Overclocked by K. S. Augustin Read Free Book Online Page A

world.
    In the Blue, her brain had to ad­just to a dif­fer­ent rate of change, one much faster than what she was used to. This was the world of mega-and tera-flops made real and her brain had needed time to ad­just. It had star­ted with static ele­ments, like se­cured net­works, be­fore filling in the data path­ways. She thought of them as roads, while the rab­bit ob­vi­ously saw them as pipes. Then, lastly, she saw the ac­tual data pack­ets as they sped their way through cy­ber­space. She had never thought of data pack­ets as things of beauty be­fore. Now she knew how wrong she was.
    A yel­low cube, brush­ing close, brought her back to her senses.
    There was a path­way between the build­ings and the high­way. This would be where pack­ets dis­en­gaged them­selves from the rib­bon of traffic, await­ing en­trance to their des­ig­nated net­work. Tania walked its length, hop­ing no packet would dis­en­gage and crush her. Then the traffic began to slow down. She re­cog­nised it as her brain fine-tun­ing the ad­apt­a­tion, not so much slow­ing the traffic as giv­ing her mind a boost of speed.
    As an ex­per­i­ment, she opened her tether again. Ac­cord­ing to the in­stru­ment, she had been in­ser­ted nine minutes and four­teen seconds ago. She con­tin­ued star­ing at the tether’s small dis­play, but the seconds’ in­dic­ator didn’t click over to fif­teen. She stood and watched for what she es­tim­ated to be a good minute. The num­ber of seconds didn’t change.
    As she snapped the lid shut again, Tania real­ised that she was now truly a part of the Blue, op­er­at­ing at the speed of cy­ber­space. She had been clocked up.

Chapter Four
    She found Carl a day later, ma­chine time. She was skim­ming levels, float­ing up­wards and down­wards, try­ing to fo­cus on build­ings that looked dif­fer­ent, us­ing the level where she had been in­ser­ted as her home loc­a­tion. She figured that Carl would need a patch of real es­tate some­where to es­tab­lish as a base, and that he would make it as dis­tinct­ive as pos­sible in the hopes of at­tract­ing pos­sible res­cue parties.
    This begged the ques­tion of how, with so much in­form­a­tion to sift through, she would be able to find the right place in an ac­cept­able period of time. The only tac­tic that seemed to make sense was typ­ing “Carl Orin” into the little screen on her tether. When she ex­ecuted the com­mand, the uni­verse around her star­ted to re­arrange it­self. The change wasn’t massive. The high­ways, build­ings and vehicles looked much as they did be­fore. But there was a subtle dif­fer­ence in the kinds of build­ings she now saw. Fewer banks, for ex­ample, and more com­munity groups and cor­por­ate fire­walls. These loc­a­tions were where Carl Orin had been in the re­cent past, leav­ing traces of his pas­sage, like sticky fin­ger­prints on a stain­less steel wall. Be­ing di­gital, how­ever, the traces were either there, or they weren’t. It was im­possible to tell ex­actly how long ago Carl had vis­ited a par­tic­u­lar site, al­though Tania was hop­ing that a greater con­cen­tra­tion of vis­its within a par­tic­u­lar loc­al­ity meant that Carl had fre­quen­ted the area more re­cently. With de­term­in­a­tion, she fol­lowed her in­tu­ition and began look­ing dir­ectly for Carl’s di­gital hand­prints.
    When she fi­nally found his refuge, Tania had to ad­mit to her­self that the build­ing was cer­tainly dis­tinct­ive. Built as a single-storey cube, its ex­ter­ior looked ex­actly like the cor­ridor lead­ing to her apart­ment, right down to the flecked brown car­pet that covered it. Even the num­ber on the door was her apart­ment num­ber.
    212.
    She raised her fist, hes­it­ated for a second, then knocked.
    Si­lence.
    She was won­der­ing whether she should knock again when the door was flung