Hammerjack by Marc D. Giller

glass, in spite of the reasons that had brought him here. It was a reminder—if only an illusion—that not everything was happenstance.
    “Hey, Alden,” he heard Dex saying behind him. “You just come here to hang out, or are you actually gonna look at this thing?”
    Dex Marlowe had been on the job as long as Cray—not as a spook, but as a genetic medical examiner, another one of the darker arts that the Collective liked to cultivate. The difference was that Dex, unlike Cray, didn’t suffer from regret. That was baggage reserved for those who worked the streets.
    Pale blue light cascaded across Cray’s face as he turned away from the window. It shimmered along the walls and the floor, shadows of viscous light giving the room a sense of coherent motion. Dex was working his voodoo on the other side of the room.
    “Did you dig it out?” Cray asked.
    The GME swiveled around in his chair, fixing Cray with a knowing smile. Behind him was a complex array of control consoles linked to a large virtual display. Columns of numerics poured through thin air like a waterfall—a representation of the exobytes of data being dumped into GenTec’s domain.
    “You’d be a lot happier if you didn’t think so much,” Dex said. He was young—even younger than Cray, with a shock of thick red hair piled high enough to make him look like street species. “Look at
me,
man. No more frontal lobe activity than is necessary to accomplish the task.”
    “The voice of experience,” Cray shot back.
    “I know what works, my man. If anybody’s up for a trip, it’s you. Do me a favor and let me hook you up. I ain’t even talking industrial-grade. There’s some stuff I developed myself—won’t alter your reality so much as
bend
it.”
    It was an old joke between them. Dex knew Cray’s reputation, and was always trying to break him off the narrow. “Thanks but no thanks,” Cray told him. “I got a slippery enough grip as it is.”
    “Suit yourself. So you wanna check it out?”
    “What have you got?”
    “Beats the hell out of me, my man,” Dex said, shaking his head. “But it’s pretty weird, whatever it is.”
    Cray walked over to the extraction tank at the center of the room. It was about the size and shape of a coffin, with transparent walls that refracted cold blue light—the energy that pulsed within. Inside, Zoe floated in a protease-accelerating solution—thousands of fiber links sprouting from her body—drawing information from her tissues as easily as blood might be drawn through needles.
    “Weird is a relative term.”
    “Not in this business,” Dex observed, staring at the face inside the tank. Bathed in a hallucinogenic glow, Zoe looked angelic. “I can see why she got under your skin. Makes you wonder how she got to be a runner.”
    “Same reason you and I do what we do,” Cray said. “For the money.”
    He joined Dex at the control console, his eyes narrowing as he studied the virtual display. The GME had slowed the draw considerably, but still the node had trouble keeping up with the data flow.
    “You noticed,” Dex said, reading the expression on Cray’s face.
    “This isn’t a bottleneck?”
    “No way. I run a single node switch from here with no inbound traffic from the Axis. I’m the only one taking up bandwidth.”
    “It’s barely keeping up.”
    “I know. When I first started, the extract came on so fast I had a dozen buffer overruns before I even knew what was happening. Girlfriend was carrying some
shit,
man. Where did Phao Yin say this came from?”
    “Tagura West.”
    “The crawler attack?” Dex laughed. “Alden, what we got
here
makes those Tagura CMs look like old news—unless those boys got some skunk works I haven’t heard of.”
    Cray raised an eyebrow. “What are the chances of that?”
    “Come on, Alden. You know I ain’t supposed to talk about my other clients. I’ll get a bad reputation.”
    “You already
got
a bad reputation.”
    Dex smiled. “I know. It’s