Chapter 17
“Wake up!” said a loud voice.
Jason was catapulted out of sleep and bolted upright. As he blinked his stinging eyes, his vision resolved, and he found himself sitting on a boulder at the top of a great height, looking almost straight down a plunging mountain slope.
He jerked backward, but the hand he threw behind him missed the ground, and for a breathless instant he thought he’d fallen off the edge.
Then he landed with a jolt on his outstretched arm, and his lenses, detecting the sudden deceleration, cleared and revealed his budget hotel room.
He was beside his bed, from which he’d just toppled.
He scrambled up, reseated himself on the edge of the bed, and reactivated his lenses. And then he just stared.
Jason was used to computer-generated worlds, to video game systems reading his body’s movements while a 3D world was generated in real time in his lenses.
There were always tells, tricks that let the mind know what it was seeing was fake: a computer-generated sheen to the light, clipping objects, a lack of detail when something was examined close up, a repeating texture, a two-dimensionality to the backdrops. But this . . . this was real.
His eyes traced the plunge of the mountain as it descended into cloud-rimmed valleys and then forests and plains.
Far beyond, more mountains towered, blued by distance and splashed with rose from the setting sun.
Above them hung three moons, softened by the air he was looking through, their globes fading into the blue of the sky at one end.
The scene should have felt cheesy—he’d seen something similar in dozens of movies and video games and MeetNet rooms—but it was so meticulously rendered that he was disoriented.
Everywhere was so much detail, none of it repeating, that his mind kept trying to accept it as if it were real.
He looked down at himself, half expecting to see his real body, but he was the least realistic thing here, his avatar far less detailed than the boulder he was sitting on, its robe falling in folds that clipped through each other.
“You weren’t answering your texts,” said a voice, and he jumped and turned to see Sprite’s avatar standing nearby. “So I pulled you here so I could yell at you. Literally. Do you always sleep with your lenses and buds in?”
“Only when I’m too tired to take ’em out because I spent most of the night trying not to be assassinated.” She must have left a backdoor in his Kelly Perry account to be able to pull him here, a good phreaker move. “What is this place?” He swept an arm at the vista.
“A hobby,” she said. “I called you so—”
He interrupted. “Your hobby is building the most realistic MeetNet room ever?”
“It’s not supposed to be a MeetNet room. It’s just supposed to be private. I thought meeting on my turf would be safer.”
“This is your turf? How’d you get this much power? You have to be streaming it to me, because my phone sure as phreak can’t render this.”
“Let’s just say I carved out some space for myself on some rather powerful equipment.”
“What equipment? Government? NNA?”
“Can’t say.”
Always the good phreaker. “And you made this yourself?”
“Yes,” Sprite said, tapping her foot. “But that’s not impor—”
“Phreak,” he interrupted again, “you should be working for Hollywood or some huge video game company.”
“I didn’t bring you here to talk about my modeling career,” Sprite said. “We have a big problem. I need your social engineering to save a little girl’s life.”
“To what?” Jason said, becoming alert.
“MorDread’s men kidnapped a little girl. We’re gonna save her. Let the delivery in.”
Jason faded his smartspace and stumbled to the window, where a loud whine indicated the presence of a flying delivery dronebot.
It drifted in as the window slid up, deposited a box on the bed, and drifted out again.
Jason opened the box to find two sets of clothes and a pair of shoes. “What’s this?”
“Your costume. Put it on.”
“You mean the suit, I hope. I’m not putting on that skirt.”
“That outfit’s for your mark.”
“This is MorDread’s plan B, isn’t it?” Jason said, pulling the shirt on.
“And it’s our fault,” Sprite said. “He’s desperate. We made him start a war with Norman, and he knows if he doesn’t win, he’ll lose forever. We have to make this right.”
“I want to,” Jason said, tugging the pants up. “But how does this accomplish that?”
“Trust me,” Sprite said. “Do they fit?”
Jason looked down at himself, then went over to the bathroom mirror and shared his lens camera feed. “I think? What kind of getup is this?” It looked like a mash-up of a tuxedo and a tracksuit.
“Tyche. Very upscale. Very expensive. And yeah, it’s supposed to fit like that.”
Jason shook his head. “Emperor’s new clothes.”
Sprite snorted. “They’re not that tight.”
“Secretly everyone knows it looks stupid.”
“Don’t sell yourself short,” Sprite said.
“You look dashing, especially with your hair fetchingly unkempt like that.” Jason turned quickly from the mirror so she wouldn’t see him redden.
“But clean your face,” she said. “And wrangle that hair to hide that bump on your forehead. And hurry. Your cab’s almost there. ”
Jason ended the feed share and scoured his face, then scooped up the second set of clothes that the drone had delivered and jogged out to the parking pad.
An unusually large and sleek aircab was swooping in with a roar that overwhelmed his smartbuds.
