++++++++++++

In the late evening grey, Hazel camped behind a crooked house – it was wedged unnaturally between two taller erect houses, but it served its purpose. Flickering gas lamps had begun to spring to life, along with some wan looking electric lights, and the overall effect dimmed her vision. Too many flashes masked the clash markers.

In front of her, she stared at the team of fighters, currently engage in a skirmish with some encroaching Proletariat. Normally, she would have mowed through a few level fives and been on her way, but she had recognized the symbol on the player’s cape – the SOA shield.

For months, she had ignored the little gang of activists, but she found herself a lot more interested after her incident a few days before.

Hazel had managed to avoid Peter for three whole days, but she had sunk into a funk. Sitting by the comatose Sophie did little to raise Hazel’s spirits, but playing the game at home created some untenable situations where she lagged out at inconvenient times. Plus, her conscience required her to spend time with her best friend.

Without Peter’s equipment – superior even to Sophie’s – and without any of her exploits, the play ran a little less responsive, a little less instinctive, but Hazel didn’t actually need to gain much more equipment or status before the Partie. She had gained everything of value she could gain outside of the theoretical Trifecta, but she had to get into the invitation area. If she could find the access point, she might be able to use the code to figure out an entry.

Part of her wondered if the SOA shield on that Lower East Side apartment had marked the Trifecta headquarters. Of course, it was counterintuitive that a society dedicated to playing Wire-free would create access to special equipment available only to Wires. Maybe the whole thing was a ploy, a game cabal to lend mystery to a certain group. Hazel knew she was a desirable target in Trip, and maybe the group played both sides. Pull in the Wire-frees with the secret society crap while luring the Wireds with special goodies.

Though it made no sense whatsoever that any of it had popped up on Peter’s messages, unless he was monitoring Trip for her. She couldn’t let herself go there again. For too many years, Peter had stood as her one constant. When Lex had died, her father had died, and Peter had been left alone. Hazel had been left alone by her mother, who spent most of her non-work time taking care of Hazel’s little brother, Geoffrey. Not that Hazel resented that fact – Geoffrey needed more help since he was younger. Still, Hazel had needed someone, and so had Peter. Lex connected them, and there they were.

Hazel wanted to cry.

She didn’t want to lose Peter, but his behavior the night the Queue car had come after her had neared possessive and domineering. What had he been thinking? For several seconds, the figures on the screen in front of her blurred as her mind upbraided her for her disloyalty. She owed so much to Peter. Shouldn’t she make some allowances for him?

Drawing a breath, Hazel forced her eyes back to her game, and the screen drew into focus. Something on the screen had caught her eye outside the SS headquarters. When she realized what had drawn her, she bit her lip in excitement. On the cape of a retreating mage, Hazel had made out the outline and colors of the SOA shield again. Rushing after the figure, she approached him and charged up her stats and equipment as much as possible. She really wanted to talk to him, but the figure seemed intent on evading her. She mowed through a line of Pros that pressed between her and her target, and she avoided a single strike. Nothing of significance rose to oppose her until she approached a strangely familiar corner, where the figure disappeared through an underground door.

An underground door that mimicked as exactly as possible a real, non-virtual door, all too familiar to Hazel. The door she had stood before when the Queue car nearly flattened her. Shocked, her head started to pound. The physical room around her felt like it spun out of control, but she forced herself to focus.

All she had been able to picture that night was Sophie’s limp body from weeks before, flopping around the tumbling Queue. The malfunctioning car that took her best friend. Then the malfunctioning car that almost killed Hazel herself as she stared at the meaningless word, If not for that agent, she would have been worse off than Sophie. Haywire – the word that now adorned the upper righthand corner of her screen. The SOA shield on that cape, and Haywire on the building.

Before she could process what to do, a spectre rose from the ground in front of her, glowing with blue fire radiating on its skin. It looked to her like a virtual representation of some horror movie knockoff, but it was new to Trip, so her blood rushed heatedly through her veins in anticipation.

She had no idea how to fight the thing. She tested a couple of hits with ranged attacks: fire in case it were ice based, snow to test for regular flame, water for earth and earth for water. Throwing up a low-power shield behind her to protect from the Pros, she concentrated the larger part of her protection between herself and the spectre. It was so strange how it didn’t strike unless she did, and only measure for measure with power.

For several seconds, she tried just to run through it, bouncing into a spin every time she touched it. She couldn’t fight indefinitely, because the Pros would eventually wear down her energy. Several spells proved ineffective, and though the rebound spells dealt damage to Hazel, her hits had no effect.

