Originator (36 page)

“Kids' brains are wired differently,” said Jane. “He might have a better intuitive sense of it than straights do. But that thing in his head is Talee, and no question it recognises what these guys are using against us. If he can do it passively, it might be our only chance to see what's coming before they see us.”

Jane was right, of course. Sandy had been terrified of making serious use of Kiril's uplinks because of the dangers it posed to his young brain. But the worst that could happen was injury, and now they were facing near-certain death . . . unless they could find some kind of advantage.

“Kiri,” she said, pulling the booster cord from her pocket and plugging it in to the back of her head. “I'm going to make a connection with you. A proper connection, you understand?”

“Wait, won't
they
see it?” Svetlana asked. Danya looked scared for an entirely different reason.

“I don't think so, the booster creates its own network.” Sandy patted her pocket, where the cord connected to the booster unit. “It's all self-contained.”

“But you have to make wireless contact with me,” said Kiril, glancing up at the rock overhang above them. “But I guess it won't penetrate this.”

“But keep an eye on it,” said Jane, “because from what we've seen of Talee, they can hack into any network, wireless or otherwise, whether it was meant to be hacked or not. Autistic-external won't help you.”

“Sure, but they have to see it first,” said Sandy. The hum in her head indicated a network presence, the booster creating a cyberspace construct of its own. It felt like a line, an artificial horizon, running through her head. One flip, and all reality would reverse itself. “Danya, just hold onto him and make sure he doesn't fall over.”

“You don't need that?” Danya asked, doing that.

Sandy shook her head. “Are you ready?

“Yeah,” said Kiril a little nervously. “Is it going to feel weird, or . . .”

She flipped it . . .

. . . and was in a blank space. There were no walls or floor, which was always disorienting at first, so she tuned in the detail just a little more . . . and a floor appeared. Walls, corners. A square room.

“Sandy?” It was Kiril's voice, and she turned. He sounded tinny, bereft of detail. A light hovered, head height, above the floor. “Sandy, is that you?”

“Hi, Kiri. What can you see?”

“Um . . . I think I see a room. And a shape, it looks . . . yeah, it definitely looks like you.”

“Okay . . . we're still not sharing very much data, that's why all the detail is low. How do you feel?”

“Um . . . okay. It's a bit strange.”

“Do you feel the water? Anything from the river?”

“No, but . . . hey, I can see more now.”

Sandy did a subconscious dart into the data stream and saw that, sure enough, the data feed was increasing. “Well, I'm not doing that,” she said. It scared her, the sudden rate of increase. Almost as though . . . “I think your uplinks are doing that on their own.”

“Cool!” said Kiril. Back in the VR room, the light representing Kiril was slowly materialising. Kiril-sized and Kiril-shaped . . . and god knew how it knew those dimensions so exactly. Most non-GIs doing VR for the first time
had to have that data fed in externally. It even had Kiril's clothes. Detail continued to resolve, far beyond what it should at this level of integration.

Finally it was Kiril. He gawked at himself, looking at his hands and arms, then turning to stare at the unnaturally bare room. Then he turned to Sandy, grinned, and ran to hug her. Sandy hugged him back. Even that felt real, almost to natural standard.

“We shouldn't be able to make VR this real on a wireless connection off a booster, should we?” he suggested.

“No.” She frowned and stepped back to look at him. “You still feel okay?”

“This is amazing!” He stepped back to look around. “I guess it knows what you think I look like, huh?”

Damn, of course it did. It amazed her that Kiril just seemed to grasp what the technology was doing. But then, as Jane said, he was intuiting as much as thinking.

“Can we go someplace?” he asked, all excitement. “Can we load some VR place?”

“No, we need a network to do that,” said Sandy. “Something to connect us to a big computer. Right now we're just inside my little booster.” Kiril jumped up and down. Then danced on one leg. Sandy repressed a grin. “What are you doing?”

“It feels a bit funny. Like . . . I don't know.”

