’re better than us, don’t you? Pretty snotty for someone who gets paid to ride dick.”

I’d heard it all before. “Better than you? Some wannabe anarchist? Absolutely.”

“We’re helping this city, freeing it from the oppressors. What are you doing, exactly? Swallowing babies for the braindead?”

“Nah, that costs extra. When you blew up that server, the whole grid went down. I wonder what happened to all the patients on life support. All the people whose homes burned down. Did you free them too?”

He was pissed, and I sat up, DITA chiming something in my ear that I ignored. I got up in his face. “When you burn the system down, who is going to protect everyone who needed it to survive?”

“You bitch, you don’t understand anything!” He pulled back his fist, and that electricity in me sparked, almost screaming for me to let it out.