Still, she had to get past the spectre somehow. Behind the spectre lay the Trifecta, though Hazel didn’t know exactly how she would access it. There was no way it was a coincidence: Haywire, SOA, and the Trifecta email.

Hazel checked her resources, and all of them had begun to wane. She had to manage some renewal pretty soon.

Inspiration hit, and Hazel aimed at the spectre and fired. Her Tetrarche abilities hummed through the space and hit the spectre, ostensibly regenerating the spectre’s mana. Instead, Hazel’s mana filled to the brim, prepped and ready for whatever magic she needed. It wasn’t a very clever defense, she realized, reflecting everything back on the attacker. Certainly, it had been done before, though with individual skills and spells, not based on an entire character.

Now she could defeat the creature, though.

Before unleashing her assault, she top-ended her armor and defensive spells, rendering them specifically to physical defenses. Charging her most powerful physical weapon, she took aim and released the attack directly onto her own avatar.

Her strength waned to less than three percent, but the spectre evaporated. Smiling, Hazel headed toward the underground door of the little pub. She prayed that once she stepped inside, that she would face no more competition. Not that pubs usually held battle scenes, but how did she know anything about the Trifecta? Maybe they fought battles in libraries, for all she knew. Or grandma’s knitting circle. Who knew? If anyone attacked her, she would be killed as soon as she gained entry, and if someone realized she didn’t have an invitation, they could ban her.

Fortunately, when she stepped through the door, it just looked like a pub.

Avatars sat at tables, chatting and “drinking” various virtual ales, and a bartender stood ready to assist anyone who entered.

“You’re new here,” he greeted her. No doubt an AI.

“Yes,” she spoke into her headset, pausing to dig in her mind for her next words. Was there some password? Would he just open the door for her when she walked up to it?

“Welcome to the Trifecta Pub. I see you’ve met our Spectre.” He continued the dialogue, apparently not expecting anything from her. “Let me buy you a drink to help you renew your strength.”

Before she could respond, some action flashed down on her, and all of her stats returned to one hundred percent. Perfect, she huffed, relieved. Regenerating stats made sense, she guessed, since the conduit into the pub required almost committing suicide.

“Make yourself comfortable,” the AI instructed. “Talk to the locals, or come back to me when you are ready to enter the Trifecta Realm.”

Hazel could feel the burn of her adrenaline, and her mind slowed to take in the entirety of the pub’s occupants in only a few seconds. Without a Wire, she had no idea if the regular modes of communication would work – the whole secret club had been created for only the Wired.

Taking a seat at a table, she parked so she could spend a few minutes thinking through what to do next. She pulled her eyes away from the computer screen and took out her handheld to access the message she had intercepted from Pete’s computer. After scanning the contents, she spied a line near the end that gave her some direction. “To access your unique invitation, use the following code: Tryptech88.”

Hazel blew out a breath and turned back to Sophie’s computer. “Let’s do this, Sophe,” she spoke aloud. When Hazel walked back to the bartender, she opened a dialogue.

“How may I help you,” he prompted.

“Access Trifecta,” she replied.

“You want to access a restricted area. Please enter your unique identifier code.” It’s not an exploit, she reassured herself.

Upon hearing the words, Hazel paused. A “unique identifier code,” which meant that she would be playing using a code designed for Peter Donovan. Could be good, could be bad, she realized. Probably the biggest factor rose from her concern that Pete would be notified, but Pete never played Trip without her. Most likely, he wouldn’t pay any attention since the message would be mixed in with the thousands he received every day.

Regardless, she wanted to enter so badly that she was willing to risk it. Worst case scenario, Pete got mad. At this point, she felt so awkward about the exchange with Pete and Rel Martins that she would almost welcome the distance a little argument would bring.

“Tryptech88.”

“Welcome to special access, Tryptech88. Please access the Trifecta through the door to my left.” The name above Hazel’s avatar now read “Tryptech88.” Steeling herself, she passed through the door.

+++++++++++++++

“So, here’s the deal,” Rel tapped on the plastic frame of the old-school keyboard with his fingernail. “I decided to pull up the utilities records from each of the incidents I have noted on my chart. Check for anomalies, look for anything that sticks out. Power surges. Hospital increases. Traffic issues, including Queue car problems. Whatever. Any reports of anything out of the ordinary.”

“And?” Vee prompted.

