Hole In The Sky - a cyberpunk novel in progress
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Table of Contents
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**The Book**
[Prologues](#prologues)
[Chapter One](#1)
[Chapter Two](#2)
[Snippets and Addenda](#snippets)
**Indices, Glossaries and Notes**
[Timeline](#timeline)
[Languages](#languages)
Prologues {#prologues}
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It is morning in the Habitation.
Victoria is reading a book in the even white light coming from the window above her. Occasionally, the light flickers, and the halogen strip in the ceiling comes on automatically, expectantly, preparing for the day when it will go out altogether. Six panels down, a whole kilometer of the sky turned off a few weeks ago. The whole area is decaying around them - this is one of the early settlements; the Library is built into the shell of an ancient church, which has since been used as a warehouse, an arms factory, and part of a train yard.
Victoria turns a page and reads:
POEM
POEM
POEM
POEM
April stumbles out of the door of a concrete bunker, bleary-eyed and still more than a little drunk. She is also wearing someone else's clothes. She gets to the end of the road, where a huge crater has been filled in and converted to a wheat field, when the owner of the clothes runs out after her.
"Come back!" he yelps, holding onto his crotch like it's going to escape.
"Not in a million years!" shouts back April.
"You'll come back next week!"
"I fucking won't!"
"You're a bitch, May!"
"That's not even my real name!"
"What is your real name?"
April laughs and makes her way through the wheat field. It's a long way back home, but Victoria can be relied on for tea and breakfast. Not that she'll be able to stomach breakfast. But the thought of it is nice.
Sir Godd sits on the thin edge of a broken-in brick wall, above a street which once had a name. From here, he can see for miles over the Habitation. In the far distance of the sky is a dark receding line, where the morning is turning on, one row of halogen panels at a time. Broken buildings, many standing on the rubble of even older houses, line the streets around him. Every few blocks, and on every stable roof, are clutches of green and yellow gardens - ripening corn, ripe barley. Somewhere beyond Godd's view, a thin smudge of smoke signals a combine harvester at work. To the east - where the day comes from - Godd spots a rusted tower which scrapes the halosky. It was the last attempt in this sector to break through. Now it's just scenery. Around it, a scurry of people wend their way home from the steel block of a brand new Internet Café.
_Humanity finds a way_, Godd muses.
Sian opens her eyes, which sting and pucker with hot sweat. The screaming organic heaving desperate mass of the crowd pushes towards the stage like a tsunami. In the glare of the stagelights, she can just barely make out the stars in the night sky.
_Diamonds in the rough_, she remembers, from somewhere. Behind her, the amp stack shudders to life as Troy lays down a deep grungy riff. She turns around and finds her brother in the blinding glare of the lights. He lifts two fingers, and she nods.
_Two more songs_. She can manage two more songs. And an encore? The bass swells, merges into the wail of the guitar - her brother's - and a sinking bouncing beat from the keyboards. Sian prepares to sing. She grabs onto the microphone, pushing her knees against the stand.
"_I am a bomb_." The shriek of it cuts across the stadium like glass across a fingertip. The blood is the silence that follows. When Sian sings, the crowd listens. Her voice is like the end of the universe. The final word.
"_Fear my flickering fall._" She staggers from the microphone, winded, breathless, empty of words, her head screaming with the noise of it all. Sian doesn't sing often. But she doesn't need to.
One {#1}
---
It's afternoon when April finally finds the Library. The halosky has taken on a bright white hue, which only makes the intermittent flickers more noticeable. She swings through the door, almost tripping over the step.
"Did you know," she begins, banging both hands down on the counter, "that there is a ruin in Angel Sector which is _exactly_ like this one?"
"You were in Angel Sector?" asks Victoria, looking over the edge of her book. "No wonder you took all day to get here."
"But I was at the most raddest party," says April. "They had a vij which was, like, the size of -" she stretches out her arms. "It was huge."
"Just 'raddest'. Or 'most rad'. Who did you get with?" asks Victoria, putting her book down.
