by Les Petersen
But I didn’t escape one little bit. She knew where to find me and would call ‘just to say hello’. I thought she’d be a man about it and just let it all drop, but she wanted to know what she had done wrong, why I wouldn’t see her, why I wouldn’t even give the security desk a pass for her so she could come in to have coffee with me. It was very difficult. I couldn’t answer her question; just sat and held my chin up and watched her lips moving.
Her voice was a little richer, huskier, like a woman trying to speak like a man. I tried running it through a sampler, crosschecking it for interference, or torque., but it was the way her larynx had changed, not a put on.
I hoped she wouldn’t call, but Kren got into the act—she must have spoken with him. He’d drop her name into conversations that had nothing to do with her, suggested I call her. I stood it for only so long, then got tough with him; told him to keep out of my business and that I could handle my own affairs. He shook his head and told me I was cracking up. We should kiss and make up, he’d said. Stuff him.
Shahn continued to call me ‘just to talk’, so she could look at me. After a while I left the screen blank so I could listen to her voice without having to watch her experiment with facial hair. The first time she called after the Cut she had a full moustache—possibly to prove she was a man in every sense of the word—the next time she wore a goatee, the time after those long sideburns that met beside her lips. Mutton Chops I think they are called.
But her voice…at times when I…
She just wanted to talk, she said, but she wanted to know stupid things. Like how did I trim my pubic hair, what after-shave went best with silk shirts, did the length of your tie show prowess, should she piss against the side of the bowl for privacy or splash it in the middle to make it sound like she was really built? For crying out loud, I have a penis, but I don’t think about how to use it! She took penis envy too far. Not only did I have to acknowledge she now had one too, but I had to—
“Are you all right, sir.” Lucy Clarke was standing above me and she was frowning. A cyborg stood at her shoulder like blue uniformed severity.
I found I had made two fists and was rubbing them against each other in agitation. I shook them out and said, “Just flexing tired muscles. Was there something wrong?”
“No, sir. The user has finished, if you would like the booth.” She held two access cards up like tickets to a show. I rose out of the seat and nodded. The Tinman stepped to one side and I trailed her through the building. As I followed her I remembered to tap the chin mount and get the Heads-up. Just over thirty-five minutes to wall down. More than enough time. She led me through another air-conditioning lock, then gave me a card to swipe while she did the same.
The Dansen was like a cross between Darth Vader’s cube and a French outdoor toilet, an interlocking decahedron splined with tubing used for cooling and sealed against outside interference. Waste tubes, an electronic touchpad, rosettes of media ducts, light amplification units, all tucked into various quadrants. I ducked through the bulkhead, took to the chair and began fitting the jacks before I realised Lucy Clarke was standing by the door, leaning in and watching me.
“You’re familiar with the Dansen, then?” she asked.
“Perfectly, thank you. My mother used one for my crib.” I buckled the straps around my thighs, pushed the pads into place. “How often do you back up?”
She blinked at my question and brushed at the lock of hair on her forehead. “About every two hours.”
“When is the next due?”
I could see she wasn’t sure and was doing a mental check on it. “In about twenty minutes, I think.”
“Thank you. Mind your head.” I waved her back, touched for door closure and it slid down, slicing through any further conversation. Seals hissed into place, I tapped GaZe and he gave me schematics for the Dansen. I dimmed the lights, closed out all external monitors and tapped Medusa. She began a rolling perimeter check. The lights dimmed even further. I could smell worn leather, teak oil and seaweed. A brisk breeze blew in through the air-conditioning vents and I closed my eyes and savoured it. When I opened my eyes, the HUD had preliminary checks all matched so I fired up the Scape.
Steel-blue grids surrounded the Dansen and letter four stories tall asked for an access code. The Dansen was stubbornly proper about its duties even though I had asked at the desk for anonymous entry. “Access to the holoCloud requires an access code.”
I gave it to them straight. “Flintlock 408. Non-specified personnel.”
