Ragnarok (9 page)

As Cato had failed in every relevant way, V team found
themselves untraced atop the second most dangerous site on the nets. The surface of the Nikkei was notorious on its own for sleazy companies, illegitimate hiring practices, and the production of about 70 percent of the world's spam. V team's anti-advert brainware was already on overdrive to block the common Nikkei commercials. Once they hit the Undernet, it would likely not be enough to deafen them to their surroundings. They could already feel scans pushing at their temples. Invasive probes that hit their links hard enough to warrant forced deletion from their defenses. A random seller would only be declined; to get itself deleted, something would have to have tried to hack them, to reprogram them to buy Skuzz or scamware. Varg took a peek at some of the programming caught in his filters.

“I just caught a strange one,” he reported, “It looks like a typical pirate store, but if you enter the site, it implants nerve impulses. Makes you feel your skin is burning away. No sales in it, no purpose.”

“Must be from the RIAA,” explained Vibs. “They released a bunch of those in the 2100s. Ancient programs, easy to catch, but some are still circulating.”

“Nasty. Oh wow, just blocked this one—an inception that you need more penises. ‘Medical-West Consortium can give you more! Limit 4 in Kentucky and Saudi Kemet.'”

Veikko laughed, “I just got one for Kruschev's Funerary Services. ‘We will bury you. Offer not valid at Disneyland, postmortem burials may cost extra.' Sounds legit to me.”

“Let me know if one starts with a C. We still have no name.”

“You think too much, Vibs. Crisco! I got one for Crisco. Weird, that's hardly Nikkei materi—Aha. It's really swill oil sold under the real deal's label. They skim it out of raw sewage.”

“I like Crisco,” added Varg, “the name, I mean. And also the shortening.”

“Well, pick fast.” Violet had spotted the black and yellow mark. “Here's the Undernet access.”

The Undernet trapdoor was no more than a warning label on the Nikkei planetoid's lowest layer floor—“Warning: This site will destroy your brain.” A spamwriter looked at them with disdain, shaking his head in disappointment, knowing the sickening goings on beneath that label. Veikko saw him and caught his attention.

“Hey, spamboy, is ‘Crisco' a good name for a mission?”

“You'll die down there, slick. Crooks in those parts 'il eat you and your pals alive,” he muttered as he floated away.

Veikko laughed, “That was a yes. Let's do it! Crooks who know pick Crisco.”

He leaped onto the trapdoor and fell out of sight. His Tikari's avatar followed immediately. Violet noticed on the spamwriter's words, “Slick,” that they all had a shiny black appearance. Though they had signed in through AleGel, they still had their obsidian avatars from Valhalla, avatars being a brain setting rather than a net selection. It wasn't a flaw, necessarily. Some parts of the net recognized them as the Obsidian Order. Balder once explained that a couple of lurkers even knew they were the netside visage of the Hall of the Slain. A good thing for the most part. People who recognized them as such knew they weren't to be messed with. Violet hoped it would work to their advantage. She hated the feel of an overlooked mission element no matter how positive its effect. She had to wonder just what else they'd overlooked on their first rogue project.

Vibeke followed after, her Tikari disappearing with her into the warning. Varg and Violet jumped last, Tikaris silently following them into the pit. And it was a pit. The Undernet looked little like the warm colorful planetoids of the common web. Where most sites loaded as globes to be wandered, the Undernet was a vast funnel with nine distinct levels. The top level was called the shooting gallery and had become a sort of proving ground for the virulent ads of the region. When they'd logged in before via Alopex, they could bypass the common entry and land anywhere they pleased on the Undernet, all without a single advert passing Aloe's natural security. Without Aloe they came in like the rest.

The shooting gallery didn't look all that bad. It manifested as a long circular garden with plush grass floors. Most of the avatars seemed benign, just common topside users who weren't there for any specific criminal activity but wanted to see the forbidden zone. Taking up a third of the circle was the Lower Mantle Bulwark Orientation (LMBO), a castle forged from stolen code and illegal barrier coding. There one could find the legends of the illegal net. Omar, The Octopus, The Hypocrites, and the infamous Caesar all worked from the LMBO, wreaking havoc upon the topside nets with hacks the common net user couldn't fathom. Hacks that even Alopex couldn't implement. Valhalla had once tried to engage Caesar to break into the Gallia Database, but he declined, having broken in some years prior and not wanting to repeat himself.

