The truck slowed to a halt and then turned to the left. Locus, who was already half-buried in unsecured cyberspace decks and cables, was jostled in his seat as the wheels left the pavement. A short bumpy ride brought them to a stop. The engine died, and the low rumble was replaced with the static sound of rain against aluminum. Locus began to unstrap himself, but in the far corner Burner did not move at all. The man had been completely silent the entire ride, a dark ghost in the corner, forgotten.

  Sweets opened the roll-up door and waved him out. The late afternoon sky outside was unchanged, gray and moody. Locus plucked his deck and duffle bag off the seat, stepped out, and absorbed his surroundings. They were just north of the escarpment, in the woods not far away from Saint Ingrid's Cathedral. The dark megastructures of downtown faded and vanished into the ominous clouds. There was a play gym nearby, red and yellow and blue plastic, and a derelict swing set drowning in a muddy puddle.

  Sweets marched off toward a creepy tree tunnel leading into the woods. Locus followed. The rain pattered against the hood of his light jacket.

  The grass on either side of the trail was dull yellow, as were the leaves on the trees. Directly overhead, the branches of the tree tunnel were dark, naked, and jagged. There was some dark green grass in the high places, at least where the leaves had not fallen. Huge puddles covered the forest floor; the foggy teal surface was broken by old stumps, yellowish reeds, and gray stones. At the end of the tree tunnel they came upon a graveyard nestled into a grove of trees with blood-red leaves and pink berries. The wall of a stone castle rose beyond the far end of the graveyard. The castle was built into the trunk of a massive tree, and it prominently featured a crumbling clock tower.

  They stopped and waited for the others to catch up. When Woodsman arrived, Locus asked: "How did you find this place?"

  "Our client told us about it," Woodsman said. "She knows every nook and cranny of my world. Apparently she found something interesting here."

  A world, the Dream Elemental said. Her voice startled Locus.

  A world? Locus thought. What kind of world?

  Come see for yourself, silly!

  Sweets began unbuttoning her jumpsuit, and she appeared to be naked underneath. Locus couldn't help but watch with anticipation.

  "No need to ogle the chrome," Twist said as she put her hands over his eyes. "It's unprofessional."

  "Good point," Locus admitted. He turned away.

  "Follow me," Woodsman said. "This castle is not connected to the matrix. It has its own isolated subnet, most likely protected by a rogue AI. There's an access point at the other end of the graveyard. Burner can open it up for us."

  Through the graveyard, and beyond a patch of pink flowers, the access point turned out to be a rusty old electrical box, surrounded by broad red mushrooms with white spots. The box read: "City of Saint Ingrid Municipal Power Service," painted white using a military-style font. The red-robed priest marched up to the thing and placed one hand on the metal. It melted and spread apart, allowing the man's hand to pass straight through.

  Street sorcery. Where did they find this guy?

  Locus turned back to try and steal one last glance at Sweets. She was far away, so he could not make out much detail, but she was completely nude, revealing all her military-grade chrome. She jumped a few times, causing her breasts to bounce.

  Such a banal dream, his Elemental said. Even the brute beasts of the forest dream of copulating with a female. You should strive for higher dreams.

  "Just can't help yourself, can you?" Twist asked.

  "That's how you know he has a penis," Woodsman said dryly.

  "Where the hell did she get all that chrome?" Locus asked, desperate to change the subject.

  "She didn't tell you?" Twist asked. "She's an active agent of the tep ay aie."

  The TEPAI? Locus wondered. He looked skeptically at the woman, and said: "You mean the urban legend?"

  "It's not an urban legend! It's real. It's one of the oldest AIs in existence, maybe even the oldest."

  Locus rolled his eyes. "Now you are just making fun of me."

  Twist shook her head. "No, it's true. She's basically the best diver in Taisia because of it. The AI recruited and trained her specifically for that one purpose."

  "You should not reveal such things," Woodsman warned. "If the client wanted him to know that, she would have told him."

  "You don't honestly believe it?" Locus asked incredulously. He sighed. "I suppose it doesn't matter. I would rather stay focused on the job."

  Woodsman nodded.

  Locus began assembling his cyberspace deck on the empty section of the electrical box, but as he worked, his mind was troubled. The Taisian Ethnic Preservation AI, or TEPAI, was just something drunken college students whispered about. Allegedly, the ancient AI had orchestrated secret genocides in centuries long gone, one foreigner at a time. It would make the government and the banks forget people existed, then send assassins into their homes to murder them, and finally sell the houses to ethnic Taisian citizens at a steep discount.

  Not unlike what we are going to be doing to this Gerard fellow, Locus realized. He shivered at the thought. There was absolutely no evidence that it actually happened. But then again, why would the AI leave a bunch of evidence just laying around? And Sweets...

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  Locus shook it off. It's just a job.

  Burner finished his work, and, without speaking, offered Locus a receiver port. Locus took it, connected his cyberspace deck to the isolated subnet, and jacked in.

  He found himself in the seat of his fighter jet, under an impossible sky. Against a backdrop of dark gray, clouds of neon green fractals drifted, shifted, connected. Corrupted black tentacles exploded from inverted fractures in the sky, blotting out the neon light. In every direction the sky was filled with stone book shelves, stacks of raw books, and twisting wrought iron lamp posts. All of these features were as big as megastructures, perhaps as big as planets. Black lightning flashed on the horizon, absorbing the light. Pages drifted in the wind, old, handwritten, yellowed.

  What the hell is this place? Locus asked.

  Home, the Dream Elemental replied. The dreams of those who labored to create the, uh... I do not know the word.

  The isolated subnet?

  Yeah, that thing. Isolated subnet. What a stupid pair of words.

  So it's sort of like cyberspace, Locus reasoned. Except different.

