The Mortician’s Dream, a Cyberpunk short story sample by Jonathan Fisher (Rights reserved)
(i don’t have an elevator pitch for this yet. it’s about the Binary Dream, the expanded consciousness of the internet, and a small group of elite hackers who prize the most protected data away from the hoarders who control the world.)
The Russian mainframe didn’t have a description to its AI core. It just hung there in digital space, a bricked up colossus of data with no description. All Bricker could determine was the sheer volume of power drawn to protect it.
Anything drawing enough comparative power to protect four American military industrialist sites was worth his attention.
Even if the run went against the cardinal rule.
He took a deep breath. The air was stale in his room, and the air conditioner failed to keep up in any meaningful way with the heat generated by the exhaust fans for his CPUs.
Every machine was connected via Ethernet to huge fiber optic ports that tapered down to two connectors that went into his temples.
He built a halo the second day he’d used the rig. Just something to distribute the weight of the connectors to his shoulders so the poundage wasn’t the sole responsibility of his neck. It looked ridiculous, but it made it easier to use.
He examined the blueprints one more time on a small laptop airgapped to the rest of the rig. This run was a fifty-fifty split; it’d either be a cakewalk or it’d be the single hardest run of his life. And until the breach, there’d be no way to tell. He took another breath, and plugged in. He sank mentally into the connection and as it happened, he became increasingly aware of the computers around his room.
As he spooled up, that awareness became less precise and distinct. The computers stopped being objects and started being extensions of his thoughts.
He felt faster, when he was down in the Dream. His mind accelerated by quantic processing that merged human thought impulse and the binary data of code into something utterly unique. Two known things created a third unknown.
The Binary Dream. Human consciousness plus every conceivable piece of digitized information. All online and accessible to anyone. A place that defies explanation, a gold mine for those dumb and brave enough to risk everything for a run.
Protecting anything in such a wide-open space required intelligence that was malicious beyond evil and intelligence that outstripped human thought. Thus came the Defensive Intelligences. Killer code designed to slag any drive that tried to penetrate the firewalls the DIs were charged with protecting.
Every run was life or death. But if you run, and you win, the data was worth more than gold.
He didn’t make notes. Notes of what happened and the play-by-play were things he wrote out fresh from the Dream, not while he was dueling. There was no energy to spare; every thought was devoted to protecting and evading the machine that wanted to melt his brain.
That’s why, when it happened, there were no notes to explain what went wrong. Bricker made the run, and the defensive intelligence slagged him into oblivion. Ripped him and his code into nothingness.
if you liked that, consider buying me a coffee?
2087
stormborns
tangentwithtanner
pixelskylines
snowghoul
