Crash Flux 1: Welcome To The Machine Read Free Page A

circuitry on its base.   Raydin looked up and smiled, “We stil’ on?”
    Adon said, “Holy… how did you manage…”  He laughed and shook his head.  “Look at this guy, drooling, can’t walk, can’t talk, and what’s the first thing he wants to do?”  He plugged the tooth into his business phone, uploaded it onto his private server.
    Irule said, “Just relax, okay?  I’m going to jack you in to the Tower Terrace until we get back to Adon’s shop.  You think you can handle a little VR?”
    “Do it.  It’ll feel lik’ a fu’kin’ vaca’sh’an c’mpar’d to-”  He yelped, interrupted by Irule running the address of the Tower Terrace simulation through his comjack.  He closed his eyes and she said, “Sorry about that.  Try to keep upright.”
    A burst of static assaulted his senses, and he slowly settled into the simulation.  He sat outside a small café, at a small patio table on a lonely, quiet terrace.  He commanded his virtual persona to move to the edge of the terrace, overlooking Datcora from a virtual sky.  He took in a deep breath, feeling the flux of rich sensory input.  Three days without knowing the touch of dream-fabric of virtual reality.  Enhanced smell, enhanced hearing, enhanced sight, nothing but blue skies, fresh air, and the city, hundreds of miles below. 
    Raydin, like Irule, had undergone a neural enhancement procedure, installing a system known as the Cognitive Enhancement Memory Augmentation Communications System, CEMACS, or C-MAX for short.  Inside of Raydin’s brain, crystal circuits distorted time and space, forcing faster than light communications.  A black case the size of his thumbnail contained enough storage to record the exact location of every cell in his body.  The jack embedded in his forehead grew warm, and a bright, glowing, radiant dot appeared on his forehead, then disappeared.
    Raydin looked down over the whole of Datcora, a massive structure covering the west coast of old America, surrounded by a transparent dome of orange light, protecting the residents from the freak electrical storms that plagued the continent.  The Hub lay at its base, a black hexagon five miles tall, surrounded by expansion rings.   Stretched between thirty tiers, billions of lines of composite titanium wire mesh were strung between thousands of kilometers of altered state carbon beams, supporting porous chitin that was half the weight of concrete and twice as strong.
    Raydin’s eye wandered across the skyway network projecting out of the Hub.  Different colored lanes supported between long series of paired structural beams formed the maze of cargo roads that fueled the arcology’s commercial infrastructure, each in turn connecting with the twenty to a hundred lane solid chitin super-freeways that crisscrossed North and South America.  Millions of hovercraft and other vehicles formed an electric pulse, beating to the heart of the nation-city.
    Centered in the Hub was the Wheel, a pit of concentric circular platforms, descending downwards and inwards like a massive strip-mine.  Tiny dots of light from the V.T.O.L. craft pulsed in and out of the infrastructure built atop the spokes of the Wheel, following the halo of lights from the guide beacons surrounding the platforms.  At the very bottom, a spiral staircase of skyscrapers curved inwards as it climbed upwards, creating a jagged spire that reached up out of the Wheel and into the sky, the exclusive province of Datcora’s ruling class, known only as The Towers.
    It all culminated at Datcora’s apex, the Central Processing Spire.  Taller than Mount Everest, clawing its way to the peak of the spire from the base of the catacombs which lay at its foundations, it was the heart of New Babylon.  The CPS was the heart of Datcora, the foundation of earth’s commerce and information trade, processing an infinite influx of data from all over the world.  It pulsed, humming loudly, bending and twisting time and space,