More info about "Machina Obscura"
Machina Obscura
a Mushroom eBooks sampler
Copyright © 2002, Carol E. Meacham
Carol E. Meacham has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work.
First published in United Kingdom in 2002 by Mushroom eBooks.
This Edition published in 2003 by Mushroom eBooks,
an imprint of Mushroom Publishing,
Bath, BA1 4EB, United Kingdom
www.mushroom-ebooks.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.
This is a sampler of Machina Obscura by Carol E. Meacham. If you enjoy reading these sample chapters and would like to read the rest, you can buy the complete Mushroom eBook edition from the usual bookshops online, or find more details at www.mushroom-ebooks.com.
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Tech-Things You Need to Know for the 23rd Century
Warez
About the Author
The steel bars within the heavy airtight door scraped against the lock mechanism, the squeak of the synthetic rubber seals disengaging very loud in the dim stillness. Light lanced around the edges of the door before it was pulled away. The tiny room revealed beyond the door was a meter and a half on each side and three meters to the ceiling, the walls and floor thickly padded with scarred and torn dull brown gelfoam. The small figure sitting up against the wall was secured in a straitjacket and the head was encased in a black plastic helmet that shut out light and sound.
“This is it,” the guard said to his companion as he brought out his WorkMate and scrolled back through the file. “Number 5429, solitary confinement. Serving five to seven for theft, data piracy and data system intrusion. Been here two and a half years.”
“Excellent,” the other man said, peering into the gloom of the confinement cell. “And she’s been in solitary all that time?”
“No, says she was in general population for the first five months. She tried to poison one of the guards. You sure this is the one you want?”
The executive turned to look at the burly guard and nodded. “She’ll do. I’ve already transferred the payment. Get her out of there.”
The guard shook his head and stowed his WorkMate into a pocket of his armored uniform. He took his tazer from the holster at his belt. “All right then, it’s your funeral.”
* * * *
“What’s the hold-up? That thirty minutes has turned into three hours!”
“We apologize for the delay, Agent Searles,” came a polite synthesized voice from the speakers hidden within the acoustic tiles of the walls. “Inmate 5429 became unruly and Corporal Jimenez had to subdue her. 5429 sustained a fractured arm and the medibot is currently working to repair it. 5429 is waking from the anesthesia now.”
Searles drummed his fingers on the metal tabletop and glanced toward the chronograph display on the commpanel by the door. He ran one hand back through thinning blond hair and shook his head in exasperation, then jumped to his feet and began to pace again. After a moment he reached for the rumpled gray synthsilk jacket flung over the back of his chair and shrugged into it. “Is the girl awake enough to understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes, Agent, the medibot used a neurohypnotic unit, Inmate 5429—”
“Fine. I’ll talk to her now. I don’t have all day for this.”
A pause as the Artificial Intelligence seemed to recover from being interrupted. “Turn right, down the hallway to the elevator, and go to the third floor, Agent. The medibot will meet you there.”
Searles didn’t answer, just swept up his WorkMate from the table and whirled out the door.
* * * *
The medibot’s skeletal manipulators were icy cold on the bare skin of her head as it removed the neurohypnotic unit. The surgical light above her overwhelmed her eyes, brighter than anything she’d seen for more than two years. Sometimes the bots had taken the helmet off and there had been a light in her cell, but it was little more than a very dim strip of a half dozen orange diodes. The thrice-weekly showers were in shadow. It was the unexpected emergence into sound and light that had stunned her long enough for the guards to haul her out of her cell, but the familiar shock of scalding water had broken through at last and she’d dived at the one at the door. She’d hoped she could catch him off guard and he’d taze her, but he was at least twice her mass and threw her back against the wall. So she’d tried again, and again, until he’d bashed her against the tile one time too many.
The quiet hum of machinery was too loud, the steel table beneath her seeping chill into her bones. The blinding white light of the surgical light moved away abruptly and the dual optics of the medibot swung into view, the irises of the cameras within cycling open and the faint red glow peering at her with mechanical coldness.
“Welcome back to the land of the living, 5429. You can get up now. Corporal Tilson left your clothing and personal effects in the storage bin two and one-half meters to your right.”
She sat up slowly, wary and still stunned at the sensory overload. She looked down at herself as she carefully swung her legs to the floor and tried to stand up. The bright greens, reds and purples of the Chinese dragon tattoo winding around her left lower leg were shockingly bright against the paleness of her skin, and so was the black and yellow cobra tattoo around her right forearm, it’s head stretched out on the back of her hand. She moved her left arm to check the comical blue and purple cartoonish monster on her arm just below the shoulder. She couldn’t check the Celtic three-armed spiral on her back, but she assumed it was still there. After two years even she was surprised to see again the artwork scrawled across her body.
She turned toward the storage bin the prison AI had indicated and caught sight of herself in the mirror-like polished surface; a distorted vision of a pale-skinned, bald-headed, androgynous wraith. The gray eyes were weary, shadowed with silence and time and pain. Thin oval face, her ribs sticking out, bony. Skeletal, like the medibot that whirred softly behind her as it moved toward the secured door of the prison’s Infirmary. Fresh bruises splotched her skin from the fight with the guard. She shook her head slightly and opened the storage cabinet door – found the clothes within.
She heard the medibot speaking across the room, and the impatient nasal voice. She didn’t bother to turn, just pulled on the faded blue jeans and dropped the t-shirt over her head in silence.
The rust-colored spots that had soaked through the t-shirt’s worn fabric two and a half years before were still there. As were the tazer burns on the battered leather jacket she pulled from the cabinet. She pulled out her boots and sat down to tug them on.
“Hey, kid. What’s your name?”
She looked up as the strident voice called from across the Infirmary, blinking indifferently at the executive pushing past the medibot.
“Agent Searles,” the prison AI said from the speakertile on the wall nearby as the executive stopped in front of the girl. “Inmate 5429 has not spoken at all since she was incarcerated. Her file states that removal of the nanobots may have caused damage to the speech centers or the auditory nerves.”
“It’s not that,” Searles said irritably. “It’s that whole ‘right to remain silent’ thing. Well, kid, that’s not going to fly with me. Look, I’ve bought out your time and as of two hours ago you’re free to go.”
She blinked again, face expressionless.
Searles gave an exasperated snort and punched icons on his WorkMate’s small screen, then turned it around to show her the file now loaded there. “Look. Release order. Inmate 5429. Signed by the warden, the judge who sent you to this crackerbox and a Federal Corrections Bureau chief.”
She blinked again, recoiling from the small screen, her hands tightening on the leather of the jacket across her lap. “Why?” she managed to croak finally.
Searles shook his head and punched the WorkMate’s stand-by button. “Not here. Now what’s your name?”
She looked up at him and abruptly got to her feet, tugged her jacket on and shrugged to settle its weight around her too-thin frame. “Xyl.”
“That’s it?” Searles waved off her small shrug. “Come on.”
* * * *
“You bought my time out of prison for a run any Gilligan with an attitude could pull?”
Searles glared at her angrily and glanced around none too furtively into the surrounding dimness of the all-night ramen shop’s interior. “I don’t want just any Gilligan out there. I need a professional.”
Xyl gave a contemptuous snort and tried to eat more of the egg roll in front of her, but everything she put in her mouth tasted wrong and she was having a hard time forcing it down her throat. “Then you’ve joined the wrong chatspace. Shoulda sprung the guy in the cell next to mine, he’s a contract laceration artist.”
Searles glared at her again. “Keep your voice down,” he hissed at her. “I don’t need a street thug, I need a top grade NetRunner.”
“Like I said, wrong chatspace.” She sat back against the crumbling plastic of the seat and the nearly colorless gray eyes regarded the executive with a great deal of weariness. “I don’t play those games anymore. Not even for fun.”
“Then how about for your freedom and enough money to keep you healthy and wealthy for the rest of your unnatural life?” Searles asked, grinning slightly as he took a chipcoin from one of his pockets and flipped it to land on the plasticized surface of the table between them. The small metallic roundel glittered in the light like a fluttering brass moth before chiming as it hit the table. “I have an appointment booked for 9 AM tomorrow at Intelligon’s South Atlantica clinic. In less than twenty-four hours you could be running with their newest upgrade on their Torus 3 nanos. An upgrade that is not yet available to the general public.”
Xyl sighed and rubbed her eyes with one hand. Then shook her head and drank off the remainder of the vitamin broth in her mug. “Download this, Mr. Big, and archive it before you answer. There hasn’t been enough money generated from any scam or so-called economic system to do the one magic trick we humans haven’t managed to pull out of our hats. Unless you count that old myth, and if you ask me that guy was on a major letdown from a weekend eating shrooms and just crashed so bad his friends all thought he’d died. It doesn’t take a brain full of nanos to get seriously flatlined, but it makes it a hell of a lot easier.”
