Jak Koke - Stranger souls

The whole process took less than half a second. Null strain.

Inside the host, the sculpted imagery continued with the body theme, but with a twist. Organs seemed to float in a soup of sanguine fluid, haphazardly connected. A massive heart pumped data packets through artery lines to all the organs. Kidneys, liver, and brain hung in the surrounding space. No lungs.

Her analyze utility recognized the different organs as subsystems on the host, supposedly in charge of different functions. She pulsed up to the brain, its ventriculated lobes looming a dull pinkish gray before her. She followed the flow of data packets and attempted to access the subsystem using her security request identity once again. No time to lose.

Two heartbeats passed before she was inside. Too long, she thought. Might have tripped an event trigger.

Once inside she searched for a datastore, and found it with her analyze program a moment later, hanging like a massive upside-down ganglion. She spooled out the dumbframe she had programmed, ordering it to scan for recent admissions to the clinic, while she swept over all the files by date. In less than ten seconds the dumbframe had come back with seven entries. None of them matched Ryan.

Frag me raw. Jane still had no direct evidence that Ryan Mercury, aka Quicksilver, was inside the clinic. McFaren and two other mages who had worked with Dunkelzahn had used some of Ryan's tissue to locate him with ritual magic. McFaren was sure Ryan was inside, and Jane trusted him, but she still wanted visual proof. She wanted a camera image of him.

Abruptly, she noticed something as she accessed the room logs. One of the rooms, D307, had been activated in the last day. The locks had been accessed, the machinery and sec cameras powered up. D307 had experienced a great deal of activity, but no official entry was made. That must be it. She decided to check the internal camera records.

A huge macrophage-like construct swooped down upon her as she detached from the ganglionic databank, trying to sleaze her way out of the brain subsystem.

"User Identify," it said.

"Decoy," she told her dumbframe. Then as she turned to the ice in front of her, transferring her bogus security clearance, the dumbframe shot past, heading back toward the datastore.

The ice moved to intercept the dumbframe. And Jane used the split-second to unleash a massive attack program against it. In the sculpted reality, her attack looked like a tapeworm, spooling out grotesquely from her persona. It coiled around the macrophage like a flattened python. And just as the ice destroyed her dumbframe, the tapeworm crushed it. The IC fragmented and disappeared.

Then she was shooting into the security subsystem before more ice could pin her down. This subsystem looked like a cancerous mass at the base of the host's spine. And she quickly learned that it was on passive alert. She double-checked her best masking and armor before attempting to give the subprocessor the commands that would let her see the camera records. Everything proceeded without a hitch until she specifically requested the trideo records for room D307.

Abruptly, a macrophage and two symbiote-looking constructs blipped into existence around her. The symbiotes looked like bacterial cells with reinforced walls and huge glycoprotein armament, and she didn't need her analyze utility to tell her that they were black ice. The utility only confirmed it, and mentioned that it was psychotropic in nature.

Fragging wonderful. Black ice could kill by inducing lethal biofeedback in a decker's physical brain. Heart stopping, brain creasing to function as the victim convulses into a series of seizures. Jane had seen it happen once, and that had been one time too many. Psychotropic black ice could do far worse than kill. It planted subliminal fears into the decker's mind. These ranged from relatively harmless phobias like aversion to entering the Matrix all the way up to mania and paranoia, which could result in the decker jacking out and going berserk, killing everyone in the immediate vicinity. She did not want this ice to touch her.

She had just the thing. One of her best attack programs. She launched it, watching the code materialize in front of her, looking like a small star, its light dim. She activated her

armoring at the same time as she ran the sunscreen utility that protected her from the bomb. When it went off a microsecond later, brilliant shards of light erupted into the close space, radiating out from the lantern like a small sun.

The macrophage simply vanished under the onslaught, and holes appeared in the reinforced cell wall of one of the sym-biotes, but the other looked nearly unscathed by the attack.

Some fragging robust armor on that code.

The undamaged symbiote spooled out a tendril of DNA, which coiled in the space above it. The Matrix equivalent of monowire. It whipped toward her, its edge sharp as honed diamond. She had no time to dodge, and the DNA whip crashed into her armor. Pain shot through her shoulder, and that section of armor disintegrated.

Two more symbiote ice constructs appeared. The system had bounced up to full alert. Drek! Three and a half against one is not great odds, she thought. Time to hide.

She formed words in her mind and sent them off as data-packets. "Axler," she said, "it's highly likely that target is located in D-wing. Up one level. Room D307."

Then she executed her escape sequence alpha. First, she retreated from the ice in a quick spurt, taking another hit from the DNA whip as she went. Second, she activated a barrier program, watching it form a transparent wall behind her. It wouldn't withstand more than one or two attacks, but it didn't need to. Its purpose was to shield and slow.

She spooled a smartframe into being next to her. The frame's persona matched hers exactly, a dataclone, and it was outfitted with her best evasion algorithms. As a final bit of tinkering, she crossloaded her datatrail info so that the smartframe would be able to backtrack and escape the system. She didn't expect it to reach log-off, but at least the retreat would appear genuine. It might just fool the ice.

And finally, she engaged a new masking utility that copied the surface sculpting of the data conduit and transformed her own persona into an exact replica of the wall. She pressed herself close and mentally crossed her fingers. If this didn't work, she was nearly out of options.

The symbiotes crashed through the barrier just as her smartframe bludgeoned its way out of the security subsystem. Jane's pulse roared as the ice plowed past, not even

hesitating, flowing by without so much as a pause to analyze her.

Sweet fragging awesome! This was why she decked.

Jane waited, doing nothing for six long seconds, an eternity in the Matrix. Then she carefully ran a medic utility to heal the damage dealt by the DNA whip. The utility repaired the damage to her persona and her armor. And when she was certain that the black ice was completely gone, she slid back into the subprocessor CPU of the security subsystem. The machine had canceled active alert, supposedly because the black ice had caught and decimated her smartframe decoy. This time in, Jane did not try to access the camera logs for room D307; they were likely still too hot. Instead she executed a control slave command on the clinic's general video feed.

The CPU cranked through her request without a hiccup, and she was in, searching for her team on the security cameras. Axler, Grind, and McFaren were no longer in the examination room, and she didn't see them waiting in the large hall that served as a common area and cafeteria of sorts.

Jane quickly searched the halls for her team, but came up with nothing. Which was good because it meant they were probably hidden under magic invisibility provided by McFaren. She just hoped they hadn't been caught. If they were being interrogated in one of the high-security areas, she wouldn't be able to locate them through these cameras.