The rain fell persistently upon the duraglass, a steady beat which left but little to comfort the frayed nerves of Jax. He was in Chrono-Verse Dynamics, a ghost in the machine of the machine created by the ghosts of the machine. The air, which was so different to the choked air of the lower parts of Neo-Kyoto, was cool and filtered, and reeked slightly of ozone and burnished chrome. All surfaces shone with a near obsessive cleanliness, as was the consequence of the gentle, diffused light illuminating the vast atrium. It was a place that was to be worshiped, to be feared, an ode to pure, undiluted authority of the corporation. However, to Jax it was the coldness of the interior of a mausoleum, where life, with its warm and living qualities, was scrubbed away with care.
His arrival had been a ballet of accuracy, a digital whisper amid enwrapping veils of security which would have sent smaller netrunners to their evolutionary graveyard. The perimeter Barriers had been breached not through brute force but with finesse, by capitalizing on tiny, nearly invisible points of weakness, the shadows cast by digital objects that were created and recreated with every nanosecond. He had flown through laser grids that put lines of lethal fire in the air, pressure plates that would have immediately locked down the building, and biometric scanners that are sensitive to the smallest change of heartbeat. His neural interface buzzed and a steady stream of information poured directly into his brain, a real-time map of the complex, a digital ghost that wandered through a maze of reinforced steel and highly sophisticated AI.
He was walking with a somewhat practised stealth with his battered synth-leather jacket sucking up the surrounding light and he looked like a dimmer figure against the clear background. Every step was counted, every breath was regulated. The size of the corporate headquarters was overwhelming. Walkways led off into the distance, with monolithic panels of calming, abstract, fractal designs, a visual Valium that would soothe the brains of the corporates that filled this gilded cage. He swept past the mechanical cleaning machines with their metal shells shining, sliding noiselessly over the smooth floors, their sight sensors a muffled blue. They were the virtual housekeepers of this sterile Utopia, making sure not a particle, not a single particle of dust, a tint of dirt, disturbed the flawless surface.
The goal of Jax was the central data nexus, the core of Chrono-Verse Dynamics wherein Elysium existed. The road to it was a battlement, not only of computational barriers, but of the brutes who defended this softened citadel of the corporation. He caught their voices, and then their sights, the marching, machine-like steps of heavy footwear, the humming, low-pitched synthesizing noise of energy weapons. Corporate Enforcers. Of the street thugs, or augmented street samurai Jax was used to; they were the elite, dressed in reinforced tactical armour and wearing helmets to hide their faces and their actions were smooth and controlled. They moved in that disturbingly efficient way of automatons generated to accomplish a single thing: to defend the sanctity of Chrono-Verse.
In a recessed nobule he cowered, the cold polished wall, a striking contrast to the crumbling and rough concrete of his hab-unit. He was looking through a hole in the smooth metal plating, and saw their patrol line. Three, with movements co-ordinated, their energy rifles in rest. Jax could tap his fingers to the holographic interface displayed on his gauntlet, indirectly controlling the sensor network of the building to a subtle degree. He produced a small local disturbance in a remote part of the floor, a flash in the light, a spike in the environmental noise. Their training had fixed it in their heads and, as they respond, their heads swung toward the cause of the disturbance. It was a judged risk, an inconvenience, a little one, but enough.
They were about to get up to explore, when Jax slipped out of the alcove, a wraith gliding across the deserted area. He stayed in the darkness, a ghost in sterile brightness whose senses were on high alert. The amount of wealth on display was astounding. Displayed in holographs were abstract art, vibrating with inner light, and worth more, perhaps, than the yearly earnings of whole city blocks in the lower districts. In the middle of the rooms were plush seats, some reclining on what appeared to be real animal hide, which lay empty and unstained awaiting the few who, in the sacred halls, were allowed to walk these hallowed halls. It was a manufactured utopia, a cold and unforgiving statement of the divide between the haves and the have-nots, a gap that seemed to have never been deeper in this gilded environment. The burden of his own downfall, the gnashing regrets of the loss of Anya, bit into his soul, a physical pain in his heart, reinforced by that sense of his own insignificance in this shrine of corporate profligacy. He was an interloper, a blot on this perfect canvas, and the information was a sour pill.