"Some... guy," says April. "It was definitely a guy." Victoria puts a tick in the M column of the paper behind the counter, but April has already ducked through the back door. Victoria follows her down. The long, halo-lit corridor leads to a labyrinth of tiny brick rooms - the old chuch catacombs. Every wall is stacked floor to ceiling with books, and every room is carefully labelled. Victoria follows April through Poetry (20th - 23rd Century), Plays, Shakespeare (he gets a whole room), IKEA Manuals, Cooking, and Books (800 pages plus), which is a room they will sort out one day when they can be bothered. They emerge in a kitchen above ground. Outside the window is a sloping vegetable patch.
"Tea?" asks Victoria.
"L33t yes," says April, dumping herself into a chair. "Like, three cups." Victoria dutifully makes an enormous cast iron pot of tea, finds last night's curry in the fridge, and serves it out.
"Had any customers?" asks April.
"Two," replies Victoria brightly. "They said they were from Skynet Sector, so word of us is spreading."
"Oh yeah, I left our posters up in the club," says April. "Soon we'll get everyone reading."
Victoria snorts. "Not in a long time." As she pours the tea, something crashes violently from beyond the catacombs, and then again, making her jump and flood the tabletop. They look at each other and sprint back up through the narrow book-encrusted passages to the top room. Dust and a bitter smell waft down through the doorway. In the door outside stands a short, dykey girl, her face and neckline decorated with tiny silver piercings. She coughs in the acrid smoke which seems to be rising from the street.
"L33ting mother of balls," she swears. "This time travel thing is a total pain." She strides into the room, brushing dust off her arms. April quivers slightly next to Victoria.
"Hello," stammers Victoria. "Who're you?"
"Alright," says the girl. "My time is totally limited so this'll have to be quick. You _have_ to believe everything I tell you. You will anyway. My name is Ada, I'm an Internet Pirate from the Cafe in Binary Sector. You have to go there and ask for me. I won't know who you are. Tell me that it's about address 0x09. And then tell me that I need you to get TempoTrans to work. And also that it is _imperative_, fucking _imperative_ that once I do, that you find a man called Godd who is six months in the past. Six months. Got all that?"
"Uh," says Victoria. "Listen, we don't deal with Pirates."
April strides over to her in a cloud of heavy dark dust and grabs her by the shoulders. "Please," she says. "Seriously, please, do this." There is a distant, strained shout from the street, that sounds like it is coming across a broken speaker.
"I have to go," says Ada. "The Wolves are coming. I'll see you soon." She runs out the door, then ducks her head back in.
"April," she says. "I'm so sorry." And she's gone. Before the dust of her wake has even settled, another explosion rocks the room, and more dust floods in through the door. April runs outside. There had been a long-dead traffic light standing in the traffic island in the middle of the road. It has been blown apart from the inside; shards of steel and burning pieces of plastic are littering the sidewalks.
"What in l33t's name was that?" coughs Victoria through the smoke.
"She knew my name, Vicky!" says April.
"Yeah, that's weird."
"No, it's fantastic! I've never told anyone except you my name!"
* * *
Ada is working late. Outside the age-warped window, the halosky is sleeping; it glows fainter and fainter with the dying energy of the day. Inside, her terminal is the only light on. With the terminals running, there isn't enough power for the ceiling lights; Ada prefers working in the dark anyway. Darkness gives her time to think and breathe.
She unfolds the tiny status display of the terminal, and types in a few commands. From deeper in the darkness, a soft whirr signals that their local server had come alive as she connects to the Internet. She slots a card into a data port and loads the soft she needs. Some Pirates rely on the soft of others to work in - there is no need to reinvent the server, after all. Ada prefers to work inside her own code. She knows its ins and outs; she knows that there are features where others see bugs. She's safe there.
Her preparations ready, she sits down in a half-broken metal chair by the terminal, and straps loops of velcro around her legs and one arm. Scrabbling behind her head, she finds the dangling snake of the interface cable. Her fingers follow it to the razor-sharp double prongs of the port at the end. _Home_. Ada closes her eyes, nestles herself in the chair, sinks the port slowly into the back of her head, where her short hair grows unevenly around the metal circle of her brainport. The soft feels a contact and springs silkily to life. Data flows across the bridge in a sudden fluid burst; somewhere already far away, Ada's eyes flicker and turn glassy white. Comatose she sinks into the chair. She is linked.
