Phosporescent hexadecimal scrolls through Ashlock’s dreams.
When she wakes, the chronometer pulses 3:44. Cold water on her face, her boots, her jacket. She’s out pacing the mist-wreathed docks by a sliver of moon.
Nobody nice is out at this hour, but they don’t hassle Ashlock (she does kung fu). Down a wharf, she kicks splinters into jetsam.
This was an easy job: they should have come out with cash, not data. They’re lazy sometimes, arrogant, but not stupid.
Somebody dumbed it up for them.
Styrofoam hunks bob around the pylon, striped with broken barcodes. Hexadecimal teases Ashlock, just out of reach.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Tach’s iPod is smoking.
“It looks,” says their fence Celesque dryly, “a little too hot for me to move.”
“Hey, nobody’s coming after this one,” says Ashlock, which is technically true. “Just put out some feelers or whatever.”
“There are practically feelers coming out of that thing already,” says Celesque.
“It’s good math. Powerful. It’ll sell.”
“Then sell it yourself, sweetie.” Celesque shrugs. “I’m not touching it. If that’s what I think it is, do yourself a favor. Hit it with a hammer, toss it in a lake.”
But information, Ashlock knows to her dismay, can be neither created nor destroyed.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
To hack the Nameless you need a Beowulf cluster, a circle in stone, two kilometers of copper wire and a serious disregard for your own safety. That’s just the basic setup, though, and in the last couple years Tach and Ashlock have kitted it out: inscriptions in slippery languages, a hotswap drive rack, staves and amulets and six monitors scrolling green on black.
All of it fails one night on a simple run for Kirrily’s money laundry. Ashlock loses a finger; Tach loses a year of his life. And in return, they get a number that wants to kill them both.
This is the Flood. There’s a lot of expensive data in it, most of which you can’t read because of extremely large numbers. You could maybe figure the numbers out if you had more time than the lifespan of the universe.
These are the Nameless. They slumber in the deep. They dream of things lost and unknowable, of casual anathema, of alphabets whose mere numerals can erase your mind; they are quantum, though they cannot be quantified.
They dream of numbers from beyond time.
Do you see where this is going?
This is Ashlock. She’s terrified.
She really, really should be.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Ashlock does kung fu and keyboards; Tach does unspeakable things. They’re a pretty good team, when either of them can manage to string two true words together, and when neither of them is currently mad.
Not “mad” as in “angry,” “mad” as “insane.” Hacking the Nameless is sexy and profitable, but it carries distinct risks to the welfare of one’s mind. They’ll reach right up the cable and suck the light from your eyes, the Nameless, if they catch you poking around their secrets. They’ll show you things no mortal should see.
But Ashlock never could let a sleeping god lie.
