Chapter 9 #2
He burned the address into his brain, then deleted the data. And then he sent a message to Sprite: Final boss located. Loot drop imminent.
The reply came back immediately: a tiny program labeled “Open Me.”
This was new. He hesitated briefly, then touched it.
The shipping container disappeared, replaced by a dark void in which the only thing in existence was a polished, ornate structure like a vast wooden judges’ bench.
It towered over him, and from behind it, six oversize figures stared down, three to a side with an open seat between them.
A harsh spotlight behind rendered them stark black silhouettes.
Jason took in a hissing breath. This was the judgment room.
He’d heard whispers of it: It was where transgressors went to plead.
He wasn’t a transgressor—was he? He’d never “met” anyone from the Collective.
Even his interactions with Sprite had been entirely textual.
Maybe this was just how they met when they wanted to talk in real time.
A hulking figure with proportions more animal than human said in a voice electronically morphed and deepened, “Ahh, there he is. Now we await only MorDread. Welcome, little phreaker. I hope you appreciate the magnitude of the wheels you’ve set in motion.”
Jason swallowed. “Thank you.” His own voice was also artificially deepened and masked, made sepulchral to match the tall, hooded, spectral avatar he was inhabiting.
Being in this body, so different from his slightly underheight and underweight physical one, usually made him feel powerful.
Not right now. For one thing, his avatar was about a third of the size of the silhouettes peering at him over the judges’ bench.
This virtual venue was calculated to put him in his place, and it was working.
“Right,” he said with false brightness. “Shall we go around the room and introduce ourselves? I’m Ghost.”
A soft light lit up a figure on the end, and he saw that it was a girl about his age.
She wore a gray hoodie, but long strands of dark hair escaped to frame her face and sweep her shoulders.
Her avatar looked like a normal person, until he noticed the fairy wings sprouting from her back.
They shimmered with pearlescent hues, subtly changing color when she moved.
Her eyes crinkled in a smile. “Hi, Ghost,” she said in a voice that sounded unmasked.
“I knew you could phreak your way out of that mess.”
“Hi, Sprite,” Jason said. His own avatar had no eyes, just a skull under the hood, because why should he let anyone guess his thoughts by his expression?
He was grateful for that now, because he could feel his real-life eyes widen.
This was no forty-year-old dude. Her appearance could be faked, of course, but despite the wings, her attractiveness was more natural and understated than that displayed by most role-playing guys, whose avatars tended to lean hard into sexuality.
Her voice, too, had none of the awkward caricatures of girliness that men’s AI-masked voices tended to have.
Her introduction over, Sprite looked expectantly at the still-dark figure to her left, but no light came on there.
The silhouette shook its head and, in a hissing, burbling voice, said, “Let him hope he never hasss to ssssee me.” Its eyes flared—too many eyes, in different sizes.
Jason was suddenly glad he couldn’t see the whole avatar.
He also noticed that both Sprite and the judge on his other side had left a couple of extra feet between this guy and themselves.
“He’s coming,” one of the figures said suddenly, and they all straightened and went still. And then MorDread was there, occupying the center judge’s spot and fully visible.
Jason had been expecting his avatar to be a hulking dark knight like his mythical namesake, but what appeared was a six-foot-tall, glowing, green, pixelated > symbol, floating in the 3D space between the other figures.
Letters flashed into being and spooled out from it, accompanied by a clacking sound like an old-timey keyboard: Welcome, My Collected.
It took Jason a moment to understand, but when he did, his immediate reaction was jealousy.
He’d slaved over his avatar for days, molding and customizing it down to the unfelt wind that slowly fluttered its robe, but it was dull and unimaginative beside MorDread’s avatar, which made a subtler and more effective statement of identity: It was a command prompt.
MorDread was appearing as the interface through which commands were passed to a file.
As a symbol of both hacking and control, it was perfect.
And it doubled as the “greater than” sign, which was doubtless part of the message.
Jason had to give it to the guy: That was phreaking cool.
Our Little GH05T Lives, MorDread said. That’s Promising. The spooling words gave away nothing about the man behind them. There weren’t even a masked voice’s inflections to work with. But Did He Succeed? Or Did I Lose My Botnet For Nothing?
“I have the location,” Jason said. “But before I give it to you—”
The clack of typing from MorDread interrupted him. You Want to Be Paid.
“Yeah.”
You Have Leverage. What Are Your Terms?
“I’ll need a ghost MeNetID. I know you guys can do that. With some money in it. That’ll make it easier to keep my head down.”
And? MorDread said.
“That’s it. The rest of my payment is you destroying that machine. That’s all I want.”
There was a silence as the figures looked at each other.
Sprite frowned down at the bench in front of her.
Maybe he should have asked for more. Maybe not doing so was making them suspicious.
And maybe he should be thinking about life afterward, once this was over.
But that life, whatever it might be, existed only in the abstract.
All that mattered right now was that the Final System be destroyed.
Wonderful! MorDread wrote. I Anticipated and Agree to Your Terms. A message pinged into Jason’s phone: a MeNetID login.
He checked, and sure enough, his phone logged right in.
His name was now Ryan Olsen. The account had very little history and no personal photos, which would be a red flag to anyone who looked at it closely, but whoever had safeguarded it had posted a smattering of generic text entries and location photos over the years.
