They’d stopped for a few minutes. It seemed like this was the destination. Sid used inertials to track every inch of the path down. By his calculations they were three hundred and sixty-two feet under Third Avenue and Forty-Second Street. He knew exactly where he was. Sid’s question wasn’t about spatial coordinates—he just wanted to know what they’d say before he crushed them.
“Do you want the good news or the bad news?” Sid recognized the voice as Bunky’s, one of his kidnappers from the bathroom.
In an overlay some scant details appeared as his internal pssi displayed what it had so far: British birth origin, Somerset accent, blood vessels on the surface of facial skin indicating probable history of alcoholism. In another situation it seemed like someone he’d enjoy meeting. Sid played along. “Bad news, please.”
The Grilla dumped him onto a chair, ripping the cover off him in a motion that nearly flayed the skin off his arms.
“A martyr, I like that,” Bunky said. “The bad news, my friend, is that you’re completely fucked.”
Sid blinked and looked around. His sensory system gathered information at the same time as his extrasensory one did the same, hacking into any networks nearby. He was in a large cavern, roughly hewn from black bedrock. Naked fluorescent bulbs dotted wet-streaked walls. Gaping holes led outward. The cavern was filled with a shanty town of tin roofs and lopsided structures that filled the floor and climbed the walls. Halfway up one side of the walls, at the mouth of one of the tunnels, Sid was seated on a terrace, surrounded by his captors.
“Now the good news.” Shaky, his other kidnapper, smiled at Sid. “You’re in a pub. The White Horse. I mean if you’ve got to be fucked, might as well be in a pub, right?” He cackled at his own joke.
Sid’s internal systems were piecing things together. Both Bunky and Shaky were at Battery Park when he walked around there with Bob. His inVerse plotted their paths from recordings, mapping their paths backward in the recorded wikiworld.
A serving bot dropped a pint of beer in front of Sid. “Yeah, I know I’m in a pub.” He picked it up and took a swig.
One of the first things he hacked into, in the seconds since they removed the cloak, was the food and drink system of the establishment they were in. Sid had ordered a beer. In fact, several beers. More plunked down in front of Shaky and Bunky. They roared with laughter.
Shaky slapped Sid on the back. “You’re all right, mate!”
On the opposite wall of the cavern, directly ahead of Sid, two tunnel openings yawned open, like two giant eyes staring at him. Mesh netting held back loose rock near the entrances, while white tubes wormed their way around the mouths. Metal ribs lined the tunnels, flanked by fat packets of cabling that snaked into the distance and disappeared into the darkness. Clunking up through each of the tunnels were large construction mechanoids.
Bunky saw Sid looking at them. “No need to worry, just our better halves come to get us for work.”
Sid wasn’t worried. He was trying to crack into them. A construction mechanoid on the rampage would give these assholes something to think about.
“Afraid we can’t hack into those,” said Vicious, Sid’s proxxi. Only Sid could see and hear Vicious. Between them they were spinning out a range of escape scenarios—flooding the tunnels with water by opening a sewage drain, carbon monoxide poisoning from jamming exhausts, a blinding flash of floodlights followed by a power failure. A combination of these might give Sid just enough time.
Sibeal, the girl from the bar, sat down on a bench next to him. “Before you do anything you might regret, let’s have a chat.” She grabbed one of his phantom hands in synthetic space. “And no, I don’t want a beer.”
Sid readied his attack vectors. “So what’s this about, then?” It didn’t matter. Whatever the reason, he was about to unleash a very unpleasant learning experience on them.
This was a den of phrackers, ‘cutters, and underminers. Sid knew their kind. He was their kind. The underminers were really just construction workers, tied to whatever local mob affiliates they had to be, but the ‘cutters and phrackers mostly worked for the Asian gambling syndicates. They knocked out corporate AIs, shifted the future timeline to try and shift odds, struggling against the future regulators who were fighting a losing battle to make sure the future is what it was supposed to be.
Sibeal rolled her eyes, and in an overlaid display Sid was surprised to see a knot of phantom limbs spread out from her, uncoiling into the hyperspaces where he was readying his assault. One by one, his strings of control were cut.
“We’re friends,” she replied. Sibeal wrapped the cut strings around him, tying up his virtual hands. She smiled. “In fact, we’re fans.”
“That’s right, mate,” said Bunky, raising his beer.
Sid glanced at his proxxi. Vicious shrugged. There was nothing he could do, but this didn’t seem threatening either. Sid turned to Sibeal. “If we’re friends, then why the kidnapping routine?”
Sibeal shrugged in pssi-space. “There wasn’t time to explain. We had to get out of there. Your friend unloaded a massive synthetic charge in that bar.”
Who were they talking about? “My friend?”
Sibeal opened a channel and shared her mediaworld reports. “Over a thousand people lost their minds, Bob was right in the middle.”
“If we hadn’t gotten you out of there…” Shaky made small explosion gestures with his fingers, as if his mind was blowing. “You should choose your friends more carefully.”
Sid assimilated the mediaworlds and frowned. “There’s no way Bob had anything to do with this. I was with him the whole time.” Not the whole time. They must have snatched him too. “Where is he?”
“We thought you might know.” Sibeal watched for Sid’s reaction. “He’s gone off grid. There’s one heck of a bounty attached to him.” She paused. “And you, too, for that matter.”
In augmented space, Sid’s proxxi nodded. So that was what all this was about—bounty hunters. He could guess what they wanted. His friends. “I can’t help you.”
“If you help us, maybe we can help you.” Sibeal spun a new information packet into Sid’s networks—a data beacon. “We found something your friend left behind. Want to have a look?”
He was on dangerous ground here. They had kidnapped him, yet claimed to be friends, then admitted they were bounty hunters. Nothing in the logical chain made him think he should trust them, and yet his gut told him he could. He was the one that had contacted them in the first place, and he needed as much information as he could get. He could let this roll. Whatever happened, he was confident he could outsmart them if it came down to it, but it might be useful to give the impression that he was in it for the money as well. He nodded. “But we split any commission?”
Sibeal glanced at Bunky and Shaky and they both nodded. “Sure,” she replied.
In the background their networks began handshaking the reputational matrix of the deal. Sid hoped it wouldn’t come to that. He was tracking the hundreds of identity tags that Bob left behind in his escape, multiplying these by the thousands of exit points and the dense transport network.
Bob could be almost anywhere in the world by now.
2
The priest watched the young man in the next cell. So young, and yet he couldn’t ignore the signs. He looked out through the rusted bars of his own cell, shuffling his feet along the stone floors, looking for just the right angle. Yes, there it was, hanging in the blue sky, its tails spreading as it grew. There was not much time.
The young man groaned.