“It's a simulation,” Sandy explained. “All the signal receptors in your brain that work when you're walking or jumping have to be stimulated exactly the same as when you're doing it for real. Since you're so new to it, your brain isn't reading quite the same signals, that's why it feels strange. But after a while, your brain will fill in the gaps on its own, without needing to be told.” Because the human brain, worryingly enough, liked to be fooled and would compliantly play along when directed. Except for high-des GI brains, which broke information down into pieces and refused to accept the overall narrative quite so easily.

“I can't believe we're not actually here,” said Kiril, looking around. “This is so cool.” Most people in VR for the first time had some kind of nausea or cognitive difficulty before their brains adjusted. Sandy couldn't help but feel proud that Kiril showed nothing like it.

“Now, Kiri,” she said, “come here, take my hand.” He took it. “We're going to go into data mode.”

“You mean cyberspace?” It remained the colloquial term. “I've been there lots, I can see that fine on my AR glasses.”

“You ready?” She flipped again, and the blank walls disappeared. About them was infinite space . . . and yet finite, close range, and lit with light. Here was a huge, massively complex golden half-sphere, layered and gleaming with complexity.

“Woaw!” She could still see him, physical representations were not necessary in cyber, but for Kiril on his first adventure, it was probably easier. His figure was transparent, postureless with nothing to react against in this space. “What's that? Is that you?”

“Yeah, that's me. Or that's every bit of my brain and systems that's connected to a network.”

“It's
huge
!” Again she had to smile. A seven-year-old's enthusiasm was infectious. “That's 'cause you're a GI, right?”

“Yeah, there's much more in my brain that connects to something. And all of that is able to connect to a network. See that over there? Look to your left.” He looked. Not far off was a much smaller globe with a similar radiant layer, like atmosphere over a planet. “That's you. See these little fuzzy links between us? They're kind of whizzing around all over the place?”

“Is that the wireless? I mean, that's cyberspace showing a wireless connection?”

“Yep. Now let's go over and have a look at you. . . .” She did it slowly, because sudden movement in here could really create nausea, which the disem-bodied brain struggled to process, leading to a VR breakdown. Kiril's network construct came closer, intricate details emerging, like a tightly wound ball of microfilament wires. “Each of those little wires is an information pathway. And this outer shield is your barriers. So right here your barriers are hardly active at all, you're admitting me no trouble at all. That's why we can share a VR space together so easily without a proper network.”

And that scared her again, because if his barriers were that easy to penetrate, he'd be completely defenceless to the Talee . . . but on the other hand, his net connections didn't link to anything very vital. Attacking them could sever connection between his brain and the uplinks but couldn't actually attack his brain at all. Yet. With the level of invasiveness of this uplink tech, that would come later, she was sure of it.

It looked good though. Solid. The detail in his construct was organised in ways that looked to her trained eye as though they shouldn't work with normal tech . . . clearly something else was going on with Kiril's tech, down on the molecular level. The tests the FSA doctors had done had suggested as much.

“How much does it connect?” Kiril asked, gazing at it. “I mean, these are the receptors here and here. . . .” he pointed to where the wireless tendrils seemed to be interacting with the construct, causing reciprocal flashes of activity. “So these are activating my VR capability? And I should be sharing all kinds of stuff with you, into that VR stuff?”

“Well . . .” It wasn't an easy thing to explain to someone without the technical lingo. “Sure. But see, this is the problem with Neural Cluster Tech, NCT—the stuff they were using on Pyeongwha. It shared
everything
. There was no filter, and then every other brain responded the same way, so you had this crazy echo effect, where people's brains were all trying to copy each other, and it changed the way their brains worked.”

“See if you can feel this,” said Kiril. And Sandy felt . . . wow. It was odd, a completely unwarranted change in her emotional state. Only it wasn't
her
emotional state, it was . . . Kiril? She felt excited, but not in the more complex way an adult might . . . it was just enthusiasm, without roots. But more than enthusiasm. Awe? “That's how I felt the first time I saw Tanusha from the air,” Kiril explained.