Ada opens her eyes.
_Welcome_, says the soft, with a quiet, measured voice. The phonetics here are perfect, the acoustics also; Ada loves little details.
_You are logged in as Ada_, the soft continues. _How may I be of assistance?_
Ada had named the soft GateSlut while drunk one night, and meant to change it every time she had logged in since.
"Hey, GateSlut," she says. "What's up?"
That's another problem with other peoples' soft - it's never any good at slang. GateSlut has no such problems.
_There are one hundred and two users linked in the nearest 32 addresses,_ says GateSlut.
"And geographically?" asks Ada. "Within, uh, three Sectors?" She wants peace and quiet for her work, and while other users won't just enter her soft, it's nicer to know they aren't all weighing down on the Habitation's hardware.
_Twenty-three users,_ GateSlut replies.
"That's better," says Ada. "Alright, let's get to work. Load up Troll and Vole, and set up the C& environment in a corner somewhere. I'm not going to use it yet." Troll is a bouncer and firewall soft that Ada had written years ago; it is programmed to be nice to her friends and very, very mean to anyone from Qwerty or Bluescreen Sectors, which are both run by exes. Vole is the Virtualised Online Language Editor, and is used by all hackers worth their salt, though Ada has rewritten hers significantly. C& is her coding language of choice. It is a variant of C++, and had been designed by a good friend in Angel Sector; it is pronounced Camp(ersand) and used by most lesbian and gay Pirates for the sole reason that it is hilarious.
Troll comes to life in the distance as a hulking mottled green thing, a mossy stump with arms like excavators, and immediately gives a sense of scale to the empty, white world Ada is standing in. Ada prefers programming in a blank world (whitescreen, Pirates call it). A towering clutter of multicoloured blocks, like the LEGO set of a very spoilt child, builds up to her left. C& is, of course, available in all the colours of the rainbow. A few thin, glasslike panels materialise in front of her and fill silently with text; Ada keeps her Vole setup minimal.
Ada begins working. During business hours, she manages the running of her Internet Cafe, which leaves little time for any coding that isn't work-related. The nights she has to herself. And every night for the past three weeks, Ada has been searching for the Holy Grail.
"GateSlut, open up a chat with M3rl1n, please." GateSlut complies; M3rl1n's worn face appears to her right.
"Hey, Merl."
"Hey, Ada. Not sleeping?"
"Never sleeping. Ready to have a look?"
"Sure. I was compiling some soft which might help; it's virtual but runs natively in the processor."
"You wrote it in assembly?"
"Mostly. I was just thinking if we're looking for something to do with hardware, we might as well code in it, too."
"Send it over." The soft arrives almost instantly; M3rl1n's code is always a horrible mess and this one is worse than usual, it flops like a wet mop across Ada's floor, planting itself eventually at her feet.
"You've no respect for your code, Merl."
"You're fussy. Alright, now-"
"Woah, hold on." A small legion of tiny red spiders had erupted from the smooth white floor around M3rl1n's mop, beeping in alarm. "I've got my virus scanners going crazy about your code, Merl."
"Oh, yeah. Ignore them, I got that too. It stores data in the processor cache and there's some bug in address 0x09 that gets read as a virus when it's triggered."
"What? There's a virus in the _CPU cache_?"
"No! It's just a bug."
"CPU caches can't have bugs."
"Ours do."
"We use different hardware."
"Leave off, Ada, it's nothing!"
"No, it's not. Think about it. The CPU cache is a blank slate; it's where the computer dumps data for quick use. It's wiped every time the computer turns off. How can there be something in both our processors that stays there?"
"Alright, for l33t's sake, it's probably my code. You're such a pain, Ada!"
