read. Along each and every strand strobed the light pulses of retrieval programmes, communications, dataflow of all kinds, some of it, no doubt, the sensing presences of his fellow Fives.
He could never explain what this was like to Otto. Words failed him, pictures failed him. It was a billion electronic trees branching one off the other, it was an ocean of emotion, it was a soup of idea and being, it was an infinity of honeyed fact, a stack of candied universes composed of sweet, sweet numbers his machine mind longed to consume, to parse, to possess. It was none of those things.
Humans could not get the raw Grid.
For all it was ostensibly Richards' natural environment, on the Grid he felt clumsy and unsure. His true form was alien to him, monstrous and multi-dimensional. The raw Grid was at odds with sense. It was logic forced into illogic.
He was being hunted through it.
The meanest-looking shoal of eel phages he'd ever seen was speeding single-mindedly after him, weaving through the Grid's teeming packs of knowledge, the programmes within arrow-swift and intent. Phage-eels were guard dogs, the kind of thing that governments had patrolling the spaces where their dirtiest secrets hid, the kind of thing Richards had himself installed to guard the entrance to his base unit. They were massively infectious, anathema to the existence of data, the killers of the unliving. This pack was loose, roaming free on the currents of the web, no owner's mark to identify them. A standard-model shoal would not and could not do that. These must have been heavily tampered with. Richards locked into the shoal, tried to shut it down, to talk its stupid group brain into inaction, but it had been mercilessly butchered, wired up to identify him as a rogue AI fragment no matter how hard he pinged his identifying information at them. When they smelled Richards, they smelled a target.
At every turn his attempts to contact the authorities were stymied, each line he threw out intercepted and bounced back at him. Richards ducked down paths, trying to make his choices as random as possible, but he could not shake the shoal. The eels were ugly, ribbons of nothing undulating through the blaze and fury of the web. They ate every counter-measure Richards could fling at them without slowing. If they caught him the whole thing would need unravelling or he'd be consumed. He could just go and sit it out in his base unit, wait for his own security programmes to shred the shoal, but he was out of time. Richards could not fight the eels and help Otto.
He rather suspected that was the point.
He ran, the eels behind him, black streamers of killing code trailing death through the Grid's clatter of light, derailing spears of information, dissolving others to incoherent number strings.
Nodes and exits flashed by as Richards sped down branch after branch of the Grid's structure, the information depending from them become more and more rarefied. He was moving erratically to throw the eels, but his route took him ever closer to the old food distribution centre's online shadow. His only choice was to see if he could get out, get into something and help his friend, link up with his base unit through a secure pipe and shut the Grid and the eels out. What he would do with the eels when he got there and this proved impossible he had no idea.
He had no choice. Not if he wanted to see Otto alive again.
He passed through a little-used link into the UN mainframe, sliding past its security as a wisp of electron smoke. The eels were not so subtle, wriggling, boneless fingers forcing wide a doorway. They were immediately accosted by a hundred nearI hunter/killer security 'bots. Some of the eels fragmented under their assault, more burst through, chunks of their dead comrades frittering to nothing behind them. Part of the shoal's power was spent. Not enough. Richards fled on, diving up on to the broad highways of the United Nations,
He could never explain what this was like to Otto. Words failed him, pictures failed him. It was a billion electronic trees branching one off the other, it was an ocean of emotion, it was a soup of idea and being, it was an infinity of honeyed fact, a stack of candied universes composed of sweet, sweet numbers his machine mind longed to consume, to parse, to possess. It was none of those things.
Humans could not get the raw Grid.
For all it was ostensibly Richards' natural environment, on the Grid he felt clumsy and unsure. His true form was alien to him, monstrous and multi-dimensional. The raw Grid was at odds with sense. It was logic forced into illogic.
He was being hunted through it.
The meanest-looking shoal of eel phages he'd ever seen was speeding single-mindedly after him, weaving through the Grid's teeming packs of knowledge, the programmes within arrow-swift and intent. Phage-eels were guard dogs, the kind of thing that governments had patrolling the spaces where their dirtiest secrets hid, the kind of thing Richards had himself installed to guard the entrance to his base unit. They were massively infectious, anathema to the existence of data, the killers of the unliving. This pack was loose, roaming free on the currents of the web, no owner's mark to identify them. A standard-model shoal would not and could not do that. These must have been heavily tampered with. Richards locked into the shoal, tried to shut it down, to talk its stupid group brain into inaction, but it had been mercilessly butchered, wired up to identify him as a rogue AI fragment no matter how hard he pinged his identifying information at them. When they smelled Richards, they smelled a target.
At every turn his attempts to contact the authorities were stymied, each line he threw out intercepted and bounced back at him. Richards ducked down paths, trying to make his choices as random as possible, but he could not shake the shoal. The eels were ugly, ribbons of nothing undulating through the blaze and fury of the web. They ate every counter-measure Richards could fling at them without slowing. If they caught him the whole thing would need unravelling or he'd be consumed. He could just go and sit it out in his base unit, wait for his own security programmes to shred the shoal, but he was out of time. Richards could not fight the eels and help Otto.
He rather suspected that was the point.
He ran, the eels behind him, black streamers of killing code trailing death through the Grid's clatter of light, derailing spears of information, dissolving others to incoherent number strings.
Nodes and exits flashed by as Richards sped down branch after branch of the Grid's structure, the information depending from them become more and more rarefied. He was moving erratically to throw the eels, but his route took him ever closer to the old food distribution centre's online shadow. His only choice was to see if he could get out, get into something and help his friend, link up with his base unit through a secure pipe and shut the Grid and the eels out. What he would do with the eels when he got there and this proved impossible he had no idea.
He had no choice. Not if he wanted to see Otto alive again.
He passed through a little-used link into the UN mainframe, sliding past its security as a wisp of electron smoke. The eels were not so subtle, wriggling, boneless fingers forcing wide a doorway. They were immediately accosted by a hundred nearI hunter/killer security 'bots. Some of the eels fragmented under their assault, more burst through, chunks of their dead comrades frittering to nothing behind them. Part of the shoal's power was spent. Not enough. Richards fled on, diving up on to the broad highways of the United Nations,
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