The crowded shopfronts and neon smear of billboards looked just as they had a block away, but behind them everything was different. We'd entered enemy territory, and Buckingham was not a Network which treated opposing agents kindly. It was everywhere, overseeing every business transaction and drug deal, taking its cut from every exchange and advertisement. Its eyes were as eternally vigilant as only those of a machine intelligence can be.
At my side was Rumble, each of us with a pot of glue and a long rolled sheet of paper. This was his first job, and he was eager. I'd already had to tell him to slow down once, to draw less attention to us. Behind us came Gill, tiny and hunched with his hands stuffed into his pockets. He didn't want to be here, and to be honest I didn't want him there either, but he'd been assigned. He might come good after a few jobs, and he might get himself and a whole mess of others killed. Only time would tell.
Suddenly Rumble knocked shoulders with someone, and before I could react he was exchanging insults with a pack of Asian toughs. Triads most likely, not the sort that we usually come across and definitely nobody that we should be starting trouble with. The last that I'd heard was that most of their factions were allied with Catfish, a Network that we'd established a shaky truce with several months back. This was the last thing we needed. I pulled him back, flashing a message instructing him to stand down. There was a momentary standoff, an exchange of postures and glares, but eventually they turned away, slinging Cantonese insults back at us. We watched them go, then turned and went on our way.
A few minutes down the road, his biometrics told me that he hadn't relaxed. Any more drama from him could be a real liability. "So, ah, how did you come to be part of Claymore anyway?"
He shrugged. "I got wired, and figured that I didn't just want to be in any old Network, you know? Wanted to choose. My old man ran with Claymore, said they did good by him, so I switched on in one of their zones. Here I am."
I nodded, glancing back and forth as we crossed the road towards the alleyway. He'd gone live in Leyton, so there'd been no struggle to incorporate his rig at all. "But why an agent? You could just lose a few processor cycles like everyone else, enjoy Claymore's protection and get on with life. Why be out on a cold night like this?"
"Don't want to be like everyone else, pissing about with whatever the Network lets you have. I want the good stuff. The bandwidth, the memory. I want the speed, man."
I heard the hunger in his voice. I knew it well. Kids like him didn't have a lot of choices in the world, and going active in a Network often seemed like the quickest route out of their lives. "You want the big leagues, huh? Maybe even a little server space? Put out some content?"
He pulled back at that, and I thought maybe I'd hit a nerve. I turned to Gill, flashing him a friendly smile, trying to draw the weird little guy out a little. "How about you? What brings you out into the big bad night?"
He shrugged, eyes still on his feet. "Need money, you know? Rest of the family goldfarms, but we can't make the bandwidth. Sent me out to get it."
I snorted. I didn't get any spark off him. I doubted very much that he would come to much within the Network, and I'm rarely wrong about these things. He reached up to brush his hair out of his eyes with long, delicate fingers. Artist's hands. I snorted again. I wanted to probe him more, make sure that my initial assumptions were correct, but we were there and question time was over. It didn't matter, really. Either way, people like him had their uses.
We glanced back and forth as we hurried across the street towards the alleyway that was our goal, then slipped quietly into it. Gill was left at the entrance, trying to appear nonchalant and looking out for opposing agents. Rumble and I pushed past garbage cans and rotted heaps of refuse, the sky above still bright with billboards. Our destination was not the simple metal door that we stopped at, bugs circling a single muddy bulb, but the security camera facing it. It had been identified by Claymore as having a magic combination: a direct link into Buckingham, and no physical security.
We moved fast, hefting our pots of glue and unrolling the papers, turning our eyes superstitiously away from the runes emblazoned on them. I flicked off my active apps, fearful that they should be infected, and I felt Rumble do the same. I caught a glimpse of the rune as I smeared glue across it, a complex knot of black shapes that would unravel into dynamic and aggressive attackware when read by a machine intelligence. Our rigs were protected, theoretically, but the camera opposite wasn't. We worked fast, slopping glue onto ourselves, then dropped the gear and ran. We grabbed Gill and headed towards the shopping district, splitting up as soon as we hit the crowd. Rumble slapped me on the back and vanished, Gill slunk away without a word.
As I moved through the crowds, suddenly alone and trying to lose myself even more, I thought about my world. About the Networks. I'd heard stories from the old days, how old families built the botnets that became the Networks to steal processing power from others, how that power ended up being stolen from them. It must have been strange, really, to have had an actual person in charge, someone who could only know as much as a person and make all those dumb people mistakes. Strange, but kind of nice.
Rumble was a good kid. Too eager by half, but he'd learn, if he didn't get killed first. Gill, on the other hand, was not meant to be with us. There was a time when I'd think about the lives that people like him should have had, the lives that they might have had without the Network. Sometimes I even wondered about myself. Now I try my best to ensure that the playing pieces that pass through my hands resemble people as little as possible.
I put my head back and ran my fingers through my hair, shaking off such thoughts. People were crowding past me, real people with real lives. I mingled among them, trying to appear innocuous, trying to keep the grin off my face as the billboards around us flickered and fell into static and the chaos began.
Alex Hardison is an Australian writer recently returned from living in London.
Having completed Honours in Politics and read more hard SF and cyberpunk than is good for a young man, he now travels the world, getting in adventures and turning out the occasional short story.