“Override requires security check. Please place your badge on the scanner.”
The machine’s insistence was irritating, but the badge was on the scanner already. I know how to play the game. The light ban hummed across it and the steel-blue bars came down. A male voice began speaking to me, rolling his r’s like a Spaniard. “Welcome to the HoloCloud, brought to you by Dansen Corporation and Brothers Four. Do you require holographic, High Definition Volumetric Display, virtual or console access?”
“Virtual.”
“Thank you, Flintlock 408. Have a nice trip.” The room faded to sepia and the credits rolled up one side of my world. Colour returned and a stone bridge appeared before me, one that took me from where I sat into the world of Cyber. Pleasant music was playing and a landscape of rolling hills and olive groves grew out of the colours. I put the feed through the holoface for clarity and GaZe latched on to double-check it while I stood before the bridge, smelling the tangy atmosphere of the orchards; a pebbled road scrunched when I moved my feet; bright light fell through soft clouds, crickets ticked in the moderate heat. I could hear the water in the brook running beneath the bridge and the taste of oranges tingled in my mouth.
“Team up?”
Sansan answered. “We’re here, Harold. Dansen backup systems operating, but system blocked from recording conversation. GaZe has temp files filtered, all cookies disabled. Bleeder has locked us in and is working on covering the footprints. Do you wish for PAN representation?”
I was pleased she had used my alias and gave myself a few moments to think about the Reps for a moment. The Dansen could give each of them a human body in this universe, give them faces and actions, a physical human presence. I decided against it: I would be constantly aware of their physical change and that could be disastrous. “I’ll run it alone, Sansan. Give me symbolic only and hypertextual guidance to begin with. Have Harold on standby in case things get sticky.”
“Yes, Sir.”
The word “start” appeared before me, hovering above the bridge. “Medusa, shadow check, image cohesion, Fault, and all that. You know the drill.”
“Stacked and standing, Harold.”
“GaZe, Needle access standby, constant internal checks.”
“You have it, Harry.”
Wall down twenty-two minutes, thirty-four seconds. Time to get to work. “Listen up, everyone. Alert status red. We’re going in to see the Steel Hand to find out what they’re doing. We’re in the danger zone.” I flexed my wrists, rolled my head on my shoulders. “Keep the formation tight. Use of OTHER authorised. Watch for back up programmes. Immediate closure if they begin. Bring us back alive, gang.”
Sansan gave me the affirmation I needed. Readout like the bands of a graphic equaliser appeared on my left-hand side, giving readings of Over The Horizon Emergent Risk. If any submarine programme or high level bomber came at us from the OTHER, we would know it before it reached the Dansen–but it would be messy never the less.
All journeys begin with one step, so, with one small step to start, I kicked out and crossed the bridge at a run.
The horizon flattened. The orchards disappeared and grey concrete walls rose out of the ground. A cityscape, saturated with veins and arteries, a living hive, connections, access points. Eight hundred stories of activity. Worlds of information., but I wanted something deeper and raced down the main street past all the yellow cabs and delivery vehicles, turned down Forty-Second Street and aimed at the river that ran thro
ugh the middle of the city. The Needle was in place on the riverbank, circular steel doors enclosed by a ribcage of iron six meters high, marked in yellow and black diagonals. A large black and white sign hovered just in front of it, warning me that access was restricted. Dozens of Bluefin Tuners swarmed about it: small hybrid viruses attracted by the unusual coding I had used. Medusa sent in a trawler, scooped them out of the way, began dissecting them for useable parts. The Needle opened, I punched up entry and we dropped into the underworld of the HoloCloud.
Chapter 6
Ocean going, sails rigged and humming against the masts, old wooden planking beneath my feet, half-cabin aft and spray coming off the ice-breaker bow. A low swell was coming up from the west, lifting the ocean surface like a cat playing under a rug and we rode under dense, rain-laden cloud cover. Icebergs bobbed to the south and east; fog smudged the horizon to the southwest and I could hear foghorns wailing like mating cattle in the distance. The smell of salt water churning in my wake.
