Nebula Award Stories - 1983 #18

by Robert Silverberg (ed)

  She smiles.

  “Son of a bitch,” said Bobby, “we just told Chrome we’re an IRS audit and three Supreme Court subpoenas . . . Hang on to your ass,, Jack ...”

  So long, Rikki. Maybe now I see you never.

  And so dark, in the halls of Chrome’s ice.

  Bobby was a cowboy and ice was the nature of his game, ice from ICE, Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics. The matrix is an abstract representation of the relationships between data systems. Legitimate programmers jack into their employers’ sector of the matrix and find themselves surrounded by bright geometries representing the corporate data.

  Towers and fields of it ranged in the colorless nonspace of the simulation matrix, the electronic consensus hallucination that facilitates the handling and exchange of massive quantities of data. Legitimate programmers never see the walls of ice they work behind, the walls of shadow that screen their operations from others, from industrial espionage artists and hustlers like Bobby Quine.

  Bobby was a cowboy. Bobby was a cracksman, a burglar, casing mankinds extended electronic nervous system, rustling data and credit in the crowded matrix, monochrome nonspace where the only stars are dense concentrations of information, and high above it all burn corporate galaxies and the cold spiral arms of military systems.

  Bobby was another one of those young-old faces you see drinking in the Gentleman Loser, the chic bar for computer cowboys, rustlers, cybernetic second-story men. We were partners.

  Bobby Quine and Automatic Jack. Bobby’s the thin pale dude with the dark glasses, and Jack’s the mean-looking guy with the myoelectric arm. Bobby’s software and Jack’s hard; Bobby punches console and Jack runs down all the little things that can give you an edge. Or, anyway, that’s what the scene watchers in the Gentleman Loser would’ve told you, before Bobby decided to burn Chrome. But they also might’ve told you that Bobby was losing his edge, slowing down. He was twenty-eight, Bobby, and that’s old for a console cowboy.

  Both of us were good at what we did, but somehow that one big score just wouldn’t come down for us. I knew where to go for the right gear, and Bobby had all his licks down pat. He’d sit back with a white terry sweatband across his forehead and whip moves on those keyboards faster than you could follow, punching his way through some of the fanciest ice in the business, but that was when something happened that managed to get him totally wired, and that didn’t happen often. Not highly motivated, Bobby, and I was the kind of guy who’s happy to have the rent covered and a clean shirt to wear.

  But Bobby had this thing for girls, like they were his private Tarot or something, the way he’d get himself moving. We never talked about it, but when it started to look like he was losing his touch that summer, he started to spend more time in the Gentleman Loser. He’d sit at a table by the open doors and watch the crowd slide by, nights when the bugs were at the neon and the air smelled of perfume and fast food. You could see his sunglasses scanning those faces as they passed, and he must have decided that Rikki’s was the one he was waiting for, the wild card and the luck changer. The new one.

  I went to New York to check out the market, to see what was available in hot software.

  The Finn’s place has a detective hologram in the window, METRO HOLOGRAFIX, over a display of dead flies wearing fur coats of gray dust. The scrap’s waist-high, inside, drifts of it rising to meet walls that are barely visible behind nameless junk, behind sagging pressboard shelves stacked with old skin magazines and yellow-spined years of National Geographies.

  “You need a gun,” said the Finn. He looks like a recombo DNA project aimed at tailoring people for high-speed burrowing. “You’re in luck. I got the new Smith and Wesson, the four-oh-eight Tactical. Got this xenon projector slung under the barrel, see, batteries in the grip, throw you a twelve-inch high-noon circle in the pitch dark at fifty yards. The light source is so narrow, it’s almost impossible to spot. It’s just like voodoo in a nightfight.”

  I let my arm clunk down on the table and started the fingers drumming; the servos in the hand began whining like overworked mosquitoes. I knew that the Finn really hated the sound.

  “You looking to pawn that?” He prodded the duralumin wrist joint with the chewed shaft of a felt-tip pen. “Maybe get yourself something a little quieter?”

  I kept it up. “I don’t need any guns, Finn.’

