Unstable Diffusion

Chapter 1

There's too much on my mind

The Kinks

"Angels are gone, keep moving", Fowler's command rang in Tax's head when the shooting stopped. It all happened too fast. Tax noticed the team shrunk. He heard Haley Reid's swearing. She was spitting blood and hatred. Cypher was bleeding from his ears, nearly zoned out, barely standing. And pissed off.

"Where's the silence?" asked Lily. She also seemed not all there.

"You'll know the silence when you see it, lady", grunted Donavan.

The crew moved on, stepping over dead angels' bodies.

Mr. Tanaka's dream seemed oddly realistic. It had a clear, hyper-detailed texture. Objects were perfect, pure phenomena. Tax has never seen such beauty. One could spend hours admiring the architecture, was it not so scary in the first place. The quality was exquisite, only the background slightly blurred. Which was perfectly normal. Shapes of things tend to dissolve on the edge of oblivion. That's where potential threat could come from. The angels and all types of security measures could strike at any time until the crew makes it to the silence. After the first confrontation they were short of four people – only six of them remained. And they knew nothing about this part of Tanaka's mind. It was that type of dark and hostile mindoznes which Donavan called "shitlands" or "haireas".

"How much are we being payed again?" asked Cypher in a somewhat annoying tone.

"Not enough to make your face bearable", replied Haley Reid.

"C'mon, lady, you don't see what you sit on, do ya'?"

"Shut up both of you", cut Fowler.

He was calm for a leader who had just lost four of his best people. Lil Shelly, Keyra Stone, Rory Hendrix and Vysotzky. All dead. Now he was left with Donavan, the sniper, Cypher, the bomb guy, and Haley Reid, the toughest bitch since Ellen Ripley, as Rory once put it, bless his soul. Those were three biggest hotheads of Fowler's old band. And then there was that pair of absolute rookies, Lily and Tax. The two were – allegedly – the best dreamweavers out there, but knew nothing about fighting. One more attack like that and they are not coming back from this job.

"Keep moving", said Fowler. "We won't back down, not until we're done here".

The data recovery team was warned that Mr. Tanaka, the Keeper, guarded his ideas jealously. Walking through the intricate construct of his mindscape, they understood that he must have been generating it for many years now, using the most advanced engines available. The whole mission seemed like an acid trip to some distorted fairy tale conceived in a deranged mind of a genius. Except that the landlord was dying and with each his breath the construct was decaying.

"Kid", Fowler addressed Tax for the first time since their entrance. "The silence is usually hidden behind some sort of riddle. It might be a maze or a pun. I reckon you are able to find it, if you want to see your payroll, right?"

Tax nodded hesitantly. Rumor had it there were entire servers in Tanaka's mind. The old man would store anything for those willing to pay his price. Highly confidential personal data, classified information, plans and patents, maps and holograms, documents compromising entire governments, as many recipes for antidotes as for poisons, even dreams, memories, genetic codes... and people. Well, not exactly people – their shadows rather, or whatever it is about the very essence of a human being that could possibly be digitalized. Every contractor's secrets were hidden and protected somewhere in the meticulous construct of this incredible mind. Mr. Tanaka's expanded brain stored it all. This old man's services made him one of the most influential people in the world. His net value was beyond estimation. But above all, Mr. Tanaka was nearly untouchable. Any sort of assault on his precious grey matter would mean an informational equivalent of a nuclear war. And now he was simply dying.

"You better hurry", growled Cypher through his teeth. "It ain't no school trip, kid".

"Knock it off, Cypher", said Haley Reid. "Our lives are in this boy's hands... He surely knows what he's doing, doesn't he?"

Tax didn't know. When applying for the job he thought he could deal with anything. He obviously lied about many things during his interview. But the jobs that he'd done before were, compared to this, like a playground to a battlefield. Tax never worked in such mind. He knew it was going to take a while before he can figure out its' workings. Back in his freelancing days he would mostly recover ideas for artists, dreams for madmen and memories for losers. But those constructs were rubbish, Tax himself started building better ones when he was in high school. It took him a lot of patient practice, for sure, but at least he could pay his rent. Now, Mr. Tanaka's construct was another level shit. Only few dreamweavers were able to develop such highly advanced constructs, the type of which would cause a sort of collective cybernetic schizophrenia were it to go viral. Only few people in the world could afford such project. Even less people could manage to enter it unnoticed. And even less could leave it alive. The matrix was designed to protect data and shatter the minds of those who would try to steal it. The range of possible traps and riddles was close to infinite, enabling the access only to those to whom it was due.

Tax knew the risks. They hired him not for his unique skills of weaving complex mindscapes, but for a less spectacular and certainly less uncommon ability to break in and navigate. Even slightly surprised by the ease of it, he entered like it was a maneuver session. Once inside, he managed to let others follow. A bunch of outlaws, as it turned out, most of them ex jarheads who think muscles and machineguns will do against matrix.

Of course, Neurogenics Biotech, the big pharma corporation that hired him, agreed when he said no fanatics, no freedom fighters, no politics, it's sheer business, but hey, who would listen to a teenage burglar. So, he basically went there with a band of outlaws. Now he was responsible for the lives of those who lived. Donavan, Cypher and Haley Reid, and Lily, that enigmatic girl, who was presented to him as a powerful medium. She was supposed to decode the silence once Tax helps them break in and find it.

So, now all eyes were on him.

"First, we need to look for abstraction", he said. "Any aspect of the landscape that seems weird, counter intuitive, absurd. That's where the gate should be. The entrance to the silence is usually a gravity-defying, grotesque aberration from what common sense can conceive. In most basic constructs it's usually an impossible building or some nonsensical figure...."

"Dude, there's no universal agreement on what's absurd, is there?", interrupted Cypher.

Besides, in Mr. Tanaka's mindscape nothing seemed to conform to the common sense. It looked like a surrealist painting, a dark one, full of despair. It certainly did not encourage further exploration. But he must keep looking. No matter how bad things might go down there, he could not withdraw. For he believed that somewhere within the construct something that he deeply needed was buried.