"I'm just thorough. Go clean your code." She gives the mop a swift kick and it skitters across the white floor like it is filled with spiders, fading quickly into the distance. M3rl1n vanishes in an annoyed huff; Ada sits down in a virtual chair and starts thinking.
The Holy Grail is the name M3rl1n has given to what he is searching for. In the old days, there had been a big cup called a Grail which a bunch of knights - soldiers - had quested to find. Ada isn't sure why. They were probably thirsty. That story is where he's gotten his name from, too. Ada had agreed to help him out of curiosity, and because she was friends with his brother, who owned Necropolis Sector. The Holy Grail is the possibility of soft - the programs and virtual worlds the hackers work in - to extend itself into the world of hardware, into reality. According to M3rl1n, their parents had searched for the same thing, but discovered it was impossible. M3rl1n is determined to prove them wrong.
Ada spends half an hour going over what they've coded so far, minus M3rl1n's new buggy soft, which she wants nothing to do with. She finds nothing new. Out of bored curiosity more than anything, she loads up a hardware visualiser. It's a 3D reconstruction of the terminal her brain is currently linked to, which spreads out around her like a metal forest. She pilots it down to the CPU chip, and dives into the cache, zooming in closer and closer until she is the size of a dustmite. In here, it is dim and quiet, and she is surrounded on all sides by a filigree of microscopic copper wires.
"GateSlut, be a dear and run me a virus scan on 0x09," she asks. The red spiders pop out from inside wires and chips, scampering through the maze of the circuitry. She runs after them as they clamber through the cache, down narrow corridors a few micrometres across, across wide plains of sillicon green. They turn a corner flanked by copper towers linking to some higher-up chip, and, looking at where address 0x09 should be, both she and her spiders stop in their tracks - the spiders from confusion, Ada because she can't believe her virtual eyes.
Two {#2}
---
Cups of tea - most empty, some half-drunken and cold - cover the little kitchen table. Victoria has her head in her hands, looking out at the dark vegetable patch beyond the window. April is asleep in her chair.
Snippets {#snippets}
--------
I'm looking through a hole in the sky
I'm seeing nowhere through the eyes of a lie
I'm getting closer to the end of the line
I'm living easy where the sun doesn't shine
Black Sabbath - Hole In The Sky
* * *
"What've you got there?" asks Godd, noticing the tally behind Victoria's head.
"That's... uh, that's customers," says Victoria.
"You get a lot of women!" exclaims Godd pleasantly. April stifles a giggle.
* * *
Godd has been alone for a very long time now. It has been thirty years since he has stopped searching for the others. He has grown old and weary, but some things never age, and he is as fast as he was in the beginning. And that will come in handy.
Godd stands in the centre of the wide plain - a basic, undecorated piece of soft, refresh rate of 120 fps, download rate of at least 18 TB/sec. Which is not enough for the stunt he is about to pull. He unloads the sky and most of the ground, leaving himself in an empty black space on a circle of grey stone, lit by an undefined, hollow grey light. From where he stands, a thin green line stretches in both directions along the ground. Refresh rate climbs to 200 fps, download rate to 22 TB/sec. That is better. The blackness is so unforgivingly complete that he loses his sense of scale. He waits, and waits, and waits. Motionlessly. His clock counts in nanoseconds, and a punishingly vast number of those pass before anything happens.
In the black distance - he cannot tell how far away - an object appears. It is tiny at first, but as it approaches him, it resolves into a human shape. It is short and wide and compact, built like a boxer. As it gets even closer, Godd sees that the shape is decieving - it is
* * *
The door to the Internet Café is a steel-faced gouge in the wall of one of the repossessed buildings - it looks like it had been a hospital. Gaudy graffiti runs along the bottom two metres of the walls. A few people are malingering by the doorway - a pair of skater chicks in tight t-shirts and jeans and a man with dark, greasy hair, who looks like a bouncer. April leads the way.
"Hey," she says to the man. "We're looking for Ada."
He glances at April. "You got an address?" April recites the one Godd had given her, and hopes to hell it is right.