“Nothing particularly unusual on most fronts, but one thing I noticed was that for each incident, there was an unusual steady-state power drain within a two-mile radius. There were a few anomalies, but it was over eighty percent. There is a pinpoint of unusually large power usage very close to the incident that was damaging to infrastructure and was hushed up by the powers-that-be.”

“Stead-state what?”

“Like an electrical perpetual motion machine. It drains huge amounts of power, but generates enough to support itself.”

“But you have no idea what is using the power?”

“None.”

“So, run another report,” Vee declared. “Look for other entities or items that correlate at or near the sites. Maybe schools, hospitals, government buildings, factories, farms. Is there anything near the incidents that could account for a large energy drain?”

Rel pulled up his most charming smile, something he had not used much since entering college. “How about, you run the reports, and I go do my job and be a field agent?”

Rolling her eyes, Vee laughed at his mostly unsuccessful attempt to bait her. “What did you have in mind? If I’m taking the time to do this, I want to know why you’re not.”

“So, remember Austen Trace?”

“Your new fanboy crush? Of course. I’m not doing this so you can go flirt.”

“I don’t intend to go anywhere near her,” Rel insisted. “The night I met her, she was standing only a few feet from one of the power drains, staring at a door that seemed to lead into the building.”

“You think she knows something?”

“I think it’s possible. I didn’t know anything about this that night, so I didn’t even know what questions to ask her. But what if she was there about the power drain? Do you know who her boyfriend is?”

“Boyfriend?” Vee couldn’t hide her surprise. She had assumed Rel was trying to get a date with the girl.

“Boyfriend, best friend…some very close relationship if his body language was any indication.” Rel paused for effect, staring at Vee with an eager grimace.

“Okay,” Vee laughed. “You’re obviously very excited about this. I’ll bite. Who is her boyfriend?”

The smile grew wider.

“Peter Donovan.”

Obviously impressed, Vee crossed her arms over her chest, squinting her eyes in thought. “Now, that is some very interesting information. Unexplained events, government cover ups – and the architect of the system that runs everything in the world…”

“Ironically, everything but Ms. Trace. She’s Wire-free. I love the irony.”

Vee shrugged. “There has to be some mystery in every relationship. Guess that’s the only way Peter Donovan can get mystery.” She tilted her head at Rel. “So all the giddy interest really is just because you’re a fan of her game?”

“I mean, obviously, if she’s dating Peter Donovan,” Rel sighed, “she’s off limits. When did that ever stop anyone from admiring a vid star or a celebrity? I think she’s pretty. She’s funny. And she is famous in the gaming world – Wire-free, one of the top gamers in the world, and she wrote the Pills exploit that shut down the game for two weeks a couple of years ago. Whether she cares two cents about me, I think she’s great. I can be a fan and enjoy being around her without needing to date her.”

“You just better watch yourself,” Vee urged. “Peter Donovan runs that Wire attached to your brain.”

“He doesn’t physically run it. He runs the infrastructure that makes it have any meaning. Individual governments manage their section of the Stream independent of Mr. Donovan’s Bridge. We all know that the architecture for the Bridge includes a disconnect from an individual’s vital function dependency – that was how he sold the governments on it after the Crash. The worst thing he could do to me is cut off my access to the Stream, render my Neurex ineffectual.”

“Or send Queue cars after you. Or Jolt you. Or steal all your credits. Or dictate that Lewellen fire you. And if you think he can’t access the root of that Wire, then you are really naïve.”

“I’m not moving in on his girl. Besides, you’re making the most powerful person in the world – someone who has had incredible power for almost three years and shown no signs of instability – sound like a raving madman.”

“A man will do crazy things for a woman,” Vee shrugged.

“This isn’t even about Peter Donovan. It’s about power drains, and trying to find out what they are., and random cracks in infrastructure. I’m sure he’s not used to this being the case, but Peter Donovan is peripheral to Austen Trace, who is my only possible lead at the moment. I’m just going to check out that location a little more. Only afterwards will I track her down and talk to her, try to see if she knew about the drain when she was there. In the meantime, you’re going to look for correlations with the power drains and see if there are any points of interest nearby.”

++++++++++++++++

Tomás paced the empty, ten-foot office of Associate Director Marquis Lewellen, his impatience growing with every minute. Finally, AD Lewellen entered the room, and Tomás found focus for his anxiety. “Tell me you have something,” Tomás begged.

“What am I supposed to have, Tomás? You know my hands are tied here. I had no idea you were involved when Director Bilton gave me the orders.”

“And I don’t blame you, Marquis. Just…are there any more names? Any other victims we can make a pattern from? I need to know who has done this, and why.”

