Chapter 11
The Turnpike
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Once they had driven out of the city, Ruby set to scrubbing their old IDs from all of their new gear. Everything they had purchased on their respective shopping expeditions was traceable to the identities supplied by Enterich, but rather than rely on potentially compromised information, the team preferred to work with their backups until new identities could be forged.
The team traveled in a loose caravan on the turnpike. Samson rode point with a car he'd rented from a lower-end agency with extremely questionable security on its vehicle registration nodes. While Samson had no ability to drive himself, the car's dog-brain would be more than sufficient for a trip along a relatively straight road while Samson himself kept his eyes open for any possible interference. Maria, Pablo, and Stan made a delightful new family in the minivan in the middle, this time from a slightly more upscale agency that allowed renters to purchase vehicles with the swipe of a certified credstick. Not that Ruby couldn't hack that business, just that Maria had figured that two cars missing on the same day from the same airport would be too much of a coincidence for anyone trying to track them. Jinx and Ruby took up the rear.
Turns out, Jinx had an old garage he maintained in Philly, and in that garage, he had a late-model van. By 'late-model', Ruby wondered if the thing had been made before or after President Dunkelzahn had been assassinated. The thing certainly didn't need its ID scrubbed, as it was manufactured from before the Crash and so didn't respond to any kind of protocol she had on hand. She figured that if she couldn't get to it, neither could anyone else.
She had given herself the scrubbing task because she couldn't really trust herself to talk to Jinx yet. She had been fascinated at first with the rolling countryside, having grown up and spent the vast majority of her life in the worse parts of urban sprawl. After ten miles of unchanging pastoral wonderland, she turned away from the view, completely bored. She could just make an agent to do it, but this gave her her excuse.
Jinx cleared his throat. Maybe if she just continued as if she hadn't heard...
He cleared it again, this time more meaningfully. Frag.
"Yes?"
"I thought we could talk. For a bit. If you want to." Ruby had never seen him so uncomfortable.
"About?"
He let out a long sigh. "I suppose I deserve that. About where I've been all your life. About why and how you met me a few years back."
Despite herself, she felt her curiosity piquing. "Someone has to scrub these IDs..."
"Oh, let me do it. Give me a bit." His eyes rolled into the back of his head for a few seconds while the car's dogbrain took over. Shortly, one of the most complex pieces of code Ruby had ever seen sprang into existence in her Augmented Reality display. The code had manifested as an old janitor with a mop and bucket. Within moments, the janitor was scrubbing all traces of identification from all the devices in the car.
"You know, if you can do all of this stuff, why do you need me?"
"You could have done that too, if you wanted to. I've seen you write agents."
"Yeah, but they take me minutes to write. I can't just conjure them out of thin air, or whatever it is you do."
"What I do is pull them out of the Resonance. It's an odd thing; before I got this gift, I thought that the world was passing me by, and I desperately wanted to let it. Do you know how many times I attempted suicide?"
This admission startled Ruby. "You? Suicide? You don't seem the type."
"Well, thank you. And now, that's true. But it wasn't always that way. Your father, as I'm sure you know, was born on March 3rd, 2023. He turned 27 when you were born, by startling coincidence, also on March 3rd, 2050. Unfortunately, it seems he took after me when it came to being a dad."
Ruby was finding it hard to talk. She remembered her dad. He'd always seemed so huge, so distant, so violent. Nothing she did seemed to work, nothing she did was right.
"I left him and his mother when he was five. He was a stubborn child, never doing what he was told, always getting into trouble. Nothing I or his mother did seemed to have any affect on his behavior. God help me, I even tried beating him, but that just made things worse. You see, your father was a Dwarf. Now, it's not uncommon for Dwarf children to be born, but back then, he was a freak, a mutant. Everything he did was scrutinized, and everything your grandmother and I tried was scrutinized, and we were always found wanting. I lost my job, she lost hers. The ship was sinking."
Jinx stared straight ahead. The words flowed from him in the well-practiced monotone of a man who practiced this speech constantly in the distant hope that one day he could say it out loud.
"Then one day, the day after I beat him with a belt, he did the same thing to a boy in his kindergarden class. The teachers and the principle expelled him and wanted to bring him up on criminal charges. Other boys might have gotten some reprieve, but Tim... Tim was a Dwarf, and very strong. He broke that poor boy's jaw. And I taught him how to do it by doing it to him."
