Ragnarok by Ari Bach

if she told the truth? One man who sold— sold not gave away, not acted upon information—would know that the black avatars stole the thing. He’d sell it to Skunkworks of course, but what could they do about it? They’d already seen T team, and everyone knew the Obsidian Order online were a dangerous gang. But then again—
    â€œYes,” said Varg. And it was done. Yoshi smiled and laughed. He linked something to a faraway user, then closed his notation window.
    â€œDon’t worry, I won’t tell the skunks. They don’t pay well enough!” He turned to Violet. “Hand me your cock. I’ll scour the mountain for your friend Mishka.” V team was stunned. Through their avatars he must have sensed it. He went on, “I deal in information, kids! Mishka told me who the Obsidian Order were in exchange for a tip on Birlacorp.”
    He jumped out of his kiosk with a dexterity that mismatched his avatar. He took the blue rooster icon from Violet and integrated it into his net partitions. Then the back of his head popped open to reveal ocular hookup protocols. He let them see what he saw as he jumped down toward the next ring. The project was on course.
    Looking through Yoshi’s eyes, they could get a hint of the programs he was using. Beside the new blue Gullinkambi program, there were about fifty icons for net security. Some they recognized, others they didn’t. It was rude to look around at the man’s brain, but Violet couldn’t resist peeking at some of the program specs he had running. One was an illegal log deletion protocol, another was an avatar speed alteration buffer so he could trick sites into letting him move at illegal paces to surprise or escape an enemy. One was a false contact barrier so he could pretend to let people in without doing so. He sensed her looking at it.
    â€œThat one doesn’t work on the Crag, dearie. Nothing works on the Crag.”
    Yoshi left the sack and hopped down to the airspace of ring nine, the lowest of the low, the anus of the entire net. Violet had never seen the place before from the common net. It was, in theory, a visual micro-weblog conglomeration. But she could make out no images. The ring cycled so fast she couldn’t focus on any single thing. It was like a whirlpool over which Yoshi floated calmly toward the center. She could see how the board acted like a meat grinder, some of the avatars had programming to view the board, but at the cost of their sanity. It would have their brains functioning at impossible speed, doing severe nerve damage. It was a sort of drug for net users who had exhausted the rest of infinity and now needed the most extreme just to feel anything at all. The ring, it was rumored, contained as much information as the rest of the net combined, but it was all a waste. Whoever looked into the abyss would be devoured by it—the promise of all the knowledge in the world at the cost of the inability to use it. An eternity of heightened awareness as your body rotted away in a comatorium or died at home. A living death.
    Yoshi came to the void, surest access point to the Black Crag. One could log on to the Crag itself, though they’d be killed instantly by whatever might be waiting for them. One could enter the void of the net from any access point and try to find the Crag, but the Nikkei Undernet point was situated directly over it. The Crag didn’t respond to calls like common planetoid sites above, where one could simply state the address and the place would appear. It was a site that worked on its own terms, ones not understood by its own users. Nobody understood how it let people bypass contact barriers. In theory, no part of the net should have allowed it. The one inviolable rule of electronic communication was that nothing could be forced on you. Even in the void between sites, that rule was in force. But once a person set foot on the Crag, everything changed.
    Yoshi set down, and