“Problem is, I have names, but they are only something we can monitor through the Bridge, and anything in the Bridge is traceable. If I hand you that information, whoever has done this will know the source. There is one more victim in town, and I will try to move my man there, but when I can’t tell him why he’s there or what he’s doing…He has to figure out this pattern on his own. He’s found one subject; I’m giving him another one. Eventually, I’ll send him your way, too, but it will look suspect if I move too fast.”

Tomás sighed. “I just need to find out how to fix Sophie. Before this person does something worse to her – I’ve already encountered fifteen deaths in the children of my direct business associates internationally, and dozens more in comas. I have to believe this is related, whether Sophie was in a car wreck or not. We have to think outside the box.”

“If there were anything you could tell me about the message.”

“Like you, my hands are tied. If you suddenly have some inside information…? I can’t risk Sophie. Would you risk Ripley? This person is apparently ruthless. You know it’s about infrastructure. Your guy figured that much out.”

“But I doubt he comes to me with any new information, since I had to verbally shut him down. Fortunately, he has latched on to one of my brighter supervising analysts, and their heads together are pretty formidable. I’m just praying he is as smart as I think he is. With the adrenaline trigger set to the new target, hopefully he will glean the proper information.”

“Who is this target?” Tomás demanded.

“Better if you don’t know,” Marquis countered.

After a moment’s reflection, Tomás decided not to press. “I appreciate your doing this for me. Don’t think I don’t understand the risk.”

Marquis rose to his feet, signaling the end of the meeting. “I’m not risking the same things you are. Ripley isn’t old enough for a wire.”

“But you are…”

Waving away the concern, Marquis opened his door. “We’ll fix Sophie, my friend. We’ll get this.”

Steeling himself, Tomás stepped out of the room.

+++++++++++++

Peter stared at the small cloud of darkness that represented the Trifecta on the Rendering of his framework. When he had set up the server farm to manage the sub-game, he had purposely separated it from the Bridge. Though the chances were very slim, the possibility existed that someone could access the glitch if he hosted it in the Bridge, so he had physically separated it onto a server. Yet someone had used his access code to enter the Trifecta – a direct access to his server – and he had no idea how. He had needed that tag to lure his targets to the cave, but he had not used it in weeks.

If he wanted to know what had happened, he needed physically to go to the farm and tap into the system there to access the overview. He should have been able to topside monitor the wire of the person who had accessed the game, but the person seemed not to have a wire. In the region, that fact narrowed the possible options to about a thousand un-Wired elites. Most of them would love to access a secret stash of weapons, and Peter had run the invite from his public tag, so it wasn’t incomprehensible that someone had accessed it. He never monitored that inbox as carefully as he should have, because he never sent anything important there. Not until the Trifecta, which he had done specifically because it gave him plausible deniability if the truth came out before the Deconstruction. Since his public tag had been hacked a few times, no one could blame him conclusively. Hazel could verify that he rarely paid attention to that link.

Peering at the little blue dots that represented the Tripartite game, Peter closed his eyes for a moment. He had worked too hard to manage the Deconstruction to let anything distract him. To manage it, the biggest difficulty had come at first, tracking down the old ground-based server farms in the right areas, finding and recruiting associates to create SOA – useful idiots, really – to bring the farms back online. Teaching them how to link the servers to the Bridge, all without detection by any monitoring government.

Since he couldn’t utilize Wires or blackmail to manipulate the hackers into helping him, he had to play into their penchant for conspiracies. He had to mine the Wireless pits to find the most disgruntled anti-Wire crew, all of whom needed the expertise to manage the job. Then he had to create the “secret anti-Wire society” and bring them in by subterfuge to a great, fictional scheme to enact anarchy.

Peter wasn’t an actual anarchist, despite the fact that he intended to create anarchy. Power required structure, and he needed power to make his life predictable.

He did, however, need those server farms up for the initial setup. And he had needed an “in” to lure the real targets into the mix. That was the hardest part.

Pete had taken almost two years just to recruit the hackers, set up the system, and unleash the glitch. All while researching the best targets to set up the Bridge Deconstruction for him. He had spent weeks finding the people, people who had potential jobs that would accomplish the purpose, who had young adult children, and discovering what online activity those children engaged in. He had needed to readjust his exact strategy a thousand times as the factors narrowed to the proper combination. His entire life once he had recovered from the shock of Lex’s death, Peter had worked to undo the possibility that the death could happen again.