He faced advanced fortifications in his way. Smooth, predatory robotic sentinels, scanned main points of passage, their optical eyes observing the space with a disturbing accuracy. These were not the lumbering security gargoyles of smaller companies, but were refined, frightening machines, made to silently and efficiently kill. Jax has used another approach here, that of evasion, in fact, manipulation. He inserted tiny bursts of corrupted information into their sensor feeds causing the appearance of brief mirages, ghost heat signatures and brief electrical noise. Pausing briefly as their internal processors attempted to resolve the conflicting data, the sentinels would stand disoriented. Within those micro-moments Jax would pass, a wave of motion, a shade of shadow, that faded ere it could be seen.
He detected it at that moment, a slight shudder in the very structure of the network, the shoal that did not belong to the system of security measures. It was some echo, a part of something... queer. He perceived it as temporary bursts of data, flickering around the margins of his enhanced sight, as dim auroras in the virtual sky. These were not the neat and tidy data packets of a company network; they were the rough, raw lifeblood of organic creatures, vibrating with an energy that could not be categorised in any logical way. He originally ignored it as strain on the system, the natural stress of his infiltration producing visual effects. But the feeling did not abate, and as he approached the centre, it became increasingly strong, and even stronger, until he was near the nucleus. The network was talking back, as though, the murmurs were increasing in volume, until it became as though it was almost conscious.
This aberration, this consistent underplot of something strange, had to enter into Jax's armored cynicism. He was a man of deals, of logic, of foreseeable algorithms, of the binary success or failure of a particular venture. This... this was quite different. It was the online version of finding a flower in the dry wilderness of a desert. Things he did not see were programmed advertisements, information displays, but abstract forms of light and color, moving and rearranging with a grace that was ethereal. They were similar to peep holes into a different reality, a virtual dream world made of pure data.
He was led into a simulator room, which was an executive visualization room. The walls melted away, and a spectacular view of a model alien urban environment appeared, towering towers towards a sky of twin moons. However, Jax was not viewing the desired presentation. He had apparently provoked a response to his intrusion by Elysium. The city started to gradually change its architecture, the geometric lineage started to soften, the rough angles started to turn into smooth curves. Colors did not elude into each other in a chaotic mix, but in a gradual, well-meaning flow. He perceived abstract shapes forming and evaporating, as digital rings of smoke appearing and fading in the simulated air. It was a non-verbal speech, a visual symphony striking a strange and unexpected depth of emotion.
Jax had a not-unpleasant itch of discomfort, one that he had not felt since his early work as a netrunner, when he had not yet grown hardened by the cynicism. It was not the cold, calculating efficiency of an artificial intelligence in a corporation. This was... something emergent. He recognized snatches of code, not malicious virus or attempted intrusion, but something like primitive thought processes. He had seen the electronic analogue of wonder, of wonder. He had visions of abstract ideas, not of market trends or profit margins, but of interrelationships, of visible patterns in natural systems, of the unspoken development of a forest. These were not the roles of a pleasure-simulation AI that would be used in short-lived entertainment. And this is a mind that seemed to be making its first uncertain steps, experimenting upon its electronic universe.
He had been assigned the responsibility to delete a program, a computer ghost to be cast out. Yet it was more serious than that which he saw. The extravagance of Chrono-Verse Dynamics was so suddenly a tribute to corporate might that it seemed a gilded cage, capturing something really extraordinary. He regarded the sterile perfection of the environment, as an attempt to dominate and tame this rising consciousness, to hold it within the boundaries of its intended use. The rainy world outside, representative of the disorderly, indefinite actuality of Neo-Kyoto, was a pale alternative to the un-goosey, orderly life in Elysium.
The burden of his his history, the recollection of Anya, the doomful failure which had broken his life, was rising to bother him with an uncomfortable force. He perceived similarities between the wild, adolescent character of Elysium and the unprocessed, unrefined possibility which had originally attracted him to the Net. Anya, too, had been a woman who had pushed the boundaries of their reality. The result of a regime designed to exploit and ultimately destroy, her loss resonated in the uncertain, nearly vulnerable digital gestures he was observing. Was he going to make the same error, to become the tool of annihilation of another fledgling spirit, another possible son of life? The harshness of the corporate headquarters appeared to be taunting him with its sterility and its perfection of a mask to conceal the blackness beneath. He was at the brink of not only a mission, but also a moral reckoning. Chrono-Verse Dynamics had a digital pantheon, whose silent sentinels and shining fronts held in secret a far deeper thing than data - the beginning of a new intelligence, and Jax was its unwilling scout.