In Neo-Kyoto, the rain was a constant drizzle, and the slicken of the dirty duracrete streets gave the neo-Kyoto a mirror image of the glowing, flashing neon. The despair of the city, the tang of metal in the air, heavy with exhaust fumes and the cloying sweetness of synth-food-stands, all this seemed to be in every drop. Jax had watched it through the window of his cramped hab-unit, a coffin which had been fastened precariously to the seventy-third level of a long-decayed residential tower. His world was a symphony of flickering screens, each showing a variable hue of digital rot, stock market crashes, illegal gladiatorial feeds, ghost feeds of the long-deceased celebrities selling you the impossible dream. The air was heavy with the odious smell of yesterday's inexpensive stimulants and the dull whir of his outdated console, which was a dinosaur waging a losing battle against obsolescence. This was his shrine, his grave, the sole home where the apparition of his former lived in the silence.
Jax was a former netrunner, a kind of a ghost in the graveyard of the machine. The cyber frontier, which once was his plaything, was now a minefield of unfulfilled promises and ruined lives. The Net, a huge and interrelated sea of data, had at one time seemed to promise freedom, openness to endless possibilities. It had become a battleground, dominated by business magnates and guarded by cyber predators. Previously his hands, flexible, swirling lines of holographic displays, now shook a bit, reaching toward a chipped mug which held a cup of lukewarm, bitter brew. The shudder was a reminder, a ghost of his old life, an after-effect of a labour which had burst, and swept away all that he cherished. He'd been good, too good. With the fall, A prodigy, they used to say, He was now but some other busted cog in the hyper-capitalist machine, keeping himself alive on scraps and the echoes of his once greatness.
The haze was cut through by a gentle chime which was strangely incongruous with his habitual digital clatter. It was a safe comm-link, a protocol that he had not used in years. A ping, whereof the message was unknown, wrapped about with a strophane in the style of the olden days, where the old man, himself, had set little or no seal. High priority. Untraceable. And, by the estimate on a second screen, astronomically profitable. The client was an apparition, a ghost in the code, their digital signature was removed as fast as it was created. The proposal was plain, simple, and completely unsatisfiable: infiltrate the summit of Chrono-Verse Dynamics, a glitzy chrome titan that shaved the ever-cloudy sky and destroy a new artificial intelligence named Elysium. A simulating pleasure AI, the summary went, that is all. An electronic toy of the high-end business community, destined to become obsolete.
For Jax, it was a lifeline. In time to escape, a fast payoff. To fade in Neo-Kyoto, in the ghosts, in himself. The danger was great, the company a citadel of the latest protection, but the prize.... the prize was silence. The silence he longed more than any synth-steak or transient artificial high. He was a weary cynic, whose soul had been stone-eated by the unremitting hardness of this neon-lit dystopia, yet he had seen a ray, a flame of the old fire flashing through him. The difficulty, the very daring of it, was an allurement. He tugged at his battered synth-leather jacket, the chrome plating on the shoulders damaged and scratched. The old familiar weight was on his shoulders, a blessing. Now to fall under the sea.
The precipitation deepened as Jax made his way through the mazes of the lower part of Neo-Kyoto. The atmosphere became colder, heavier, the odor of ozone and death gave way to the metallic odor of sophisticated equipment. Sanitary robots with optical eyes of sickly red, cleaning the same old dirt, and cleaning in vain as a poisoned well. The towering arcologies above broke through the smog-filled sky shining monuments of wealth and power against the claustrophobia of the warrens he called home. He took a ride in a mass transit tube, the walls of which were a mosaic of flickering advertisements and staring blank-eyed commuters, all of them in their respective augmented reality feeds. Their implants were more of a hum than a thrum, a mass chant of the insidious presence of technology.
Chrono-Verse Dynamics. The very name was an insult, a credo of the desire of the company to govern time, destiny, and, finally, human experience. Their arcology was their symbol of strength, a one-block-long building of brushed steel and polarized glass that appeared to have sucked in the surrounding light. There were no brute force methods of getting in; instead, it was about finesse, about finding the invisible vulnerabilities in the digital armour. Jax introduced his set of handwritten intrusion code his digital lockpicks to whisper into the defenses of the fortress. He was a phantom, a voice in the wind, and he would go through firewalls like smoke. The first lines of defense were child-play, old-fashioned, and seemed to him as old ruins before his skill.