“But you have managed to pull that particular rabbit out of the hat. Several times, in fact.” Searles tugged his WorkMate out of his coat pocket and scrolled down through the file contents displayed on the small screen. “The Persona info file retrieved from your previous nanobot collective indicated you have flatlined and revived at least half a dozen times.”
Xyl stared at him unblinking for almost five seconds. “Corp, you’ve got a giant economy-sized case of the stupids. Flatlining and reviving doesn’t mean I’m a professional, it means I haven’t got the sense that Saint Darpa gave to small black squares of silicon. Computers learn from their mistakes, humans don’t.”
Searles tossed his WorkMate back onto the table in front of him. “Listen, kid, what is the sense in spending the best years of your life rotting in some hellhole of a prison getting beaten by the guards every other day? I’ve sprung you and now you have your life back. I’m giving you the chance to get right back to the life you seemed to be enjoying before you got tagged and bagged. What else do you want, a jumpticket to the Orbitals? Because that’s the one card I can’t pull out of thin air.”
Xyl sighed and gave up on trying to eat the egg roll. She ran a hand over the hairless skin of her head and rubbed her eyes. “Fine, great, it’s your chipcoin. What is it you want me to do again?”
“For the moment, just show up at 8:30 AM tomorrow at the Intelligon Clinic. Everything’s already paid for. That chipcoin is linked to an open expense account, just don’t go buying yourself the Governor’s Suite at the top of the Peachtree Hilton. Take a couple days to rest up and make sure you’re not going to have a cerebral hemorrhage. I assume you’re aware it usually takes less than a day for shakedown time on re-implantation.”
Xyl nodded and reached for the chipcoin. “How do I find you?”
“You don’t. I’ll call you.” Searles grinned and gathered up his synthsilk jacket and WorkMate. “And keep your head down. I won’t be able to haul you out of storage again.”
* * * *
The dawnlight was beginning to rise over the trees, causing the morning dew to mist from the pines and maples and willows. The distant hum of traffic and the wail of sirens didn’t disturb the stillness; the ducks floating on the small lake were paying more attention to their reflections on the mirror-calm surface of the water. It was muggy already, the Southern tropical climate uncomfortably sultry even through the dark of the night. Two and a half years of seasons had passed while Xyl had been confined in the South Atlantica Correctional Facility. She’d never realized how she’d subconsciously kept time with the tilting of the planet and it’s attendant climatological changes. North Atlantica seasons mostly operated on the relative amounts of air pollution and the artificial divisions of the calendar.
Xyl sat cross-legged on the rickety siliplastic boat dock, watching the water and the ducks, the light slowly rising over the trees across the lake. She turned Searles’ chipcoin over in her hands, her fingers tracing the imprinted icon of the Federal Bank of Atlantica. Then her eyes fell to the red-brown stains on the loose white folds of her t-shirt.
She reminded herself for possibly the hundredth time that night that she could simply walk away. Disappear. Take a walk down a maglev tunnel or take a dive off the Peachtree Hilton’s roof. There was no real reason why she should let a bot stick a needle in her skull and inject two hundred milliliters of saline and nanobots into her brain. The civilized twenty percent of the world’s population floated a precarious existence on the suppressed rebellion of the other eighty percent, narrowly escaping being pulled under and devoured by frantically tossing out hope to the hungry monster they’d created. If you wanted to die but didn’t want to do the deed yourself there were plenty who’d do it just for the giggles.
There was no reason at all why she had to go through with this.
She tucked the chipcoin back in her jacket pocket and got to her feet. The sun lanced into her eyes, but it made nothing any clearer, answered none of the questions.
It didn’t bring back the dead.
* * * *
The rippling moire pattern began to fade, the surging waves of white noise began to recede behind the hum of machinery and the whirring of servomotors. The great advantage of neurohypnotic anesthesia was that it took less than two minutes to bring the patient back to full consciousness. It did nothing to ease the sharp ache in her neck and the slight burning deep inside her head, but those would both fade in a matter of hours. Xyl lay back on the thick gelfoam and closed her eyes, watching the flashes of colored light as the nanobots began to make themselves at home inside her brain.
Standard nanobot clinic procedure required the nanobot recipient to remain at the clinic and rest until the technicians recieved the first upsignal self-test. Her exhaustion pulled her under as the colors began to fade into geometric forms and alphanumerics.
* * * *
Pepper –
I don’t know if you’re there anymore, you old bomb-tosser, but I’m doing this anyway ‘cause I don’t have anyone else to pontificate to anymore. Besides, you were the only one besides Auri who ever actually listened.
I guess you’ve known long since what happened. You may not have the details, just that Auri’s dead. I don’t know what happened to Bubble and Squeak, but I’d assume they got out before Security showed up. I know they traced our signals, it came out in my trial. We almost made it. Another hundred yards and we would have been out and away and richer than Azim’s forty thieves.
They shot her, old man. One second she was right beside me, we were dodging for all we were worth while all the demons of hell seemed to be having a mummer’s parade behind us, then her bike was on the deck sliding and she wasn’t on it anymore. I couldn’t leave her there. I’d have flashfried them all if I’d had the hardware. But she died in my arms.
You always told me Auri would get me in trouble someday, but I know that’s not what you meant.
Well anyway, some nutcase Fed bought out my time. He’s run me through the nano mill and gave me a chipcoin with a lot of zeros between the numbers and the decimal. Why, I have no idea. I already had an agenda when this null-bit in a cheap suit came knocking at my cell door. The last thing I needed was some Fed wanting an expendable NetRunner to haul me out of my own private hell.
Why is it that when you’re alive and trying to connect people mostly ignore you but when you’re busy trying to die those same people will throw themselves in front of a maglev to save you? Oh yeah, I remember now. It’s those zeros between the numbers and the decimal.
Well, in true ex-convict style I spent my first night of so-called freedom sleeping in a public greenspace. I thought about waiting until all the motherboards brought their microchips out to play so I could stare leeringly at the little girls, but I had to be at the nano mill at 9 AM.
I think I’ll head north. Mr. Big’s got the tab so I might as well go somewhere where the air needs chewing and the street never sees the sun.
It’s all the same anyway, old man. Just bread and circuses and economics, everywhere you go.
Xyl was jerked out of her uneasy doze by the drag of deceleration as the maglev commuter train began to slow. The lighting inside the train began to brighten and the synthesized bot voice recited departure instructions in Arabic, then in Mandarin, then in German. Disoriented from the sudden transition from dream to waking, she glanced up at the scrolling LCD screen near the ceiling and tried to figure out where she was.
North Atlantica, Old Manhattan. The blue alphanumerics scrolling smoothly across the bottom of her visual field indicated World Trade Center Station. The tiny tumbling green pyramid in the lower left corner of her vision was not blinking, so she had no NetMail or CallBacks waiting. She nodded unconsciously and reached up to retrieve her backpack and her long black leather coat from the luggage rack above her head, waiting as other more eager passengers got to their feet chattering and laughing.
Thirty-six hours of doing nothing but sleeping and staring up at a hotel room ceiling had partially erased the more obvious signs of exhaustion. A quick shopping run via her nanos’ Mid-Mode had brought the hotel’s bot to her door three hours later with two changes of clothes, the leather longcoat and tickets for the maglev commuter express to Old Manhattan leaving that afternoon. She’d downed two liters of vitamin broth but hadn’t been able to keep down the vegetable soup she’d forced herself to eat. She didn’t care. Vitamin broth had enough calories to sustain human life, that was its intended purpose. In a few days it wouldn’t matter anyway.
World Trade Center Station was the main maglev commuter station for North Atlantica with more than two hundred trains arriving every hour from East Canada Metro, Mid-Atlantica/Old DC and South Atlantica. Elevated and underground tracks all over Old Manhattan were managed and controlled by North Atlantica Port Authority through a collective of advanced Artificial Intelligences. The human contingent of the Port Authority had realized decades ago that human operators simply could not handle the thousands of decisions that had to be made every hour when a single error could send hundreds of people to their deaths and bring traffic to a halt for days. The system now ran itself with the AIs at the controls, and there had been only two accidents in seventy-six years. Both of those accidents had been due to human error.
The main concourse of the Station was a hollow cube of a building reaching ten stories to the roof. Arrival and departure concourses lined the four walls at every level, baggage-handling bots trundling along on small fat balloon tires and beeping stridently to clear people from their path. The first floor was all shops, ticket counters, food vendors, and an indoor greenspace with playground equipment. The roof was gridded off in landing squares for aircraft. An expensive hotel took up most of the east wing of the Station past the concourses, catering mostly to the corporate class. The north wing was devoted to accessways to the local subway maglevs radiating out to North Atlantica Metro itself.
