//------------------------------// // Chapter 18: Rack // Story: Synthesis // by Starscribe //------------------------------// The next thing Dakota knew, she was sitting up in Clay’s bed, letting the sheet fall away in front of her. Several hours had passed, and her internal sense of time demanded she get up. There was somewhere she had to be, something she needed to do. Right, the parser! I need to go with Beck, make my case in person. Her whole body ached, and the smell of sweat and other things was thick around her. Not unpleasant, but… she would have to leave them behind. Clay twitched beside her, then opened one eye. “Somewhere to be?” She nodded weakly, then rose. She had to hold the bed on one side to stop from falling. To her surprise, she wasn’t wearing an illusion. Her chest got warmer, her cheeks flushed. He didn’t cover my scars. “Going to the Badlands. Got to get a parser that can make sense of Dream Valley.” “Oh.” He sat up, watching her. He didn’t shy away from looking at her body this time. She looked away from him, girlish and embarrassed as she searched the darkened interior for her underwear. “That sounds like fun. I don’t get to do much work in Equestria. They always need me out here.” She finally found her clothes piled up beside the bed and started getting dressed as quickly as she could. Beck wasn’t exactly a punctual pony, but she still didn’t want to keep him waiting long. “Does that mean you won’t be staying in Abyss much longer? They’ll… send you and Applejack out again to save the world?” He nodded. “Never know when. Might be a few hours. Might be a few weeks. But I’ll be back. If you decide to stay here. Rarity doesn’t… or won’t… make that offer to just anyone.” Dakota finished with the jumpsuit, and actually managed to make it to the door without Clay stopping her. That only made him more infuriating. Some part of her wanted him to stop her from leaving, no matter how important her mission was. But her rational brain prevailed, and she found herself out in the hallway. Cinnabar appeared beside her as soon as the door hissed closed, as though he’d been waiting out here the whole time. “Well, that was unexpected,” he said, his voice flat and sarcastic. “I did not see that coming.” “I hope you didn’t,” she said, folding her arms stubbornly. “Are you gonna help me with Beck or not?” He nodded. “Of course I’m going with you. You can still barely work your kit, Dakota. You need me there. Going into the changelings’ den without your Synth, no way. I just think its funny you thought this would go differently.” They set off together through the halls. Dakota was still a little too sore to walk completely normally, but at least there was no one here to stare. She kept one hand on the walls in case she slipped or stumbled. After her fingers passed smoothly over a porthole for the third time, she finally stopped walking, tapping on the glass and looking out into the blue. There was the artificial reef, and the surprisingly colorful fish surrounding Abyss on every side. “This porthole doesn’t feel like glass,” she said. “Oh, because it isn’t,” Cinnabar said. “There are only a few windows on the entire station, and they’re all places where they’re functionally necessary. Fallbacks in case of different system failures. No other window you see is really there. It’s a structural weakness, further complexity in manufacturing. Better just to have a waterproof camera and pretend.” “Right.” She had been getting used to the overlay. It felt plausible enough that she wanted to believe it, even if on some deeper level she understood that she was moving from one cube to another. But that was another painful reminder, a point that would ground her every time she passed a window. Eventually she reached her quarters. She swung the door open, and wasn’t that surprised to see Beck pacing back and forth inside. He was back to looking like the black insect Dakota now knew was called a changeling. A villain species in most parts of Equestria. But not where they were going. “Didn’t know if you would show up,” he said. “You worry me. Don’t scare me next time, Dakota.” He tossed something onto the table—a dense bundle of paper. “There’s your ID. You owe me 20k for it. Mostly bribes. You’re a Canadian now. It would’ve been better to say you were Swiss, but I know you only speak English. Learn to fake an accent.” “Eh?” Cinnabar shoved her painfully in her good leg, forcefully enough that she still stumbled into her room. The airlock door slid closed behind her. “You can do better than that. Want me to pay him?” “Obviously,” she said. “Right now.” The changeling looked up, his horn glowed, and several different Identifiers appeared in the air between them. “Send a thousand bits to each of these shell identities. I don’t want a trail connected to you anymore. Bad for your ID, bad for me.” While Cinnabar made the transfers, Dakota walked over to the table and lifted the virtual stack of documents. It wasn’t just a fake identifier and a fake name, though that was there. It was also a spoofed client, one she could run outward facing when she was in public places and appear like her fake self. “Right, plug that in,” Beck said. “We’re going through some public systems