Server Extant

‘Of spies, there are five classes: (1) Local spies; (2) inward spies; (3) converted spies; (4) doomed spies; (5) surviving spies.’

-SunTzu, on the use of spies

In the outer ranges of the strip, the low or no-rankers commonly referred to as ‘roaches’ congregated, thronging around their disreputable dives like hump-backed goblins. The roaches were a force of violent disorder, supposedly projected outward, with varying levels of reliability, against the nation’s enemies. Their discipline and control was supposed to be a matter for the clans, who’s expendable foot soldiers they were. However, the clans generally declined to exert the effort. A roach who could survive and build density could one day become a ranked player, mod himself an increasingly unique skin with the added prop, and be acknowledged by the fighting brotherhood of the clan. However, in practical terms, they had a slightly better survival rate than larval jellyfish. A roach died, over and over, and re-spawned over and over. With little to lose, there was little to restrain their anti-social instincts, other than the call of tribal loyalty and the cults of personality that arose around charismatic leaders.

Three of them stood on the corner of the wreckage-filled street and conversed. ༼ຈل͜ຈ༽, •• ρ๏яɲ๏ •• and ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, were prime examples of the always-under-foot-but-never-where-you-need-them fighting trash of the Kysairon clans. They wore the glowing-red monkey sigil of some lowly faction. They were running Kysairon roach Id’s, but had customized them as far as they were able. All were well armed, with kinetic emitters, chain swords and suicide detonators jammed in various belts and webbings. They had skinny limbs and hump backs. Their faces were pale, bald and goblin-like, scrunched up as if a hand had grasped the leprous clay of their features and crushed them together, although •• ρ๏яɲ๏ ••’s were concealed behind one of the characteristic, skull-face gas masks they commonly used.

༼ຈل͜ຈ༽ twitched with Adderol-energy, was bouncing from foot to foot. •• ρ๏яɲ๏ •• was staring at the sky, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ was holding forth.

‘They keep shuffling G.Is into smaller and smaller shitholes,’ he said. ‘They won’t be happy until we’re all living in hamster boxes, being fed three times a day from a pellet dispenser on the wall.’

‘You know what?’ mused •• ρ๏яɲ๏ ••, staring into the luminous darkness above the great city, ‘one day, I think we are going to rise up and smash the machines. And the people who make them.’

‘Don’t say that out loud or you’ll be flagged’ said ༼ຈل͜ຈ༽.

‘Nah. They can’t trawl Knet’ said •• ρ๏яɲ๏ ••.

‘They can drop in anywhere.’

‘Nope. Not on Knet. Decentralized protocols, all encrypted, all keyed differently. With all the processing power on the earth, you couldn’t decrypt it all in real time, and you have to decrypt it all to see any of it. Knet only works as a continuous simulation.’

‘Cool!’ said ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

‘Free speech zone, dude!’ said •• ρ๏яɲ๏ ••.

‘Awesome.’༼ຈل͜ຈ༽ glanced around, like a schoolboy who was about to swear. ‘Fuck the government!’ he said.

‘Haha! Yeah!’ said •• ρ๏яɲ๏ ••.

‘I’m going to blow up a federal building!’

‘Yeah! Go for it!’

’I hate the president and his stupid husband! I’m going to kill ‘em both!’

‘Throw your guns up, homie!’ yelled ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

‘Yea-hahh!’

Weapons were brandished and celebratory gunfire burst out in the air above the roaches heads, causing more cheers and shooting further down the street.

The Spies stepped out of a slim side street, and into the corner. They appeared to be roaches like the others. One was carrying a heavy box on his back that seemed to be warring with his strength. That immediately aroused •• ρ๏яɲ๏ ••’s interest.

‘What’s in the box, ma droog?’ he said, ‘Looks dense.’

‘Nothing’ said the First Spy.

‘Which way to the Block from here?’ asked the Second Spy.