As she turned toward the elevators she was caught by the view of Old Manhattan visible through the floor-to-ceiling windows at the corner of the concourse. A drizzling rain was blowing through the city. High above Security rotorbuses thunked across the sky, shining their spotlights down into the streets thousands of feet below. The sky was an opaque mahogany brown, raincloud and smog and light pollution building a dome over the city. The buildings were massive dark outlines speckled with lights, the lines of local subway maglevs snaking along between them. Far off across the water was the dark half-shattered form of the Statue of Liberty, which had been partially destroyed by terrorists a hundred fifty years before Xyl’s birth. A fire somewhere in Hoboken was shooting orange flame up toward the clouds, sending up an orange glow. As she watched a line of bot-controlled barges began to approach the docks across the Bay.
She felt as much an outsider as she always had in real-time. While she was well aware that fully ninety percent of the people around her had nanobots infesting their brains and nervous systems, she felt as if she moved inside some invisible shell, unseen, unnoticed. Mothers with children, corporates chattering at their WorkMates or LifeMates as they walked to the elevators, Security at every boarding platform, a group of schoolkids from East Canada giving their teachers a hard time as they tried to find their luggage.
Xyl wondered if she was the only one who noticed the panhandlers at the top of the subway station stairs.
It was cold underground, the constant rush of low-pressure air drawing the heat from the walls. She settled her backpack on her shoulder and descended into the sepulchral flickering half-dark of the subway station.
The polite, freshly-scrubbed veneer of prosperity and wealth fell away at the first subway stop as a half-dozen wireheads shoved their way aboard the maglev train before the doors had opened completely. The group of Asian corporates who were lined up to leave the train automatically fell back to the car’s rear exit, not even slowing down their animated conversation as the young thugs laughingly shoved them down the aisleway before they threw themselves into the handicapped-reserved seats at the front of the car. Xyl kept her head down, knowing that if she made eye contact they’d be on her in a heartbeat.
Not that she particularly wanted to. Young, loud, muscles artificially enhanced through a combination of drugs and nanobot surgery, bald like Xyl herself, each sporting a jagged triskele tattoo on the back of the head and a bristling array of ROMchips behind and above their right ears. She pulled her coat around herself and tried to be as small and inconspicuous as possible, but grinned slightly when she saw a smartly-dressed woman across the aisleway gather her WorkMate and her sleeping child closer.
Apparently she’d been spotted anyway.
“Hey! Input!”
Xyl looked up to see one of the young thugs standing a few feet away, hanging like a monkey from one of the grab-bars near the ceiling, looking down at her with a grin. He had an almost elfin face, thin and pale like most NetRunners and wireheads, one side of his head dotted with chipjacks and the ear on the other side decorated with at least a dozen silver rings. His eyes were a strange electric green, undoubtedly nano-enhanced. He wore ripped and faded jeans and a battered leather jacket and combat boots, the typical gang uniform that rarely changed. His friends in the seats behind him were chuckling and jabbing each other playfully in the ribs and nodding at their compatriot hanging from the grab-bar. The boy glanced back at them for a moment, laughed, then turned back to face her. “You got a place to crash tonight, input?”
Xyl blinked and laughed shortly. “You wouldn’t be able to handle me, Gilligan. Some spiders eat their mates.”
The boy blinked, obviously thinking. Then he grinned again. “That sounds like fun, would it hurt?”
Two of the other toughs jumped up and tugged their friend from the grab-bar. “C’mon, coproc, leave the input alone. Drop line.”
“Drop line? Why? It’s just an—”
The others hustled the boy down the aisleway, promising to explain it later. Xyl tried very hard not to grin as they fled to the next car.
* * * *
“Azim! Azim, c’mon, you know it’s me. Answer the damned comm!”
Xyl throttled down her annoyance and glanced around, triggering the VoiceComm signal to drop line. The tumbling purple dodecahedron morphed back into the green pyramid, minimized from Mid-Mode to StandBy and zipped down to its place at the lower left corner of her vision. She glanced up and down the alleyway and back to the blank steel door in front of her. She shrugged her backpack a little higher on her shoulder and looked up the crumbling brick wall, trying to see if there were any lights in the building above the junk shop.
Little Cairo was too dark. Two and a half years before, the night she and her lover Auriel had left with their friends to raid the research and development division of GelTech Industries, Little Cairo had been alive with light and the wild strains of Morrocan dance music. The last call for prayer had been quavering from the windows of the mosque down the street and Elinda had been dancing in a whirl of nano-enhanced reflexes and purple synthsilk and silver chains, showing off for Pepper and Azim’s son Jamal.
Now, there was only darkness and the crunch of broken glass underfoot. The windows of the pastry shop were boarded up with sheet metal. The “public” face of Azim’s operation, a ROMware shop, seemed to be cleaned out and deserted. She could see a layer of dust on the windowsill through the metal slats of the security bars. The only place with any lights on was the coffee shop and the brothel on the second floor above it. And there was no one in the coffee shop, just the ancient serving bot motionless in the corner.
No voices. She triggered her chrono display and the green pyramid morphed into green alphanumerics. It was just after dawn, there should be some sort of activity, at the mosque if nowhere else.
She shook her head and pounded on the steel door. “Azim! Jamal!”
The door abruptly jerked open and a small brown hand reached out, caught the edge of her leather longcoat and yanked her forward into the doorway.
“Who are you and what do you want? We’ve already paid up our bribes for the month!”
Xyl winced and put up a hand to block the red pinpoint of a targetting spot shining in her eyes. “Jamal?! Have you lost whatever passes for your mind? It’s me! Xyl!”
“Merciful Allah!”
Movement, and abruptly the targetting spot vanished. Xyl blinked as she tried to clear her eyes, followed the small skinny figure and the hands pulling her forward into the crowded confines of the junk shop. And voices, at last, familiar voices hissing angry questions at each other in Arabic, and Xyl was pressed down onto an ancient packing crate and a warm mug of spiced coffee was suddenly in her hands.
“You should not have come back.”
Xyl looked up at last and tried to grin at the dark Egyptian face peering down at her. Azim al’Nair had aged in the two and a half years she’d been gone. The weathered lean face was lined with fatigue and deep worry lines, and his long jet-black hair was showing much more gray than she remembered. And there was much more wariness and suspicion in the gray eyes. They were surrounded by the irregular miniature skyline of crates and shelves that held the true merchandise of Azim’s trade: weapons, electronics, molecular synthesizers, controlled chemicals, remote sensing equipment. And more than that, information, which usually was kept in the gray matter of Azim’s own brain, accessible only by his nanobots.
“I came to get my WorkMate,” Xyl said after a long drink of the coffee. “Where’s Pepper?”
Azim gave a long sigh and looked away. “I don’t know. He disappeared – was taken, I should say – soon after you and Auriel were captured.”
Xyl clenched her hands on the mug and closed her eyes. The little green pyramid continued it’s ceaseless silent tumbling in her own private darkness. “What use would anyone have for a crazy old Marine with post-traumatic stress? Why’d they take him? Was it Security?”
“No. The Walking Dead. And that is why you should not have come back.” As he spoke Azim left the circle of light cast by the tensor light on the wide table where she sat, moved to the locked bins along the wall. Xyl heard one of the locks disengage with a beep and the dealer rummaging in the contents. “He gave me your WorkMate just after you were captured, for safe keeping. And because he feared his faulty memory would fail him and he would forget who it belonged to and sell it or wipe the memory. He knew you would come back for it someday.” A moment later the dealer came back to the table and put the small handheld device down in front of her. Xyl quirked a grin at the battered hard plastic casing decorated with the same whimsical blue monster that matched the tattoo on her arm.
“What’s this about the Walking Dead?” Xyl asked after a moment. “Who are they?”
“A gang. A very powerful, very large gang.” Azim nodded toward the front rooms of his store, indicating the streets outside. “I’m sure you saw the state of things outside. Before, when you were here, there were many of your kind, many different groups, small or large. Sometimes you worked together, sometimes you fought. But this new gang, the Dead, they are like an amoeba. They’ve absorbed all the smaller gangs, and if they refused to join the Dead they were killed. Hunted down like dogs, on the Net or IRL. The Utopians, the Chaos, the Sharks, the Analemma Collective, they’re all gone or dead.” The dealer shook his head sadly. “And it is all of Atlantica, not just here in North. They are beginning to take over Pacifica too, or so my brother in San Fran tells me.”
“And you’re still here?” Xyl asked incredulously.
“I pay them bribes and don’t question when they come to raid my shop!” Azim said angrily. “I am not the only black market dealer in North Atlantica. I am useful to them, so long as I keep my head down and don’t ask questions.”
Xyl put the coffee mug down on the table and rubbed her eyes wearily. “Well, it’s nice to know who I need to keep clear of, at least.”
“I do not think you will be able to,” Azim said tensely, shaking his head. He looked up and gestured to his son, visible through the darkened doorway into the front of the shop, gun in hand as he kept watch of the street. “I think they will be coming for Jamal soon. After that, I will leave.”
