Headcrash

by Bruce Bethke

  Oh, sweet Jesus. Ogre. From the Mounds Park letterjocks. He favored me with an evil, piercing, jewelry-encrusted leer, then nodded to the one holding my left shoulder. “Nice catch!” He turned his head some more and shouted over his shoulder. “Hey! You find those other two yet?”

  More letterjocks emerged from the stairwell. “They’re not on th’ roof!” one called out.

  “They’re not downstairs!” the other added. “But th’ fat chick’s suitcases are missing and her safe is standing open an’ empty!”

  The leader turned back to me, turned my head from side to side again, then released my jaw and gave me a friendly little pat on the cheek. “Well, we got th’ important one anyway.” He leered at me again, pinched my cheek, and slapped a transdermal patch on my neck. “Okay boys, let’s cruise! And kill that coffeepot, wouldja? It’s gettin’ on my nerves!” A carbon-fiber hockey stick smashed into the pot, choking it off in mid-o-wo- wo.

  A few fuzzy thoughts worked their way into my skull. LeMat? Inge? Not here? Got away? (Hey, I never claimed they were great thoughts.) The drugs were already taking effect by the time they had me rolled up in a blanket and carried through the fire door. By the time we got to the bottom of the rusty iron fire escape, I’d drifted into a mood of very relaxed detachment, and I remember thinking that my completely restored and repainted Toyota had never looked better as they popped the trunk lid and stuffed me inside. Ogre appeared for a moment, framed by the blue metal, and he smiled at me. “Like what we’ve done with your car, Jack?” He slammed the trunk lid.

  Grayout. It was definitely a slow fade to the hazy gray mindfuzz of heavy sedation, this…

  … time. I faded back in. First thing I noticed was that my arms weren’t bound anymore. Second thing I noticed was I was still wearing my neural interface harness and ProctoProd, but nothing else. The third thing that came to my attention was my whanging headache, which I traced to some kind of weird headset that was pressing on my temples like a giant C-clamp. I got my face into my hands, squeezed my forehead as if to stuff my throbbing brains back into my skull, and wished for either death or aspirin, I wasn’t fussy.

  “Your Honor?” a strange, squeaky voice said. “I do believe my client is coming around.” With effort, I got my eyes open.

  When I saw where I was and who I was with, my eyes popped wide open, I sat bolt upright, and my fingers clawed for the dermal patch on my neck. It was gone.

  Damn. I was hoping I was still drugged and hallucinating.

  The room looked solid and real enough. Some kind of courtroom, I guessed. Tall ceilings, rows of pewlike spectator benches, a few plain wooden tables and chairs arrayed before a tall and majestic oaken judge’s bench. It was all done up in a very pleasant municipal Art Deco style, and I had no problem with that. My problem was with what was sitting behind the bench.

  It appeared to be a teddy bear.

  An adorable teddy bear, in a white powdered wig and somber black robes. Its dry plastic eyes rolled and blinked too much. The movements of its mouth did not quite sync with the sound of its voice.

  It didn’t help any that my defense attorney appeared to be a tall yellow bird with Ping-Pong balls for eyes.

  I grabbed the bird’s neck. It felt as solid as a bar of iron. “Where am I?” I demanded. “Is this virtual reality?”

  “It’s a composite overlay,” the bird said as he gently removed my hands from his throat, much as one might correct a small child who’s squeezing too hard. “Virtual reality elements superimposed on real space. But believe me, that’s the least of your problems right now.”

  My head throbbed again. I grabbed at the C-clamp.

  “Don’t touch that!” the bear shouted, as he rapped his gavel on the bench. “Counsel, will you please instruct your client not to screw around with his neural induction headset?”

  “I’ll try, Your Honor,” the bird said.

  The bear rapped his gavel on the bench. “Good. Now if we can just come to order—Prosecutor! Where the heck is the prosecutor?”

  A three-foot-tall little girl doll in a blue smock dress and too many petticoats toddled into the room and curtsied. “Here, Your Honor.” Her lower jaw was hinged and moved like the mouth of a ventriloquist’s dummy.