"Right," says the man. "Wait here." He slouches into the doorway and comes out a minute later holding a pair of silver strips - digital keys.
"Terminals six and seven," he says. "You've got ten minutes, Ada said she's paying." April gulps. Here comes the tricky part.
"We don't do terminals," she says, failing to keep her voice from shaking a little. The bouncer stares at her as if she has just said she was a leper.
"I'm sorry, what?" he asks.
"We, uh, don't have..." April stutters, pointing to the back of her head.
"For l33t's sake," says the man, and swings back inside. This time he takes a lot longer, and comes out looking pissed off.
"She's inside," he says, disbelievingly, "and I have no idea why she wants to talk to luds so you better not waste her time." The girls step into the doorway. The room inside is dimly lit by a flickering halogen strip and smells of overheated metal and sweat. Victoria wrinkles her nose. Closest to the door is a wide bank of screens, formed entirely of computer cases tied together with cables, at which is lounging a painfully thin guy in glasses. He pulls them down his nose to look at the newcomers.
"The luds, eh?" he asks, flashing them a wide smile. "She's through there." He points across the room to a bead curtain at the other end. As they walk towards it, Victoria and April see the rest of the Internet Café - the terminals. There are ten, which means this Café is doing well. They are the size of payphone booths, and thigh-thick pipes full of multicoloured cables stretch from them, across the floor and walls, to the screens at the front. Most don't have proper shells, and their heavy insides dangle like intestines from behind the business ends, the black-and-red prongs of the interface cables. A few of the terminals have people plugged in, slumped into chairs next to them. The prongs are stabbed into the backs of their skulls, Velcro straps looped around the chairs stop them from falling out. Red LCD readouts hanging loosely from the eviscerated insides of the terminals show how much time each user has. One reads ‘00:19:02:52'. The young guy plugged into it looks grey and drained, and has a scalpel-thin silver syringe buried deep in his wrist. Another set of tubes lead away from his trousers to a large silver machine.
"Big spender," says the man behind the screens, noticing where she was looking. "He's got a drip feeding him nutrients and crap like that. And one taking shit away. Literally. It's why we're in a hospital. Got all the gear." Victoria shivers. Turning away, they go through the bead curtain and come out in what seems to be an office. It is as large as the room behind them, and filled with junk - broken terminals, piles of wires and cables, more screens, some flickering wanly. In the middle of the room is a huge wooden desk littered with bits of electronics, and sitting at it, boots up, is a short redhead with short hair and a very short skirt. April makes a little happy sound from behind Victoria.
"Ada Lovelace," the girl says. "Hacker and pirate. What's up?"
* * *
April and Ada had gotten to talking in spk, the pidgin that all hackers, whatever their clan, could communicate in. Victoria understands only snatches.
"This neg wat u grok-grok," rattles off April. "this doubleplusgood 2 u n ur 192." Ada looks unconvinced.
"U send sumthing neg pre-be download," she retorts. "N is neg cos be extreme. Is cos be neg-download. Neg wid hax, neg wid l33ts."
"Ur doublepluserror," replies April. "U eva try it?"
"Neg," concedes Ada.
"Den try it," says April. "Wat be doubleplusneg could deus-ex?"
"Doubleplusungoodest? They nab us. And den - well, nobody knows, do they?" she asks, switching suddenly to English. "But that's the point, nothing _good_." April sighs and rocks back in her chair.
"Vicky," she says. "Try and reason with her." Victoria leans in towards Ada.
"The point isn't the reward. Which, mind you, would be huge. We're not talking like lots of server space for a long time," she explains, blundering her way through the mechanics of the Internet, "we're talking like _all_ the space, every server, for ever."
"That's not possible," says Ada.
"Yes it is," says Victoria. "It's called winning. Here you're flies on the rhino's back."
"I don't know what a rhino is," said Ada.
"Doesn't matter. It means you're small. You might be a big Café in the scale of Cafes, but you're small in the scale of the Internet. This works out, you'll own the Internet. You will be the people you have been fighting."
"This isn't for the sake of fighting," Ada says angrily. "This is for the sake of _fun_." Victoria looks at her in despair.