“I can feel that, yes,” Sandy said quietly. She didn't know what to think. All her years of uplinked and networked experience, she'd never felt anything like it. With anyone.

“How about this?” This one she recognised immediately . . . and she had to flip them out of cyberspace into the VR room once more, because she'd started to cry, and in cyberspace an unrequited physiological reaction could cause VR collapse. He stood before her now, in the blank white room, scruffyhaired and incurably curious, gazing up at her. Looking at him, Sandy felt love, so pure and intense . . . yet not
hers
. “This is when I think of all of us together,” said Kiril. “You, me, Danya, and Svetlana. I mean, not all the time, but when I think of what it would be like if one of us wasn't here? And then I think of how much I like all of us together.”

“I feel like that too,” Sandy managed to say, her hands on his shoulders.

“I know,” he said, smiling. “I can feel it.”

This degree of interactivity was dangerous. The future implications . . . but screw the future implications; she was trying to keep them alive. And this degree of interactivity might just support . . .

“Kiri, I'm going to drop us out. Are you ready?” He nodded. She flipped again, and . . .

. . . they were back in the cold water, Kiril blinking on his rock, supported by Danya's arm around his shoulders. Cyberspace was still before her eyes, and she made a few frequency adjustments, adjusted booster power, and activated her own local tacnet. It fired up quickly, with just the booster to run on . . . and immediately she could see Kiril's construct grab it, interact and process it . . . and suddenly icons were spreading across her view, red and ominous.

It took her several moments to figure out what she was looking at. Hostile icons. Enemy, as tacnet processed things, friends and enemies . . . and then it hit her, as she registered ranges, trajectories, even numbers. The Talee synths were broadcasting some kind of search signal, filtered by their own uplinks, and Kiril's uplinks, being of a similar type, were picking that up and processing it while bouncing nothing back. Now tacnet gave it a framework within which to express what it saw, and these red hostile dots on her screen . . . they were the Talee synthetics hunting them. These were the enemy. And Kiril's uplinks meant she could see them, for as long as they kept active scanning.

“Jane!” she said, meeting Jane's eyes. “Tacnet, now!”

Jane connected her own booster, and suddenly Jane was there too, her icon reading green as tacnet failed to recognise her as friend or foe, and Sandy switched it to friendly-blue. Now Jane's eyes widened to see that display.

“Well, that's a start,” she said. “But if you generate that wireless connection with Kiril in the open, they'll spot it like a giant fucking beacon. And if they've acquired armed flyers by now, which they surely have, they'll put a rocket on you before you can blink.”

Amirah blinked her eyes open. She was in the backseat of a groundcar. Poole was leaning over her, removing an insert cord from the back of her head. A moment ago she'd been in FSA HQ. Arguing with the Director. It seemed
indistinct now, like a dream. But it had certainly been VR. Hadn't it? VR recollections were always precise, never dreamlike.

“Where am I?” Poole was attending to someone unconscious beside her—there were four of them, she realised, crammed into the backseat of the car, Poole sitting across their laps. The car was moving erratically, unlike most car rides in Tanusha. Manual control, she realised, looking out the window. It was a regular Tanushan road, not a highway, but there were vehicles parked randomly across the verges, people standing about, talking in groups, pointing. What the hell was going on?

“Talee tried their mass-VR assault on all Tanusha,” Rhian said from the driver's seat. She wore light combat armour, and various weapons were jammed into the gaps between seats and passengers everywhere. “Put all the FSA out, much of the CSA. Now the whole thing's collapsing.”

She indicated out the windows, steering between stopped cars. Traffic net must be down completely, Amirah thought with incredulity. That never happened. A few of the stopped cars had been in accidents, mostly minor ones . . . but if it was like this all over Tanusha, there'd surely be worse elsewhere. Here in the front yard of a suburban house a cruiser was lying on its roof, attended by a small crowd of civilians.

“Cruiser crash,” said the GI in the front passenger seat—Leon, she remembered his name. FSA spec ops, low-40s designation. “You ever seen a cruiser crash?”