  “Okay,” he said, “okay,” and I quit drumming. “I only got this one item, and I don’t even know what it is.” He looked unhappy. “I got it off these bridge-and-tunnel kids from Jersey last week.”

  “So when’d you ever buy anything you didn’t know what it was, Finn?”

  “Wise ass.” And he passed me a transparent mailer with something in it that looked like an audio cassette through the bubble padding. “They had a passport,” he said. “They had credit cards and a watch. And that.”

  “They had the contents of somebody’s pockets, you mean.”

  He nodded. “The passport was Belgian. It was also bogus, looked to me, so I put it in the furnace. Put the cards in with it. The watch was okay, a Porsche, nice watch.”

  It was obviously some kind of plug-in military program. Out of the mailer, it looked like the magazine of a small assault rifle, coated with nonreflective black plastic. The edges and corners showed bright metal; it had been knocking around for a while.

  “I’ll give you a bargain on it, Jack. For old times’ sake.”

  I had to smile at that. Getting a bargain from the Finn was like God repealing the law of gravity when you have to carry a heavy suitcase down ten blocks of airport corridor.

  “Looks Russian to me,” I said. “Probably the emergency sewage controls for some Leningrad suburb. Just what I need.”

  “You know,” said the Finn, “I got a pair of shoes older than you are. Sometimes I think you got about as much class as those yahoos from Jersey. What do you want me to tell you, it’s the keys to the Kremlin? You figure out what the goddamn thing is. Me, I just sell the stuff.”

  I bought it.

  Bodiless, we swerve into Chromes castle of ice. And we’re fast, fast. It feels like we’re surfing the crest of the invading program, hanging ten above the seething glitch systems as they mutate. We’re sentient patches of oil swept along down corridors of shadow.

  Somewhere we have bodies, very far away, in a crowded loft roofed with steel and glass. Somewhere we have microseconds, maybe time left to pull out.

  We’ve crashed her gates disguised as an audit and three subpoenas, but her defenses are specifically geared to cope with that kind of official intrusion. Her most sophisticated ice is structured to fend off warrants, writs, subpoenas. When we breached the first gate, the bulk of her data vanished behind core-command ice, these walls we see as leagues of corridor, mazes of shadow. Five separate landlines spurted May Day signals to law firms, but the virus had already taken over the parameter ice. The glitch systems gobble the distress calls as our mimetic subprograms scan anything that hasn’t been blanked by core command.

  The Russian program lifts a Tokyo number from the unscreened data, choosing it for frequency of calls, average length of calls, the speed with which Chrome returned those calls.

  “Okay,” says Bobby, “we’re an incoming scrambler call from a pal of hers in Japan. That should help.”

  Ride ’em cowboy.

  Bobby read his future in women; his girls were omens, changes in the weather, and he’d sit all night in the Gentleman Loser, waiting for the season to lay a new face down in front of him like a card.

  I was working late in the loft one night, shaving down a chip, my arm off and the little waldo jacked straight into the stump.

  Bobby came in with a girl I hadn’t seen before, and usually I feel a little funny if a stranger sees me working that way, with those leads clipped to the hard carbon studs that stick out of my stump. She came right over and looked at the magnified image on the screen, then saw the waldo moving under its vacuum-sealed dustcover. She didn’t say anything,
just watched. Right away I had a good feeling about her; it’s like that sometimes.

  “Automatic Jack, Rikki. My associate.”

  He laughed, put his arm around her waist, something in his tone letting me know that I’d be spending the night in a dingy room in a hotel.

  “Hi,” she said. Tall, nineteen or maybe twenty, and she definitely had the goods. With just those few freckles across the bridge of her nose, and eyes somewhere between dark amber and French coffee. Tight black jeans rolled to midcalf and a narrow plastic belt that matched the rose-colored sandals.

  But now when I see her sometimes when I’m trying to sleep, I see her somewhere out on the edge of all this sprawl of cities and smoke, and it’s like she’s a hologram stuck behind my eyes, in a bright dress she must’ve worn once, when I knew her, something that doesn’t quite reach her knees. Bare legs long and straight. Brown hair, streaked with blond, hoods her face, blown in a wind from somewhere, and I see her wave good-bye.

