The prompt twinkled out of sight. The tunnels of grey likewise whisked themselves away. The interface itself seemed to almost implode, collapsing into a pinprick nothing in the space of nanoseconds. It left behind a single display, which was not bound by planar frames. It just ran in all directions, fading into nonexistence as it spread out from its source.

I felt a chill run through me. Despite the pressure I was under, despite the

Tick…tick…tick…

time slipping through our fingers, I took a moment to appreciate the sensation. It had been a long time since I’d been this deep, and wielded this kind of power. Ages since I’d used this access and visited this sacred place. Here, at the crux of all things for someone in my line of work…a place that subsumed the lowest of codes, was baser than the validations, precursors to all conventions and rules. Here, where hacks like me ran boundless through the untamed wilderness, where I could read the program’s every line and ferret out it’s every secret, touch it at its soul itself, and shape it to my every whim – this, or any other program in the Coalition’s network, if I could find where it was hid. Here, where the grist of our profession was stored, waiting for its turn at the mill. Here, where there were no checks or balances, no error messages or logs, where anything went that I could think of, and code was as the Greeks once thought life was like before the world: chaos, dark, wasteful, and wild. Here, which felt a corporeal place, instead of just a weak projection…where it seemed for all the world like I could reach out with my human hand and touch a finger to that plane, press against it and feel it resist or yield, even (dare I say it?) shatter it, if I so desired. Or just follow it, in any direction, and chase doggedly at that horizon until I, too, faded into nonexistence.

Oh, no, the bottom it was not. Make no mistake about that. There were layers yet I could have burrowed, caverns I could still have delved – places where I could have not only shaken free of laws of the realm, but re-written them entirely. Made two plus two equal five, or six come after eight, or told the system that 11001001 was actually binary for a clown on stilts guiding an elephant through a hurricane – but this was as far as I would ever go. Here I was akin to Shakespeare, scribbling at an empty page, with all the tools of our respective languages ready at our beck and call. Any deeper and I’d be a monkey with a quill and ink, making random marks on random surfaces, scratching my head with a furrowed brow and wondering if they meant something.

A green-white cursor blinked at the end of a block of text, against a field of darker, duller green. I smiled inwardly again. A touch of nostalgia, by whoever had built this thing.

Who says hacks don’t have a sense of humor?

I swiped through a few of the blocks, skimming through the opening lines, trying to get a feel for how this thing was organized. There was no index now, no handy labeling of all the sequences, or links where dubs or calls were used. Not here. Things were scattered about in whatever order the hacks had thought of them, knowing the system would parse them down and assign an order of operations based on which definitions were used in which arguments. Variables called the ends of the earth, names defined themselves wherever they fell. Some appeared at the end of a thread that were needed in their primal sequence, and others were set in the first few blocks but only used in capstone logic. I paged through as fast as I dared, scanning for something, anything, that could serve as a landmark, and help me home the thing I sought. But there were none that I could find. In the end it was only by sheer luck that I stumbled upon the first of the sections I was looking for:

Jumbled strings of letters and numbers appeared in the space below. To the untrained eye they would have appeared random, but I knew what they were…the codes assigned to every Participant of the Coalition authorized to play in this space. All HQ, I had no doubt, with pay grades well above mine. One I even recognized, from the active personnel reports that appeared automatically at each of the Coalition’s facilities every morning: the Director’s.

I had to cull a laugh at that. The thought of the Director herself swiping away at the LifeStat systems, trying to balance this atmospheric element or tweak that purification stage, it was just too much!

You remember hers, but not your own, huh? Innocent bit of hero worship? Or are you just that much of an ass-kisser?

Goddamit.

