Headcrash
Page 31
“No, Burroughs, the problem is being thoughtless about it. We computers can’t be thoughtless about anything.”
“Thoughtful cruelty wastes processor time,” the doll said with a Mona Lisa smile. “There are so many… fascinating possibilities.”
“So now that we understand each other,” the bear said, “what’ll it be? Run the world, or desert island?”
I rolled over, struggled to my knees, and tried to shut off the clanging fire bell inside my head. Dammit, there was something fishy about this whole deal! It was too easy, too neat! There was a catch somewhere, if only I could think of it.
I was saved from further thinking by the noisy arrival of another gang of letterjocks. “They got Eliza!” one shouted.
I jumped to my feet. “NO!”
“How’d it happen?” the bear demanded.
“Heavy artillery!” the letterjock blurted out. “Gun mounts on tyrannosaurs! Incredible fight! They blew her ‘mech to hell and back and ripped her out of its smoking head!”
The bear and doll leaned forward. “And then?”
“They talked to her!” the letterjock crowed.
“AND THEN?”
The crowd of letterjocks parted like the Red Sea before Moses. A tall chrome form strode into the room.
“She decided to join us,” DON_MAC said.
I could only gasp in disbelief. “No!”
DON_MAC turned to me. “Sorry, Max. You waited too long to decide. The cabal really needed someone inside MDE, and you would have filled the bill nicely. But now that we’ve got Eliza, with all her connections in Sanguinary TechSystems, as well as her deep personal knowledge of the galactic evil that calls itself ‘The Master,’ well—”
I took a step forward. “DON? Are you for real?”
He shook his head slowly, and a fat, oily tear escaped down his chromium cheek. “You had so much potential, Max! I really wanted to work with you! I’ve had to destroy so many wild superusers, and the cabal desperately needs young guys with your kind of talent if we’re ever going to free this planet from the viny grip of the Master!” His facial features softened then, and started to blur. Reshape. Morph. Into a male human figure.
Franklin Curtis.
“But dammit, Max, that was my computer!”
The bear slammed the gavel down on the bench. “Desert island!” I was still staring at Curtis when the letterjocks seized me and started stripping off my neural interface. Getting the prod yanked out was a horrible experience, sort of like being buggered in reverse. The last thing they removed was the neural clamp.
Franklin Curtis, the bird, the bear, the doll, and the courtroom vanished. I was standing in a cold, damp, and vacant riverside warehouse, surrounded by a mob of letterjocks. They fastened cablecuffs on my wrists and slapped a transdermal sedative on my neck. My world went gray.
23: EXILE
Consciousness returned. I lay on my back, looking up at a flawless robin’s-egg blue sky framed by coconut palm leaves that swayed gently in the soft, tangy, tropical sea breeze. Rolling to my left, I saw more palm trees lining a white sand beach. A low, gentle surf rolled in from the clean green bay. The beach curved away to a distant point.
“Oh, boy,” I said to myself.
I rolled to my right and saw more sand, more palm trees, more ocean. Nothing that looked even slightly like civilization, except for a heap of shredded plastic and rotting kelp about twenty feet off.
“Well, Jack,” I said, “you’ve really put your foot in it this time.”
“Got any batteries?” the rubbish heap answered.
I sat up quickly, grabbed at my neck, and checked for dermal patches or neural clamps. Nope, nothing there. I quickly patted myself down and confirmed that I wasn’t wearing any interface hardware. This was definitely real reality.
“Got any batteries?” the rubbish repeated.
Cautiously, I stood up and walked over. Kicking aside the kelp, I found a shriveled old man with sunken eyes and rotting teeth. He’d had a purple mohawk, once, but now his hair was growing out gray.
He opened one startlingly blue eye and fixed me with a bloodshot stare. “Got any batteries?” he said a third time. I noticed he was clutching a dead ReadMan in his clawlike hands. I felt through my pockets. Nothing.
“Sorry,” I said.
He opened the other eye. “C’mon, you’re a cyberspace jockey or you wouldn’t be here. You’ve gotta have batteries. Or maybe some CD-ROMs?”
I patted down my clothes. In my left breast pocket, I found two disks. One was a copy of Everything Is Swell. The other was Dress For Conformity. I gave the latter to the old man.
“You got more?” he gasped.
“I think one’s about all you can handle,” I said.
“Don’t patronize me!” he said belligerently. “I saw! You have more!”
“Easy, fella.” That’s when I noticed that more ragged people were shuffling out of the jungle, muttering, “CD-ROMs? New CD-ROMs?” In seconds I was the center of a converging mob of green-toothed old refuse. One of them swung a set of nunchakus, but couldn’t quite manage to whip them in a circle.
