Headcrash

by Bruce Bethke

  Come to think of it, though, he never had the chance to get that out of his system when he was twelve, did he?

  And pretty soon, I’d wallow around full circle and be back to feeling guilty about decapitating Charles and knocking out T’shombe. More than anything else, I wanted someone to reassure me that I hadn’t really hurt her. Not physically—after all, it was only VR, and the violence was purely symbolic—but I wanted to know that I hadn’t damaged her trust.

  Wednesday, May 31, 8:07 P.M.: LeMat, Inge, and I were working out in our pocket reality again. By this time we’d pretty well settled on our final mission configuration. I was going in as MAX_KOOL, of course, and my Harley would be, as always, a Harley. But after a very brief attempt at working as Don and Sophia, Inge and LeMat had spent three days polishing up their Reba and Gunnar aspects, and they were going in in a virtual HumVee with a .30-caliber machine gun in a ring turret. (LeMat had wanted an M-1 Abrams main battle tank; Inge had wanted an Aston-Martin DB-5 with the complete “Q” option package. The Hummer, I guess, was a compromise.) I didn’t care what they drove, just as long as they stuck to their driving and kept their hormones under control for the duration of the mission.

  We were taking a five-minute breather when Reba thought she heard something scratching on the other side of the Net portal. I went to check it out, and found a battered and bleeding Thing2 lying on our virtual doorstep, barely clinging to virtual life. I scooped up the poor little monster, carried it inside, and gently laid it on top of a Formica cube. Reba and Gunnar gathered around as its blue eyelids fluttered open.

  “Hi, boss,” Thing2 said weakly. “You got a minute?”

  “What happened?” Gunnar demanded. “Where’s Thing1?”

  “Thing1 is compost,” Thing2 said. “As for what happened: we followed your orders.”

  “Why aren’t you rhyming?” Gunnar blurted out. “I specifically programmed you to speak in rhymed couplets!”

  I stepped back and glared at Gunnar. “You did that?”

  “Look,” Thing2 wheezed, as it coughed up a load of pink pastel blood, “you two wanna argue, or you wanna hear my report?”

  Reba stepped in, then, to touch the little monster gently and smooth its blood-caked fur. “Report, please,” she said, with a soft and maternal voice I’d never even guessed at before.

  “We followed your orders,” Thing2 gasped, between coughing fits. “Set up an observation post, watched for twenty-four hours, then moved in closer and set up a new post. We got away with that for four days.” Thing2 paused to writhe as a wracking spasm of virtual simulated pain surged through his tiny, blue, furry body.

  “And then?” Reba asked gently.

  The spasm passed. “We were moving the post again tonight,” Thing2 said, “when we crossed some kind of invisible perimeter. Man,” he paused, to cough up another load of pink pastel blood, “your boy Curtis knows some sick people in the Department of Defense. Some of the defenses around Castle Franklinstein…” His voice faded away. A last, deep, sighing breath escaped from his tiny body, and he sagged and went limp, and was horribly still.

  Reba smoothed the blue fur around Thing2‘s face again, then felt at his neck for a pulse. Slowly, she turned to look al me, a glistening tear in the corner of her eye. “He’s dead, Jim.”

  We gathered around silently. Gunnar took off his helmet and bowed his head.

  Thing2 sat bolt upright and opened his eyes. “Not quite, thank you! Curtis has an important lunch tomorrow, and you’ve got a perfect window of opportunity between ten and noon EDT! But whatever you do, watch out for the—urk!”

  The little sucker keeled over right then, and flopped face down on the table with a sound like a croquet ball dropped on a concrete floor. Reba gave him a nudge. “Think he’s really dead this time?”

  Gunnar drew his 9mm pistol from his hip holster and racked the action. “There’s one way to make sure.”

  20: ASSAULT ON CASTLE FRANKLINSTEIN

  Thursday, June 1, 0900 Local Time: Gunnar stowed the last ammo can in the back of the virtual HumVee, slammed the tailgate shut, and walked over to join me and Reba. “We ready?” he asked. He looked at me. I looked at Reba. She slapped a magazine into her virtual FN FAL rifle and slung it over her back.

  “We ready,” she said.