  Bobby was making a show of rooting through a stack of audio cassettes. “I’m on my way, cowboy,” I said, unclipping the waldo. She watched attentively as I put my arm back on.

  “Can you fix things?” she asked.

  “Anything, anything you want, Automatic Jack’ll fix it.” I snapped my duralumin fingers for her.

  She took a little simstim deck from her belt and showed me the broken hinge on the cassette cover.

  “Tomorrow,” I said, “no problem.”

  And my oh my, I said to myself, sleep pulling me down the six flights to the street, what’ll Bobby’s luck be like with a fortune cookie like that? If his system worked, we’d be striking it rich any night now. In the street I grinned and yawned and waved for a cab.

  Chrome’s castle is dissolving, sheets of ice shadow flickering and fading, eaten by the glitch systems that spin out from the Russian program, tumbling away from our central logic thrust and infecting the fabric of the ice itself. The glitch systems are cybernetic virus analogs, self-replicating and voracious. They mutate constantly, in unison, subverting and absorbing Chrome’s defenses.

  Have we already paralyzed her, or is a bell ringing somewhere, a red light blinking? Does she know?

  Rikki Wildside, Bobby called her, and for those first few weeks it must have seemed to her that she had it all, the whole teeming show spread out for her, sharp and bright under the neon. She was new to the scene, and she had all the miles of malls and plazas to prowl, all the shops and clubs, and Bobby to explain the wild side, the tricky wiring on the dark underside of things, all the players and their names and their games. He made her feel at home.

  “What happened to your arm?” she asked me one night in the Gentleman Loser, the three of us drinking at a small table in a corner.

  “Hang-gliding,” I said, “accident.”

  “Hang-gliding over a wheatfield,” said Bobby, “place called Kiev. Our Jack’s just hanging there in the dark, under a Nightwing parafoil, with fifty kilos of radar jammer between his legs, and some Russian asshole accidentally burns his arm off with a laser.”

  I don’t remember how I changed the subject, but I did.

  I was still telling myself that it wasn’t Rikki who was getting to me, but what Bobby was doing with her. I’d known him for a long time, since the end of the war, and I knew he used women as counters in a game, Bobby Quine versus fortune, versus time and the night of cities. And Rikki had turned up just when he needed something to get him going, something to aim for. So he’d set her up as a symbol for everything he wanted and couldn’t have, everything he’d had and couldn’t keep.

  I didn’t like having to listen to him tell me how much he loved her, and knowing he believed it only made it worse. He was a past master at the hard fall and the rapid recovery, and I’d seen it happen a dozen times before. He might as well have had NEXT printed across his sunglasses in green dayglo capitals, ready to flash out at the first interesting face that flowed past the tables in the Gentleman Loser.

  I knew what he did to them. He turned them into emblems, sigils on the map of his hustler’s life, navigation beacons he could follow through a sea of bars and neon. What else did he have to steer by? He didn’t love money, in and of itself, not enough to follow its lights. He wouldn’t work for power over other people; he hated the responsibility it brings. He had some basic pride in his skill, but that was never enough to keep him pushing.

  So he made do with women.

  When Rikki showed up, he needed one in the worst way. He was fading fast, and smart money was already whispering that the edge was off his game. He needed that one big score, and soon, because he didn’t know any other kind of life, and all his clocks were set for hustler’s time, calibrated in risk and adrenaline and that supernal dawn calm that comes when every move’s proved right and a sweet lump of someone else’s credit clicks into your own account.

  It was time for him to make his bundle and get out; so Rikki got set up higher and farther away than any of the others ever had, even though—and I felt like screaming it at him— she was right there, alive, totally real, human, hungry, resilient, bored, beautiful, excited, all the things she was . . .

  Then he went out one afternoon, about a week before I made the trip to New York to see the Finn. Went out and left us there in the loft, waiting for a thunderstorm. Half the skylight was shadowed by a dome they’d never finished, and the other half showed sky, black and blue with clouds. I was standing by the bench, looking up at that sky, stupid with the hot afternoon, the humidity, and she touched me, touched my shoulder, the half-inch border of taut pink scar that the arm doesn’t cover. Anybody else ever touched me there, they went on to the shoulder, the neck ...