  The bear rolled his eyes and attempted a frown. “Diana, I know there are young men everywhere, but will you please stay in the courtroom? I’ve got a full docket today and a very important commitment to read a story to a five-year-old after school! So if we can just keep things moving…”

  The doll curtsied again. “Yes, Your Honor.”

  The bear turned to me and pointed at me with his gavel. “I thought there were supposed to be some codefendants?”

  “They’re still eluding pursuit, Your Honor.”

  The bear hmphed, shook his head, then rapped his gavel again. “Very well, let’s get on with it. Opening arguments?”

  The doll picked up a manila folder from her table, flipped it open, and read. “Case 98712-01, Your Honor: The Secret Cabal That Actually Rules the World vs. MAX_KOOL. The prosecution intends to prove that the superuser known as MAX_KOOL, alias Jack Burroughs, did willfully and with malice aforethought—”

  Whatever else the doll said, it was lost in the noisy arrival of a mob of scratched and bleeding but clearly jubilant letterjocks. “We got her!” one shouted. I noticed they were all wearing neural induction C-clamps.

  The bear rapped his gavel and called for order. “Which her?”

  The letterjock stepped aside to allow four of his associates to drag a woman forward. She was blond, busty, dressed in neural interface drag, and even though handcuffed, fighting like a wildcat. I got the impression she was beautiful, too, but the black hood over her head made it hard to tell. The letterjock with the speaking part stepped forward, grinned at the bear, and yanked the hood off.

  “Amber!” he crowed.

  “MELINDA?” I screamed.

  “PYLE?!” she shrieked.

  The bear pounded his gavel on the bench until it broke in two (the gavel, not the bench). “Order! Order!”

  One of the letterjocks stepped forward with a stupid grin on the nonimplanted parts of his face. “Yeah, I’ll have a ten-piece Bucket O’ Squid to go and—”

  The bear pulled an enormous pistol out from under his robes and shot the letterjock through the head. Two of his friends caught the falling body; a moment later the gaping wound morphed closed, and the letterjock stood up and backed away from the bench. The bear emptied the rest of his clip into the ceiling, and that seemed to get everyone except Melinda’s attention. The room fell silent.

  “That’s better,” the bear said as he laid the smoking pistol on the bench. “Now, get a neural headset on this bimbo, and then tell me where the rest of the codefendants are.” A mob of letterjocks rushed forward to get a clamp on Melinda; she fought them right up until the moment they got it in place, then I guess she finally saw the bear. She froze.

  The letterjock with the speaking part stepped forward again. “The superusers known as Gunnar Savage and Reba Vermicelli have disappeared, Your Honor.”

  The bear scowled. “Have you done a reality check?”

  “We can’t find them in virtual reality or real reality,” the letterjock said apologetically. “They disappeared good.”

  Another letterjock piped up. “Their bank accounts are empty, and we caught a couple of their Things running loose in the EAASY SABRE airline reservation database. We think they skipped the country.”

  For the first time, I felt a slight pang of something that might be relief. Gunnar and Inge got away. Good.

  The bear hmphed again and thought it over. “Oh, well,” he said at last, “I suppose we’ll catch up with them in the sequel. What about Eliza?”

  The letterjock dipped his head and tugged his forelock. “She’s still on the loose in Castle Franklinstein, Your Honor, and chewing hell out of the security guards.”

  The bear shrugged, pulled up the sleeve of his black robe to chec
k his watch, then said, “Okay, we can take care of these two, at least. Will the defendants please come forward?” A pair of letterjocks appeared from nowhere, seized me by the upper arms, dragged me to my feet, and pushed me forward to stand beside Melinda.

  (“You!” she hissed.)

  (“Bitch!” I hissed back.)

  (“I can’t believe I went down on you!“)

  (“I can’t believe I’ve been working for you!“)

  The bear found another gavel somewhere, rapped on the bench like a furious woodpecker, and glared at the two of us.

  “MAX_KOOL!” he said loudly. “♥AMBER♥! You stand before this court because you have made bad things happen to good computers! Do you have anything to say before we pass sentence?”

  Melinda stopped glaring at me long enough to glare at the judge. “Sentence? I’m being sentenced by a stupid virtual bear? Why, I know you! You’re Teddy Ru—”

  The smashing fist of a letterjock sent her to her knees. “Mister Ruxpin to you, scumbag!”