"Alright, fine. You _don't_ join in on this, there's not going to be any more Internet, ever."
Ada smirks. "That's stupid. What's your proof?"
"My proof," says Victoria, "is TempoTrans." Ada looks suddenly stunned and angry.
"Now you're just fucking with me. How the hell do you know about it? That's _my_ code."
"Chill," says Victoria. "We know about it because you finished it in the future and sent it back to us, so we could find you and get you to help us, or else you'll never finish it."
"The _fuck_?"
"It's simple," says April. "TempoTrans is soft, yeah? But it's special soft - it makes links to hardware, and that hardware can "
"You can't know all that," says Ada furiously. "I've only just started writing the code. Nobody in the world knows about it."
"And that means?" prompts Victoria.
"...I told you guys about it?"
"Yes!" crows April. "In the future. Well, no, in our past. In your future."
"So... it works?" asks Ada. "It actually interfaces with reality?"
"I suppose so," says Victoria. "Is that such big news?"
"You have no idea. Nobody's ever done it before.
* * *
"You know how the Pirates work?" asks Ada.
"No," replies Victoria, sighing. She has a feeling Ada is about to tell her.
"They work pretty radly, is how." Victoria winces slightly at the bastardisation of the adjective. "Up there, above the halosky, the UTAAF have built servers. _Fuckloads_ of servers. Very, very good servers. They need them because it's like a transport system - they connect soldiers to a server, transfer their bioware - their brain programming - across to another server connected to another body, and download it. Instant soldier, twenty kajillion miles away, ready for combat. Right, so, what we do is we hack into one of these servers, install our own software over the top of theirs, and sell access to the users down here. They get, like, twenty times the speed they'd get on our local net. Hell of a trip. Grok?"
"I... grok," replies Victoria, wondering how uncool she sounded. "So... really, you are fighting against the UTAAF? You're hacking their servers?"
"I suppose so," says Ada, as if the thought had never really occurred to her. "But that's not the point. I'm an amoral babe. I don't care who I'm fighting - or who I'm helping, for that matter - as long as I get my reward. And that's what you're supplying, sweet cheeks. A reward."
"You'll get your reward," says Victoria. "Don't you worry."
* * *
"So what do your users pay you in?" asks Victoria, looking over the banks of terminals. The red-and-black interface prongs dangle phallically from the dirty orange plates which are welded into them at head level. Only one terminal is on - a teenage girl is slumped into the chair standing by, the whites of her eyes shining glassily from underneath her half-open eyelids.
"Brain-juice," replies Ada cheeriy. Victoria looks at her in horror, and she taps the side of her head. "Not juice. But brain power. Energy. Human brain's one hell of a processor. Multi-threaded, cross-computational, self-enhancing - so the interface goes both ways. The soft we send them doesn't just give them visions, it shares their brains out as processing pools. If you can't afford a hacked server - and hell, we can't guarantee them every week - you can link in when there are lots of users online and your experience will be, uh, enhanced." She puts the last word in air quotes. Drug dealers always do that sort of thing.
"It's sick," says Victoria.
"Well, sweetie," says Ada, "you wouldn't know. I personally think the back of your head looks pretty disgusting." She fingers the metal port nestled at the nape of her neck fondly. "These babies are works of art. Mine's a '22 - now that won't tell you anything, but it means I'm one badass babe."
* * *
April wakes to find Ada still asleep. She is dreaming restlessly, twitching under the covers. April digs her arm underneath her breasts and gives her a cuddle. She wakes up slowly.
"Morning," murmurs April. "You okay?"
Ada groans. "I haven't been unlinked for this long since I got my port fitted. I think I'm having withdrawals. I have had the worst fucking nightmares." April buries her mouth into her shoulderblade and kisses her.
"You wanna go and plug in?" she asks. "It's okay, I don't mind. I went out with a boy once, all he wanted was to plug in and have sex."
"How long did that last?" murmurs Ada.
"Well, not long, but that's not the point. Do you wanna plug in?"