“A jet cab?” he shouted over the noise. Instead of the usual asymmetrical rotors engineered to be as quiet as possible, this cab had six jet engines, currently angled toward the ground and reflecting thunderously off the pavement.
“The target’s in Baltimore,” Sprite said, her voice barely audible even in his smartbuds.
“Who’s footing the bill?” Jet cabs were for rich people.
“A child’s life is at stake,” Sprite said as the cab’s door swung open and Jason slid inside. “No price is too high.”
The door slid closed, mercifully cutting the noise to a level Jason’s smartbuds could attenuate.
The cab rose sharply, pushing him into his seat almost before he’d managed to buckle in.
The DC skyline wheeled as the cab curved to a new heading and transitioned to forward flight, and then he was pressed backward by the acceleration of six jet engines at full power.
“Two questions,” he said. “Who’s the target, and is this gonna make me a target again?
” Huntsman would be very angry at having taken an unexpected round trip to Chicago or wherever, and even if he wasn’t back yet, this kidnapping was evidence that MorDread had no shortage of ruthless bastards at his beck and call.
“You won’t be anywhere near the kidnappers,” Sprite said. “Your target’s a fashion influencer. Here’s her MeNet.” He clicked the link she sent and scrolled through while she went on. “You’re a marketing exec working for Tyche. Your job is to get her into that outfit you’re carrying.”
There was a type of hacker that bragged about social-engineering girls out of their outfits. Jason had never been one of those, but he also had no experience getting them into outfits. He said, “Any tips on how?”
“Tell her it’ll get her the Trophy she’s after.”
He rolled his eyes. “Any less cryptic tips?”
“She’s romantically interested in a pro gamer. You’re gonna promise to get her noticed.”
“Oh, phreak, Trophy Lombardi?”
“That’s the one.”
“How do I promise that? The dude’s got like ten million followers competing for his attention.”
“Eleven million.”
“And this girl’s got, let’s see, eleven thousand. Not the same league.”
“Tell her if she wears the outfit and posts a picture of herself with the caption I’ll send you, it’ll get Trophy’s attention. But she has to do it within ten minutes.”
“Ten minutes?” But when Jason pulled up his phone’s GPS, he saw he was streaking across the map at over three hundred miles an hour. He could already see the Baltimore skyline on the horizon. “How does wearing this outfit get her noticed by Trophy?”
“That’s being worked on.”
“Your mysterious ‘team’?”
“Yep.”
“Why am I doing this? Why not you? You obviously know a lot more about whatever’s going on.”
“I can social-engineer online okay, but I suck at it in person,” Sprite said. “I can’t interact the way most people can.”
That was an unusual admission in a phreaker of Sprite’s caliber. It made Jason feel a burst of warmth toward her. “Who’s the little girl MorDread nabbed?”
“Her name is Kleio. She’s Chloe Dunne-Carr’s daughter.”
“The politician who stood up to Norman the other day?” Jason brought up her MeNet feed.
It was the typical politician profile, with a series of slick photos taken at rallies and fundraising events.
Dunne-Carr looked more human than most politicians, but maybe he was just predisposed to like anyone who talked back to Norman.
“MorDread thinks she can strong-arm Norman? That’s stupid.
Norman’ll never give—” He stopped short.
His phone had detected who he was looking at and brought up a small window labeled “Related News.” A headline there caught his eye:
Breaking: Norman Authorizes “Final System” to Locate Kidnapped Child
His stomach plunged faster than the cab as it settled on a parking pad outside an apartment building. “Please tell me,” he said, “you’re not working with Andrew Norman.”
Sprite said, “I’m not on Norman’s payroll, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Bullshit.”
Her avatar’s face appeared in a chat window, eyes narrowed. “Why the phreak would I lie to you, Ghost?”
He glared back. “You already did. You’ve been pretending to work against the System, and all this time, you’ve been working with it!”
“I’ve been working to get it out of Norman’s hands. I never said otherwise.”
“What the phreak does that mean?”
“Look, can you indulge your feelings of betrayal later? Clock’s ticking.”
“This is sickening,” Jason said through his teeth.
“I saved your life,” Sprite snapped. “Do this and we’re even. You can walk away and never see me again if you feel so contaminated. Just help me save this little girl first. You have Dunne-Carr’s feed up? Look at her, Ghost. Look at the little girl.”
Jason kept glowering, but his eyes shifted to the politician’s MeNet feed.
There were several informal pictures of the woman in a park with what must be her family: a tall Black man with a humorous smile and a little girl whose eyes and mouth in every picture were wide with the kind of open delight at the world you only ever saw in kids.
“Ghost,” Sprite said, “we can save her. But we need you. She needs you.” Sprite’s voice suddenly went up an octave. “Ghost, we have two minutes!”
“Phreak!” Jason kicked open the door.