Valknut suffered the indignity of having to walk through the landscape, unable to simply appear where they wished. They'd have to make their way down each ring from portal to location specific portal, treating the vast rings like a combination lock to find their man. And like the rest of the net, they'd have to deal with the same dangers.

Violet spotted the first threat coming from far away: a Skuzzbot. It had no avatar, but against the limp code of the walls, it stood out as a blister in the VR. Contact barriers were still in play so it couldn't hack her and make her buy the deadly Skuzz, but the bot would monitor her and learn what she was after, then disguise itself and wait to be touched. Veikko had spotted it first and hit it with a delay code.

There were several others incoming: Silkbots, zombieware, zombified users sent recruiting, fractal theft algorithms. Violet even spotted a transcription bubble floating ominously around the ring. Alopex could have burst it in an instant if she were there. But rogue as they were, V team couldn't do a thing but avoid it. It would eventually find a user and take over their monetary implant back on Earth, alter their RNA transcription to produce physical worms, and then release the parasites to infect the innocent in reality, where contact barriers sadly didn't exist.

“Yoshi is in the Deutsch section of the gambling sack,” said Varg, “We have a long way to go.”

The avatars followed Varg as they descended from level to level, trying to stick near to the German routes and portals. Level Two sold pornography. Pornography even Varg was loath to witness. Most was thankfully nothing particularly worse than what appeared topside, merely made more scandalous by merit of its location. The appeal of the forbidden. But some corners of the ring didn't display what they sold. That was their advertisement, that they wouldn't even show their stock on the illegal Undernet. The team moved quickly, not wanting to even consider what might lurk inside those rooms.

Having lost their appetites completely, they arrived in the third circle, where the illegal foods trade thrived. Where illegal high concentration livestock farmers hocked their abused goods. Where foie gras was advertised openly, where endangered species were sold by the premium cut. But the crowds on the third circle didn't flock to eat beef. A crowd on that ring meant someone was online offering the real forbidden fruit—Soylent goods. Human blood was common enough, but all hell broke loose when an avatar appeared offering genuine human meat. It was often a lab growing the stuff illegally, but if ever a live farm went online, it was in the third circle.

They dropped quickly to the fourth, the Black Nikkei itself. Arms dealers, illegal medical stores. It was estimated once by Forbes that the amount of cash flowing through the fourth level of the Undernet was ten times what passed through the top five subconglomerate companies topside. There were so many avatars Violet could believe it.

V team had browsed the ring a hundred times for Mishka. But that was under Alopex. It looked completely different as a common user. They couldn't instantly see the true identities of the anonymous around them anymore. Violet was surprised to find a few were black solid blanks like their own. She wondered if any might be from Valhalla, seeing right through their own from Aloe's eyes. Common detective work could resolve her curiosity about some of the crowd.

The biggest transaction in the ring was coming to an end. Violet used a plain Bryce hack to listen in. It was a matter of shipping rights. Heavy load transportation from Mars to Earth, massive payment, massive security. She didn't try to trace any of the avatars, but some were obvious. WYCo wasn't even disguised. Xorats was there, evidenced by a poorly hidden provider log. Zaibatsu had two avatars present. She'd have to trace to learn which, but if they were on the Undernet, one was likely Yakuza. The avatar she guessed was the Yak won the contract as V team left the area. Violet followed her team down to darker circles.

The fifth circle was a thick swamp of anonymous hate. Primarily a ranting zone, the arena was also rife with duels. Where offended p
arties from above came to settle their disagreements without contact barriers. Here they would take each other's hands and fight to the death with their cruelest hacks. Many of the avatars were frozen as statues, duels in which both had become caught in infinite loops, their bodies dying off in the real world, and their brains stuck forever in their f
inal feuds.

