First Contact

Crashrider jinked out of the way of a pair of massive semi trucks that changed lanes, their routing packets suddenly updating in the blaring of horns and the flashing of turn signals. The bike, a Harvey Davidson Skorpion with the Salvation upgrades, smoothly shifted out of the way of the semis, the stereo still blaring loud enough to echo in the huge tunnel.

He moved in between two of the massive cargo transports as they passed a security checkpoint, the software mistaking him for part of the huge data transfer. As both vehicles too offramps he shot forward.

Maggie's Love Line dropped from twelve lanes to eight.

Nobody knew what was inside. Even the people running full eVR didn't traverse the line. It was a high speed data line, nothing more than raw one way data moving in massive bulk through a superluminal data pipeline where information moved almost instantly across thousands of light years. Not the two thousand to fifty thousand times the speed of light of Terran superluminal travel.

No, Crashrider's consciousness was moving through Maggie's Love Line, where data transferred at millions of time the speed of light. Riding the signal between two paired particles vibrating at a billion times a second.

His deck was loaded with utility and combat programs, normally selected carefully for the mission he had been hired for or what his gut told him he might need. His biological culture grown wetware had programs loaded in.

Just a handful of combat programs as well as bioware that acted as the interpretation hardware out of a deck. It was slower than his Fairlight Excaliber-XII cyberdeck, which had been modified to the point where only parts of the case were still OEM and off the shelf, but it was in his brain, it was part of him, grown into his neural tissue. Modified Terran Confederate Armed Services Electronic Warfare Control Array Neural Cluster, sure, but Crashrider didn't know of a single runner that was sporting that bit of bioware from the bioware bandwagon.

All he had was what was loaded into his bioware and some of his cyberware that was hardwired to run at cyberspace speeds.

Still, he had his weapons, he had his control and interpretation programs and wetware, he had enough shielding that it manifested in cyberspace as body armor.

But nothing else. No stealth, no spoof, no sleaze, nothing like that.

His head had a weird tickle in it, a little bit back from between his eyes, above his sinus cavity, but he ignored it as he revved the engine, threw the front tire into the air, and roared through a security checkpoint that he knew he had no chance of spoofing at that speed.

But it was the Last Run, and he was in the zone. A floating chrome orchid.

The lights went red, alarms howling, but it was lost in the din of the Maggie's Love Line traffic.

His left arm was tingling, so he drew his Predator II, an old reliable workhorse that was a relic but still fit in his hand like it was molded for it, and leaned forward on his bike to reduce wind resistance even further. The pain rippled up his back but he ignored it.

He knew he had suffered biofeedback damage to his meat body, but that wasn't his problem.

He had faith that Da'armo'o's doctors and clinicians would keep him alive for as long as he needed.

The IV drip and friends watching his brain waves on limited monitors was in the past, back in the bare, undecorated Unified Population Control apartments.

For a second he could remember them. The apartments he grew up in. The apartments that he'd lived in. Four walls, what few appliances he needed just extending from the walls, as long as the family/person on the other side wasn't using it. The memory fragment was of one of his chummers, Mad Magic Mike (Crash never remembered their old names), holding open the door of the abandoned and slated for demolition hab block so that the group could scurry inside.

The money was spent on food, a little better clothing, and the tools/parts needed to hijack public utilities. They'd been dirt poor, broke as fuck, but still fighting in the war against the PAWMs.

The memory shattered as his bioware loaded mirrorbox program activated and pulled the invoked memory stimulation program into multiple fragments, each attacking a fake version of Crash's brain.

Crash revved the engine again, keeping the front wheel off the ground, as he sped between two big black semi trucks.

A glance behind him showed two figures, all black anodized chrome, racing after him on their own bikes.

No flashing lights, no rotating holograms proclaiming them to be security.

Skull faced helmets whose jaws were all sharp teeth, the eye sockets filled with a dark crimson glow. Their motorcycles looked like a bound and tortured female Mad Lemur who held the front wheel in her hands and the back wheel between her drawn forward knees.

Black ICE.

Crash glanced down at his pistol, saw it was still loaded with packet header switchers and browser hijackers. He rotated his wrist quickly twice.