A formation of Grey-cards flitted out of the cloud and skimmed just above the ocean surface to the northeast, razor wings humming in the wind. They looked like animated arrowheads, grey outlined in neon blue. We ran ahead of them. From the west two lumbering cargo vessels groaned out of the fog and wallowed past under full loads, possibly carrying covert research assistance for some university, possibly Steel Hand propaganda aimed at user groups coming on-line.
Water is symbolic of the collective subconscious, Shahn used to tell me, and here we were in the middle of it. Maybe it has to do with research rather than information. I don’t know for sure, but it strikes me as more probable. Information is out there, like the truth, but you need to go looking for it. This ocean beneath Cyber-city was people looking, rather than the information they looked for. Why else would there be swells, tides, and currents? Water, the world’s greatest solvent, capable of getting into rock over time. Do you see what I mean? Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink. I turned south, put speed under the keel.
The Grey-cards scudded closer and a flock of Medusa’s clay pigeons scattered to cover my tail. The Grey-cards spiralled down to investigate them. I pumped up the speed, watched for fins, left the Grey-cards weaving amongst the clay pigeons and guided us toward BAY3 and the Steel Hand’s harbour. We hit the roaring forties, settled down and sculled ahead of the time waves that towered behind us, safe out front of the heat trap. Landfall in thirty seconds. A long time at sea. Time to explain it to you, to bring you more information. It may bore you, so page down if you have to., but not too far.
The roaring forties of Cyberspace are the four o’clock bands of time that advances around the world. People finish their day jobs about then and patch into the Cloud just to chat. The roaring forties can be a slow crowd because the servers are saturated, lag is horrific. Usually a Shiner tries to work outside that time, to stay on the dark side of the planet and weave through the commercial ice floes. There’s also another band around the nine o’clock mark, not as intense; more secure and a little boring. I wanted room to move, so I had crossed the planet, going through late servers that came on-line at three-thirty to assist the flow, (that’s the heat trap) then rode from one to the next ahead of the time wave, watching for fins and armadas.
BAY3 in twelve seconds. Four dolphins surfaced nearby, raced ahead of my bow. Two were Bleeder’s manifestation: I know his markings (One of those had a chipped fin—which was HaRf). The others were Sansan and one of Medusa’s security programmes — sentries to assist us through the troubled waters ahead. They dipped and rose like they were knitting the sky and sea together, blowing fine plumes of air each time their graceful grey backs rose above the waves.
Medusa expected trouble and the battleship that churned up over the horizon gave a good reason for caution. A towering gargantuan of steel turrets. A package more potent than Gracelands and coke. Camouflaged to confuse the Grey-cards, but I knew the source code well enough to pick them out from the skyline. Two destroyers joined the battleship, sleek wedges of viral influences and counter-culture defences. Above, slinking between clouds, was a flight of angel-hawks: more defences, though beautiful with their pale apricot wings and long tapering indigo tails. I hailed the battleship, gave it my call sign, waited for their response while Medusa created smoke about me, just in case.
They acknowledge the call, came closer to escort me ahead. Eight seconds later I was channelled down a river toward the port town the Steel Hand call Home. The banks were lined with reinforced concrete bunkers from, which showed steel barrels, gun emplacements and searchlights. Beyond them were towers of glass, elevator lines into the cloud, factory production. (Propaganda factories, that is.) Powerboats rose on fiery wakes, zipping past me and out of the river channel, heading for open ocean.
When I reached the harbour mouth, Medusa’s dolphins dropped under the water and left me alone. I reduced speed, dropped a sea anchor and waited for response from the harbour master with the guns on the battleship trained on me.
Unexpectedly, the OTHER readout showed activity to the north. I had GaZe run a check on the OTHER’s system and sent Bleeder to check on the source of the reading while Sansan prepared emergency evacuation. Bleeder’s two dolphins dropped out of sight. It could just be the Steel Hand guarding the back lanes, or the roaring forties coming in on a remote server connected to the Dansen. Better safe than sorry.