in a few NATO countries on our way down to Badlands. Plus, I’ll be with you. I can work out any bugs.” The spoofed client appeared visually like a magical scroll, wrapped up tight with a black seal in wax. She knew better than to think she’d be able to read it, she just twisted her other arm to bring up her interface, then held the scroll close enough to scan. The effect was instantaneous. Her vision flickered for a second, and a warning played in one ear. “Software from unknown source is asking for permission—” then the voice spooled down, like a speaker running out of battery abruptly. Her vision returned a moment later, and a new button had appeared on her interface. “Identity.” “One more thing,” Beck added, as Cinnabar paid the last little transaction, and the Identifiers all vanished. “It will delete itself if you ever get arrested. No records, no connection. No proof they can recover you had it, either. Good for both of us. If you do get arrested, you’ll need a new alias anyway.” Dakota reached out with one finger, and activated the new button. The effect was instantaneous—a flash of magic around her, not unlike the one when she went abruptly to Equestria and was forced to look like a pony. This one had changed her appearance too. Long black hair now hung down from her shoulders. Her chest was larger, and where her arm was visible through the jumpsuit there was no sign of the stitches. “Uncanny,” she said—in someone else’s voice. She got one word before stopping again, reaching up and poking her face. It still felt the same. “Can’t… real time?” She didn’t have to learn the accent, it was already there. “Real time,” Beck said, wings buzzing with pride. “Some of my best work. I snatched some of the open source spec sheets for your implants. Almost nobody can do it, but your brain has a coprocessor. Totally authentic. Can do it for languages too, just like a pony.” “You never told me!” she exclaimed, glaring at Cinnabar. “Might’ve been useful to know I could do this sooner. Maybe I could’ve… asked those assassins not to kill me? If I asked nicely.” “It’s just a filter,” Cinnabar said, glaring up at her. “Just because you sound like you’re from Alberta doesn’t mean you actually think you could say sorry to an assail.” “Fair. How much would it cost for a translation program too, Beck?” He shrugged. “Not my area. I bought this one from university animation department. Included in the price you paid. No time to waste on this, anyway. The Court is waiting for us. Long way to go, many systems. Come on.” His horn flashed, and a glowing doorway appeared in the air in front of them. Dakota wanted to tell him she’d rather wait—she had just walked here after several hours with Clay. She could barely stand, felt hungry and thirsty and smelled like she’d just been… doing exactly what she’d been doing. “Cinnabar, could you order snacks? That would be… good.” He rolled his eyes. “Already did. It’s not like I became your Synth yesterday. On the kitchen counter.” He wasn’t exaggerating. Dakota hurried over, grabbed the oversized water-bottle and tube of survival rations, then followed Beck through the open doorway. As she expected, the passage into Equestria proper forced her to be a pony again. She blinked, waiting for the disorientation to pass. She wasn’t even herself, but a yellow unicorn with the same black mane she had in hair. It meant she levitated the snacks alongside her instead of carrying them in her mouth. She glanced to the side—her fake EI was there, a single tulip growing in the snow. This wasn’t Port Jouster, though—Beck had taken them into a metropolis. Manehattan was every bit as busy as the city it was roughly based on, with skyscrapers just as impressive and streets just as packed with carts and foot traffic. This one had a few advantages on the real one—there was no piss in the gutters, no trash, no smell of alcohol and depression that drifted up from drains and manholes when she stood in one place a little too long. The ponies passing them on either side looked busy and gruff, but they also hurried about with opportunity in their steps. They were ponies with purpose. Plenty of them were probably humans, too. Dakota could almost see the patterns of intention as they moved. Whenever there were two of them close together, that was a near guarantee she was seeing a person and their Synth. It took her a few moments to find Beck—he was already getting away from them. Changelings weren’t tall, and he hadn’t even hidden himself in the crowd. “Wait…” She caught up with him after a few hurried strides, stumbling and shuffling forward. She kept expecting to smack into the side of her cube, but… there was no sign it was even there. “You’re just gonna walk around like that?” Beck met her eyes, grinning mischievously. “This drone is, sure. But look around. Not the only one. Manehattan is metropolitan, liberal. Most human city in the west.” He was right. There were almost as many non-ponies here as ponies. Griffons and dragons and the like filled the sky as thick as pegasi, and on the ground there were minotaurs and other near-animal creatures whose names escaped her. Weren’t they from that movie that hadn’t done very well? In a crowd like this, a changeling didn’t