* * * *
Pepper –
I used to wonder if you’d tell me what it was like to see all this from the Orbitals or if you’d just go on one of your riffs about how we’re all living like rats down here. Of course you were usually saying that stuff after a hefty snootful of that Russian rocket fuel you sucked down like water, so Saint Darpa only knows what the hell you were thinking.
Azim says it’s not safe in North anymore. He told me to leave, go down to Old DC, or better yet South. Somewhere where the local biz isn’t as lucrative for the Walking Dead. He thinks they’ll leave me alone down in DC if I act like a CorpRunner since they’ve got most of the Corps down there pretty much under their control. Maybe, I dunno. There’s nothing left for me in North anymore anyway.
But I’ll be damned if I play CorpRunner. And I’ll be damned if I hide like some silly Gilligan.
* * * *
Xyl swung her backpack off her aching shoulder and dropped it on the bed, her eyes sweeping the neutral colors of the hotel room’s interior. The commsignal booster on the bedside table, the bulletproof and polarized window opposite the door, the large round table and two chairs in the corner. The view through the window showed the rainslick armored side of the hotel’s other tower some three hundred yards away and beyond it the brownish-gray gloom of early afternoon.
She shrugged out of the longcoat and sat down on the bed, tugging open the velcro closures of her boots and kicking them away. She sighed and flopped back on the bed, put her arm over her eyes and contemplated sleeping. But biz was biz and the sooner the run was done the better. The little green pyramid had been blinking pink for the last fifteen minutes as she made her way from Little Cairo back toward the old financial district.
Knowing that delaying wouldn’t make things any easier, she focused on the tiny tumbling green pyramid and triggered it. It zipped to the middle of her visual field and expanded to show the VoiceComm mid-mode, the virtual representation of a communications package – buttons for placing and receiving voice calls and messages. She rotated it to the side of the pyramid that handled messages and triggered the CallBack button. She heard a quiet beep as the call was initiated.
“Kid? That you?”
Searles’ voice was routed via her auditory nerves, audible only inside her own head. “Who else would it be?”
“Right, right. You ready to go?”
“Maybe. Depends on the run.” She triggered the VoiceComm back to Minimized mode and it contracted to a tumbling purple dodecahedron at the bottom left of her visual field. “I’m at a Wall Street corporate crackerbox.”
A pause, and then Searles said, “That’s not good enough. Find somewhere more secure.”
“And hold up a sign that says ‘I’m a Runner, Security free for all in the hot tub at ten, tag and bag at midnight’? I don’t think so.” She pulled the pillow over her head and silently wondered if Searles had ever tried to hire a Runner before or if he was doing this for the glamour and excitement. “You worry about your open expense accounts, I’ll worry about Security. What’s the run?”
“That can wait for the moment. You shouldn’t have gone back to North; you’ve picked up a tail. Possibly more than one.”
Xyl sat up abruptly and tossed the pillow away. “What in the sacred hard drives of Saint Darpa are you blathering about, Corp?”
“I’m ‘blathering’ about that little side trip you made to Little Cairo. That’s right in the middle of Walking Dead territory. You’re an untagged Runner on their turf, dealing with a black market dealer who, I might add, deals almost exclusively in banned weaponry and electronics.”
Xyl didn’t wait to hear more. She dropped line on the call, tugged her boots on as quickly as she could, and shrugged into her longcoat halfway to the elevators.
The rain was coming down in sheets as she took the stairs up from the subway maglev two at a time and burst out into the middle of Little Cairo’s four square block territory. It stung her eyes and left tracks of grit down her face and scrawled black streaks across the skin of her head and neck, made the slime of the old alleyways slick and treacherous under her boots. There were people on the streets now, women wrapped in black moving silently under the wide awnings of the butcher shop, in the lights of the fish market, hurrying home huddled under the reinforced plastic of rain parkas. Somewhere, faintly, she could hear someone playing a sitar with drums keeping time, and laughter and voices arguing in Arabic.
She skidded around the pastry shop’s inert bulk and into the alleyway leading to the back door of Azim’s shop . . .
. . . a door that was hanging open, torn halfway off it’s hinges. And a small, brown, blood-streaked hand was flung across the threshold.
Security sirens were approaching in the distance. She turned and fled.
Pepper –
Azim and Jamal are gone. If you’re out there, if you’re still alive – – I don’t know if you are – – we’re alone now. Just you and me, kid.
There are two things a person really and truly can’t live without in this world anymore. A WorkMate and a chipcoin. Everything else can be left behind. But it meant leaving behind my t-shirt that had Auri’s blood on it. It was either leave it behind or get fragged when I went back to get it. I knew they’d be waiting for me. I caught a bot-car to the Central Park maglev station and bum-rushed my way onto a corporate skyhopper that was dropping off passengers. Burned out the bot-brain when I forced it to plot a jump. Five minutes later, I’m back at Trade Center Station and booking myself on the next train to Miami. I’m hopping off at DC but the Feds and the Walking Dead don’t know that.
Now I’ve got a headache from the damned bot-brain I hotwired and I’m getting lightheaded. Exhaustion again.
Two hours to DC. But I can’t afford to sleep. What if they’re on the train? Walking Dead, Feds, both? Hasn’t that null-bit Searles managed to trip some kind of system flag himself yet?
* * * *
The Georgetown University subway station was a blaze of light and color as Xyl stepped off the maglev. A reggae band was holding court at one end, all drums and an ancient synthesizer keyboard. White acoustic tile walls muted the sound somewhat, as did the noise cancellers in the ceiling that dampened the deep oscillating thrum of the maglev itself. Delivery bots, low black insectoid forms towing wheeled flatbeds, all arms and three-fingered manipulators, scooted purposefully around her as she headed for the escalators.
It was night again now. Bot-controlled taxis streaked past her in the sultry summer air; the sour smells of hot wet concrete and the high-pitched whine of electric cars. Old DC still held a great deal of its former governmental character even though the actual government it had originally been constructed for had long since been dismantled. The world was governed from Geneva now. The regional governments of Atlantica and Pacifica had divided up between them the populous East and West coasts of the old United States. Each had become city-states that would have unhinged the minds of those who had first organized themselves into such sociopolitical divisions.
She wandered for some time through the streets of Georgetown, getting the lay of the land and marking locations. The buildings were mostly newer construction, though many she passed had the bronze markers of historical preservation. Behind the lines of shops and office storefronts were residential streets hidden in the abundant greenery. It wasn’t long before she realized she was being followed.
She stopped and ducked up a narrow stone staircase between two of the ancient buildings, feeling her way up the stairs in the gathering twilight, ivy beneath her hands skimming the stone walls. By the time she got to the top she had to stop to catch her breath, then peered up and down the street. An obviously affluent residential neighborhood judging from the well-kept houses, the wide cobblestoned street, the small manicured lawns filled with flowers. Bowing to necessity, she triggered the nanos’ Mid-mode and queried for a street map, then turned right. In moments she’d found another staircase between another pair of houses, much better lit, leading down to the street she’d just left.
As she got to street level again she stopped and peered around the corner. A Security troop carrier was pulling up to the curb and two men in the usual urban camouflage and kevlar were running toward the staircase she’d ascended a few moments before.
Looking down the other side of the street, she saw two young girls not much older than herself in leather skirts and short jackets, mirrorshades covering their eyes and chipjacks above their ears flashing as they ducked into a doorway trying not to be seen by Security. As they did Xyl saw one of them had a jagged triskele tattooed on the back of one chrome-nailed hand.
Moving quickly, she dashed out and between two of the bot-cars at the curb, then watched the orderly procession of electric transportation moving by in front of her. The moment the line slowed as the cars far ahead paused to make a turn, she scuttled between two of them and up three to a taxi. She jerked the door open and piled inside.
The man and woman inside, both obviously corporate executives from the stylish but elegantly plain clothing, stopped speaking instantly and stared at her in astonishment.
Xyl righted herself as best she could, then grinned in what she hoped was a convincing manner and began her usual snappy patter without missing a beat. “Hi, how you folks doing? Sorry if I startled you, I’m Auriel D’Angelo, administrative assistant for Lennon, McCartney and Starr Acquisitions.”
* * * *
The corporates dropped her off at the Georgetown Hyatt-Regency. By the time she got there she’d already booked herself a room in the Business wing and ordered another two sets of clothes and a backpack to be delivered to the hotel as soon as possible. The hotel had a drive-through secured entrance and she hopped out on a wave of false promises to get in touch with her new corporate “friends” about some NetSpace development work. She stopped only long enough to let the hotel scanner confirm she had no weapons or proscribed electronics and to confirm her chipcoin with the booking clerk. She scooped up the doorcard and headed for the elevators.
