Chapter 5
Jason’s body was sending just the right amount of adrenaline through his veins to outline this bright morning in primary colors.
As the NNA airvan rose into the air, the asphalt shoreline below was a stark demarcation: on one side the city of the past, bare and ugly, and on the other a riot of late-summer green.
In the slanting morning sun, the vehicle streets were made visible by the glimmer of cabs and trucks between the trees, while many of the footlanes were hidden entirely by foliage.
Even the soaring verticality of the skyscrapers was interrupted every few floors by vine-clad skywalks and overhangs, and the towers were crowned with the thick groves that had earned them the nickname “treescrapers.” It was a beautiful morning in the most beautiful city in the world.
The NNA Tower came into view, stabbing upward from the middle of the Potomac.
During the Cybercrash riots, the river had protected Arlington from the fires raging in DC, but the forested Theodore Roosevelt Island had caught and burned.
Afterward, the Park Service donated it to the newly formed NNA.
Nothing was more evocative of the reborn city’s aspirations than the two-thousand-foot Tower that now dominated the island and the DC skyline.
This, its iconic profile said, is how America rebuilds: It constructs the most beautiful and advanced and eco-friendly city in the world, then crowns it with the most beautiful and advanced and eco-friendly building in the world.
The effect was only slightly marred by the thin tubes that ran up either side of the Tower: the world-famous escape chute system, patented by Norman himself. Because when you build a monument, you also build a target.
Jason was targeting the Tower today in a way he hoped Norman had not accounted for.
The airvan followed a long stream of aircabs in a wide, slow arc over the city, before the other vehicles dropped away one by one and theirs was the only one left on a trajectory that put the Tower’s dome and two jutting, curving garden wings in the center of the windshield.
Steel-and-glass greenhouse latticework roofs reached down to meet the Tower’s garden wings.
It always struck Jason as ironically fitting that this made each wing look like the corner of a great eye, with the central dome bulging outward in the middle like the eyeball.
The eye dominated the windshield for a moment, then the van tilted and plunged across the crowded playgrounds and pathways of the sprawling Tower Park to alight at a visitor pad.
As he followed Bruno out, Jason texted Sprite: What’s the word?
Her answer pinged in. Same as before: Wait.
He grimaced as he quickstepped to catch up with Bruno’s long strides.
Sprite was his only contact within the Collective, and he sometimes wondered how representative she was of the organization as a whole, and especially of MorDread, their shadowy leader.
Sprite seemed to share Jason’s intentions, but she’d had to really lean on MorDread to get him to go along with this plan.
Sprite read his thoughts. You’re asking to fire the opening shot of a direct war with Andrew Norman.
We’re already at war, Jason replied, following Bruno up the wide steps.
A shadow war, Sprite wrote. Not the same thing and you know it.
If we don’t stop the Final System before it’s launched as OverNet admin, Jason replied, there won’t be any shadows left to . . . His subvocalization trailed off.
He’d seen pictures and videos of the Tower’s atrium, but they didn’t do justice to the size.
It was so wide and high that his brain didn’t fully grasp that there was a roof over his head.
Sunlight streamed through more than a hundred stories of glass, dappled by climbing vines and trees spread across regularly spaced mezzanines.
Water channels cut deep, straight lines in the polished marble floor, feeding the groves, grass patches, and fountains that dotted the atrium with a careful appearance of natural randomness while also subtly outlining walking routes for the hundreds of busy and important people bustling along wearing busy and important expressions.
Those routes all met at the back of the atrium, where a ring waterfall veiled a dozen glass elevators.
MorDread doesn’t underestimate the magnitude of what we’re starting, Sprite texted.
You shouldn’t, either. If this fails, it won’t just be Norman who’s after your blood.
MorDread doesn’t forgive. And Huntsman .
. . let’s just say he enjoys his work. I hope you made a contingency plan, because I did.