When Jason told his trust-check AI app to scan the account, it decided the user was merely introverted, not suspicious, and the rating came back eighty-one.
A very good score. Breaking the eighties was a feat many people aspired to.
He added a photo of himself to the profile to seal his ownership.
I Trust Money is Enough? MorDread typed.
Jason checked the new account’s BankNet and found a hundred thousand crypcoins there. He was rich. That was a weird feeling. Even weirder was how unimportant it seemed. The ghost account was more valuable.
Enter Location of System Here. A box appeared in Jason’s vision—a private, encrypted two-way communication.
MorDread wanted to keep the location close to his chest, apparently not even trusting his compatriots with it.
Whatever. He could do what he wanted as long as he followed through. Jason began to type the address.
Before he could finish typing the street number, a message zipped into his smartspace and unfolded, lightning fast, as if the animation had been turned up 300 percent. He Lies He Won’t Destroy It!!!
Jason froze. “What?” he said out loud.
Is There a Problem? MorDread wrote, but it was obscured in Jason’s vision by another message, a screenshot of a private communication from MorDread to someone unknown:
Intel Indicates System Has Vast Network Array Hooked to It Locally, But Its Core is Discrete and Transportable, In Fact Has Been Moved Before.
Norman’s Security is Not Sentries but Secrets.
So If Your Trust in GH05T Is Justified and He Can Learn Location, A Dozen Men Could Extract Core With Acceptable Risk.
Jason’s stomach lurched. That was bullshit. But even as he tried to deny it, he already knew it was true.
Phreakers were supposed to be lone wolves, or, at most, to come together in loose online gatherings of like-minded hacktivists with no command structure.
After all, receiving commands was the opposite of hacking.
But the Collective was different. They had a hierarchy.
They didn’t tolerate internal feuds, disagreements, splinters, or any of the things that held back other phreaker groups.
They had unity, focus, discipline. So it had always been obvious to Jason that they were what security specialists termed a “state actor,” hacking on behalf of another government, almost certainly Russia.
He’d known that, and needed that. Because Russia would be motivated.
The creation of an artificial general intelligence was like the first shot in a nuclear arms race all over again: Whoever had that technology had an unthinkable advantage over anyone who didn’t.
Russia would have not only the motivation but also the means to deliver a physical strike on the Final System.
No mere phreaker group could have done that for Jason.
But that also meant they would have the means, and even greater motivation, not to kill but to steal the System.
Why had it never occurred to him that they wouldn’t be content to destroy America’s latest weapon when they could steal it and catch up to Andrew Norman all in one moment? “You have to destroy it!” he said.
We Will.
“But you won’t.”
There was a long silence. Then: Did You Figure This Out on Your Own, Little Phreaker, Or Were You Told? The figures exchanged glances, except Sprite, whose eyes were wide and locked on Jason’s. Give Me Location, MorDread wrote, Or I Must Kill You.
Fear mingled with the despair in Jason’s heart. “If you kill me, you’ll never learn its location.”
Another pause. Then MorDread wrote, Would Anything I Could Reasonably Do Induce You to Tell Me?
Jason opened his mouth, but the image of Mia rushed into his head, stepping onto the crosswalk. And nothing came out.
The silence stretched.
Siiiiiiigh, MorDread typed out. Plan B. Go Now.
One of the judges silently disappeared.
Huntsman, You Have Him Locked Down?
The hissing, burbling figure gave a hissing, burbling laugh. “Two sssteps ahead of you. I’m five minutes from hisss position.”
“What do you mean?” Jason said. “You’re in DC?” And he knew where Jason was. He should have known the Collective’s little chat program would include a positional tracker! How phreaking stupid could he get?
The hissing judge laughed again. “Better run, little Ghost.” A spotlight came on, and for the first time, Jason could see the figure clearly. It was a spider.
Spiders were low on the list of Jason’s favorite things.
They looked wrong: too many legs, too many appendages, too many eyes.
Even the small ones made his skin crawl.
This was not a small spider. It was three times his size, even hunched behind the judges’ desk.
Now it reared and unfolded its legs two by two, arching them high over its back and extending them toward him.
Fangs glistened, and uneven rows of opaque, faceted black eyes fixed on his.
He was peripherally aware that this dude had spent even more time on his VR avatar than he had, right down to the bristly hairs all over its body.
Mostly he was busy feeling sick terror, because this was obviously Huntsman.
He’d heard the rumors—hoped they were only rumors. Now he was sure they weren’t.
“I told you to make a contingency plan,” Sprite said sadly.
Jason fumbled for his phone to break the connection, but his hands were shaking and he dropped it. Falling to his knees, he felt blindly for it, but it was invisible, part of the real world he couldn’t see, and in his panic, he didn’t even think to deactivate his lenses.
“Don’t worry, little phreaker, I’ll make it quick,” the spider said, its voice bubbling through venom. It was climbing over the judges’ bench now, its legs sticking to the sides grotesquely.
Jason’s phone knocked against his hand and skittered away, and he lunged after it. The spider laughed again, high and wet, and leaped. Jason flinched and fell back, but the spider disappeared mid-jump.
He had disconnected. Gone back to the real world.
To find Jason and kill him.