  Gunnar stuck his hand out and offered me a handshake. I looked at it strangely. “For luck,” he said. I took his hand, and Reba joined in the three-way handshake. Then she grabbed the back of Gunnar’s head with her free hand and gave him a big, sloppy, open-mouthed kiss with lots of tongue.

  “For luck,” she said, when she came up for air.

  I decided to settle for another handshake.

  “Okay, gang,” Gunnar said, when the bonding ritual was concluded. “It’s showtime. Head ‘em up and move ‘em out.” He turned and started walking toward the HumVee, but Reba darted in ahead of him, stowed her rifle, and parked her cute little virtual butt in the driver’s seat. “Move over,” Gunnar said. “I’ll drive.”

  “No.” Reba wrapped herself around the steering wheel and prepared to defend it to the death. “I’ll drive.” Gunnar took a deep breath, as if psyching himself up for a major argument—then sighed, walked around the vehicle, and climbed in on the passenger side. Looking across Reba, he gave me a thumbs-up.

  I kickstarted my Harley. Reba fired up the HumVee. Gunnar reached up and tapped the virtual remote control clipped onto the visor. Like a garage door into the very heart of the sun, the Net portal slowly rose open.

  Someone was standing there, on the other side of the portal, silhouetted in the dazzling virtual light. Someone skinny.

  Eliza.

  “Shit!” Gunnar spat. He leapt out of his seat, scrambled into the ring-turret, and struggled to get the machine gun into action. Reba made a grab for her rifle and leaned awkwardly out the driver’s door. I summoned my best cocky smile and prepared a half-dozen witty ripostes.

  “Wait!” Eliza called out. She raised her thin hands high, and stepped into our local space. “Please don’t shoot!”

  Well, that certainly was out of character. We all froze.

  Eliza took another step forward. “I’m here to talk.”

  Gunnar remembered what he was doing, racked the action of the machine gun, and trained it on her. “We’re listening.”

  Eliza took one more step forward, then stopped. Her icy blue eyes flickered between the three of us, like a matched pair of delft china pinballs caught in a complicated set of bumpers. “I was hoping we could discuss this like adults,” Eliza said at last, “but I see now that was a silly idea. So I’ll make this brief, kids.

  “Like it or not, I’m coming with you.”

  Gunnar sat up straight with surprise, then looked at me. I looked at Reba. Reba flipped her safety off, took a bead on Eliza’s head, and growled, “You’re outvoted, snowflake.”

  Eliza vanished.

  “Look kids,” Eliza’s voice echoed, from nowhere in partlicular. “We could have a fight now, and you might even win. But I can pretty much guarantee that no matter what the outcome, I’ll keep you tied up long enough for you to miss your launch window.” As if to reinforce the point, both my bike and the HumVee’s idling motors cut out in that moment.

  Eliza precipitated back into existence, behind me and to my right. I spun around in my saddle. “Or,” she said calmly, as Gunnar whipped the machine gun around and accidentally put a burst of fire into the polyhedron heap, “you could try to ditch me. In which case,” she smiled, and spread her arms in a gesture that took in the whole local virtual space, “I wouldn’t count on finding my home system intact when I came back, if I were you. I know where you live now.”

  She smiled again, then strolled over to me, lightly hopped onto the p-pad behind my seat, and put her feet up on the highway pegs and her skinny arms around my ribs. “Or,” she said, “you can understand that my war is with Amber, not you, and let me ride along. If it makes you feel better, think of it as keeping me close s
o you can keep an eye on me.” She turned her head, to rest her sharp cheekbone on my back, and gave me a tight and not entirely unaffectionate squeeze. My eyebrows went up. I looked at Gunnar and telepathed a question.

  Gunnar looked at Reba. Reba snorted in disgust, then flipped her rifle back to safe and stowed it. Gunnar reached a decision.

  “We’ll take her along,” Gunnar announced firmly, as if it was his idea. “That way we can keep an eye on her and make sure she doesn’t start any trouble.” He nodded assertively, locked down the machine gun, and dropped back into his seat.

  “Good thinking, General Custer,” Reba grumbled. She restarted her motor, grabbed the steering wheel with both hands as if to rip it out of the dashboard, and leaned forward to rest her chin on her knuckles.

  Gunnar ignored her and looked at me. “Well? What are we waiting for? It’s showtime!” He flashed a cocky grin at me and pumped a fist in the air.