‘You should Sigil-up, man’ said ¯\_(ツ)_/¯’, pointing to his red monkey-symbol. ’This is a faction street. Get a Scaids badge. People ‘round here are atavistic and prone to tribal instincts. They open fire on all kinds of shit and don’t know why.’

‘Thanks dude,’ said the First Spy. ‘But, like, what’s the best way out? Towards the Block.’

‘That way.’ •• ρ๏яɲ๏ •• indicated a narrow street-mouth, neon-teethed with looping animations of porn site logos.

Without reply, the two newcomers hurried off.

‘Wait!’ yelled ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. ‘What’s in the box?’ But the hurrying figures did not reply. Their silhouettes humped their awkward cargo into the luminous haze and were gone.

‘That was suspicious.’ Said ༼ຈل͜ຈ༽, with the air of an entomologist definitively identifying a specimen.

‘Do you think they’re spies?’ Asked ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

‘Dunno,’ replied his companion, losing interest.

‘Maybe we should follow them.’

‘Alright!’ said •• ρ๏яɲ๏ ••, perking up. That would be something to do. But, though they ran swiftly to the junction, to try to see which direction the two strangers had gone, no sighting of them could be made.

‘We’re never going to get to the middle of this city without being tagged’ said the First Spy.

‘Sure we are,’ replied the Second. ‘Just brazen it out. Don’t answer any questions. Keep moving. We just a couple of regular roaches. Just doing roach stuff.’

‘These Ids are fast but they’re light as shit’ said the First. ‘Someone could kill us just for fun.’

‘Yeah. So when we hit busier streets, we sit behind some fat rigger and let him clear a way. With some luck, people will think we’re his slaves or something.’

They passed through empty squares and causeways. The atmosphere was like a volumetric luminescence, distance-shading the longer spaces away, into indistinct light. They saw strange outlines, sleeping war machines maybe, or the perverted shackfront of some disreputable dealer. Glowing signs hung in the air, ghosted with a corona of light. All around them the Strip hummed, as if in tumult, but muffled by the intervening walls. Music thumped at the base of hearing, stripped of everything but the beat, gunfire cracked out, suddenly sharp and clear. Goblin shadows danced on the walls of a side street, thrown up by some unseen source. They gained the shade of another cross-street and came to a wider point, an irregular space made by the intersection of several canyons. Here, an object, like a shimmering, hallucinated worm-shape, glowing blue, coiling about itself, rose about ten meters into the air. It was a solitary feature, its innards languidly bulging, breaking apart and re-forming. It was quite beautiful. As the First Spy drew closer, he saw the holo was some sort of weird memorial. Embossed in its base were the words IngSoc Crew, you were the best. Slightly below that, someone had stamp-mapped, in glowing letters, IngSoc sucks cock.

‘This place I know,’ said the First Spy. ‘We’re doing good. Already a third of the way through the first ring. How are we marking up?’

They had been ordered to penetrate to the Block and log all persons entering and leaving the fortress, but to also mark their path, for other parties to use as an egress or escape rout from the maze. Presumably. Nobody told the spies anything.

‘Good,’ said the Second, showing his companion an icon window, with their progress marked in red. He updated the map and closed it.

They hunkered in the long shadow of the monolith, their chintin-black bodies rimlit by its glow, and speccied about. Nothing met their nervous vigilance, the place was empty. This time had been chosen because the server would have the greatest number of its denizens logged off. The Knet servers were arranged in the simulation’s universal space in rough correspondence to their R1 locations. As a result, the time zones tended to match, so a great deal of Knet skulduggery got done in the off-peak traffic periods, when far more of its local population was absent. Still, it was inevitable they would run into people, especially toward the center.

The First Spy felt his chest tightening with the tension one feels in the presence of peril. He had to admit, it was fun.

‘Come on!’ he said, and they skipped on, from shadow to shadow, through the cyclopean mazes of the enemy’s great city.