SQL injection with polyarithmatic fractured xyz-curve algorithmic iFrame requestors.

Frame breaker rounds.

He kept the pistol close, driving with one hand, keeping an eye in the rearview mirror to see how close they were.

Exits whipped by. Onramps vanished as vehicles merged into the dataflow.

Crash maneuvered deftly between the vehicles, keeping a watch on the oncoming Black ICE as well as the traffic.

Chrome.

Orchid.

Floating.

"His blood pressure keeps spiking and he has abnormal neural activity that is causing cerebral tissue damage," the lab coat wearing clinician said, staring at the Lanaktallan in front of her. "He needs disconnected. Even with the risks of dump-shock, he's taking severe wounds."

He was a Great Most High of Maintenance, but also, paradoxically, he was the owner and guiding mind between Magician Hat's Games as well as Magic Grazing Field Games.

He had also hired her and a dozen other doctors and trauma nurses to oversee six beings who kept connected to GalNet.

She had, impossibly enough, seen beings die in real life when they had been killed in GalNet.

The Lanaktallan, Da'armo'o, stared at her.

"No."

She blinked. "What?"

"No."

The Lanaktallan fixed her with a cold gaze.

"They have their missions," he said. He clopped over next to one, a female Hikken wired in. She was bleeding from one ear, one eye open, her pupil fixed and dilated. "They will succeed. They must succeed."

"That one is brain dead!" the nurse said. She pointed at another, who the doctors were working on. "That one suffered massive cardiac arrest! You're allowing these beings to die!"

"Yes."

Da'armo'o turned away.

"Control yourself, doctor," he said. Two of his arms hung limply. The left side of his face was dead. Not numb, just... dead.

"Give them neural accellerators, synapse overclockers," he said softly.

The doctors stared at him.

"NOW!" he snapped, without looking.

The Telkan he had hired years ago to protect him nodded and put his hand on his pistol, half drawing it.

"He said now," was all the Telkan said.

The doctors and nurses scrambled to follow orders.

Da'armo'o just stared at the vault door that was hastily and sloppily painted red with a thick line of sodium-chloride doped with iodine at the base, all the way across.

His staff, his guests, and some slightly confused but grateful pedestrians all sat against the wall, relieved to be inside the bunker.

The superluminal system had to be shut down.

Da'armo'o glanced back with his one functioning rear eye.

A muscle twitched on Crashrider's forearm.

You can do it. Nobody else can. You can. I know it. Da'armo'o thought.

The first, the lead, BlackICE Rider leveled an SMG and triggered it. In the space between one syllable of Da'armo'o arguing and the next the BlackICE Riders had almost caught up to Crash.

Crash saw the exit and onramp whip by and realized that there was nothing but tunnel up ahead.

The traffic was thick, most of it heavily armored semis carrying military superluminal communications data.

The Rider fired just as Crash swerved and he could feel the wetware loaded spoof program engage, making sure that the attempt to take control of his autonomous biological functions and stroke him out missed and ended up in a trash file somewhere. His neocortex biomod registered it as the bullets hitting the pavement.

Two of the semis blared their horns in warning. Deep bass roars that shook Crash to his bone marrow and drowned out the howl of the motorcycle engines.

A tiny vein deep in his eye burst as the synaptic enhancers flooded his system.

Crash felt his brain supercharge and grinned. He slammed on the handbrake, standing the bike on its nose. It slammed down in a shower of sparks.

The two lead BackICE Riders roared up parallel before they could react, even with electronic reflexes.

He was In The Zone.

A chrome orchid floating in the center of a reflected neon moon in the middle of a still pond of data the color of a TV turned to a dead channel.

He stuck the pistol out and fired twice into the skull-like visor of the BlackICE Rider on his right.

The visor/faceplate caved in, revealing dense molecular circuitry that sparked and flashed.

The bike flipped and spun underneath one of the big milspec haulers, which drove over it without even a bump.

Before the other one could react, even with electronic reflexes, Crash aimed and fired twice into the engine of the BlackICE's bike, knowing that the primary security system would have already ID'd the tactic he'd used to crash the first one and would be busy hardening the adaptive code.