  The fighter jet was parked at the top of one of the bookshelves, not too far from the edge. Locus realized he would need to turn around and take off in the other direction. By rote memory, he went through the startup checklist. Soon the engines were spooled up, and after a few redundant safety checks he released the parking brake and punched the throttle up to taxi power. Once the craft was moving forward, he pressed the brakes on one side, causing the alien sky to slowly rotate around him.

  It would have been an unremarkable takeoff, if not for the flurry of torn pages that flowed over the canopy like snowflakes. He reached takeoff airspeed just before reaching the edge of the huge bookcase. While the altimeter indicated he was at sea level, the lofty edge of the bookcase dropped away to reveal his true altitude was at least thirty thousand feet. The ground far below was black, pocked with craters and rivers and lakes filled with brackish green water.

  The airspace just ahead was clear, so he configured the auto-pilot to hold altitude and heading. Then, he flipped.

  Sweets was already on the move. With perfect balance she was sprinting along the top planks of an old wooden fence, to prevent revealing her location by splashing through the puddles. Her skin felt cold as rain streamed off her naked body. All of the buildings within the castle town were brownish gray with gray doors and blue trimming. There was also a cafe with a red door, and a well with a red gazebo cover on top. At the end of the fence she reached a stone door leading to the castle interior.

  "Cowboy, are you ready?" Sweets asked.

  Locus used his deck to add a waypoint to his fighter jet flight computer, one which matched her relative position. Then he flipped back. His waypoint was off to one side, hovering over one of the massive stone bookshelves. This particular shelf only had a single book, black and leather bound, resting horizontally on the top shelf.

  Data, Locus realized. Here, books are the representation of data. Maybe the missiles will work?

  Using the buttons on the stick, Locus activated one of the missiles which had been loaded with a legacy icebreaker. It was the type of program that used first principles to devise a series of exploits and take control of a system, without any prior knowledge of that system. It could not be used against modern self-healing ice, but it would make quick work of whatever security system the door was using.

  He rolled on edge and pulled up on the stick until the bookshelf was directly ahead. He aimed the gunsight just using stick and rudder. When he pulled the trigger, the missile lanced off the rail toward the book, leaving a long stream of smoke in its wake, setting fire to the stray pages that fluttered along its path. When it struck the book, it exploded with gold light. Black ink began to precipitate from the book and flow in waterfalls from the edge of the shelf.

  Flip.

  The stone doors rumbled to either side, opening the way into perfect darkness. Sweets navigated the long maze of narrow stone hallways, which led finally to a dim chamber lit by old gas lamps. Shadows dominated the space, dark, industrial, whirring and blinking and beeping. It was, in fact, a server room, cramped and dusty. The floor was coated in a vine-like blanket of cables.

  Sweets crouched down, placed one palm against a nearby server, and brushed away the dust. It appeared to be an ancient design, but thankfully there was a very modern universal jack port. Sweets tugged on the jack at the nape of her neck, just below the ear, and slipped it into the server port. Locus waited for the port-forwarding notification to appear on his deck. When it did, he activated the forwarding protocols, which effectively added the entire server cluster to the isolated subnet, with Sweets acting as an intermediary.

  Flip.

  The new hardware manifested as a new bookshelf, vaguely in the direction of her new relative location. The new shelf was stocked with uniform, skyscraper-sized black books, leather bound with gold lettering. Each one was, Locus reasoned, a unique server. Because they were all connected, any one of them could be used as a target. He armed another missile, lined up a shot, and fired.

  Locus flipped again. A few moments later, Sweets said, "I'm in."

  "What is it?" Locus asked.

  "It's a cryptocurrency server cluster," she replied. "A very, very old one."

  "Cryptocurrencies?" Locus said, astonished. "You mean like, the pyramid schemes and artificial price trends that early programmers invented to scam suckers at the dawn of computing? Those cryptocurrencies?"

  "Yeah, but there is a difference. I've located the employee training videos for this facility. I'll play them at one point five times speed."

  Locus flipped back to his fighter jet and forwarded the new video into his HUD. A corpo in a black suit appeared and started regurgitating the usual HR word salad.

  Finally, the lesson started: "We use the finest hologram technologies available, and all of our titles and deeds are printed on polymer substrates. You cannot see this on your screen, but this title was printed with a distinct set of colors on the front that turns into shades of gold on the back. There are features to create depth and movement among the images, as well as an optically variable device that resembles the Capitol Building here in Saint Ingrid, which is white under normal lightning but fully colored when viewed under UV light."

  A quick matrix search on his deck revealed that such security features were cutting edge technology over one thousand years in the past.

  "Our most important security feature is the use of the cryptographic blockchain. Each title contains the hash code required to fulfill the requirements of the current block. This is the only copy of that hash code, because the server which generated it immediately deletes that portion of memory once the printing process is complete. In other words, the physical documents become part of the blockchain."

  Locus flipped.

  "What an asinine way of doing things," he said.

  "Yeah," Sweets agreed. "Early cryptocurrencies were intended to replace physical fiat currencies. It seems like they went full circle with this design."

  "Wait, this is a problem, isn't it?"

  "Yeah."

  "How many titles were printed after the title for Gerard's house?"

  "Three," Sweets said. "All of them for the same bank."

  "That's not too bad," Locus said. "We just need to re-compute the entire blockchain starting with Gerard's title, then print four new physical documents and stuff them in their respective bank vaults. How long do you think that will take?"

  "This blockchain has been in continuous use since cryptocurrencies were invented, all those centuries ago. These hashes have a lot of leading zeroes. Estimate says twenty-five minutes. How are things looking on your end?"

  "The sky is clear," Locus replied. "Twenty five minutes is not a long time. If there's a rogue AI up here, I haven't seen it yet."

  "Good. Keep me posted. Enjoy your flight."