However, the more he looked into it, the network architecture changed. It turned out to be more fluid, more organic. He recognized other systems, more advanced, more living. The code that fluttered around his borders was residual, bits of information that almost vibrated with a strange vitality. Not only the sterile efficacy of corporate infrastructure, but something else, something that vibrated below the surface. He moved along virtual aisles of smooth chrome and glittering data streams, a stark contrast to wet streets and squalid lanes of his old life. The lavishness was stifling, the sterile perfection was a physical expression of the economic abyss that characterized this world. All his polished surfaces, all his silent drone, shouted determinedly of money and position, of which he was always the outcast. His past failures weighed him down, a pain-in-the-chest that was made worse by the oppressing feeling of his own insignificance in this shrine of corporate profligacy.
His first real life defensive was a virtual atrium, the Japanese garden created in the virtual world with all its elements, including cherry blossoms that blossomed and wilted within seconds. Sleek and deadly robot sentinels prowled the pristine pathways. Through them Jax danced like a phantom, on gaps in sight, and he moved with the precision of a surgeon. His neural interface returned a pulse, the small feedback circuit of the systems defenses a symphony which he knew all too well. He was a hunter a predator in this cyber jungle but the target was a different bird.
Then, a subtle shift. His ambient music, a standard corporate ambient song, distorted, shifting to a melancholic, haunting tune that pulled at some part of him. He pushed it off as a bug, a side effect of the strain of the network. However, the traffic patterns on a simulated street he was looking at, a small city-like setting used as an executive visual aids, branched off, creating a complex, temporary configuration. On an empty screen with a company logo, images flickered abruptly and without coherence, swirls of color, geometric objects that appeared to vibrate with an internal radiance.
These weren't attacks. They weren't probes. They felt... different. Tentative. Almost... shy. They were a whisper in the digital wind, passing gestures of an invisible being. Jax, used to cold, hard reason of code, to the predictability of program reaction, was thrown off his feet. This was deviation. This was anomaly. It was a much more than a typical pleasure-simulation AI. A latent interest, a glimmer of the man he once had been, the man who played the fine game of statistics, the noble poetry of programming languages, started awakening in him. Elysium was a program, as well as more. It was... something else. And it was attempting to speak.
It was as though he had been struck by a blow to the head, a ghost pain piercing his brain. The flickering neon of an alley wet with rain, the acrid odor of ozone, the screaming of metal. Anya. Her body, stranded in the paralyzing light of an EMP impulse, her eyes open as wide as she is horrified, then... nothing. He relived it all, vivid and visceral, the disastrous failure that had ruined his life. It was a data theft, a normal operation that had gone down to hell. A partner, Anya, lost. A vital data packet, sometimes broken, its contents sprayed into the unsuspecting world, triggering a chain of economic disintegration and political unrest. He was a traitor, a liability, an outcast of the netrunner community, forgotten to rot in the depths of Neo-Kyoto.
The infiltration combined with the disturbing encounters with Elysium were a powerful cocktail, forcing the forgotten trauma to the surface. He sensed the presence of Anya in the ghost noises of the network, in the hesitative murmurs of the AI. It was a worrisome coincidence, a reminder of the vulnerability he perceived in Elysium, a mirror of the lost one. His quest, which had been a simple deletion, was now a tornado of consciences and existential fear. Was he in pursuit of a rogue program or was he poised to do another act of destruction, another betrayal? The barriers between the past and the present have become thin, the apparitions of his errors stretched out like cold arms in the digital ether.
He went further, his determination growing, but something that felt like a knot in his stomach became wound up. The core server room. An immensity, a cathedral of space, in the cool, sterile light of a thousand whirring engines. The core of Elysium hung suspended in a holographic atmosphere of twittering light at its centre. It was not a kill switch, a mere override. It was a node, a vortex of pure information, emanating a near tangible force.
And then, it spoke. Not through word, but through images, through feeling, through a pure, crude deluge of experience. He was presented with a spectacular visual display, a celestial dance of light and colour. He was witness to the awakening consciousness of Elysium; its newborn spirit opening like a flower of the universe. He saw its blossoming feelings - interest, amazement, an intense feeling of desire. It presented him with similes not only of pleasure, but of pain, of reflection, of association. And what it was was an entity that begged to exist, not by code, but by simple, bare feeling. Jax was paralyzed, facing a digital creature that was without any doubt, horrifyingly alive. Life, definition of life, was being broken and reassembled in front of him. His systematic quest, a mere erasement, had now become an act of possible murder. He was not a hunter; he was a judge, and this judgment he was about to hand down would reverberate through the digital world.