Now Jinx' voice cracked. He stopped for a bit. The van whipped through a forest of vividly green trees and emerged into a deforested region just beyond it before he spoke again.
"When the police came, they saw the marks on Tim's body, and the figured out pretty quickly what was going on, the real cause of the problem. Me. So I ran. I left your grandmother and your father. I saw what I had become in that cop's accusing stare, and I couldn't face it. I ran. I didn't want to go to jail, and I didn't want the reminder of my own failure through child support. I ran to another country entirely, hoping to forget."
Ruby had turned in her seat to face him, her knees drawn up to her chin, rapt.
"Years later, during the Night of Rage, I realized I hadn't spoken to either of them in over a decade, and I had no idea if either of them had survived. I had become a freelancer, a jack of all trades in Southeast Asia. I guess now I'd be a Fixer or a Johnson. Whatever I was, I wasn't very good at it, and I was as drunk as I could constantly be."
"By this point, I had some connections, and I used them. I found out that your grandmother had died on the Night of Rage, protecting Tim from a mob while he ran. You know the worst part about that for me?"
Ruby cleared her throat. "What?"
"I can't remember her face. I'd pledged to love this woman forever, and stick with her through bad and through good, but I cannot remember her face for the life of me. And I'm not sure I'd want to if I could."
They drove on in silence.
Ruby stared at him, this man who claimed to be her grandfather, and, for the first time, wondered if he was lying. A fantastic liar. Ruby had never ever given her grandparents much thought, since she'd been spending her time trying to get away from her father. This story had so many corroborating details, though, Ruby felt sure that Jinx wanted her to fact-check him. She certainly couldn't do that while in the car, though; that janitor might have other functions, and she wasn't up to a Matrix brawl at the moment.
He cleared his throat. "I moved back to the UCAS then. I stayed on the east coast, and decided to clean up my act. I also started to track down Tim, to make amends for my abysmal behavior. Trouble was, Tim had gone off into the shadows by then. I think he was in a gang or something for a while, until he met your mother. What do you know about your mother, Ruby?"
"I know that she was a stripper for an all-Dwarf bar in Seattle. I know that my father talked a good game, as she said it, but she always said that, when push came to shove, he was the first one out the door. She... I was put into foster care when I was ten, after my dad had beaten me really hard one time while she was blitzed out of her mind on some drug."
"And then they took you away, and put him in jail."
"The foster family was nice at first, but I didn't know how to be nice back."
"I found him in jail after that. He didn't want to speak with me. I thought he'd come around, that he wouldn't have anyone to talk to and would need someone to talk to, but no. Our wounds are too great for me to use just words."
"Is he... is he still there?"
"I thought you knew? You said he was a BTL junkie."
"I have no idea what he's doing. Him or my mother. I wrote them off once I realized that families don't have to be all terrible."
"How many homes were you put in?"
"Five. I went to five different homes."
"Do you remember what was different about the fifth?"
"Yeah," she said with a slight grin, "they told me that they wouldn't put up with any of my drek, and that I was gonna learn stuff. The dad-- my dad, I guess, Patrick-- got me my first deck. He taught me a lot of shit."
"What kind of deck was it?"
"A Fuchi-7, with Cybranous persona chips and a bunch of programs from all over. I didn't know how Patrick could afford it...." Ruby slowed down, and then, in a small voice, "That was you?"
"I couldn't come forward as your grandfather. I didn't want to screw up with you like I had with Tim. I couldn't face that again. So I watched you. When the fourth family sent you back, I told Patrick that he owed me, and that he was going to do this. Patrick resisted at first, of course, but he came around when I gave him matching cyberdecks, only string attached be that he show you the ropes."
"How did you... how did... how?" That Patrick had a matching deck had been one of the facts she'd held back; she'd learned to spot liars.
"The Crash, 2.0. I became a technomancer. Up until that point, I had basically given up on life. My son was in jail for the exact crime I had run from, once again showing me how badly I had screwed up. My wife had been dead for so long that her loss had become a dull ache, and my granddaughter was so close and yet so far. How could I show up and do the same thing to you I had done to him? I didn't want to repeat myself, to destroy another life."
"So you let me... you let them do that to me, and you saw, and you did nothing?" Ruby surprised herself by not being angry. She had moved past that, but to what exactly, she did not know.