Jason shook away a moment of uneasiness as he followed Bruno to the elevators. Huntsman was the Collective’s fabled “fixer”—he fixed problems by making them disappear. But this was the best chance Jason would get; if he failed, it didn’t matter what happened to him.
Bruno hit the Call button, and an elevator slid into distorted view behind the rippling water, which then parted like the Red Sea, allowing them to step inside.
The elevator must have read Bruno’s destination, because it closed its glass doors and rose without being told.
Jason was a little disappointed that it stopped only one floor up—the view during a full ascent must be breathtaking—and even more disappointed when Bruno took him across the mezzanine and through a doorway into a very ordinary-looking office space filled with cubicles and people in suits, and then into an empty office.
Bruno closed the door and jerked his head at the desk and terminal.
Jason seated himself in the plush chair, while Bruno pulled up another and threw himself into it.
“Here we are, in a cushy office, in the daytime,” Bruno said.
“This isn’t what I imagined hacking was like.
But at least you look the part today.” Jason was wearing the hacker-stereotype hoodie in honor of this moment, despite how incongruous it was in the summer heat.
“You actually gonna use this terminal, though?”
“Computers aren’t off limits,” Jason said, opening a connection to the terminal in his smartspace. “You match your tools to the weakness you’re exploiting.”
“Well, that sucks for you, ’cause sh—the Final System has no weaknesses.”
“We’ll see.”
“You surely will, young son.”
Jason spread a virtual keyboard on the desk surface in front of him and cracked his knuckles.
Time disappeared.
A detached part of his mind hoped Bruno was paying attention, because this was the kind of hacking he’d been expecting.
Way back when, long before Jason had been born, there’d been this addictive puzzle video game called Tetris.
It was so addictive that people would play it for hours at a time, and when they fell asleep, they’d still see the game’s little blocks falling, falling.
But the fascinating thing was what people felt when they were playing: total focus.
They’d start playing for a few minutes, and when they looked up, it would be three hours later.
It was like their whole being had been absorbed into those falling blocks.
Psychologists called that a “flow state,” and it wasn’t only video games that induced the high.
Artists got it, concentrating on their art.
Or musicians, doing what they did. For Jason, it was hacking, and it was zen.
He could almost see it, probably because of all those old hacker movies.
In his mind’s eye, cyberspace was pitch black.
Black, but not dark: There were a million, a billion, points of light all around him.
Each was connected to the others by a thousand thin strands—or, sometimes, by only a few.
Those were the ones that interested him.
Those were the secure places, the protected places.
He was approaching one now. He had half a dozen terminal windows open, portals into an abstract puzzle box of characters and code, and the analytical part of his mind was parsing strings, finding addresses, manipulating pointers, propelling him forward.
But in his mind’s eye, the point of light grew, unfolding petals that became new paths and points.
What had seemed to be a single location was a little world unto itself, a web of interconnected travel ways—part map, part maze, part fortress.
He moved through it, wraithlike, a mind detached, his keystrokes soft footfalls, each finger placed as surely and carefully as a tightrope walker’s feet. Because he wasn’t the only mind here.
Like any good fortress, this place was defended.
It was guarded by the minds of its architects, who had tried to foresee his actions before he’d ever thought of breaching their network.
Their security AI stood in the electronic world like simulacra.
They were suspicious now, sniffing for him.
One false keystroke could mean discovery.
But the tracers were counterfeit minds, pale shadows of the human minds that had designed them.
They gave the illusion of intelligence, but deep down they were nothing more than sets of mathematical formulae, like every AI.
Jason opened a connection on an unused port and copied a dummy file through, then backed out and waited to see if the tracer programs would follow it.
They did, as he’d known they would. They had no choice.
They were the wraiths: soulless, bound by their programming, incapable of creative thought. Unable to recognize a ruse.
He closed the port, leaving the tracers confused, like a dog when the scent it has been following abruptly disappears. His fingers flew, carrying him deeper into the network, over barriers, through invisible cracks, past the silent guardians, unseen.