11:45:52. The digital display pulsed crimson on the horizon of his vision. A distraction, but something Cort needed to be aware of. Time was running out. In less than fifteen minutes he would turn twenty. No longer a teen. No longer eligible to jack in to the matrix via the computers of the Sisterhood of the Shard, an organization made up of hardwireds that accepted no one not in their teens. Lack of trust for the older generation, he supposed.
Actually, he kind of agreed with them. Already it was dicy, Cort--courtesy of past favors rendered--being the only male allowed within a kilometer of their semi-hidden center. Surrounded by four crumbling clapboard walls, thick coils of cable snaking from fathomless openings in the ceiling and floor, he felt the walls close in around him, smothering, air thickening, breath in hard little gasps.
He lifted the rope of fiber optics enclosed in clear wrap, gently placed the slightly bumpy circuit board at its base into the slotted socket below his left ear. Closed his eyes and felt the connection at once. Cyberspace. Jacked in to one of the most powerful computer matrixes this side of the Pacific Rim authorities.
A cool blue plain stretching endlessly before him. No fields of data...yet. He slipped the red plastic disk into the mother unit, listened to the whir and activated the software with a flick of a finger across the bubble plastic keypad beside him. Software he’d borrowed from a dead courier--of no use to the corpse. The fact that he’d not harmed the man assuaged his guilt not the least. Robbing the dead wasn’t his way. Until now, when the way of life as he knew it was about to change... and the dead man had carried just what the doctor ordered.
Cort opened his eyes and saw a double image, inside his head behind his eyes and on the computer screen before him. It could make you dizzy if not used to it. Eyes once again closed, he flowed down the corridor of cyberspace, one with the world of information. He wasn’t inside the computer, just the next closest thing: the images projected directly inside him through his implant, represented a visual interpretation of endless dimensions of data compiled and stored by conglomerates, large and small. Arasaka, Militech, Tokyo-Chiba conglamerate--they were all there. He was a pulse of light, cool green, riding a wave of pure energy. Great walls surrounded him, represented by all the colors of the spectrum.
He approached the towering, flaming walls of the Pacific Rim defenses, and tensed, hoping the software he’d pirated--along with a couple of wrinkles he’d feverishly created this afternoon--worked the way it was designed. If not he’d fry, inside the machine and out, an act too insignificant to even draw the attention of the Pacific Rim’s outer sensors. Webs of flame licked at him as he approached, increased in size thousandfold until he could see individual cracks across its surface.
He forced his eyes to remain open as he struck the wall...and passed through! The software had worked. Fingers danced and the second stage of his program began, sealing the breach he’d created and convincing the Pacific Rim’s computers that there had never been a rift in the first place. Cort avoided the Arasaka sector like the plague: their crystal shards laced with endless intricate loops of false trails and traps. Same for the remains of the New Tokyo domain. Despite the quake of ’24, temporarily reducing the city to twisted steel skeletons resembling dinosaurs imagined from the drugged mind of a Edgerunner, their data remained inviolate, their black ice death to the touch, neurological damage followed by physical death, specialized software or no.
Finally he reached Myaka enterprises, one of her former places of employment, under a pseudonym, of course. The software--hopefully--would create a diversion, causing their computers to think the breach was located in another part of the world, far away from sunny San Diego (if you considered an average of one hour of sunlight a day sunny). In. The insides of their data represented by vast pale cubes, coded with a string of numerals and letters.
It took about ten seconds for his sub-program to crack their code and locate the particular box he’d sought from the beginning. Just an address--that’s all he was after. A woman’s address--one who could change the destiny of his country.