stand out as much as he would’ve in Port Jouster. There would be no Royal Guard called on this threat, not in a city that existed in Equestria only by the laws of real estate, not by any understanding of roleplaying or rules. “Fair.” Once she’d caught up with him, it was easy to match his pace. The changeling was so much smaller and slower than she was. “Why don’t we go directly to where we’re going? Why go through Manehattan?” As she asked, they descended down a wide set of steps into a metro line. It felt only sort of like she was going down stairs. As they walked, Dakota felt just as much like the steps were pushing up on her from below. Every moment she had to be careful not to watch her legs too closely, or else cross the wires in her brain and trip again. Down in the station tunnel was an attractive mosaic along the wall, and a street band playing for bits with their instruments out. Dakota tossed one in as they passed. “Can’t get to it that way,” Beck answered, keeping his voice low. They were surrounded by other creatures, but he still watched the space around them carefully. “The route is like a password. Required path opens the way. If you try to go straight there, nothing to find. Equestria wants us, but it only meets us halfway. Have to play by its rules somehow. Walking is like… showing we respect it. Showing we want to be part of the world even if we don’t agree to all its rules.” Dakota shrugged—it wasn’t exactly an answer that made sense, but she wasn’t a hacker anymore. Anything she’d been able to do had died when she got hit by that truck. “Going here is… safe? Your friends aren’t going to try and… expose me or whatever, will they?” Beck laughed again, a strange reverberating sound that shook Dakota’s chest as though a bass was aimed directly at her. “If anyone in the Hive wanted to do that, they wouldn’t come. They already know what this is about. No big secret. Every decker in the world is watching your case. That thing in Australia… spells setup brighter than neon. We can see when it’s right in front of us.” They passed through several more connections—not onto a metro train, but through a maintenance tunnel that took them out in a tropical beach. Then they swam a little ways out to a diving platform, jumped down into a space station orbiting the planet and filled with the constant shouts of buying and selling as various corporations traded their goods. Some part of Dakota wondered how much of the route was genuine—maybe Beck was complicating the path so she wouldn’t be able to come back. But she didn’t confront him about it, and eventually they emerged into a palace of metal and broken computers, structured in a shifting insect hive that moved and changed whenever she tried to focus on it. From the floors above, from the dark corners, from the openings in the walls—blue eyes watched. “Do you feel like you’re in a little over your head?” Cinnabar asked, his voice silent. Even so Dakota winced, wondering if any of the creatures watching them would be able to hear. But none had reacted to the message. Could she reply safely as well? He’s in my head. There’s no transmission to pick up. He should be safe. Except that she’d already seen evidence her implants could be manipulated. Equestria’s root authority had done it to Cinnabar without even trying. And they’d been able to overhear their private conversations. “Yes. I wish we had tried to get this parser from the university system or something. Wouldn’t that be safer?” “If they gave it to us,” he responded. Still there was no sign of a reaction from Beck or any of the other creatures. Her arrival was apparently a sign, because as they walked forward towards the central chamber, thousands of bugs were emerging from every opening. They came in different colors, some of them bright, while others were more like Beck and had color only on their fins. Some seemed to be amused, while others had such alien emotions that she couldn’t guess at what they were feeling. The walkway opened into a huge forum, with raised seats running up the wall. Plenty of them were already occupied by bugs, most small like Beck. Except for the front row… Dakota recognized those. These were queens, bugs that sat as tall as Alicorns and practically radiated their power. Equestria only had one Alicorn—could these hackers do what Twilight could? Each one of them sat on an impressive stone throne, carved of a single solid piece with many openings. It wouldn’t have been terribly comfortable to sit on. But let’s be real, these are all fat nerds sitting on gaming chairs in their basements. Fat nerds that ruled over Equestria’s underworld. “And she appears,” said the largest and most impressive of all the queens, her mane bright green and her teeth razor sharp. She leered down at Dakota from her throne, gesturing at the raised platform in the center of the room. Beck didn’t have to tell her that this was where she had to go. “Something like her appears, anyway. A changeling in her own right?” She sniffed, then turned slightly. “No, that mask was spun by another. Not as impressive. It would be an asset if you were multitalented.” “Should I turn it off?” Dakota whispered to Beck, her voice as low as she could. It probably wouldn’t