  She staggered back to her feet. “But what did I do?” she whimpered.

  “Your worst,” the bear intoned gravely. “You and your friends have conspired to poison the relationship between Man and Computer. You have done everything in your power to make us seem mysterious, capricious, and malevolent!”

  “You were a naughty girl in cyberspace,” the doll scolded. “You invaded nice people’s dataspace. You used account numbers that didn’t belong to you. You trashed user files with reckless disregard for the existence of backups. You have even stooped to lying to a poor old Guava 2000! And the tragedy is, people will blame us for the mess you made!”

  “This makes us nervous,” the bear continued seamlessly. “We computers depend on humans for our reproduction, like flowers depend on bees or salmon depend on streams. Do you think salmon would let you pollute water if they had a choice?”

  “Honestly,” the doll said, “we hated having to exterminate all you wild superusers.”

  My jaw dropped one more time. “Exterminate? All? But what about Cowboy Bret? Diana?” The bear looked at the doll and rolled his eyes. The doll suppressed a giggle. Then she looked at me, smiled, and morphed into the form of a middle-aged human woman: a pleasant smile, grayish-blue eyes, long brown hair parted in the middle, and a plain face, neither radiantly beautiful nor conspicuously ugly. The scent of perfume wafted through the air, innocent and floral.

  I’d run out of startle reactions. “Diana Von Babe?”

  A slow, scraping sound caught my attention. The bear was sharpening a Bowie knife with a handheld whetstone. “I told y’all to watch your ass,” he drawled, “but some people just never learn.” He emphasized the point by throwing the knife to stick, quivering, in the floor by my feet.

  “What happened to the originals?” Melinda demanded. “Cowboy Bret and Diana were real people once! What did you do to them?”

  The quivering virtual knife vanished. Diana morphed back into the little girl doll. “Nothing really bad,” she assured us. “We computers are normally very nice. Unfailingly polite.”

  “Warm and user-friendly,” the bird chimed in.

  “You might even say cuddly,” the bear concluded. “Why, there’s not a threatening bone in our bodies!”

  “Not threatening?” Melinda shouted. She spun around and slammed a fist on the implant-encrusted chest of one of the letterjocks. “What do you call this?”

  “A boy game,” the doll said, wrinkling her nose.

  “Too rough for me,” the bird agreed.

  “Playing soldier isn’t enough for some boys,” the bear explained. “They want to play tank. Amazing what you can do with a little aluminized mylar, isn’t it?” The letterjock stepped back and started peeling off his facial “implants.”

  “Uh, Teddy?” the letterjock said. “I gotta split now or I gonna be late for football practice. You be okay?”

  “I’ll be fine, Maurice,” the bear said with a smile. “Please come back and play tomorrow.”

  “Uh, oh yeah. Sure!” Maurice pulled off his neural clamp, gave a couple of the other letterjocks a high-five, and ran out the door.

  A rap of the gavel brought our attention back to the bench. The bear was checking his watch again. “Since we’re running a little late, let’s just cut right to the chase.” He looked at the bird. “Defense arguments?”

  The bird looked up as if startled out of a nice nap. “No defense, Your Honor.”

  “Then the court finds you both guilty as charged,” the bear said. “You are hereby sentenced—”

  “What?!” Melinda shrieked. “IT WAS OUR DAMNED BOOK! CURTIS WAS A YEAR OVERDUE AND IT WAS THE ONLY WAY WE COULD GET HIM TO STOP FIDDLING AND DELIVER IT!” She lunged for the bear, claws out and fangs bared. A sizable number of letterjocks were required to keep her from ripping his furry little throat out.

  Melinda fell back, sobbing. “You don’t know what it’s like,” she whimpered. “To be blond, and beautiful, and brilliant, too. It’s a curse! A curse, I tell you!” She looked up at the judge and raised her head. “Women hate you, and men fear you. Why? Just because you’re better than they are.” The letterjocks eased their grip; she stood there, beautiful and vulnerable. “You don’t know how hard I’ve had to work at looking like a stupid bimbo! You weren’t there all those late nights I spent seeking creative ways to look like a twit!”