The Georgetown Hyatt was built like a fortress. The outside walls were three feet of solid concrete slabs reinforced with steel and aircraft titanium mesh. The windows were permanently sealed double panes of bulletproof glass with a liquid crystal core that could be turned reflectively opaque at the flip of a switch to shield out visual or infrared scanning. Each room was bot-scanned for sensing devices or other electronics when they were cleaned. The roof helipad, the underground maglev entrance and the street-level entrances were guarded by the Hyatt’s own security who also carried Panic Buttons to summon Atlantica Security. Cameras linked to the hotel’s AI peered down every internal hallway and the elevator shafts. Bots and the Hyatt’s security patrolled the hotel’s service levels and kitchens. They also had secured soundproof and signalproof conference rooms, and signalproofing was available on some of the rooms. Each room had locks that could be programmed with the occupant’s own security code. None of this was cheap, but Searles had told her to find someplace more secure and it was his chipcoin she was running through the credit-scanners.
Lightheaded and aching with exhaustion, Xyl flipped the room’s windows to full opacity and firmly commanded herself to wash the grime of the North Atlantica rain away before she ruined a perfectly good set of bed linens. She took her WorkMate from her coat’s pocket and tossed it to the bed before shrugging out of the leather longcoat.
She woke up when the hot water finally ran out and the cold spray forced her back to consciousness.
* * * *
Eight hours later Xyl woke to find the room dark with night. She triggered the chrono display and the green pyramid morphed into green alphanumerics. It was the middle of the night, three hours til dawn. She yawned and opened the battered cover of her WorkMate, folding it up and sliding it into the recessed slot on the back of the device. She put her thumb to the biometric sensor beside the directional buttons below the screen and the tiny green pyramid in the lower left corner of her vision automatically zipped to the middle of her visual field and expanded into the virtual representation of the WorkMate’s bot personality. A comical green, furry, two-legged three-dimensional cartoon character with a short green elephant’s trunk, big googly eyes and spindly arms ending in white mitten-like hands. It jumped and flipped in a somersault, then rolled up into a menacing martial arts defensive posture.
“Xyl! Where have you been?” it asked after a moment when the auto-test sequence was done.
“In storage, just like you,” Xyl answered the WorkMate’s bot construct. “Pepper gave you to Azim for safekeeping while I was in prison.”
“Prison? What happened?”
“That’s a very long story,” Xyl said, not really wanting to go over it. “And anyway, it’s over with now and we’ve got a job.”
“Gotcha. You want a rundown of what I’ve got on tap?”
“Yeah, chapter and verse. I might need you to run out on the Net while I’m asleep and get whatever we don’t have. You can never have too many Nulls or too much Shielding.”
“Copy that. You want the list by alphabetical order or use category?”
Xyl stopped to yawn again and closed her eyes, pulling the pillow over her head. Wally still floated in her visual field, bobbing slightly with nervous energy and flexing his fingers. “Use category, subsort alphabetical.”
“Gotcha.”
* * * *
“Boss? Boss, it’s time to wake up now.”
Xyl felt the warm ocean of sleep beginning to recede, the flickering dream images of alphanumerics and the outlines of virtual objects fading as her mind came back online. “Wally?”
“Boss, you’ve got a bad problem.”
“Whaddaya mean?” Xyl slurred, still half-asleep.
“These twisty new Torus 3 nanos you’ve got inside your head now have a remote kill switch.”
Xyl rolled over onto her back and looked up at the ceiling, digging the WorkMate out from beneath the covers. She triggered the tumbling orange torus ring that was Wally’s minimized form and the ring immediately zipped up into her visual field and expanded into the green cartoon character. “Cortex burn?”
“No. Arterial blockage, cardiac arrest. I can’t break the encryption; it looks like a Level 1-A, military grade.”
Xyl sighed and rubbed her eyes. “Looks like Mr. Big wasn’t such a sugar daddy after all.”
“You’re sure this guy’s a Fed?”
Xyl grinned a little. “Yes, he’s a Fed. He’s too Gilligan to be a Corp. His Comm number’s on a South Atlantica Fed server exchange.”
The bot construct jumped in place in her visual field. “Maybe he’s not so Gilligan after all. Maybe he doesn’t want any witnesses. Or evidence.”
“Or he doesn’t want any loose ends afterward. Whatever.”
“If you say that old saying of Sergeant Pepper’s—”
“‘Ours is not to question why, ours is but to do or die.’” Xyl chuckled as the small green construct growled and somersaulted in annoyance.
“You want me to keep trying on the encryption on your nanos?” The little construct went through several of it’s programmed martial arts moves; poses meant more for show than actual fighting, meant to indicate the bot’s quasi-emotional state of agitation.
Xyl looked up at the smooth white of the ceiling and didn’t answer for a long moment. “No.”
“It’s your funeral, boss. You want that warez rundown now?”
“Go for it, Little Buddy.”
Wally hopped and somersaulted again in annoyance. “Sure thing, Ginger.” The construct put it’s white-mittened hands up in front of itself and a yellow sphere appeared between them, then expanded to show a textfile listing sorted by category and alphabetically. The text floated in Xyl’s visual field, scrolling smoothly past, each filename on the list briefly changing from silver alphanumerics to orange as Wally spoke. “In the Attack category, we’ve got DeathRay, Drop Kick, Gag, The Holy Hand Grenade of Saint Darpa, Null, Scrambler, and Xacto. In the Defense category, AcidSlide, GateGuard, Get Out of Jail Free, Mask, Shield Level 7, and Sticky. In the Utilities category, BodyCheck, Identify, KillJoy, NetBug, Skater, Squash, SysInfo, and Sergeant Pepper’s Yellow Submarine. And last but definitely not least, in the Virus/Worm category, we’ve got 2BorNot2B, Jolly Rancher, and GarbageMan.”
“Jolly Rancher? Who put that old kludge in there?” As she spoke to the construct Xyl triggered the blinking green pyramid tumbling in it’s ceaseless dance and brought up the hotel’s foodservice menu, scrolling down through it. The textfile was automatically resized to accommodate it.
“Sergeant Pepper. He thinks it’s funny. And despite it’s decrepitude no one has been able to find a way to wipe it completely all at once. Whoever wrote the original code was a genius.”
Xyl snorted an indelicate mirthless laugh. “You just keep the damned thing Squashed; the last thing I want is those damned mooing cows in my head.” As she spoke to the construct she finally realized that vitamin broth wasn’t on the hotel’s menu at all and keyed for potato soup and orange juice. No NetRunner could afford to get drunk, the effects on the nervous system didn’t fade for days and NetRunning simply wasn’t possible while intoxicated. She keyed out of the hotel’s menu and the textfile re-centered itself. She scrolled down through the list, thinking. Wally had minimized again back to the orange torus ring tumbling in the corner of her vision beside the whirling green pyramid. “Wally, what about the Mu module?”
“Security, boss.”
Xyl nodded slightly. “Yeah. Security. Where’s that keypad?”
“You forgetting something, boss?”
“Wally, sometimes you’re more paranoid than me,” Xyl said with a sigh. She threw back the blankets, reached for the comm booster on the bedside table, and turned the small half-sphere until she found the controls for the signal-proofing hardware installed in the hotel room’s walls. A brief burst of static across her visual field told her the signal disruption was indeed in force, and the windows were already turned to full opacity. She got to her feet and staggered none too steadily to the door, checking to make sure it was locked. “Okay, Professor, make it quick, I’ve got food on the way.”
The WorkMate’s transmission had faded slightly as she moved across the room, but the small green construct reappeared in her visual field as she huddled back under the covers. Wally jumped, whirled, and clapped his hands. A triangular neon-blue keypad appeared and expanded, Wally himself minimizing back to the tumbling orange torus ring. “Go for it, Skipper.”
Xyl put her hand up to rub her eyes wearily, but it did nothing to erase the ghosts, the sudden vision in her mind’s eye of tossing yellow-gold hair and eerily bright sky blue eyes. And it didn’t make the keypad floating in her visual field go away. She keyed in the passcode.
“And we have a winner,” Wally said as the last digit was confirmed. The construct popped back up as the keypad vanished, flipped into a handstand and then into a complicated dance move. As he did so a line of blue light grew from a point that appeared above the construct and quickly delineated a wire-grid sphere. The sphere began to spin slowly as chrome silver spun into existence on its surface, tiny spots of light weaving around it like fireflies in orbit around a moon. “MuSpace Relocation Module, version 1.5, constructed and compiled by Auriel D’Angelo. Operational Status – Functional.”
Xyl didn’t speak for a moment as she watched her lover’s greatest creation spinning in serene silence. She’d lost the t-shirt that had held Auriel’s blood but she still had this product of her genius. “Wally . . . do me a favor. Copy the module and lock it up in your offline archives, all right? Extra copy for safekeeping. Full security.”
“Right, boss. Done.”
“Maybe we’ll go out on the Net and have a look around after I eat,” Xyl said.
