The Fractal Prince by Hannu Rajaniemi

fight the urge to curl up into a ball, reach for the suit’s tiny ion drives through the neural interface and fire them.
    The thrust pushes me out of the boiling current of data, and the world goes blissfully dark: we are back within the suit’s operating regime. I fire the drives again to stabilise, and they die as well, leaving me in a disorienting spin.
    —going too fast , shouts Perhonen in my ear through the neutrino link. The butterfly avatar of the ship beats its wings frantically inside my helmet, a delayed reflection of the ship’s distress.
    ‘I would be going faster if somebody had updated their traffic models!’ I yell at it. I straighten my arms to slow the spin, praying that I’m not going to collide with a processing node. Too much disturbance inside the router and it’s going to call the zoku sysadmins. Although if I don’t get the Box open in a few hours, angry zoku computer nerds are going to be the least of our worries.
    Hold on. Just stay put. It’s settling down .
    I start healing again. It feels like needle-legged ants crawling all over me, accompanied by a sudden light-headedness. I’m still in a bad shape: my hand has not grown back properly, and the body’s synthbio cells are riddled with mutations and cancer analogues from being exposed to hard radiation. At least Mieli now allows me enough control to turn the pain off at will. The only problem is the detachment that comes with the numbness, and I can’t really afford it in a job like this.
    The suit vents heat and hisses. The gogols’ complaints in my head settle down into a soft murmur as the suit systems recover. I lick sweat from my lips and take deep breaths, squeezing the Box in my hand, hard. There should be easier ways to break into something that small.
    ‘And by the way, I’m all right here, thank you for asking,’ I mutter.
    Do you want to update a simulation model of a quantum system with about three million unknown parameters? No? Then shut up and let me and the gogols do our job .
    I can’t blame the ship for being slightly cranky. We turned her wings – her pride and joy – from something resembling trapped aurora borealis into rigid grids of quantum logic, the closest thing we have to proper quantum processors. Which also means that if something does go wrong, it’s going to be difficult to run.
    And then there is Mieli, who seems awfully keen to die a heroic death.
    ‘I would like to point out that I’m still the one going in,’ I say testily.
    I would like to point out that it would be nice to be appreciated, Perhonen says. So you think your box god is just going to welcome you with open arms and help us ?
    ‘Don’t worry, I’ve dealt with him before. And I know what it feels like to be in a box. You’ll do anything to get out. You’ll even throw in your lot with smartass ships and Oortian warriors.’
    I’ll take your word for it. In any case, the traffic seems to be settling down .
    ‘How long?’ The suit’s spimescape is back up at last. It shows me a reconstructed view of the router’s innards. The price of being invisible is being blind – which makes it somewhat tricky to break into a vast machine constantly creating and dissolving new components. At least for the moment I’m in the stable outer layers, away from the heavy processing centres.
    Oh, should not be more than an hour or so. Try not to get bored .
    ‘Great.’ I squirm inside the suit. My makeshift outfit is not exactly comfortable: it’s essentially a chunk of smartmatter, loaded with custom gogols and fitted with a few extra pieces of kit like the drives. It feels like wearing a full-body suit of wet clay, and I’ve been inside it for nearly two days. The neural interface is improvised and crude, with a constant spillover of the gogols’ muttering into my brain. The thought of another hour in it, floating in the router’s outer layers, possibly hit by another traffic spike at any moment, does not exactly fill me with joy.