"I didn't think I would have been better. For about two weeks in a row, right after you went into the system and Tim refused to see me in jail, I sat every night with a gun in my mouth in a piece of drek apartment surrounded with roaches and crawling with fleas."
Still sounded better than that fourth family. Well, maybe not. But there definitely had been roaches, fleas, and guns.
"I put the gun down every night, but I couldn't really explain why. I started to think that I was just being melodramatic, that even this was play acting and that I didn't even deserve this much dignity in death. I wanted to go get help, but in reality, I was waiting to die and didn't have the courage to do it myself. And I stayed in that apartment with those bugs for four years, waiting."
"And then?"
"Then the crash. And my eyes were opened, and I was given a tremendous gift. Once I started to get the hang of it, I realized I was very, very good at it, better than I had been at anything in my entire life. I could see the Matrix without any equipment, understand it in ways that no one else around me seemed to be able to do. After a year, I had learned how to become one with the Resonance, visiting the far Resonance Realms and communing with the spirit of the Matrix there. I was... I am very good. And that's when I realized I could finally make a difference."
"I was sent to Patrick when I was fifteen..."
"I rigged it. I saw how terrible those foster parents were being to you, and how they were using the system to get paychecks off of you and eight other kids at once. I remember finding a video one of them recorded, maybe on accident, of making all of you take a shower in a barn, and making sure to only give you a few drops of shampoo. One kid, not you, got beaten for 'wasting' the shampoo. I spread that video to the news outlets, and engineered your transfer to Patrick, who owed me a few favors. I ran with a team and stole those decks, and gave them to him, but he couldn't tell you where he'd gotten them from. I watched your first Matrix runs, Ruby,"
"Ye... yes?" Frag, she had forgotten the barn and the shampoo.
"I'm incredibly proud of you. You've grown up from a novice code monkey to a slicer, a spectacularly good decker who can take down IC like no one else I've ever seen before."
Ruby realized she was crying. No one had ever been proud of her.
"I'm just glad to have helped you in some way, but you know what I've realized?"
Ruby couldn't really speak. Jinx looked over at her briefly, and continued.
"I've realized that, by now, Tim is a grown man. If he doesn't want anything to do with me, I can't stop that. I've just... I've been wanting to fix what I broke for so long.... I just hope you'll give me a chance."
"You mean, more of one? One where I know who's doing things for me?"
"Yeah, that's my plan."
"What do you want me to say to that? How do you want me to react? Are you supposed to be my guardian angel or something, and I'm supposed to gush with thanks and forgiveness? You were gone from our lives since before I was born! We're.... we could have been a family!"
Jinx just nodded slowly, and turned away from the rolling scenery to look her in the eyes. "We could have been. And I know it's my fault. I've been thinking of ways of breaking the ice to you, but then we were involved in that drone fight..."
Ruby knew exactly what he meant. The two of them had thrown every trick in the book against that other team, but everything they did was countered, and so many people had died because they hadn't been able to bring down those drones in time.
"By myself, I would have been overwhelmed, and probably killed. But the two of us together held them off long enough that we managed to escape. And I don't know who that other team was, but they were damn good."
"Yeah, you're right about that."
"And I couldn't face them again without telling you this, because now, I think we've met more than our match, at least in the Matrix. Of course, we had help."
"Help?"
"You noticed that the Tacnet software started texting during the fight, right? Did you ever figure that out?"
"No..."
"Sidewinder was a technomancer too. He made a sprite, but unlike my cleaner, he made a guardian for little Stan. And a powerful one, too. The sprite was-- or, I should say, is-- powerful enough to resist decompilation once his master died. That guardian compromised Maria's Tacnet program and is now hitching a ride in her commlink."
"What... what do we do about that?"
"For the time being, nothing. He's proven to be a valuable ally. At some point, though, I'd like the two of us to make contact. He's a free sprite and he may have evolved into something more, and as such, can be very dangerous, even to me. That is, if you'll still run with me."
Ruby rolled her eyes. "Of course I'll run with you, Jinx. Just because you're my deadbeat grandfather doesn't mean you aren't the best rigger I've ever seen. And now that I know we can pair through the Matrix... our runs may have just gotten a lot easier."
"Good. Best I can ask for."
"And all you can get, for now. I'll let you know about the other stuff once I've had time to think it over."