ECHO PROTOCOL

The Job

Rain doesn’t fall in Ironvale anymore. It gets sold. Vireon Dynamics owns the weather grid same as it owns the water reclamation towers and the air scrubbers and, if you believe the rumors that circulate in the lower levels where I do most of my actual living, a controlling stake in roughly half the thoughts anyone in this city has left that haven’t already been monetized twice over.

I’m sitting in a booth at the Copper Kettle, three levels down from anything resembling natural light, watching a man named Marcus Teague nurse a drink he’s been nursing for twenty minutes because he wants me nervous before he actually tells me what the job is. I’ve known Marcus eleven years. I let him have his twenty minutes because that’s the price of doing business with a fixer who’s kept me alive this long, and because the drink he’s nursing costs more than most people down here make in a week, which tells me exactly how much this particular job is actually worth.

“You’re stalling,” I say.

“I’m building atmosphere,” Marcus says. “You used to appreciate atmosphere.”

“I appreciated it more before rent went up.”

He finally sets the drink down, and something in his face shifts from performance into something considerably more honest, which is the thing I actually trust about Marcus even when everything else about him reads as careful theater. “Vireon’s running something in their Tier Nine research wing,” he says. “Something they don’t want in their own quarterly disclosures, which means it’s either illegal, embarrassing, or both. Client wants a full data pull. In and out, nobody the wiser.”

“Tier Nine is locked behind physical air gap,” I say. “You know that. Everybody who’s ever looked at Vireon’s architecture knows that.”

“Client’s paying for the air gap specifically. Says you’re the only ghost in Ironvale who’s actually cracked one before.”

That part’s true, unfortunately, and true things have a way of getting me into exactly the kind of trouble I keep telling myself I’m too smart to walk back into. Two years ago I ran a job against Halcyon Biotech that required exactly this kind of physical breach, in person, gloves on the actual hardware, and I still carry the scar on my left forearm where their automated countermeasures decided a ghost in their server room deserved something considerably more physical than a simple system lockout.

“How much,” I say, because eventually you have to ask, and because Marcus knows better than to waste my time with a number that isn’t going to properly answer the question my hesitation is actually asking.

He tells me the number. I don’t flinch, because flinching in front of a fixer is how you end up negotiated down before the conversation’s even properly started, but internally something in my chest does the math on exactly how much of my accumulated debt that number would actually clear, and the honest answer is most of it. Maybe all of it, if I’m careful about how the payment structures across the job’s various completion milestones.

“What’s actually in Tier Nine,” I ask.

Marcus’s expression does something I don’t like, a flicker of genuine uncertainty that doesn’t fit his usual careful composure. “Client didn’t say. Client’s paying enough that I didn’t push.”

“You always push.”

“Not this time.” He finishes what’s left of his drink in a single motion that tells me considerably more about his own nerves than his careful words have managed. “This client feels different, Vesper. I can’t tell you exactly how. Just different. Careful in a way that reads more like fear than like ordinary corporate paranoia.”

I sit with that for a long moment, weighing accumulated debt against accumulated instinct, understanding that every job I’ve ever regretted taking started with exactly this kind of uneasy feeling that I talked myself past because the number on the table was too significant to properly walk away from. I think about my apartment, four levels down, rent overdue, the particular cold that settles into concrete when the heating grid decides your block isn’t worth prioritizing this cycle. I think about eleven years of increasingly careful jobs that never quite cleared enough to actually get ahead of Ironvale’s particular gravity, the way this whole city is built to keep people exactly where the corporations find them most conveniently, predictably useful.

“I’m in,” I say, and watch relief and something considerably more complicated cross Marcus’s face in quick succession.

“Client wants the extraction complete within the week,” he says. “I’ll get you the access schematics by tomorrow. Vesper...” He stops himself, reconsiders whatever he was about to say, and settles instead for something considerably more careful. “Be careful in there. Whatever Vireon’s actually hiding in Tier Nine, I don’t think it’s the kind of secret that stays quiet once somebody actually finds it.”