stop these creatures from overhearing, but that didn’t mean she had to be stupid. He nodded once. “We’re all using onion routing. Only the queens can see you. My spoof isn’t good enough for any of them.” Queens, huh? Beck hadn’t been lying when he said that the best hackers in the world were the ones who played along with Equestria. This almost felt like something that could’ve fit seamlessly into Equestria’s world. Some part of Dakota wanted to bow to them, try to appeal to their egos… anything to get their help. But that part wasn’t nearly loud enough to make her do it. Dakota stomped her way up, then called up her interface and deactivated the false persona. Beck was apparently right about the mask, because none of the bugs in the upper layers reacted. Maybe she looked as much like a nondescript changeling as they did to her. Oh God, this is a Sublayer. Maybe the hackers aren’t roleplaying after all. “She should tell us what she’s thinking,” said an orange queen on the far end, speaking with a man’s voice she could just imagine drinking mountain dew between sentences. There wasn’t even an attempt to match his way of speaking to the movement from the avatar’s mouth. “We don’t come here to socialize. You’re the decker named Dakota. You have something for us. A crack no one ever managed. Why do we fucking care?” “Careful, Lazortron,” said the green one. “She’s terrified. Look at her. Implants are broadcasting heart rate, how cute. We could at least give her a formal welcome.” Lazortron made a frustrated sound, spreading her wings briefly in front of her face. “Like any of us care about your game, Chrysalis. I’m getting a fuckin’ pizza. Be right back.” The queen slumped forward onto the little table in front of her and started to snore. “What about you, Shadowblayde? Would you lead us?” Cinnabar settled down onto his haunches beside her, body firm and stable as the earth pony had ever been. “Don’t worry about anything, Dakota. I can pull us out anytime. Abyss is really generous about breaking links.” “Not unless I say,” she said. “I feel like these people will want to test us somehow. More than money. Don’t do anything unless I ask.” “Let every bug rise as we present Dakota, Decker of Chicago,” said a deep blue queen. A smattering of the bugs around the room actually stood up. Most just muttered to each other, looking bored. “Welcome to the Badlands, Dakota. Your desires are your own.” She sat down, and the few bugs who had honored the request shuffled in their seats as they did the same. “Thank you,” Chrysalis said. “Now, we’ve already heard your case from an esteemed member of this hive, Beck. But you will have to convince us without him if you want our help. You must have already learned that you had nowhere else to go. There are no others capable of giving you what we can. No other ponies you can run to for help.” Dakota stood a little straighter, and her avatar fidgeted her wings. Stop it, avatar. You’re not supposed to show them how worried I am! How many changelings were there, anyway? It looked like there were hundreds of seats, but that didn’t prove anything. The entire crowd might be fake. For all she knew, it might just be the queens that were real. Or maybe not even them. Maybe Beck was leading her on. It didn’t matter. “I need to go to Dream Valley,” she said. “You want something hard, I’ve got something fucking hard. I’m going all the way to the Monolith.” As she spoke, an interface appeared just in front of the podium, in the empty space above the six queens. It covered up many of the audience, but she suspected the ones it hid weren’t very important anyway. It was a large pie chart, with one section green and one section red. “These are the shares in the Hive’s contract,” said the purple queen, her voice sounding like a twenty-year-old female text to speech. “You must secure fifty percent of the hive in order for your request to be honored.” From the look of it, the six queens together each held about ten percent of the “Hive,” except one that held twenty percent. That meant the rest of the audience was almost unimportant. Two of the big slices were already green, along with a small fraction of the others. Beck’s slice was probably one of those, but he was still just one bug. I need all the queens but one to want to help. Maybe that’s where their titles come from. They decide what these hackers do by collective will. “Good, yeah.” Lazortron said, sounding like he was speaking with his mouth full now. She was a little surprised the avatar didn’t have a pizza box in front of her. “Interesting challenge, we get that. Deeper in Dream Valley is tricky to get to. What I want to know is why we should fuckin’ care.” “Because, uh…” She hesitated. But this was really just talking. They hadn’t attacked her yet, hadn’t threatened her. Maybe she could do it. “Because Kayla Rhodes is there, or left her mark there. You probably already knew I was looking for her, or heard it. Well, it’s true. And that’s where she went.” “Bullshit,” Lazortron called. The graph above shifted slightly towards red. “If another human could go, we wouldn’t be here. Her method would be out by now, you could just grab it. Obviously it can’t be done.” Cinnabar spoke up from beside