“Sure. Go ahead.”
All of the Human Resources staff were v-borns; not a single natural-born cell among them. The smile Simran gave her was fixed and programmed. Their brains were vestigial, and so, Celeste heard, were other parts of their body. It was said they were much more submissive and easier to bring to orgasm than a natural-born woman. The men of the Crawl loved them mad, unsurprisingly. Less effort needed always wins approval.
The mid-secs were a real hive of ‘mixed meat’, these days – a term Celeste hated because it smacked of old-time prejudice. Entire hate channels were devoted to those who thought v-born citizens should be deleted. She didn’t think so, but the way men, and some women, flocked around girls like Simran left her with a feeling she preferred to leave undefined. The tinge of isolation made her reach into the pod’s dispenser for a pink, to buzz up her mood. No matter what overlays she used to brighten, sharpen, or darken the world, that particular reality, was closed off to her – always out of reach.
She knew Simran was running a standard diagnostic check, ensuring Celeste was operating within parameters and not dropping off the authorised Compound streams to connect with illegal channels or lo-sec threads. Celeste watched the metallic shimmer of the girl’s hair. Her hand raised, involuntarily, but then stopped. Was she going to touch Simran’s hair – see how real it felt, or did not feel – or tear it out at the roots for the hell of it?
Simran finished the diagnostic check and raised her head, giving Celeste that dumb, bland smile again. “That’s all fine. You may connect now. Have a good shift. Shalom.”
Celeste fake-smiled and nodded her thanks. “Shalom.”
Her stare followed Simran for a moment as she walked away. Her skin was crawling with the need to both touch and hurt the girl. She tore her gaze away and finished prepping for the first chase of the day.
Closing her eyes, Celeste touched a finger to the nodule under her earlobe, gently manipulating and stroking it in a different way to when she’d been conjuring an overlay earlier in the hub-car. This time, she was going deep, into the Flood. A tremor went through her body as she felt her soulwire engage. This was the part she always dug. It began as a slight flickering in the periphery. This was the Flood tuning in to the unique rhythms of her brain’s synaptic flow. The sensation of connecting was, at first, like falling: triggering a primal instinct that made the muscles clench against impact. She let the falling take her, and though her eyes were closed, she could see her body appear to be undoing itself, silently flaying away into nano-streams of coruscating light that extended on and on in all directions, spreading out and out to create a unifying web.
She was mere consciousness here, without body, without form. The thought of herself, her name alone, had to be held onto. This initial rush was why people loved the Flood – you felt so much of a part of something, of so many people, that to disconnect was to feel loss, to become minute and isolated from a universe you felt at one with.
It wasn’t called the Flood for nothing either; every day, people became lost in it. Rogue surges broke apart the matrices of their thought patterns, shattering selves into pieces, consuming them and leaving only traces behind. These traces were her quarry.
Celeste Walker held onto herself until the rush passed and she was fully initialised. Algorithms rendered themselves as steady pulses, passing through the web- structure visual of the Flood. It was different to triggering an overlay; this felt like the skin of reality had been peeled back to reveal what lay beneath – the truth.
Time to chase down a trace.
You had to be tough to be a chaser. Traces were loaded with memories and vibes. Once they got inside your head, you needed to be able to keep yourself separate. It wasn’t easy to do that. Some chasers went under. Too much contact with other consciousnesses drove them out of their minds. Afterwards, they were taken back to their modules, their fried brains wired in, zeroed out, and quietly dropped.
Celeste felt a shift like a change in sea pressure. Heavy shadow passed over the web visual, making it fragment. A CI was in the Flood, deep-scanning. You reconned them in the same way a school of fish feels the presence of an undersea predator. Best thing was to be mind-still until they were gone. This one lingered, letting itself weigh upon the thought-patterns of all those in proximity. She saw a few lights go out nearby – death by corporate identity.
The shadow lifted. The CI had moved on, and Celeste felt a familiar break in one of the light-flows nearby. She could sense it as fluctuation, a wild splintering of fractals and indefinite shapes. She drifted towards it, imagining herself reaching out with an invisible hand.
She took a breath, a ghost-reflex, as she made contact; the next step in the process, and the most hazardous. If this went wrong, she could end up lost in the Flood. The tell-tale flickering at the edge of her periphery alerted her that another shift in perception was about to occur.
Celeste went in. She plunged her imaginary hand into the heart of the fluctuation. A violent surge of sensation punched into her cortex. Viral tears bled from unreal eyes. Blood ran into her mouth as she bit down on tongue and cheek. This trace had a lot of hurt inside.
Everything changed. The Flood’s non-space evaporated as reverse-rain. The web-structure ebbed away. A sense of space and sound developed, along with the ripening of odours and the emergence of flesh-and-bone bodies. She felt floor beneath her feet, and the heavy bass of thunderous nu-music resonating in her gut. Looking around, she saw people and place take shape, resolve into clarity.
Memory comprised the bulk of a trace, and it behaved like a protective outer shell. She had to get to the core of the trace in order to defuse it. She looked down and saw she was someone else: an ebony man with an elegant body, multi-coloured dreads and a self-graphitised fibe-suit. The illusion would have to be maintained, or she would be perceived as an anomaly within the trace, which could turn on her as an immune system turns on invasive bacteria. This was another risk. If she spent too long isolating the core to defuse the trace, she could lose her sense of self and become a part of the illusion, drifting around the Flood. Her body shipped back to her module for zeroing and the drop. She wondered how many chasers were down in the lo-secs, vegetating their lives away, and how long it would be until she joined them.
Chapter Five
The trace-memory was a party, mapped out over several rooms, all heaving with people. They were younger than Celeste, making her feel self-conscious, despite wearing a body that matched theirs. The music was so loud that she couldn’t hear what was being said around her, or to her, most of the time. Barrel-tanks of alcohol rested against the walls at irregular junctures, corrugated pipes ran from each one to a crude release-valve that, when turned, let out a foaming gush of vape-cold beer. The core of the trace would be a person the memory belonged to. Sometimes, this was easy – especially if they were the only person in the trace. This was not going to be easy.
She pushed through the boorish crowd, looking for obvious signs. There was little regulated behaviour here, which was often a feature of Flood-born fantasies. Dreams of a life outside the modules, hub-cars, and toxin-clouds.
Celeste saw a frail girl sitting alone, sipping at a bottle that bore an animated DiGi-label of a winking cat in a top hat. She wasn’t making eye contact with other partygoers and seemed to be there with no-one. She was clad in a long-sleeved T-shirt, a black polka-dot skirt, bright yellow leggings and unlaced army boots. Her lank whitish hair fell in front of her eyes. This could be the core she was looking for.