  I got my right foot on the starter and kicked the Harley back into rumbling virtual life. Then a tilt to the right to get the kickstand up, pull the clutch in, step the tranny down to first, and rev the engine a few times, just for the hell of it.

  Reba roused herself from leaning on the steering wheel, stomped the clutch to the floor, and slammed the Hummer into gear. “Goddamn Army,” she snarled, as she floored the throttle and popped the clutch. The HumVee launched forward into a scream of expensive burning rubber and an insane whoop from Gunnar.

  I waited until they’d cleared the portal, then turned my head and looked over my shoulder at Eliza. “So tell me,” I said, “why are you coming with us?”

  Eliza crawled up my back and gave me a light peck on the cheek. “Because Gunnar is too busy watching Reba’s ass to remember that he’s supposed to be watching yours. And, since it is a kind of cute one,” she goosed me, just to make it clear what she was talking about, “I figured I’d volunteer for the job.”

  I wiggled my tush out of her grip and gave her my best dubious glance. “No Solomonic solutions this time?”

  Eliza blushed; it actually put a rather pleasant glow on her otherwise pale and unhealthy face. “Sorry about that. I thought I could outbluff Amber,” she shrugged, “but I guess she’d rather destroy what she can’t control.”

  I thought it over. “Good enough for me,” I decided. I dropped my butt back into the seat—let out a little eeek! when Eliza grabbed it again—then revved the motor, popped the clutch, and blasted through the portal. Thirty seconds later we’d spotted Gunnar and Reba up ahead of us on the InfoBahn.

  “You need some road music!” Eliza shouted in my ear, struggling to be heard over the hissing of the stray bits in the datastream. “Steppenwolf, I think! Or maybe Bob Seger!”

  “Who?” I shouted back.

  Eliza scowled and shook her head. “Nah, definitely not Who! Unless you morph into a hippie and drive an old paisley bus!”

  I let that one go and cranked the throttle wide open.

  10:17, East Coast Time: We stood on the shoulder of the OC5, overlooking the dark and desolate wasteland beyond. The valley immediately below us was a churned expanse of brown mud, dotted with small piles of scorched wreckage, broken stretches of barbed wire, and the splintered remains of shattered trees. On the other side of the valley there stood a massive, foreboding, crenellated edifice, like something Mad King Ludwig might have built if he’d been a paranoid survivalist. Eliza stepped up to the guard rail and pointed at the structure. “Behold, Castle Franklinstein!”

  “Can’t say much for the landscaping,” Gunnar noted.

  “We stand at a great crossroads!” Eliza went on. “Behind us lies .com, the domain we know! Before us, .mil, the domain of dangers unguessed!”

  Reba was scanning the horizon with her vidbinoculars. She lowered them, bit her lip, and pointed. “Isn’t that DARPA?”

  “Yes!” Eliza cried. “And beyond it, .edu, and the shadowy alliance between the military and academic worlds!”

  Gunnar tapped Eliza on the shoulder and steered her around in the opposite direction. “So what’s that smog pit?”

  “That, my friend,” Eliza said with a manic grin, “is the famous Valley of the Military-Industrial Complex! And beyond it, were the air not so polluted with the toxic residue of expensive boardroom cigars, you would see the insane, tangled, and Byzantine domain of .gov!”

  “I see.” Gunnar nodded. “So how come you’re shouting?”

  Eliza turned to him, and shrugged. “It seemed more dramatic.”

  I stepped into the conversation then, and steered everyone’s attention back to Castle Franklinstein. “Eliza, honey?” She looked at me. “I get the feeling you’ve been here before. Is there something you’d like to tell us?”

  She considered me a moment longer, took a sidelong glance at the castle, and turned back to me. “Max? This is the ultimate No Person’s Land. Your friend Curtis has got fingers in all kinds of pies, and some of them have some nasty fruit fillings.”

  “Such as?”

  Eliza suddenly cocked her head, as if listening to a dog whistle, then she turned and pointed toward .edu. “We’re in luck! Watch and learn, Max. Watch and learn!”

  A moment later, I heard it, too: the high, shrill scream of distant turbine fans. “Got it!” Reba called out as she scanned the sky and fiddled with her vidbinoculars. “Looks like…”

  She lowered the binocs and made a sour face. “It looks like a cartoon,” she said.