Of course, after the first couple of years of dealing with governments, Peter’s agenda had changed. True, Lex’s death had devastated Peter, but he had recovered quickly enough. By the time he was planning the details of the Deconstruction, he had shifted from disrupting the system that had killed his brother to preserving the system that had built Peter into the position of power he had achieved. He had seen the mindlessness of the average person in their utter reliance on the Wire, and he recognized the potential for states to manipulate their populaces. If Peter needed something from one of those players, how could he ensure they would comply? Too many puppeteers, and Peter would not countenance fighting with idiots on power trips. He had fixed the Bridge, he had perfected the Wire, and he deserved for people to defer to his expertise. There would always be people with whom he had to network, but it would be the network who most closely aligned with his thoughts.

For the most part, though there were a few nonnegotiable characters, Peter found that most people had a weakness he could exploit – like code in a program. Like the daughter of the man who ran the most important security company in the world – the company that would have exposed Peter if he started implementing any major changes outside of established protocols.

Sophie DeSoto. Sophie herself was insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but Peter honestly hated the girl. The only other significant person in Hazel’s life, Sophie had stared past Peter’s usual charm and found him lacking, a fact she clearly expressed to Hazel. Sophie didn’t trust him, and Peter depended on getting people to trust him. Especially Hazel – he could not afford for anything to create doubt in Hazel. She was his link to his real self – not the persona he had invented. He had her neatly in line, and he needed her to stay that way. As a rule, Peter kept everything neatly in line – Hazel, the Bridge, and the Wires.

Now, though, he had encountered something else he hadn’t predicted. Someone had stolen his Trifecta tag. Had an outsider really worked his way into the one strategically vulnerable place that Peter had spent two years cultivating? If he did what he wanted to and ignored the violation, what could happen? Worst case scenario, someone could access the glitch. So what? Anyone who tried to access the glitch would either fry their own mind or be kicked out of the game. There was little danger, and Pete didn’t have time to dig into it. Even if someone wanted to interfere with his plan, it was unlikely that anyone could if they tried. To protect the game, Pete would either need to go directly to the server and try to mine it or to backtrace his code to see if anyone had accessed or hacked his email. Both options were highly time-consuming.

Or I could actually enter the game and try to hunt down the intruder, Peter grinned. If he hit his deadlines early, he just might do it. Find the hacker, deal with him, and then with his leftover time, maybe pay for a contraband gamertag to lure Hazel into a match and take her down a notch. For months, she had complained about how much her surgery had kept her from dominating the game, as if no one could beat her. Peter would manage the Deconstruction, then once the Bridge was gone and the system shut down, he would make sure she knew who had beat her. That will hand me months of gloating, he grinned to himself.

When the monitor started flashing, Pete didn’t notice at first. It was in town, and Pete only had a couple of points of interest in NAmdam, so he tended to block out the near environment. One of the in-town targets had already served his purpose, and the other was managed for the time being. So why was an alarm going off?

Accessing the local video feed, Pete trained the camera to the DeSoto home. So unconcerned was he about Tomás DeSoto and his cooperation that Pete hadn’t even set up a monitor yet, so there was no trigger for an alarm there. Mr. DeSoto was an ongoing project, but his danger had all come from the virtual realm, not the physical, so Peter hadn’t set to monitor the man’s home – just his activity on the Stream. Pete had needed to know, though, if DeSoto tried to report the situation with Sophie to law enforcement, so he had set up the alarm to notify if an agent showed up at DeSoto’s house.

When he saw the face on the screen, Pete wanted to break something. Jolt it! When he had set up the DeSoto monitor, he had intended it to protect his hold on DeSoto. He never imagine he would need it to protect his hold on Hazel. Fortunately, Hazel was at the DeSotos’, or he would never have received the notification. Pete didn’t have time to protect Hazel from herself – from Aurelius Marints, the stranger who had inserted himself between Peter and Hazel. Pete should have reached out to Chad to take care of the guy the night of the wreck, after the suspicious look that agent had aimed toward Peter.

Of course, the only way to do that without detection would be from one of the ground servers, and since Martins wasn’t a gamer, Peter held no easy lure to manage it. In a week or so, that would be fine, since the Deconstruction would finish and no one would be able to trace anything. For now, though, Peter just had to find another way to interfere.

Have to do this the old-fashioned way, Pete simmered as he shut down his equipment and started for the door. If he biked, he might make it there before the stranger had time to reach Hazel. There was something about that man that Peter did not trust, and something about the way Hazel noticed him that bothered Peter even more. As he crossed the intersection by his home, he linked to Chad.