Data Runner by Sam A. Patel Read Free Book Online

until Bigsby turns on the Free City news stream. More discussion about the Blackburn scandal. More about the company’s finances. More about how broke they really are. And much more speculation about how badly this whole thing could compromise the security of the Alliance.
    Blah, blah, blah.
    The thing is, even if Blackburn has done business with the Caliphate, just what does the Alliance Senate think they’re going to do? Blackburn, Ltd. isn’t just the biggest standing army in the world, it’s our standing army. Blackburn is the Complex. Sure, there are other defense contractors out there, but none that could even come close to handling the full military needs of the North American Alliance. If Blackburn really is too big to fail , as they used to say back in the Old-50, then those other companies are all too small to succeed . So my guess is, after all is said and done, and the people responsible are given their slaps on the wrist, Blackburn won’t be going anywhere.
    But still they continue belaboring the discussion. Like any debate, it goes on and on and nothing is said that hasn’t been said a thousand times before, so I pull out my thin screen and enjoy the ride into the Free City of Tri-Insula, or what used to be the old City of New York. That’s when it hits me, right as my thin screen flashes alive, whoever came up with that trigger code for Cyril’s business card had to be Morlock. I mean, to pipe across the aggrenet completely undetected like that, it had to be piping through the Morlock layer.
    That’s right, the Morlock layer, otherwise known as the undernet.
    That invisible layer of packet switching that lies beneath the aggrenet, the one most people have never heard of, and the few who have simply dismiss as urban legend, it’s real. It is very, very real. Martin is Morlock, officially. And though I’m technically still waiting for my work to be tagged, I consider myself Morlock as well. I can’t tell you how many of us there are. That’s kind of the point. We all use the same handle; not just for anonymity, it hides our numbers as well. For all anyone knows, there could be five or five thousand of us behind that tag. Only one person knows for sure—the only Morlock with a unique identifier is the leader, Moreau. But if you think that tracking a single individual would be much easier than tracking an entire collective, you’re wrong. If you know where and how to look, you can always find traces of Morlock, but over the years Moreau has proven to be completely untraceable. Believe me, I’ve tried. I’ve scoured the furthest regions of the undernet looking for him, only to come up empty every time. To say that Moreau is very good at covering his tracks is an understatement. Lots of people are very good at covering their tracks. I’m very good at covering my tracks. But there are those people in the world—you know the kind—who are so good at avoiding detection that they never leave tracks in the first place. Moreau is one of those people.
    Nevertheless, finding him has become a personal mission. I can’t even say why, really; I just want to be the one who does. It’s not him I’m after per se, it’s the challenge of finding him. And on that subject, I do have a theory. The way I figure it, his base of operations has to be somewhere out in the squatter settlements. That makes the most sense. With so many people creating so much transmission in such close proximity, you can’t pinpoint anything in all that noise. Not unless you were to sneakernet in and do it in person. But that would open up a whole other can of worms. Like any refugee camp, shantytown, or favela, the squatter settlements has its own laws, its own system of justice, and its own set of rules. The first rule being—if you’re not from the settlements then you are an outsider, and they hate outsiders.
    We take the bridge into the Free