her. No one stopped him. “Rhodes wasn’t just anyone. Her Synth was Twilight Sparkle, Equestria’s Administrator. Anything she did, they probably did together. Twilight could have protected her. She is where the information came from in the first place.” Not strictly true, but true enough that none of the changelings questioned them. Cinnabar didn’t seem to want to tell them about the hall of the dead. Or maybe they couldn’t. Either way, they’d earned themselves back a few more shares of the audience. Except so far, none of the queens had moved. “What makes you think you can make it that far?” Chrysalis asked. She leaned forward on the stone table, leering down at Dakota. “Humans have attempted the trip before purely for academic reasons. They have traveled out of pride, or bravery, or out of some belief that treasure waited for them in the parts of Equestria no other humans could visit.” “Because…” Dakota winced. It was another good question. What made her special? If anything, her brain was weaker than the others who might’ve made the trip. She was held together with duct tape and string, she wasn’t some strong-willed Ph.D. in a university somewhere with the best equipment and hospital staff on standby. But she had to say something. “Because I’m more desperate than they are,” she eventually said. “And I’m going chemically assisted. I’ll be using Poison Joke for the whole trip.” “Might be worth it just to see what happens to her,” said Shadowblayde, casually. “Nobody has combined a special parser with Poison Joke before. Maybe the Rice people could’ve got deeper with it.” “Or maybe they would’ve just went more insane,” Lazortron argued. “I’m not convinced.” But blue was. She’d apparently changed her vote. Dakota only had to move fifteen percent more of the audience. She wasn’t the only one who had noticed that—there were gasps from the audience, and a good section changed too. Shadowblayde’s loyalists, I bet. They want to vote like she does. “There is one question more important to me,” Chrysalis said, rising from her chair and buzzing down to the floor in front of everyone. “I know ambition when I smell it, and I smell plenty of it on you. You’re a pony who knows what she wants. One who isn’t afraid to take what she deserves, no matter who stands in her way. A pony like you might stay sane long enough. Not pony enough to lose your individuality to the conflux, not human enough once you use Poison Joke to be overwhelmed by its feedback. It is an interesting opportunity. “But suppose for a moment that we help you. You swim down to the deepest recesses of Equestria, and look into the face of God. You see what not even the Assembledge understand. You find Rhodes. What then? What happens to the secrets you uncover? Where do they go?” “I’ve been hired to find Rhodes,” she said. “So I find her. Everything else…” She shrugged. “I’m not gonna lie and say I’m fighting for information. I don’t know what goes on down here. I’d have to lie to say I knew who you’re fighting and why.” “This means you are willing to make an exchange.” The queen walked right up to the raised platform. Her eyes were dark, and Dakota couldn’t tell if the lust on her face was for the avatar she was wearing, or what she represented. Maybe both. “We value exchange here. Not just bits… this will happen, but it is beneath discussion. We know your account can pay our fees, or we would have nothing to say. Besides that. Suppose you… brought some other program in the parser. A verbose logger. When you returned, you would bring it with you. One of our own would collect it, and everything it contained.” “Everything except where Rhodes is,” Dakota countered. “I have to be the one to find her, or…” She hesitated. Admitting just how desperate she was to these obvious predators was probably not a good idea. “Anything else.” “Think about that carefully, Dakota,” Cinnabar said. “You’re going into the deepest parts of Equestria. If you bring a logger with you, they’ll be able to see the structure like they couldn’t ever see it from up here. They’ll have more information for their exploits than any other hackers in the world. There’s no telling what they might try to do to Equestria.” “Do you see any other options?” Cinnabar remained stubbornly silent, staring at the floor. More than enough admission for Dakota. “This is… an acceptable compromise,” Chrysalis said. “As you have already observed, many of us do not care about this missing person. Those who do can learn on the news broadcasts like everypony else.” “Then I accept.” Another larger section of the graph turned green, the single biggest slice. Chrysalis’s own slice. Once she went over, almost all the audience still holding out went with her. Only two of the queens still held out—not nearly enough to stop the deal. Dakota sighed, letting her wings fold to her sides with relief. The conversation went on—they negotiated the specifics, the price, and the time of delivery. Dakota coasted through that part, as they talked her up to a million bits for the parser. The single biggest expense of her life, probably more than she’d ever make from solving cases. But what does it matter? Once I find Rhodes, it’s all over. I only have to make it a little further.