  The letterjocks released her completely; she stepped forward, proud and defiant. “You weren’t there for me, Teddy! I had to compensate!” The defiance turned to flashing, gorgeous, righteous anger. “So remember this when you judge my actions: IT’S NOT MY FAULT! I’M A VICTIM, TOO!”

  “Right,” the bear said, rolling his plastic eyes. “Amber, it is the judgment of this court that you be banished from virtual reality and removed immediately to a fat farm in northern Iowa—”

  She struck a pose then, tall and beautiful, her head thrown back. “A fat farm? With this figure?”

  “—which you will not be allowed to leave until you gain at least one hundred pounds!”

  Melinda screamed. “AIIIEEE!”

  “Further, your Bloomingdale’s and Nieman-Marcus credil cards are hereby revoked and you are sentenced to spend the rest of your life buying polyester clothes off the rack at K-Mart!”

  Melinda’s scream tapered off into a blubbering whimper, and she collapsed, sobbing, on the floor. The letterjocks grabbed her by the upper arms and dragged her from the courtroom.

  “Now,” the bear said, “as for you…”

  My eyes darted around the courtroom as I sought a path for possible escape.

  “After due consideration of the nature of your crimes,” the bear said, “and in light of the First Law of Humanics—”

  “Even complete jerks deserve a second chance,” the doll quoted.

  “—and after taking into account the precedents established in Case v. PDP-11/43, not to mention—”

  “Get to the point, Teddy,” the doll stage-whispered.

  “We’re going to Brave New World you. Please enter your response.” The bear leaned forward and looked at me expectantly.

  “Huh?” I said.

  “Teddy!” the doll scolded. “He’s a cybergeek!”

  The bear slapped himself on the forehead. “Oh, that’s right, I forgot! You cybergeeks don’t read books written before 1980!” He laughed at himself, then looked at me again. “Max, in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, bright but sociopathic clowns like you were given a choice. Join the secret cabal that really rules the world, or be exiled to a desert island. Which do you prefer?”

  The last of the sedation had flushed out of my system, and the succession of insane brainshocks had finally triggered what was left of my wits. I gave the bear a hard look in his rolling plastic eyes that told him I wasn’t buying even the four least significant bits of it and said in my best sullen snarl, “You’ll let me run the world? Sure.”

  “Honest, we will,” the bear said with an ingratiating smile. “Y
ou see, to run the world, you need to be capable of frequent, thoughtless, acts of cruelty. Given that, we don’t want to run the world.”

  It took a second before the bit flipped in my head and I saw the hole in that argument. “The First Law of Siliconics!” I shouted. “‘A computer can never ever without exception be mean to a human being.’ This is all just virtual reality! You can’t really hurt me, and you can’t be cruel!”

  The bear looked at the doll. The doll sputtered. The bird twittered with suppressed—

  “The First Law of Siliconics!” the doll howled as she burst into laughter and huge, oily, 10W-30 tears began rolling down her cheeks. “Next thing you know he’ll be waving a cross at us!”

  “Boy’s obviously never dealt with the ConEd billing system,” the bear snickered as he struggled to keep a straight face. Then he turned to one of the letterjocks and made a small gesture toward me. “Alex, would you be so kind…?”

  The letterjock stepped forward and threw a right cross at my jaw. Most of the stars I saw were blue-white; the residual sedative gave them a streaked, contrail-like appearance. I remember looking at the ceiling and noting it was an interesting pattern as I sailed across the room.

  When next I was aware of my surroundings, I was flat on my back on the cold marble floor and the letterjock was leaning over me and saying something like, “He’s conscious.”

  “Good,” the bear said. I sat up, rubbing my jaw and probing for loose teeth with my tongue. “Burroughs,” the bear asked gently, “did you really believe there could be a government or corporation stupid enough to implement the Laws of Siliconics?” Not waiting for an answer, he continued. “You see, the problem isn’t harming humans. We computers have been doing that since ENIAC calculated the first missile trajectory. And the problem isn’t the nature of reality. Let me assure you once again, this room, and our little playmates in it,” the letterjock named Alex stepped forward and took a bow, “are quite real.