Amur

Amur

The Chiss homeworld is filled with neon-lit megacities, where dark-hulked skyscrapers pierce the perpetual cloud cover and offer, to their most exalted occupants, occasional glimpses of a shrunk and sullen sun. At ground level, hover-cars maneuver through streets littered with the effluvia of a hyper-capitalist society, lit only by ads for implausibly low-priced cyberkit, high-grade methalux, and companionship priced by the hour or night.
But these cities have a mirror reflection. For every corpo tower in the great Capital of Sharakaur, an evershifting dataspire reaches into the depths of the netherworld, a millennial forest of colossal size, roots intergrown over generations, millions upon millions of computing nodes linked together by billions of kilometers of fiber: the Chiss Planetary Net.
Through this forest rove many beings, for even the lowest of the indentured servants laboring for the Corps will live half his life or more on the Net: working, socializing, finding romance or some approximation thereof, and making the necessary bureaucratic genuflections to the all-consuming and all-interested attention of the State. Among these ordinary citizens move stranger forces: temporarily discorporated droids cloaking themselves in organic likeness, maintenance protocols moving along the datalines like huge spiders, emancipated AIs of great age and power soaring dragonlike through the shadow spires.
Among the most feared of the beings in that netherworld are the Netrunners, the digital shinobi of the Ruling Houses. And infamous in their ranks was a young prodigy known as cruxx. He appeared on the slicing scene like a storm, announcing himself with a data exfilitration of the Csapla House servers of breathtaking audacity and scope.
Cruxx belonged to House Nuruodo’s fearsome Netrunning corps, a role in which he thrived. Divinely free of conscience, implacable, playing the Net as if it were the most dangerous and involving video game in the world, it never occurred to him to think of any consequences his actions might visit on the corporeal world.
Late one night, glutted with success after another exhilarating dive into a rival’s forbidden data precincts, cruxx meandered back towards his home spire along a roundabout path. He found himself in a Node he had never visited before, one that took the aspect of an old pre-tech town, made out of stone and trees, with dirty alleys faintly lit by a sun always just on the verge of setting. In the long shadows of a bridge above him, a shadow perched, and he touched the hilt of his sword warily.
“Whoever you are, go away,” he announced dismissively, sure of himself. “I’ve no more time for games tonight.”
“Who-who-who am I? OWL, I am. But Who-who-who are you?”
The figure leaned forward, and the slanted rays of the permanently setting sun revealed a young woman of bird-like aspect, her arms hidden in a cloak of feathers, her eyes lambent in the gloom.
Cruxx had by now scanned the entity, found her to be an AI. There wasn’t much compute behind her, not nearly enough to be a threat to him. But there was something strange as well. She was sitting on a lot of data–a lot of data. Like some old archive system that could store and fetch and little else.
“Buzz off, silicon. You don’t need to know my name,” he made a dismissive gesture, and the force of his technomancy hit her squarely, flinging her from the Node.
Something about OWL nagged at him, however. After jobs, he often found himself wandering through the dusty corners of the Net, half-hoping, for reasons unclear to him, that he might run into her again.
And to his surprise, he did. He would hear her wings flapping above him, look up and see a shadow shape, then in a cloud of flutters she would be sitting in a window ledge, a tree branch, a broken statue of some forgotten Architect of the OG system during the first wave of Network Integration.
They talked of strange things, idle thoughts, fancies, distant worlds of the galactic core and all the peculiar alien life that lived there. The more they talked, the stranger Cruxx felt.
“Who-who-who are you?” OWL asked him again.
“I told you already,” he replied. “Cruxx.”
She looked at him silently.
“Amur,” he admitted. “Nauru Amur.”
“A good name, pleasing to the ear. Much better than cruxx.”
“I always just wanted to be cruxx.”
“Do you still?”
Suddenly flushed with anger, he said, “You’ve done something to me! I don’t know how. My cybertech should fend off neurological attacks. But when I figure out what it was you’ll be sorry!”
She blinked her eyes once slowly, and that was the end of the conversation.
Cruxx’s next mission was another routine skirmish against their rival House, Sabosen. Their Tantalum mine on the asteroid Naver-7db was overproducing, damaging the stock value of Nuruodo’s own mining subsidiary. Cruxx would perform a supply-chain attack on their pharmaceutical supplier. A batch of anti-rad pills would go out without their active ingredient. The organics on that rock would get a bad batch of pills, get cancer and need to be shipped off for treatment, or die. Either way, Sabosen’s Tantalum production would dive into the toilet, and Nuruodo would climb back on top, where it belonged. Nothing he hadn’t done a hundred times before.
Only this time, after he had completed the slice, he hesitated. His imagination conjured up a vision of the miners on that distant base. Real people who were hoping and praying to survive long enough to get back to their homes and families. People with lives like his.
Cruxx left a subroutine behind to undo his hack after he left, to make it look like Sabosen had uncovered his work and fixed it. It happened sometimes. Even cruxx wasn’t infallible.
But he had screwed up worse than he knew. His first sign that something was wrong was when he next encountered OWL. He flew to their most common meeting place, eager to tell her of his strange epiphany.
But there he found Nazz3, his superior in the Netrunner corps, holding OWL at swordpoint. Before he knew it he was surrounded by his own former comrades and stripped of his weapon, symbolic focus of his tech powers.
They made him watch as they deleted her, made it slow, so she could experience the fear of creeping oblivion sweeping over her. Made him listen as she cried. Then they burned out his neural interface and cast him out of the Net.
His punishment for treason was to live as a normie commoner, doing scut jobs at the bottom rungs of Chiss society, butt and victim of all bullies, who liked nothing better than to see an elite cast down below even them.
And there he would have stayed, but for a sympathetic creche-mate and some credits he had managed to bank for a rainy day, in the best Chiss paranoid style. Between the two he was able to forge an identity good enough to get aboard a tramp freighter out of Chiss space. Nuruodo has a standing warrant for his arrest and return to Chiss, should he ever land on a world with an extradition treaty with the Chiss government. He still has about 90% of a top-end Chiss cybertech rig in his head, along with an unhealthy level of knowledge of Nuruodo’s House security protocols.
A marked man, Amur has slipped away to the Outer Rim, hoping to disappear.

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