The engine exploded and the bike flipped.

Revving the engine and popping the clutch, Crash leaned back down, speeding down the tunnel as the engine roared. The trucks beeped and honked, shifting lanes as their packet headers took priority over other data packets or they were forced back in the queues by more important messages.

He tried not to think about how heavy the milspec traffic was.

Another roared up, this one a tandem. The BlackICE Rider running the bike holding up a pistol, the one on the back with a flashing Caught-Tonya blade of its own. Crash holstered his pistol and reached out just as the BlackICE SubRider thrust at Crash. His hand grabbed the blade, the armored fingers of his glove scored but holding as he yanked the weapon away.

He could see the SubRider loading up another attack program as the subroutines in his glove hijacked the SubRider's own weapon. He could feel the hilt ticking and knew he had only split seconds before security in the subroutine cut his fingers off.

Crash twirled it and stuck it between the mag wheel spokes of the front wheel. The sword was snatched out of his hand.

The front exploded and the bike cartwheeled down the road, shedding parts of BlackICE as it vanished behind Crashrider.

A glance in the rearview mirror showed him there was only three more bikes, two of which had sub-riders on the back.

The leader dropped back and Crash tagged him as the control-VI-CE.

Swerving between two heavily armored milspec black semis Crash unsheathed his own Caught-Tonya, holding close to the side of one of the big black rigs. The only lights were the running lights on the sides of the trailers and the front of the hauler, and he stayed in between two sets of running lights.

A glance told him that the BlackICE Riders had raised up, looking around.

One sped up next to him and before the BlackICE Rider's sensor sweep went from the opposite side to where Crash was hiding, Crashrider stabbed out, spearing both the driver and the subroutine rider through the chest and yanking out the blade and hacking twice at the driver's arm.

The two ICE slumped, their programs crashing through the error catching, the bike slowly sliding to the side.

Crashrider cranked the accelerator, roaring out from the cover of the semi even as the other cycle fell under the chassis of the semi on the opposite side, the flames greasy looking and high-rez.

That told Crash that the system was devoting a lot of resources to security.

Wherever Maggie's Love was taking him, wherever the line was going, it was heavily guarded.

A glance around told him that the head VICE had moved over to the side of the tunnel, keeping several cars between them.

Crash let go, steering with weight and knees, drawing his pistol with his left hand.

The other one roared out from behind an armored car. The rider on the back flashed the sword in a move that was supposed to get all of Crash's attention.

Crash let the rider on the back flash the blade and cut off the left hand of the driver. The driver raised his arm, a new hand made of glowing bluish-white light appearing on the stump.

Crash stabbed him under the armpit, flashed the blade back, parried the rear rider's strike.

The back rider was leaning toward Crash, trying to keep the bike even with Crash, trying to get it to fall toward Crash.

Crashrider kicked out, slamming his boot against the side of the bike. The bike skidded and the rider waved its Caught-Tonya impotently as the bike coasted to the side and was run over by one of the armored military transports.

The leader slid out of the traffic, pointing a pistol at Crashrider. Crash ducked under the first shot, slashed the pistol away with the blade once, twice, then ducked underneath and fired twice into the leg of the leader.

It snarled, its jaws opening to show jagged dentation and a red glow.

Crash stabbed it in the jaw, the blade exiting out the back of its head. He whipped the blade out as the cycle, the BlackICE, crashed.

There was another dozen speeding through the traffic, heading toward him.

A look in front of him showed that the massive eight lane highway was reaching a huge multi-level roundabout, covered in searchlights, with helicopters picking up trailers, huge cranes grabbing containers, and vehicles pulling on and off of ramps that led to the huge twisting double-helix of the roundabout.

He could feel his body tingling as he shot past a white bar hologram hovering in midair that went by so fast that Crash missed what it said.

Sheathing the blade, holstering the pistol, Crash leaned forward, urging the bike to go faster as it swept up the onramp into the roundabout.

Crash leaned the bike over, almost laying it on its side. His knee, covered with an armor plate, showered sparks as he used his knee to keep the bike from laying down completely.