A motor launch left the battleship and crossed toward me, bouncing up and over the waves, its nose dipping deeply each time it ploughed into the bottom of a trough. It was laden with trouble. I could see a bulky grey haired oriental standing on the deck as if the world was his oyster. He wore a leopard-spotted suit, blue suede shoes and a red bow tie, and his eyes were ice-green, so piercing I would have sworn he was looking at my soul. He spread his legs against the roll of the waves, put his hands on his hips and nodded his greeting across the distance. I waited for him to get closer. When the launch lay alongside he said, “Earner, a pleasant surprise.”
I bowed low in reply. The response time for them to confirm my ID showed they were dedicating a BlackBeard, or something larger, to their defences. The Steel Hand had many powerful systems and it’s easy for them to confirm identities. I even know how they did it. They had tracked backward, knew the call came from the Walkers Flat Library, had checked the area from a satellite feed and had taken notice of the new car parked outside. Using it as an anchor point, they had found records of its purchase, had run down all the information out in Casho-land and thought they had me pinned. They were capable of that kind of speed. Nothing to worry about, they’d be thinking I was just a curious hacker, possibly a recruit. A name was nothing. They could have that if they wanted, but if they tracked backward too far they’d find the footprint of Flintlock activity in the area. Time to be wary. “No more of a pleasant surprise than it is to meet you, Ho. How’s business?”
“Fine. And you?”
I patted my stomach. “Bit of indigestion. You know how it is?”
“Something you ate?”
“No – something that’s eating me.”
Ho nodded thoughtfully, as if he was really worried for my health. “Well. Perhaps the next meal you have will be more satisfying.”
“Perhaps.”
He looked at the vessel I stood on, up to the sails and along the hull line. It was a tight ship, sleek yet sea worthy. What he could not see would surprise him, but what he could see would cause no alarm. He finished his surveillance, received robotic orders from somewhere. “Do you want to enter the domain,” he asked, “or are you just visiting?”
Cameos, as I have said, are alternative personalities. All the Steel Hand’s Gate Keepers are Cameos called Ho. Not very good ones. I’ve seen this kind of Cameo before. He was like a bad actor that has the conversation sequences in order, but is mouthing everyone else’s lines. I didn’t answer his question directly. “Who created you, Ho?”
He didn’t even blink. “Cyrus did.”
Immediate r
esponse. That made it easier. “He has done a good job, you are a competent manifestation. Is Cyrus monitoring you?”
Ho looked a little perplexed. Cameos might be self-aware, but they have no sense of self-worth; their egos are dampened to avoid the possibility they’d ever argue for legal rights. Ho managed to work away from my comments. “He has no need to, Earner. I’m capable of assisting you without his direct involvement. How may the Steel Hand help you?”
Time to use my smarts. Time to get this shit sorted out. “I’m plagued with a problem Ho: one the Steel Hand may be able to help with.”
He nodded thoughtfully again. “What would that be Mr Harold Earner, Special Investigation Officer on 408 assignment for Flintlock?”
Hell! They were moving very fast and had continued to back-check. Something definitely was amiss. Any second now they’d replace Cameos. No time for subtleties. Hit and run. “If I had three eggs,” I said, “and each one was a male, how many feathers would each one have?”
This time he did blink. In the split-second it took him to work out I had asked a layer-riddle, Medusa had cloned his appearance. The clone rose out of the deck beside him and answered for him, “All.”
Ho turned to look at his double. The layer-riddle had cut through his security check, through his AI coding and eliminated the link to his database. I followed up quickly, before he could speak. I asked the clone, “Who made you?”
“Ho did,” it said.
Ho was blinking rapidly now. His mouth dropped open and he turned to his double, reached out to touch him, wondering at the incredible act he had performed. The double did the same, reaching out in his turn for Ho’s hand. As they touched they merged, like a figure walking into a mirror and dissolving.