Copper Rain

Copper Rain Part 6

The Present

I'm hanging from a virtual rock staring into the eyes of the man who is supposed to be dead. And this is a problem. Not the Titus being dead bit, I got over that not long after I killed him, but the fact that his avatar is in here is a major problem. The virtual world I'm using is running security protocols that are supposed to unhackable. HeXtract prides itself on data defense and employs a constantly evolving Quantum Prime Sequencer to ensure nothing breaches the walls. There's no way he should be in here.

I grab the man's hand, and he drags me up. He looks like the same old Titus—which is fucking annoying, because my avatar has me locked in at my current age and wisps of gray feather my temples.

"Zoie tells me you're onboard," he says to me.

I decide to play it straight. Whoever's setting this up has to have some serious juice. Hacking into a Quantum protected server, setting up an avatar of a dead former colleague, playing around with machine intelligence that, on the surface, is dangerously close to AI level all takes power that only resides at the upper limits of the corporate Houses.

"The card is pretty persuasive," I answer.

"I wondered if it would work," says Titus. "Our shared history is not exactly pristine."

"Fuck you. You fired first," I tell him.

"And I missed first, cowboy," he replies. "Did you ever wonder about that?"

We're standing high up on a virtual tepui—stylized after the mesa-topped mile-high stone columns in the South American jungles of Old Earth. In the middle of the ragged rock top is a small lake which overflows and cascades down the side in a series of impossibly colored waterfalls. Behind Titus rises a pale purple mist flecked with green.

"You were always crap with hand-based weapons," I say.

"Maybe so. But you didn't miss."

"Hell no. I knew I tagged you, but I didn't know how bad."

Where the fuck is he going with this? Right now I'm more interested in finding out how his avatar got into the system than reliving old, dead times. Besides, if he can hack in here, then HeXtract's security has a shit load of problems. And it makes my position even more precarious. I've hidden myself well, extremely well, but this shit is next level penetration. And the formerly alive Titus also knows my secret—this has bad news written all over it, but how much does this version of Titus know?

"So what happened?" I ask. "Did I just clip you? Are you still kicking?"

He laughs and shakes his head. "Didn't miss. You tagged me good. Straight through the heart."

"So what the fuck am I dealing with here? Are you a sys-trawl? Tell me you're not one of those reborn, rehashed motherfuckers."

The prick smirks. "Nah, not enough of me on the grid for a trawl. I'm the other thing."

"For fuck's sake, tell me that's not fucking true."

I plant my virtual ass on a virtual piece of rock and try to work out exactly kind of fucked up shit is going on. If he's not a high-end sys-trawl, then there's one other possibility that lurks. Though there's no way anyone authorizes that kind of tech after the AI Prohibition, especially for a dick like Titus.

"Do you remember what happened?" he asks, shaking me out of my reverie. "Do you remember the kill?"

I've done a lot of hard drinking over the years and, depending on the level liquid in the bottle, parts of my early history flicker in and out. But I remember that day just fucking fine. It was the beginning of the settlement. It was bare bones staff only, and we had the run of the nub. My new identity was in place, and I'd passed all of the HeXtract recruiting tests, which was easy as they were essentially the skills I had from my sunk former life anyway.

Titus was hitting the booze hard and doing shit that would get his butt busted if top brass were around. According to the agreement I had with the other two card holders I was supposed to keep him in line, but he didn't give a shit. We had our shared secret, and he was happy to push the limits knowing I could do fuck all about it. Little did I know that he was setting HeXtract up for a takeover, distracting us while a corporate predator spun into attack position, coming up from the planetary well to attack our vulnerable flank. But there's more to it than that. A lot more. And if this avatar knows the true story behind Titus's death, then times are about to get very interesting.

"Last I saw you, you were plunging down the drill hole," I say, sticking to the truth.

"Yeah, well, that happened, but I ended up in a helium pocket—flash frozen."

"You're fucking kidding me. And that preserved you?"

The avatar taps the side of his skull. "Preserved the stuff up here. Enough to get in a cerebral shunt and the rest is the magic of science."

So far, so plausible—at a stretch. Cerebral shunts are a way of preserving an individual's mind; the memories, the emotions, the experiences, everything, but there's a couple of decent-sized problems. The process of extracting the memories mushes your brain into cortical soup, though I guess that's not so bad if you're already a human popsicle. If the procedure is successful, your mind then resides in a cyber-cortex that can be hooked up to any number of operational protocols. But here's the major problem, under the AI Prohibition, cy-texes are banned throughout most planetary systems, and if Titus is actually a cy-tex, it means there's someone big and nasty behind him.

"You're telling me you're a cy-tex."

This gets me a mock clap. "Go to the top of the class, Tarq."

"That's bullshit. Nobody does that crap. Too fucking dodgy."

"Nobody perhaps . . ."

"So who found you?" I ask, playing along until I can work out what the hell is going on. "You can't have been working alone."

Titus cocks an eyebrow. "You haven't worked it out?"

"You were dead. The body was gone. There wasn't much to work out."

I run through a list of people that have been nubside since the beginning. None of the miners, the construction crew had been and gone before most people turned up, which left only admin staff. And the drivers. Then I get it.

"Shit, it's got to be Val?"

"Bravo, Tarq. For someone who's supposed to be a data rat, you're outstanding at ignoring the obvious."

"But she wasn't in our unit," I protested. "I would've remembered her."

As I say this memories of Zoie come to mind. The flickering of her hands as the tetracap card wove between her fingers. My mind skitters and a burr of a thought forms on the edge of my memory. I try to get a fix, but it flits away as the Titus avatar continues.

"I met her on another mission. She's like you."

"She's Intel?" Shit. I've been getting played from the get go. This is embarrassing.

"But what's the real game here?" I ask. "Why's Zoie involved?"

"We need the four of us back together," he says, ignoring the question. "We need to open the tetracap."

"It's closed for a reason, Titus."

His avatar shakes its head. "Desperate times, desperate measures and all that shit. You're need to suit up for this one. You're on the clock, buddy."

With that he turns heel, thrusts his arms wide and dives off the tepui. I watch as foil extrudes between his arms and sides like an old-school wingsuit. Then he spirals out of sight.

What the fuck am I missing here?