  Fifteen seconds later, the flying thing was big enough to make out with the naked eye. It looked like—oh, like an F-21 fighter, as redrawn for use in a Saturday morning kiddie series. Too many planar surfaces; too many garish primary colors. Way too much belching flame for anyone who has to really worry about heat-seeking missiles, and not near enough airfoil surface to actually keep the thing aloft in any kind of real atmosphere.

  “Who the hell is that?” Gunnar muttered.

  “Some kid,” Eliza guessed. “He got into DARPA through .edu, most likely, and about now he’s thinking he’s got a clear path for a run on .mil. There’s just one thing in his way.”

  I arched an eyebrow at Eliza. “Castle Franklinstein?”

  “Your friend Curtis doesn’t just write,” Eliza said. “He also does some very black-budget computer work. Lately he’s been testing intrusion countermeasure software for the CIA, and in about ten seconds this kid is going to cross the perimeter…”

  When it happened, it was almost too fast to see. A laser lanced out from one of the towers of the castle and painted a bright green dot on the approaching plane. A surface-to-air missile roared off a ramp somewhere else in the castle and went supersonic with a boom as the second stage kicked in. Two seconds later the kid was spinning down out of control with one wing gone and his engines in flames.

  “Scratch one cyberpunk,” Reba said as she lowered her binocs again.

  “Oh, no,” Eliza said, “the fun is just starting. Watch.”

  The kid had brought the plane out of the spin, somehow, but it seemed like kind of a wasted effort as the fuselage was starting to break apart—

  Wait a minute. It wasn’t breaking up; it was morphing. Blocks were shifting around, shapes were changing, the engine nacelles rotated and became limbs. By the time it hit the ground the aircraft had transformed into a giant humanoid robot, and it landed on its feet with an earth-shaking thump, not half a mile from the castle walls. The robot paused a moment to get its bearings, then morphed its right arm into a plasma cannon and started advancing across the muddy field towards the castle gate.

  It made less than a hundred yards before something blasted into its chest and sent it staggering back, leaking oil and black smoke through a gaping chest wound.

  “What the—!” Gunnar gasped. “Where did that come from?”

  “Keep watching,” Eliza said.

  The second time we heard the krummp! of the cannon and saw the robot’s right arm go pinwheeling away in a spray of shattered metal. Then we heard the deep roar of mighty e
ngines, and the muddy field came alive as the hillocks started crawling.

  “Jesus!” Reba spat. She thumbed the controls of her viib binocs, and swore again. “What are those things? Tanks!”

  “Not exactly,” Eliza said. “They’re OGRE T-4 Robotic Battle Vehicles. Unmanned, autonomous, with firepower rated in kilotons per second and unfailing obedience to orders. Dumb, but very lethal. Didn’t you read RoboCav?”

  A third shot took the robot’s right leg off at the knee. It fell over backward and hit the ground with a sickening crunch, left arm flailing all the way. Gunnar tried to grab the binocs away from Reba.

  Reba fought him off. “Nope,” she said to Eliza, when Gunnar had backed down. “I never cared much for Curtis’ non- fiction.”

  “A pity,” Eliza said. “It would tell you a lot about the way he thinks.”

  The OGRE RBVs closed in on the downed robot and switched to miniguns. Like surgeons operating with chainsaws, they quickly hacked away the robot’s left arm, left leg, and remaining stumps. Then they retracted their smoking miniguns and extruded massive robotic arms, tipped with huge, sharp, clawlike steel hands.

  “Personally,” Reba went on, “I preferred his middle-period techno-thrillers. Green Storm Rising is probably my favorite.”

  Eliza looked at Reba and wrinkled her nose. “You’re kidding! You mean that one where the UN Ecology Police try to enslave the world, and it’s up to a handful of chainsaw-toting beer-guzzling Oregon lumberjacks to stop them? How could you?”

  Reba shrugged. “I like lumberjacks.”

  In less than a minute, the OGRE RBVs had the robot’s torso disassembled and its helmetlike head rolled to an upright position. Some of the OGREs sprouted drills and saws then, and they opened up the head like a can of beans.

  There was a kid inside the head; fifteen years old at best. He screamed once as the OGRE’s sharp steel claws descended on him. Then, bloody claws rising and falling in terrible rhythm, they disassembled him, neatly plucking out and displaying intestines, liver, lungs, eyeballs…