I leave the Copper Kettle twenty minutes later with a job number in my head and an uneasy weight in my chest that I tell myself is just ordinary professional caution, the same caution that’s kept me breathing through eleven years of exactly this kind of work. I don’t yet know how badly I’m about to discover exactly how wrong that reassurance actually is.

The walk back to my apartment takes the better part of an hour, cutting through six levels of Ironvale’s stacked, layered architecture, each level its own particular ecosystem of desperation and adaptation. Level Nine, where the Copper Kettle sits, still gets filtered daylight piped down through the arcology’s mirror shafts, enough that the corp workers who drink there in the evening can pretend, for an hour or two, that they’re not actually living inside a concrete hive stacked forty stories into bedrock. Level Four, where I actually live, gets nothing but the amber emergency lighting that Vireon’s maintenance contracts specify as legally sufficient, which tells you everything you need to know about how the city’s various corporate landlords actually value the people paying to survive down here.

My apartment is one room, a fold-out bed, a data rig I’ve spent considerably more money maintaining than the actual furniture around it, and a window that looks out onto a maintenance shaft rather than anything resembling sky. I bought the rig used from a decker who was retiring, or dying, or both, those two outcomes tending to blur together in this line of work, and I’ve rebuilt half its components myself across the years since, enough that I know every quirk of its particular architecture the way some people know a lover’s particular habits.

I pull up Marcus’s preliminary schematic the moment I’m properly settled, running my own independent verification against Vireon’s public infrastructure filings, cross referencing what little actually gets disclosed about Tier Nine’s physical security against three years of accumulated intelligence I’ve gathered from other ghosts who’ve tried, and mostly failed, to properly breach Vireon’s more sensitive research architecture.

The air gap is real. That much I confirm within the first hour, tracing the physical network topology as far as public records allow before hitting the deliberate blank space where Vireon’s own security documentation simply stops disclosing anything useful. Air gapped systems don’t connect to any external network at all, no wireless bridge, no remote access point, nothing a ghost like me can properly touch without physically, bodily entering the actual secured space and jacking directly into hardware that was never designed to trust anyone standing where I’d need to stand.

That kind of breach requires physical presence, physical risk, the kind of job that ends careers and occasionally ends considerably more than careers when corporate security decides a body in the wrong server room deserves whatever response their liability lawyers have pre-approved for exactly that scenario. I think about the scar on my forearm again, phantom ache flaring at the memory the way it sometimes does when I’m about to do something my own accumulated experience is quietly, insistently warning me against.

I message Marcus for the physical access schematics he promised, and spend the remainder of that long evening running every simulation my rig can properly manage against Vireon’s known security countermeasures, trying to build a plan considerably more careful than my own uneasy instincts currently feel entitled to trust.

Somewhere around midnight, working through my fourth pass of Vireon’s known countermeasure patterns, I find myself thinking about Marcus’s odd hesitation back at the Copper Kettle, the way his careful composure had cracked, just slightly, around the edges of a client he clearly knew less about than his usual thorough vetting normally allowed. Eleven years working with the man, and I’ve watched him negotiate with people who’d sell their own siblings for a marginal profit margin without so much as a flicker of genuine unease. Whatever this client actually represented, it had gotten past his considerable professional armor in a way that few things ever properly managed.

I pull up what public records exist on Vireon’s Tier Nine research designation, finding mostly redacted filings and the kind of deliberately vague public statements corporations issue specifically to satisfy disclosure regulations without actually disclosing anything genuinely useful. One filing, buried three years deep in an obscure regulatory database I only access because I maintain considerably more thorough archives than most ghosts bother keeping, mentions something called the Cognitive Emergence Framework, a phrase so carefully bureaucratic it could mean almost anything, and precisely because of that vagueness, probably means something the company considered genuinely significant enough to bury this deeply.

I don’t sleep much that night. Whatever waits behind Vireon’s careful air gap, I understand, working through my rig’s final simulated approach vectors as the amber emergency lighting outside my window cycles slowly toward its own automated dawn setting, this job is going to require considerably more caution than even my own already substantial professional paranoia currently feels adequately prepared to properly provide.