  But she didn’t do that. Her nails were lacquered black, not pointed, but tapered oblongs, the lacquer only a shade darker than the carbon-fiber laminate that sheathes my arm. And her hand went down the arm, black nails tracing a weld in the laminate, down to the black anodized elbow joint, out to the wrist, her hand soft-knuckled as a child’s, fingers spreading to lock over mine, her palm against the perforated duralumin.

  Her other palm came up to brush across the feedback pads, and it rained all afternoon, raindrops drumming on the steel and soot-stained glass above Bobby’s bed.

  Ice walls flick away like supersonic butterflies made of shade. Beyond them, the matrix’s illusion of infinite space. Its like watching a tape of a prefab building going up; only the tape’s reversed and run at high speed, and these walls are torn wings.

  Trying to remind myself that this place and the gulfs beyond are only representations, that we aren’t “in” Chrome’s computer, but interfaced with it, while the matrix simulator in Bobby’s loft generates this illusion . . . The core data begin to emerge, exposed, vulnerable . . . This is the far side of ice, the view of the matrix I’ve never seen before, the view that fifteen million legitimate console operators see daily and take for granted.

  The core data tower around us like vertical freight trains, color-coded for access. Bright primaries, impossibly bright in that transparent void, linked by countless horizontals in nursery blues and pinks.

  But ice still shadow's something at the center of it all: the heart of all Chrome’s expensive darkness, the very heart . . .

  It was late afternoon when I got back from my shopping expedition to New York. Not much sun through the skylight, but an ice pattern glowed on Bobby’s monitor screen, a 2-D graphic representation of someone’s computer defenses, lines of neon woven like an Art Deco prayer rug. I turned the console off, and the screen went completely dark.

  Rikki’s things were spread across my workbench, nylon bags spilling clothes and makeup, a pair of bright red cowboy boots, audio cassettes, glossy Japanese magazines about sim-stim stars. I stacked it all under the bench and then took my arm off, forgetting that the program I’d bought from the Finn was in the righthand pocket of my jacket, so that I had to fumble it out lefthanded and then get it into the padded jaws of the jeweler’s vise.

 
The waldo looks like an old audio turntable, the kind that played disc records, with the vise set up under a transparent dustcover. The arm itself is just over a centimeter long, swinging out on what would’ve been the tone arm on one of those turntables. But I don’t look at that when I’ve clipped the leads to my stump; I look at the scope, because that’s my arm there in black and white, magnification 40 X .

  I ran a tool check and picked up the laser. It felt a little heavy; so I scaled my weight-sensor input down to a quarter kilo per gram and got to work. At 40 X the side of the program looked like a trailer-truck.

  It took eight hours to crack; three hours with the waldo and the laser and four dozen taps, two hours on the phone to a contact in Colorado, and three hours to run down a lexicon disc that could translate eight-year-old technical Russian.

  Then Cyrillic alphanumerics started reeling down the monitor, twisting themselves into English halfway down. There were a lot of gaps, where the lexicon ran up against specialized military acronyms in the readout I’d bought from my man in Colorado, but it did give me some idea of what I’d bought from the Finn.

  I felt like a punk who’d gone out to buy a switchblade and come home with a small neutron bomb.

  Screwed again, I thought. What goods a neutron bomb in a streetfight? The thing under the dustcover was right out of my league. I didn’t even know where to unload it, where to look for a buyer. Someone had, but he was dead, someone with a Porsche watch and a fake Belgian passport, but I’d never tried to move in those circles. The Finn’s muggers from the ’burbs had knocked over someone who had some highly arcane connections.

  The program in the jeweler’s vise was a Russian military icebreaker, a killer-virus program.

  It was dawn when Bobby came in alone. I’d fallen asleep with a bag of take-out sandwiches in my lap.

  “You want to eat?” I asked him, not really awake, holding out my sandwiches. I’d been dreaming of the program, of its waves of hungry glitch systems and mimetic subprograms; in the dream it was an animal of some kind, shapeless and flowing.