Ada shakes her head against April's lips. "I wanna be here with you."
"You sure?"
"I'm sure. You're better than soft."
"Of course I'm better than soft," April says, giving Ada a long, slow kiss along the edge of the '22 port, where the skin is sensitive and raw from many plug-ins. Ada moans very softly, her whole body tensing from somewhere deep inside.
* * *
The man in the doorway is so tall and thin he seems to cut the air he stands in. His long black trenchcoat streams out behind him in the wind of the terminal fans. He has not shaved in a few days, and his stubble is coarse and black. His eyes were once black as well, but now they are empty and cold and smoothly white. He scans the room. They are in his grasp. He can't see, but he can smell, and he smells the ozone tang of hot metal and the oily scent of three human brains running at full power. And something else - something so terribly familiar - something that smells exactly like him. He hones in on that smell, cutting across the room, tossing cables and chairs away.
Godd stands up from his terminal, and groping blindly behind his head, finds the hot nub of the interface cable and pulls it out. Around him, the people slump comatose in their chairs, the terminals hum to a sudden silent stop. He turns his face to the Wolf before him, his eyes white and glassy and lit with cold, defiant fury.
"I don't think so," he says, his voice singing with electric modulations. The Wolf stops in his tracks. This was not in the program. As he falters, Godd punches him squarely in the face, his head snapping back on his wiry neck; he stumbles backwards and trips over a chair, ending up on the ground. Before Godd can make a move, he dives back up, each finger tipped with the black fishhook of a claw. The two men lunge at each other, fighting furiously and silently and not stopping for breath, since they have never needed to breathe. The Wolf rakes at Godd, who grabs his forearm and snaps it cleanly; the Wolf's other hand stabs into his neck, ripping deep red gouges, splattering the linoleum with blood. The Wolf has no blood, was designed without it; Godd attacks him bodily, throwing him into an empty terminal, ramming him against the wall over and over again, they heave like stars colliding across the room, sending chairs and screens flying. Something explodes behind them, flicks of fire burst across the dim space, suddenly filling it with dark, clasping shadows. Whirling around, the Wolf grabs an interface prong, rips it from the socket of a terminal, and jumps with it straight at Godd. He screams words that mean nothing, a slew of Spk and English dialects, stabbing at Godd's chest with the sharp points, with his claws. Godd spasms, punches the Wolf back, grabs a table, sending screens and keyboards flying, throws it at the Wolf and misses. Somewhere inside, his aiming program has been compromised; he resorts to punching at close range. They dance across the room and into the office, past the fire in the heart of a terminal on its side, which vomits acrid inky smoke into the confined space. Godd switches to radar vision, which lags painfully, but the Wolf hasn't been fitted with radar, and something inside him has been broken as well, he makes sudden stupid leaps at thin air, screaming wordlessly. Godd slams him into the oak table. Before the Wolf can react, he punches him directly in the chest with all the power his motors can muster. The Wolf's body opens with the sound of skin and cloth tearing; his wiry metal bones pop and crumple. His eyes dim to grey. His limbs judder and stop. Godd isn't finished yet. He drags him out of the office and throws him across the prone terminal, across the hungry chemical fire. The Wolf screams - a system error, not pain. For the briefest second, his eyes roll back to deep, black pupils. He has forgotten how to see, and they roll around in their sockets in panic and fear and desperation. But Godd doesn't notice.
* * *
"Wait!" yells Ada, over the now-overwhelming roar of the transmission program. She runs back to Casey, hunched behind her screens to avoid the wind.
"What's the matter?" she yells.
"I just realised!" shouts Ada, leaning over the screens. "I have to give you something!"
"What?"
"A present!" Ada pulls a tiny black-and-copper chip out of her back pocket - a processor core, the square brain in the middle of every motherboard.
"I pulled this out of a TX-9 in the office," she shouts. "There's a piece of code under address 0x000002 which is in every processor ever made. And as far back as I can find computers, it's there. But it isn't in your processors."
"What does that mean?" asks Casey.