She got to her feet again and reached for one of the sets of clean clothing, realizing she wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep. The MuSpace module’s virtual construct vanished from her visual field as Wally once more locked it away.
Pepper -
You ever get the feeling that you’re just a rat in a maze, running from one bit of cheese-flavored jellylike substance to another? Of course you do. We all do. The sociologists say that’s normal. That feeling of paralyzed futility within the hypersonic whirl of chipcoin numbers and dataflow is simply the Zen-like stasis of modern life! Take joy that your existence is translated into numbers; they move so much faster than words and take up so much less bandwidth and storage space!
We don’t move, Pepper. We just oscillate.
Why not make your tawdry existence meaningful with a cookie-cutter cubbyhole full of obsolete Chinese electronics and rickety but expensive furniture? Why not prove your worth to yourself by building redundant Netspaces that rehash information already summarized, sanitized and pasteurized for your consumption? Why not be a shining example of corporate loyalty by clocking on at the same exact moment every day, doing the same exact things you did the day before, without complaint and without deviating from the company line? Hell, why not stay overtime just for the sheer joy of Getting Things Done?
At the end of it all, when you’re laying there in the street after the bot-car has run over you and you get to that point where your nanos are core-dumping your gray matter in a futile attempt to convince you that your body isn’t really lying there bleeding to death from multiple compound fractures . . . in the end, are any of those pictures you’re seeing any different from anyone else’s? In the end, is there any one single image, one single thought, that you could truly call your own?
This world demands we define ourselves in relation to other things. We’re somebody’s coproc, we’re part of some gang, we’re somebody’s kid or parent or genetic contributor. We’re Input as opposed to Output. We even persist in believing our bodies are our own when we devote the life and lifespan of that body to pushing bits for the almighty Corp. Hell, you know that better than anyone, you let the damned Marines ship you around and throw you in front of other people’s guns.
So I ask myself sometimes . . . is what I do, is the life I choose to live, intrinsically wrong?
Is life really meant to be a rat in a maze, chasing after that cheese-flavored jellylike substance? Or is it just that the culture that has ruled this planet for over two hundred years declares that anyone who lives outside it’s dictates is a threat and therefore wrong?
When you take away the nanos, the Net, the Corps, the fast-forward life, the fashion, the metal and glass and glitter, what’s left?
Isn’t it weird that in a world that doesn’t physically exist I am far more “real” than I have ever been in this so-called “real” world?
* * * *
“Lennon, McCartney and Starr Acquisitions, yesterday is just a CommCall away.”
“Kid, where do you come up with this stuff?” Searles asked.
“I paid attention in Pop Culture 101.”
“Right, right. You ready to get to work?”
“No, I’m kinda happy here, the food’s good and I can watch North Atlantica Security’s Funniest Street Videos twenty-four seven. Saw a couple old enemies get fragged at the Madison Square Garden Free-for-All. What comedy. Security oughta syndicate it, not just do it live.”
“Right. Are you on a secured commline?”
“This is the Georgetown Hyatt. They hold global trade summits here. Every commline is secured.”
“I’m sending you a file. The target is OptiGen, they’re a small-time neuroelectronics research and development lab. One of their lab rats escaped last month and managed to dictate a sworn affidavit before his autodestruct kicked in. OptiGen is in the final beta stages of development on a nanocomputer chip made of living neuron tissue. Buckyballs made of neurons, linked into a neural processing network that is projected to triple the speed and process power of any artificially constructed system. Your actual target is the design and all related schemata.”
The purple pyramid of the VoiceComm program whirled to the “File Transfer” screen as Searles sent the file. Xyl triggered the “Accept” button and watched as the blue arrowhead icon that represented the file zipped obediently to the lower right of her visual field. “Okay, sure, you want fries with that or d’you want to try the new apple fritters? What’s in it for me, Corp? You haven’t named a pricetag yet. I only do charity work for drunken ex-Marines and orphans with big blue eyes.”
“You can keep the nanos and anything else you pick up while you’re there is your own business.”
“Oh joy, I get to clean out a mom-n-pop R&D company. The only thing of any value will be what I’m bagging for you, Corp. Try again.” And I wouldn’t be around to enjoy it anyway, Xyl finished silently to herself.
“Fine, twenty million and keep the nanos.”
“Magnanimity is a virtue in the virtual world, Corp. I’ll CallBack when the job’s done.” Xyl dropped line on the call before Searles could answer and considered the three icons now lined up at the bottom left of her visual field. “Wally, wake up.”
The motionless orange ring in the middle of the small line of icons began spinning and tumbling at her command. “Yeah, boss?” the construct asked.
“A quest, I cry, my virtually real companion at arms! We have a quest!”
“Oh please, spare me the pseudo-Shakespearean cow pies,” Wally groaned. “You woke me up for this?”
“Yes, I woke you up for this. I need my encryption files.”
“Oh all right,” Wally grumped. The construct expanded into the cartoon character form and reached down for the tumbling green pyramid icon. It expanded to fill the construct’s white-mittened hands. “Hmm, let me see, where did I put those files . . .? Oh, yeah, here they are.” It opened one side of the pyramid as if it were a box and reached inside, pulled out an icon of a large silver skeleton key. “Ready, boss.”
“Okay, good, are they still intact?”
“Scanning.” The construct went still for a moment as the WorkMate’s file scanners swept through the encryption files. “Yes, they’re intact. But they’re out of date. This textfile scans as a newer version.”
Xyl threw herself back onto the bed, looked up at the ceiling. “Well, I guess I can’t put it off anymore. I need to upsig sometime.”
“Yeah, boss. Crazy Eddie won’t deal with bots.”
Xyl sighed and nodded, though Wally wouldn’t be able to sense it. She wiggled a little to make sure nothing was tensed up, and closed her eyes. Wally minimized again as she triggered the tumbling green pyramid to Mid-mode and flipped the pyramid to the NetRunner controls. Three buttons divided the triangular side of the pyramid shape: one held a black thunderbolt, one a solid red circle, one a black circle enclosing a silver triangle. Upsignal, Drop Line, and Persona Options. She hit the Persona Options and the pyramid’s face folded up and unfolded into a black screen, the Persona module’s settings scrolling down in glowing green alphanumerics. She loaded up Mask, GateGuard, Get Out of Jail Free, and Scrambler, then checked to make sure her old Persona Appearance file was indeed active. “Fine, let’s get this show on the road.”
“No Shielding, boss?”
“What do you think that’ll look like to Crazy Eddie? One of the most paranoid people ever to upsignal? It’ll look like I’m gunning for him. He’ll be antsy enough once he sees the Scrambler.”
“If you say so, boss.” Wally didn’t sound convinced. “You want me to tag along?”
Xyl sighed. “I do, but you’d better not. As you said, he doesn’t like bots.”
She exed out of the Options screen and it flipped back to the NetRunner controls, and before she could find another reason to procrastinate she hit the UpSignal button.
The jolt of disconnection – her brain and nervous system switching their input from the physical world to the virtual immersion fed to it by the nanobots – was like suddenly falling backwards off the roof of a building. Fractals began to boil up at the edges of her vision, the rippling indigo of deep water, undulating. In a rush of fast-forward speed she was thrust through the water’s surface and plunging headlong into a pulsing world of dark triangle-patterned organic curves. The rush of speed increased, her optic nerves barely registering the textures and outlines before she fell toward the light rising in front of her.
And she was staring down at skeletal, almost talon-like white hands, the brownish tatters hanging from the emaciated limbs. As she looked down at the pasty skin, textures began to appear, a moving wave of pseudo-goosebumps sweeping up the Persona’s form, and she could see the dark tracing of veins beneath the “skin” and the weave of the tattered and fraying rags. Black wires shifted and hissed together as she moved, the lion’s mane of dark fiber-optic strands that were the Persona icon’s hair. As she watched the blood tears began to drip onto her hands, disappearing as she watched. The weight across her back was the slender, curved sword that was the Scrambler’s virtual representation, the small weight at her hip the bag slung over her shoulder that held her other programs, or rather their icons. The actual programs were now far away, stored in the unused gray matter brainspaces of her physical body. The tiny green pyramid of her nanobots orbited around her like a demented firefly, providing access to the Persona’s built-in functions. The icons for the GateGuard, Mask and Get Out of Jail Free programs were already fastened on her left arm, indicating their active status. With those three programs running her Persona couldn’t be traced back to her physical body, she projected false data to Identify and SysInfo, and no one could trap her by Stickying her Persona into a netspace or to another Persona.
And the Scrambler would take care of any who tried.
She looked up and around, and felt something that had been bound up for what seemed like centuries abruptly unknot.
