Information: Dark Matter Volume 1

Prologue

She put her cheek against the glass, pushing out sideways with her left leg while the fingertips on her right hand hooked the window-seal edge above her and right toes caught the one below. The nanofibers of her climbing suit provided the friction to keep her there. Safely wedged for the moment in the 90° inside corner, she looked down. Sixteen floors. Time for some dialogue.

"I'm up sixteen floors, well into my climb. It's been a few months and I'm out of shape. My legs are a little rubbery and it's going to take careful work." There, that should create some suspense—Would she fall? The tension always generated likes and that would add to her income, at least her legal income. She looked up. "That is my next destination." Using the command system linked to her implants she zeroed the camera on the step back at the 18th floor. "I plan to climb to the 20th, then make the jump. That's the trickiest part of the climb. I have to make it perfectly or I miss the ledge and then..." She did a pan down to the plaza below, her low-light camera catching the details perfectly. She let the camera linger on the concrete surface, zooming right in. If it didn't look quite right, the editing software would get the proper falling effect.

Sometimes that was real, though not for her. Last month there had been a Chinese climber who had slipped. His camera tracked him all the way down. That had been from a much higher building. The idiot had been trying to break his own speed record. That's how you got sloppy. She'd learned that the technique to getting the likes, the sponsorships, and the revenue was taking it slow and being artful. Good dialogue helped. She didn't climb the highest, or the fastest, or even the most difficult, but she still earned a good income. But, she laughed to herself, there was a secret there.

However, the tremor in her legs was real. She had been sick with one of the flues and lost her shape. She'd been building back her muscle tone and the most recent gym work was excellent and she thought she was fit. Now, here she was, only sixteen floors up and her legs were actually a little rubbery. She'd have to take a break on that ledge on the roof of the 18th. Eat an energy bar. It was actually an easy climb from there up the decorative steel-work that ran up the north west corner from the 19th to the 31st floor. It was a great view from there, over the harbour and mountains as well as the city, and she hoped to get some dawn sunrise shots. She was good with the camera and that would really help her video go viral.

The money shot, however, was the leap to the 18th floor setback. She was carrying a drone for that one. It would give her a great offset angle to mix with the camera on her helmet. The risk for the drone was the building's drone detection system. Getting caught by that could cause real problems. She didn't want to lose hers. Like everything else she had, it was top of the line and replacing it would set her back more than she wanted. Getting the drone set tight to the building would probably avoid the building's system. Even if it didn't, she expected the whole shot to take less than a minute, too quick for the security system to find her.

She'd spent a lot of time programming that drone. Even as an Auggie, enough brain power to run a starship, all wired into the black box on her waist, she couldn't live-manage the drone and her other gear and still manage the jump. The jump wasn't nearly as difficult as it appeared, but it would still take all her concentration. The result was the drone needed someone else to pilot it, or some excellent programming for its navigational AI. So she had programmed the drone to take off from her backpack on command. It would float overhead while she jumped from her spot wedged into the corner on the 20th floor across to the 18th floor roof setback, its camera carefully tracking her moves.

The landing on the setback would be nice and safe, and as long as she got a good spring out of her legs, there would be no problems. Damn rubbery legs. She should have waited till she was a little more in shape. She'd play that up in the dialogue as she set up the shot, but it was real. She hated risk. She practiced. Hours of gym work. Make the easy look difficult. Except today it might be difficult.