"That piece of code is what lets us time travel. It's the soft-to-hard interface, the realiser," Ada replies. "You have to hack it into every processor built from now on and make sure it sticks!"
"But... then how did you... if... what?"
"Don't think about it too hard! I have to go! Love you, sweetheart! Keep hacking!" Ada runs off, to the group waiting at the lip of the transmit. All together, they leap into the darkness.
"Keep hacking!" shouts Ada one last time, over the roar and light.
* * *
April kisses Ada on the lips, a long slow soft kiss that Ada dissolves into like ink in water. When it is over, April smiles a brilliantly coy smile.
"I think I'm going to write a book about all this," she says. "A good old-fashioned one-directional beginning-and-end book."
"You can't write a whole book," says Ada.
April laughs. "We'll find out!"
Indices, glossaries, notes
==========================
Timeline {#timeline}
--------
**SPOILERS - do not read if you don't want the whole story ruined for you!**
1991: The Quantum Wishers arrive from the future.
2010: Ada, April, Victoria and Godd find the Quantum Wishers and meet Casey. They travel back into the future.
2579: The Quantum Wishers are made.
Ada and Victoria hack the Quantum Wisher programming and reprogram the second Quantum Wisher. Ada travels to September 2663, then the two travel to November 2663.
2580: Internet Pirates attempt to steal the Wishers. One is sold to Luxane, one remains on Earth, two more are sent back in time.
2581: The UTAAF seal the Habitation. Godd is left below.
Generation 1 perishes
Generation 2 discovers the UTAAF's Internet and attempts to fight (2605-2620)
Generation 3 turns to the Internet for pleasure. (2625- )
March 2663: Godd intercepts a drone travelling from 2010 to the near future and hacks it with the help of Ada. They first encounter a Wolf.
September 2663: April and Victoria meet future Ada.
October 2663: April and Victoria meet current Ada. Ada finishes TempoTrans and travels back to March.
Ada discovers the future limit of TempoTrans and realises that something very major happens at that juncture (there are no more processors there - either one of the Quantum Wishers destroys them, or something else happens).
Ada, April, Victoria and Godd travel back to 2010.
They then arrive from 2010. They are attacked by Wolves and hide in Ada's Sanctuary. Godd's identity is revealed. The rest of the group hide in Godd while he faces off with the Wolves. While they are inside him, Godd discovers how the Quantum Wishers work.
Godd flees with one of the Wishers. The rest follow him to the Hole in the Sky. Showdown. One of the Quantum Wishers and April dies. The other Quantum Wisher chases Godd across the Hole in the Sky. Ada and Victoria travel to 2579.
November 2663: The UTAAF don't get their drone back and send Wolves back in time to determine the cause.
Showdown of Godd and the second Quantum Wisher with Wolves in the Hole in the Sky. The second Quantum Wisher kills himself and Godd gets his Wish. Both Quantum Wishers and April come back to life. The Defences collapse into the Combinatory. Godd dies.
April 2664: At the last point on the TempoTrans network, April convinces Ada to rewrite the code at 0x09 - her greatest hack.
Languages {#languages}
---------
Spk is the pidgin language of 2663. Words from Spk have drifted into the other languages of the Habitation - Habitation English is what April, Victoria and Ada speak; further-off sectors speak in nearly incomprehensible dialects, and even further on, on the other side of the Ruin, are new variants of Russian and Chinese.
Spk is a simple language to learn. Sentence structure is SVO. Verbs are modified for tense, transitivity, and modality; nouns are modified for possession.
* English: I will go home.
* Spk: I go-go 192-me.
* English: I went to Ada's house.
* Spk: I go-did 192-o Ada.
* English: I am going to your house.
* Spk: I go 192-o you.
* English: We hacked Bitrate sector last night.
* Spk: We hax-did sector-o Bitrate did-halodown.
Spk's writing system differs heavily from the way it is spoken. Since most of its speakers are hackers (or at least, most of those who need to write in it), it is compressed into a form resembling code:
* i>192(>you);
* i->192(>Ada);
* i+>192();
* we-X(-HD) s(Bitrate);