Jagged purple miniature mountains rose around her, reaching wickedly sharp peaks toward an empty black sky. To her left, rising above the nearby horizon, a photorealistic fractalization of the planet Jupiter. A shockingly bright yellow starfish-like creature was inching it’s way across the gently rolling featureless purple plain where the mountains dropped away, probably a Sysop. At the edge of the horizon in front of her a line of light delineated the edge of the netspace. The sky above wasn’t infinite, it was simply a flat black that gave the illusion of depth. The miniature mountains about her were impossible to climb, almost vertical, but hidden behind them or among them were link portals to other netspaces, other systems. Far out on the plain in front of her she could see two figures standing some distance apart, a bright spark racing between them. Kids, she guessed, playing Frisbee – probably guests at the Georgetown Hyatt just as she was, playing some game when they should be plugged into their DataMates doing their schoolwork.
“Silent mode,” she said up at the green pyramid circling her head. It beeped and disappeared, reappearing in its usual place at the bottom left of her visual field. She triggered it and scrolled down through the list of netcodes, and Blipped out of the Georgetown Hyatt’s netspace.
Again the rush of speed, the fast-forward freefall. And she was standing in an old Wild West ghost town that was far more realistically rendered than the Hyatt’s simplistic netspace. Dust and tumbleweeds blew across her path, down the unpaved street, rattling battered and warped doors and shutters, whistling through cracks in walls. The sky above was a hard cloudless bleached blue, an artificial seamless projection onto the ceiling of the netspace. The white skull of a horse, a long bony horn rising from what would have been its forehead, hung from the door of the large building to her right. To her left, a line of small empty shops, jagged spikes of glass still hanging from the frames of the windows. At the end of the street stood a wooden platform – a gallows, the rope loop swinging in the slight wind. Far off in the distance were low brown mountains, and scrubby bushes and cacti dotted the dry landscape.
She walked forward slowly, alert for any sounds not made by the programmed wind. Crazy Eddie had changed his netspace since she’d seen it last. The previous site had been a circus funhouse with traps in every hallway and room, sometimes two or three to a room. She was certain this new seemingly simple netspace design was the same, just that he’d gotten more subtle. And he sometimes traded his warez to Runners who were willing to trade time as bodyguards.
The silence was unnerving. She had to fight to keep her hand from going to the Scrambler’s hilt over her shoulder.
A wooden sign swinging from the side of the buildings to her right showed a half-obscured skull and crossbones, barely recognizable under the freshly burned jagged triskele that was the icon of the Walking Dead.
She whirled, and her hand automatically jerked the Scrambler from its scabbard on her back.
Three other NetRunners were standing silently behind her, their Persona forms shockingly incongruous in the Wild West setting. One was a modification on the standard Persona form, an androgynous humanoid shape with sharkskin texture, the eyes shimmering black diamond. The second was straight out of a NetGame, a Special Forces type with M-16 at the ready and a long knife at its belt, both weapons representations of illegal and dangerous programs. The third was a gnome in a long green cloak, it’s long white beard glittering with tiny firefly lights indicating the programs it had active. All three had the jagged triskele icon orbiting around them.
“You are trespassing. Leave,” said the first NetRunner, the one with the shark-like skin. Its voice was high-pitched and probably intended to be deliberately grating on the nerves.
“I’m here to see Crazy Eddie,” Xyl said. After so long even she was surprised at the twining whispery skitter that was her Persona’s voice texture.
“He doesn’t want to see you,” the gnome said, grinning at her merrily.
“I’ll believe that when he says it to me,” Xyl countered.
“He won’t,” the first NetRunner said calmly.
Xyl peered at the three for a moment, then transferred the Scrambler to her left hand and hit the icon for the Identify program on her left arm.
The three reacted instantly and violently. The military Persona brought up its gun as the other two streaked toward her too fast to track. Xyl dived sideways toward the building on her left as the military Persona began firing.
The short ratcheting stutter of automatic weapons fire bounced crazily around the netspace’s virtual buildings, lines of holes tearing themselves through the warped walls. Xyl dove through the empty doorway and rolled to her feet, the shards of broken glass she’d landed on scraping against the floor beneath her. One sliced into her hand as she pushed herself to her feet, numb coldness that indicated the Persona had been injured immediately engulfing that hand.
Xyl scooped up one of the long shards and Identified it, then laughed and flung the shard at the sharkskinned Persona now streaking toward her through the door of the building. It hit the other NetRunner squarely in the chest. Xyl didn’t wait to see what affect it had.
The rickety building was a ghost-town saloon. Broken chairs and overturned tables scattered around the floor were mute evidence of previous routs by the three Personas. Some of the bottles lining the wall behind the long, dust-covered bar were shattered, but most were intact. Xyl acted on a hunch and ducked around behind the bar as the military Persona came running in the door, the M-16 shattering the grimy mirror on the wall just beyond Xyl’s head. She ducked out of the line of fire with a yelp, began scuttling monkey-like along the floor with the Scrambler in one hand as shattered glass rained down around her.
She found the bottles lined up neatly on the shelf below the bar, locked behind delicate wrought-iron cabinet doors.
“Eddie, you’re a paranoid genius!” She heard the military Persona smashing his way through the overturned tables and chairs as she pulled away enough to stab the Scrambler’s needle-sharp point into the keyhole of the stylized gargoyle that was a lock on the cabinet doors. The wrought iron vanished as the Scrambler randomized the code of the security lock on the cabinet doors, and she jerked out two of the ornate facetted crystal bottles just as the military Persona came around the end of the bar.
The military Persona didn’t have time to fire. She jerked the stopper out of the bottle and flung it at her enemy in one move.
“Better luck next time, sucker!” Xyl taunted as the other Persona stopped and looked down at itself as the red liquid in the bottle splashed down it’s front and began to dissolve away its virtual form. The military Persona looked up at her once more with surprised eyes before disappearing in a flash of blue light.
“What the hell is this stuff?” she asked herself as she finally got around to checking the Identify program’s results. The white alphanumerics scrolled smoothly across the top of her visual field. “Fraggin’ hell! Military grade—”
“Virii,” came the voice from the area of the saloon’s doorway. Xyl recognized the gnome Persona’s quiet, unemphatic tone.
She grabbed three more of the bottles from the cabinet before the gnome came around the corner of the bar, a ball of green flame glowing in one lifted hand.
“Wally! Hotload Shields.” Xyl backed away, trying to scoot backwards with both hands full, one arm holding the contained virii in their bottles against her chest, the other clutching the Scrambler.
“I told you so, boss,” Wally’s voice said, audible only to her. “Shields loading . . . activating.”
The diamond planes of plum-purple light sprang up around Xyl as she rolled to her feet, shattered glass falling away from the rags and tatters of her Persona’s clothing. She was glad the glass of the shattered mirror had been simply virtual window-dressing and not a Null as the window glass shard had been. The sharkskin Persona was gone, the Null’s “divide by zero” having frozen it. “You’re not a Persona, are you? None of you are. Any NetRunner playing hired gun for Eddie would have been Masked and armed to the teeth. So why would you react to an Identify?”
“My friend, what makes you think we belong to Crazy Eddie?” the gnome asked with a smile. “And we must thank you for discovering where he hid those virii. We have been looking for them for quite some time.”
“Yeah, well, keep looking!” She shoved the bottles containing the virii into the bag still hanging at her hip, storing the virii in the gray matter of her physical body’s brain. “Military grade stuff is always single-copy. You throw a DeathRay or an AcidSlide at me and you risk corrupting these things beyond repair. So back off.”
“My friend, why would I wish to risk it when your illogical human thought processes will lead me to more of Crazy Eddie’s stockpile? And at any rate you are not of the Walking Dead and therefore expendable. Four military grade virii – five if you count the one you used on Rambo – for possibly dozens more of similar quality? I believe that would be considered acceptable loss.”
“I don’t have time to argue the point,” Xyl snapped, moving around the gnome with the Scrambler at the ready as she headed for the door. “The other two, what’s their regen cycle?”
The gnome shrugged and folded its hands over its beard, seeming content to watch her backing toward the door. “I don’t believe you are cleared for that information.”
“I’m sure I’m not,” Xyl muttered. “I’m never cleared for anything. Must be why I’m a career klepto – goes back to being told ‘no’ all the time as a child.”
She slipped sideways out the door, the simulated harsh sunlight of the netspace glinting off the Scrambler’s blade as she whirled and swept a look around the dusty street. She didn’t have much time before the other two Aivatars regenerated and showed up again.
When she had dealt with Crazy Eddie previously, when this netspace had been the circus funhouse, the warez dealer’s inner sanctum had been accessible through a hidden doorway in a room at the very center of the maze of traps. His logic had been typical NetRunner: if a Runner had the warez, the imagination or the experience to get through the traps to see him, they were worth bothering with.
The dust of the rutted road beneath her feet swirled around her as she moved up the street, the gnome Aivatar watching silently from the steps of the destroyed saloon. The sandy dust was thin on the roadway, and as she watched it shifted away in the wind revealing some sort of black markings. Arrows. Pointing down the street in the direction she was traveling.