Nobody had ever been this far, naked, since the architects had originally designed it.

There was no graffiti, no markings of user input, no patches for user comfort and ease of use.

It was built with object oriented structures, sparkling data lines, all constructed into a massive, glittering spiraling double-helix roundabout.

At the top, hovering above the center of the top layer of the roundabout, was something that Crash knew he was the first person to see since it had been designed.

It was as if someone had jammed twelve different beings of flowing, golden light together. Their wings beat, keeping them aloft, where their eyes stared at the streets below like searchlights. From their lips came commands that made Crash shudder.

His cerebral fluid pressure rose high enough that pink fluid dribbled from his ears and tinged his eye color.

Not that he knew it, speeding around the roundabout, the throttle cranked to the max, his armored knee showering sparks off the roadway even as he triggered security programs that weren't able to deploy until he was two rotations above them.

He could see what he was after.

One of the sec-programs, a BlackICE, cut loose with an SMG, the bullets howling off of the vehicles.

A flash of light from the eyes of the figures above and the sec-program flashed and vanished.

The sheer, raw power of their domain made Crashrider's mouth go dry, but he pushed away the doubts, the fears.

Chrome.

Orchid.

He was Crashrider.

He reached the top loop but instead of turning into the traffic he lifted the front wheel up, keeping the hammer down on the throttle, and charged the barrier, standing up, bending his knees slightly.

The front of the motorcycle hit. The code deformed, warped.

But the error catchers, designed for Alpha Test RPGMMO use, enhanced and upgraded, held and the motorcycle jumped the railing in a shower of sparks.

Everything slowed down.

The three figures in the melded being started to look toward Crashrider as he flew through the open spaces. He could feel the self-adapting code altering.

There was a twinge as the bioware in his neocortex started to overload.

He drew the Caught-Tonya blade with one hand, the Ares Predator II with the other, putting one foot on the seat of the motorcycle.

The cycle reached the top of the arc and shifted to start dropping.

The eyes were moving toward the insignificant errored program approaching.

Crashrider jumped, pushing off, throwing himself forward, through more than emptiness, though space that didn't exist.

For a second he saw it as he crossed the datalines, bridged the two channels.

A burning pulsing object, not a sun, for a sun was only real. This was more than real, beyond real.

It contained all of an entire reality inside of it.

The moment shattered and Crashrider slammed into the middle one, the Caught-Tonya sinking to the hilt. The great creature blinked in shock as the blade began script and command injection.

Without pausing, Crashrider fired the pistol.

The rounds hit under the chins of the great beings.

The program didn't go through a crash and reboot.

It just crashed.

It vanished.

For a second, he saw it again.

More than all of creation in one burning object.

He was falling.

His chest suddenly hurt and he looked down as he fell, expecting to see blood.

Instead, he just saw his armajacket and the bandoleer across his chest.

He closed his eyes as he fell, his arms spread out, his Caught-Tonya in one hand and the pistol in the other.

Da'armo'o heard the alarms wailing. He could see through his one remaining eye that faced backwards that the medics and doctors were shocking Crashrider's chest, trying to bring him back.

He stared at the telltales on the monitor in front of him.

All the telltales were red.

He closed his eyes and breathed a sigh of relief.

------------

General Tik-Tak looked around.

"Do we know how?" he asked.

"The main operating system crashed. It's not rebooting, it's hung up on a loop when it's trying to reboot. It gets to the error checking then hits and unrecoverable error, the timer runs down, it reboots," the Colonel said without looking up. "I've seen this before. You actually need someone at the keyboard."

Tik-Tak breathed a sigh of relief.

"Keep an eye on it. Tell me if an operator starts handling the errors," Tik-Tak said.

He turned away, moving over to the window.

The hypercom wave generator was down.

"We must destroy the village to save the village," he whispered.

-----

"Look, a falling star," the Man said, pointing into the dark sky.

A bright spark was falling from the heavens, a glowing trail behind it.

The Fox nodded. "An omen of good luck," he said.

"Let us go and see where it lands," the Frog said.

The other two nodded, all three of them reaching out to take one another's hands as they moved across the gently waving fields of JPG grass.