Ring six was a smattering of political dissident sites and underground religious groups. One log bore an icon of a crescent moon and star—Muslims, according to an old briefing. The label had a musical code under it, and Violet glanced at it to listen. It was a chant of sorts. It seemed fairly innocuous, unlike the formidable police tracking codes that stuck to any user walking in or out of the place. Other religious symbols appeared, but Violet wasted little on them. She only glared angrily at one Russian Cross, and then they moved on.

Ring seven was dominated by gang disputes. It was there that Bruise and Kigali En Ligne fought the war that lead to the Black Crag itself, that killed the most junior teams. Violet had been there not too long ago to clean up the aftermath. It was a sad place, made all the uglier by its garish militaristic designs. Thankfully ads and malware were now all but absent. The people deeper down the cruel vortex meant business and would happily spend their time tracking down an author or programmer if they were attacked.

The eighth level was the most massive. Divided into ten sacks, it housed the most colossal fraud ring in existence. Each sack held an organized crime syndicate or illegal action zone. The mafia owned the first. The next was empty, having housed the Orange Gang a year prior. It hadn't filled in, to Violet's surprise. It was seen as cursed. She grinned at that back in the real world. The level was so massive the team clung to their Tikaris and activated Geryon systems to bypass most of the netspace, a process taking longer than walking but avoiding confrontation with the illegitimate businesses that might have disputes with the black avatars that once foiled their projects.

They skipped the Unspeakable Darkness's sack where body modifications were bought and sold. Many of the mods were illegal and dangerous, but those there to buy were in no fighting mood. They just wanted their teeth implanted with venom glands, and that was fine by Violet. They skipped the Yakuza sack, which seemed to be celebrating the deal made a few circles up. And finally they came to Bulge Five, the gambling sack.

It was a rowdy place full of pitfalls of damaged coding. Everyone was sh
outing. All the link labels were in different, larger lettering. When Violet looked at one to have it sounded out, the thing screamed at her. It was nothing like gambling sites on the common net. Those sites ran in euros and legally checked and monitored every bid. Nor was it like the Nikkei nets, which ran in untraceable Yen instead of tracked euros. It was more like a den of rabid animals, or what Veikko explained as a “Mosh Pit,” a long banned musical ritual where people danced by running into each other as hard as they could. The metaphor was apt. People everywhere were trying to gr
ab each other without permission. The contact barriers kept bumping the avatars back at odd angles.

What Violet could make out amid the shouting was confusing to say the least. A large pit bull avatar was calling out stakes for some sort of match. Violet looked directly at the board icon, but it wouldn't say what sport, only the names of the contestants, which sounded like pet names instead of human. Beside that kiosk was a political betting stand. The bet was on a senate vote to censure a group of GAUNE subsidiaries. It had few takers, but the ones there were double blanked. It would take Alopex to trace them completely. On her own Violet couldn't find the avatar's name but a quick penetrative scan revealed them to be logged in from a GAUNE senate chamber link.

Varg and his Tikari were making a thorough search of the region. The sack churned slowly under their feet, showing them every dirty game from Interzone Inc. to the remains of the Purple Gang's betting businesses. Violet was tempted to ask how their old boss Hrothgar was holding up when Varg found his man. The team headed for a small kiosk leaning against the debugging gutter of a Russian Roulette casino. It was programmed in rotting wood textures with a text sign that bore no link label. Violet couldn't make it out at all. Her text software called the left letter a backward E, and the other two just looked like smiley faces. Whatever it said, Varg recognized the old man inside.

And he was an
old
man, a wrinkly, liver-spotted mess of an avatar with brilliant white hair, about ten strands of it on his entire head. He was speaking in a low curdled rasp to an ASD avatar. Valhalla had considered using ASD avatars in the beginning, the constantly shifting face and scrambling voice provided extreme anonymity and left other users guessing as to what was behind the mask, but obsidian black offered the same without the confusion or implications—ASD avatars were generally used by drug enforcement, and given the nature of some of Valhalla's contacts, they didn't want to be suspected as such. The old man handed his customer a folder, and the strange thing logged out. He looked at the faceless obsidian crowd.