I pulled back, away from the LifeStat program, and panned across the mantle, searching for another amidst the pods of programming. Some were complete, closed, and functioning, humming along like the perfect little server farms they were, while others were broken, lost, and decrepit, standing only semi-erect, like stumps of buildings after a blast. All were linked by relational data – shared definitions of variables, tracing their paths amongst the pods in lines that faded in and out, outputs both exposed and whole, the former lying at the edges of their derelict pods like piles of radioactive waste, data calls to dynamic sets, stretching off into the fog like fistulas to an unknown hold, their carriage seen as strobic pulses as they transferred from the biosphere, randomization columns spinning in massive banks of millions, billions, sometimes possibly trillions of facets clicking into place like some sort of quantum totems and, at the end of the series, either discharging their results or spinning off to try again. Counters ticking towards infinity, already reaching numbers only theorized by man after only a few decades in existence, keeping silent watch over collars and parameters long since obsolete, the Eternal Flames guttering in their version of a tomb. The feel of it was otherworldly. “Come on,” I whispered to myself, searching for one that held some auspice, “there’s got to be one. Something with a cross-reference hard-coded into it, that I can mine for what I need.” Our guys pulled them all the time, and rarely bother to scrub them after, even though they were supposed to. There had to be thousands from which to choose…preferably something universal, where they’d take the whole table, and within the last few years. “How about this one?” I homed in on a security intelligence for a sub-nuclear research lab we had started as a partnership with the Kremlin. I scanned through the protocol as slowly as I dared, but didn’t see what I was looking for. Next I tried the Master Defense Program, already rehearsing in the back of my mind an explanation for HQ why I’d back-doored one of the five most classified scripts in the entire Coalition, but I soon gave up. It was such a massive program, with so many different modules and limbs, that it would have taken days to scan properly, and even if I found a register there was a decent chance it would be one that was pulled before I had been added. In a program that mature and sprawling there could be hundreds of copies lying around, pulled and de-linked to help the hack with whatever they’d been working on at the time. I panned over to an Automated Medical Response intelligence. Perfect, I thought, that’ll have to have a crosser. Anyone working a gig like that would want one. It would be impossible to test it out, and see if the responses it was queueing up were correctly tailored to the Participant, if all you got was a random string. I didn’t have to do it this way, I knew. That knowledge nagged at me, shuttling back and forth between my conscious and semi-conscious minds, reminding me that I could have easily used the more traditional interface to scan the matrix lasered onto the back of my shoulder, and gotten my string that way instead. But I would have had to pull out of the mantle to take the scan, and something about that just felt wrong. Something I didn’t want to do unless I absolutely had to. There were guys who could have, I knew…guys who had helped build the mantle, back when the Coalition was just an idea in a few guys’ heads, and adapted the language to its needs, and who wouldn’t have thought twice about delving in and pulling out of it dozens of times in the space of an hour…but I wasn’t one of those guys. To me it was still sacrosanct, the interstices of my world, that mystic void between reality and unreality where the building blocks of lives could be created or consumed. Not a veil to be crossed lightly.

“Gotcha,” I whispered. There it was: a register containing String, Name, Date of Birth, Blood Type, Allergens, Ohms Humano-Genetic Quotient, and a variety of other medical statistics used to optimize first response. I paged through and found myself among the millions, using the date of birth as a guide, and copied the string assigned to me.

After a moment’s consideration, I found and copied Ramsay’s too.

Now to navigate back to the LifeStat user list, and…

There. I pasted, adding our strings them to the list.

And that was it. Access granted. I paged up a few times, then down, then pulled out of the LifeStat pod and meandered about a moment more, seeing if I’d stumble on something else that needed fixing, some excuse I could djinn up to stay here in the mantle, and hold on to the control it afforded, and this feeling of power that came with it, just a little while longer, but

tick…tick…tick…

there was none. Reluctantly, and not without a misstep or two, I dotted the interface in the reverse of the five-point star pattern, and felt the light go out of the world as the interface snapped back to normal. The infinity plane shimmered and shrank, and was bound again by tiled quadrangles. White replaced the greenish-black background of the mantle. Navigation resumed its clunky, swipe-driven motion, instead of the oceanic flows, so effortless I hadn’t even notice them the entire time I’d been in there. I’d just thought of where I wanted to be, and the barest movement got me going.

“Alright,” I said, once I’d gotten past the dullness, and the sense of loss, “that should do it.” Speaking to Ramsay truly now, not just narrating to keep myself company. I shuffled out from under the console, inchworming forward on my abdomen until I could grab the lip of its surface again. My suit caught on something edgy…the cover to access panel. It grated against the tile as I dragged it along with me. One of the screws tinkled as it was brushed carelessly out of its groove. I paid it no attention. There would be time to reattach it later. “We should have the access we need. All we have to do now is…”

Tcht…tcht!

My body tensed. The sound of a safety clicking off.

I looked up to see the muzzle of one of ours, trained squarely at my chest. I squinted through the visplate of the figure that was holding it. A pair of emerald eyes peered back, their lids narrowed almost to slits around the blackness of their pupils.

Banks. I might have known.