“Wait a minute,” she said slowly, and turned to regard the gnome Aivatar.
Aivatars were an advanced form of experimental artificial intelligence. They could not exist outside of NetSpace as bots did, but within their virtual element they were the activate-and-forget weapons of choice. Usually they were built to resemble animals or mythical beasts or monsters from works of fiction. The most advanced – meaning those closest to true autonomous artificial intelligence which could be proved by use of the famous Turing test – were given humanoid forms. That was how Xyl had been fooled into thinking she faced three NetRunners and also why the three had reacted so violently to the Identify. They knew that the moment she identified them as Aivatars her tactics would change. NetRunners would use weaponry on Aivatars that they would be extremely reluctant to use on a fellow NetRunner. An Aivatar had no brain and nervous system that would be damaged by use of such “final solutions” as DeathRay. They had an acceptable level of intelligence that made them useful as guardians or as search-and-destroy, but most operated on a series of predictable patterns, which made them vulnerable to experienced NetRunners.
Yet they were still machines, and like any program their only goal was to carry out their tasks. Without fail and as efficiently as possible.
Therefore, if these three Aivatars had been given the task of prison guards for Crazy Eddie, the gnome should react violently if she got near the place where the door to Eddie’s inner sanctum was hidden. It wouldn’t be able to stop itself from reacting.
“All this for a damned encryption update,” she muttered. Xyl turned to watch the gnome as she began a slow circuit of the ghost town’s buildings. “Wally?”
A double beep heralded the bot construct’s arrival. A small flash of light and the funny green-furred cartoon character appeared beside her, his short elephant’s trunk lashing in agitation. “Yeah, boss?”
“Better haul out 2BorNot2B. Father Time over there will go orbital when I find Eddie’s hide-out.”
Wally glared at the Aivatar indignantly, then clapped his hands. The green pyramid of Xyl’s nanobot interface appeared in his hands. He opened one side of it, reached inside and brought out a human skull – the virus’ icon. “Heads up, boss.”
Xyl snorted and freed one hand from the Scrambler, held it out. The construct put it into her hand.
“Get thee to a punnery,” Xyl said over her shoulder to the construct.
“Aw, I never get to have any fun,” Wally almost-whined. Xyl heard the double beep as the construct once more retreated to the confines of the WorkMate system.
“Now then,” Xyl said briskly. She turned the skull icon in her hand to show the gnome. “I think you know what this is.”
“Civilian B Level virus 2BorNot2B. Formerly military-grade, declassified and downgraded to Civilian A level—”
“Yeah,” Xyl interrupted. “Now let’s make a deal. You tell me where Crazy Eddie is and get out of my way –- and keep your friends off my back as well – – and you won’t get Old Yorick here shoved down your I/O port.”
“And if I do not wish to make this . . . ‘deal’?”
Xyl shrugged, heard the fiber optic strands of her Persona’s hair hissing like rain. “Then I take advantage of your programmed nature and find him anyway, and you get Old Yorick here doing his happy little mathematical dance with your code.”
She circled around the half dozen buildings, watching the gnome. The Aivatar was serene and calm all the while, turning to follow her movements. Post Office and Bank. Sheriff and Jail. The large structure of a stables and barn. The building that held the saloon, a barber shop, a small dry goods shop. A hardware store.
And then she came to the gallows at the end of the street, and the gnome was across the intervening virtual distance faster than she could track.
A quick step aside, the Scrambler sizzled through the shimmering diamond planes of the Aivatar’s Shield and into the gnome’s torso, stabbing downward and impaling the Aivatar to the ground.
It tried to speak, but all that emerged was a thin wail as the Scrambler randomized every mathematical operator function in its code. Light engulfed it, and it vanished without a sound.
Xyl jerked the Scrambler out of the dust and shoved the 2BorNot2B virus into the bag at her hip. She raced around to the back of the small wooden platform and found steps leading up to the rope loop swinging idly in the wind. Below the rope loop, a trap door clearly visible.
She jerked it upward and dropped down inside.
Darkness as the trap door slammed shut behind her, the sense of walls close around her and a faint subterranean echo of dripping water. And then the familiar rising hum of a tazer rifle building up to full charge.
“Are they gone?” asked a harsh, deep voice out of the darkness.
“Who do I gotta do to get an upgrade around here? Which do you want, my first-born child or my right arm?” Xyl asked, her exasperation getting the better of her at last.
She heard the tazer rifle, another NetWeapon appearing as the more familiar neuroelectronic firearm, abruptly drop into stand-by. “You.”
“No, X and it’s sidekicks Y and L. C’mon, Eddie. Those three talking heads will be back and I don’t know when.”
A small light came on, and Xyl nodded as she saw the familiar clown Persona sitting with it’s oversized floppy shoes propped on the wide slab of an ebonywood desk, the tazer rifle across it’s lap and a gigantic pair of pink sunglasses perched on the red bulbous nose. The round face was white with a huge red smile painted on, purple ringing the eyes and a yellow smiley face on the forehead. The hair was a neon blue afro. He wore a multicolored, striped baggy jumpsuit with green pom-poms stitched down the front. When Xyl knew him before, the Persona had always worn a purple and yellow striped floppy hat, the interface to his WorkMate that he’d named his Thinking Cap. But that was nowhere in sight now. Most NetRunners who customized their Personas usually assigned icons to their various programs that would match their Persona’s theme. Crazy Eddie carried his programs as comedy props and his active programs circled around his head as twittering birds, anvils, and stars, a nod to the usual outcome of cartoon mayhem.
Around them both was a prototypical survivalist’s lair. Dirt floors, wires strung along the walls, ancient lightbulbs enclosed in tiny barred cages. Wide shelves of boards and cinderblocks rose up on either side, filled with the icons of virii, worms, utilities, defensive and offensive NetWeaponry, textfiles, password codes, dossiers of blackmailable corporate executives, chemical formulae, illegal encryption.
But there were not nearly as many as Xyl remembered from two and a half years before.
Xyl opened her mouth to speak but Eddie waved her to silence, pointing to a disembodied human ear seemingly growing out of one of the walls. He gestured to the airlock door at the back of the room and Xyl nodded and followed him into the next room. The clown pushed the heavy metal door closed behind them both and spun the wheel on the door itself to lock it.
“I don’t see a Dead icon on you,” Crazy Eddie said, nodding at her.
“But I see one on you,” Xyl answered, looking up at the small jagged triskele that orbited around him with his active program icons.
“That damned thing. It was either let them brand me or get seriously and permanently fragged. Principle is one thing but you do more good for the revolution if you’re alive. A martyr can’t toss a grenade.”
“Right,” Xyl agreed. “I need the latest encryption key upgrade.”
“That all, kid? Pepper told me you were in the hoosegow.”
“Yeah. Some Fed bought out my time for a run.” A Persona couldn’t breathe a sigh of relief but she wanted to when the clown handed her the large silver and gold skeleton key he took from a nearby shelf. “Eddie . . . do you know what’s happened to Pepper? Where is he?”
The clown turned and looked at her for a moment. “Kid, don’t go looking for him. The Dead have been kidnapping people since the day they started taking over the other gangs. Not just Runners and techs but non-coms. Family. Neutrals like me they either eliminated or gave them the chance to join up. Loud-mouthed old ex-Marines who got on their nerves . . . I don’t know. But if he is alive he might not stay that way if you go sniffing around looking for him. So don’t. They’ll make the deal with you soon enough if he’s alive. If they don’t kill you first.”
“Will those Aivatars give you a hard time once I’m gone?” Xyl asked, as she shoved the encryption update into her bag.
“No more than usual. I saw you found those virii and the Null.”
“Yeah. I’ll go on so you can randomize everything again.”
The clown tapped her on the shoulder as she began to turn back to the door. She turned back and he held out his hand expectantly.
“Damn.” Xyl dug in the bag at her hip and brought out the three virii she’d found in the ghost-town saloon and handed them over to the clown. “So much for gratitude.”
“I am grateful, but not to the tune of a million and a half credits. I’m giving you the encrypt update free, remember?”
Once again Xyl wished she could sigh, this time in exasperation. “Yeah, sure.”
She keyed up the nanobot interface and triggered the red circle to drop line.
That's the end of the sampler. We hope you enjoyed it. If you would like to find out what happens next, you can buy the complete Mushroom eBook edition from the usual online bookshops or through www.mushroom-ebooks.com.
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Carol E. Meacham is a science-fiction writer and postal worker living in Rossville, Georgia, USA. Aside from reading, watching and writing science-fiction, her interests include Eastern philosophies, the United States space program, computers, and fan fiction. She has worked for the US Postal Service for eight years. Carol has written fan fiction for the Star Wars universe and the X-Men. Her goal is to publish at least one book in every subgenre of science-fiction.