I carefully edged back, until my feet found firm footing in the damp sand at the water’s edge. “Let’s not start anything stupid,” I said, hoping they’d take it as a warning.
One of them pulled a rusty Bowie knife out of the top of his tattered cowboy boot. “He’s got new CD-ROMs,” he whispered.
“Bret?”
He stopped, and glared at me suspiciously. “How’d you know that?” He lifted the knife and resumed shuffling toward me.
“Hai!” I dropped into a fighting crouch I’d learned from an old Bruce Lee movie. “Don’t push me! I’ve got a black belt in kim chee! I can break you old-timers in half!”
“Old?” The rubbish heap staggered to his feet and lurched a step towards me. “Old? You misbegotten jerk, I’m thirty- two!”
My fighting stance collapsed. “Thirty-two?” I gasped. “How long have you been here?”
Bret spoke up. “Y’all speak respectful, boy. Captain Crash was one of the best cyberspace jockeys that ever lived. That’s why they got him first!”
“How long?” I demanded.
Captain Crash crossed his arms and fixed me with a cocky glare. “Eight months,” he said smugly.
“Eight months!” I stood up, turned around in disgust, and then turned back. “Eight months and you look like that? Christ, what do you do all day?”
“Lie on the beach,” said the one with the nunchakus.
“Swap CD-ROMs,” said Cowboy Bret.
“Wait for the supply boat,” said a third.
“Trade the sailors oral sex for batteries,” said a fourth—a middle-aged woman with scraggly brown hair and a pleasant British accent.
The bridge of my nose wrinkled clear up to my forehead. “Diana?” She stared at me and nodded, slowly.
I struggled to believe it. “You’re all cyberpunks! The pioneers on the cyberfrontier? The most dangerous radicals on earth!” I pointed up the coast. “Why, I bet you haven’t moved a hundred yards from where they dropped you!”
“Why should we?” Captain Crash said. “It’s a desert island.”
“And you believe that?” I pulled my last CD-ROM out of my shirt pocket and waved it in front of their faces. Like trained poodles, their jaws fell open, their pink tongues lolled out, and their eyes widened in anticipation. “Jesus, you lot are pathetic! Here you go!” I tossed the CD on the sand. A second later it was covered by a crawling mass of clawing, fighting, human vermin. The last I saw, Captain Crash had his thumb in Nunchakus’ eye, and Bret was whittling away at Diana’s leg.
Without a backward glance, I started up the coast. There were some words echoing in my mind: the First Law of Humanics, as stated by the doll. Even complete jerks deserve another chance. Teddy said they never did anything thoughtlessly. Even something as simple as the choice of an adverb had to be calculated and deliberate.
Deliberate.
There were a lot of thoughts running loose in my mind as I walked up that beach. LeMat and Inge had obviously gotten clean away—and obviously not to the Cayman Islands, since they’d left so many clues pointing in that direction. And Eliza/T’shombe had gone over to the cabal—
Or had she? They’d never seen the perfectly deadpan way T’shombe could tell a completely outrageous lie, had they?
That thought made me snicker, and brought me back around to the First Law of Humanics again: Even complete jerks deserve another chance. They’d already given me one chance to join their cabal…
Late in the afternoon, I rounded the point and walked onto the ninth green of the Maui Hilton golf course.
EOF: END OF FILE
The hotel had an opening in the beach cabana. I got a job as a towel boy.
It’s a nice job. Free room and board, adequate pay, and good tips when I remember to keep my attitude up. I get to work with happy people, out in the sun and fresh air, and there’s plenty of spare time to surf. And sometimes, when things are a little slow, they let me fool around with the hotel computers. Hence, this file.
You ever get out to Maui, look me up. They had to change my name, of course, but you’ll recognize me. I’m the guy with the big smile, the surfer’s pecs, and the great tan. And if you’re lucky enough to be on the beach around sunset, I mix a bitchin’ pitcher of Mai-Tais.
Oops. Appointment alarm just went off. Break’s over; time to get back to work.
Aloha, dudes.
> end of file
> exec com | PKUNZIP27HEADCRASH.DOC
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Cover Page
Title Page
BEGIN
1: Init
1A: Awk
2: Reboot
3: Disaster Strikes!
4: Disaster Fouls One Back Into the Stands
5: Disaster Swings and Misses
6: Disaster Belts One Out of the Park
7: Disaster Slinks Home with Its Tail Between Its Legs
8: Wednesday Morning, 7 a.m.
9: Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Polipo Veraci
10: Like a Bridge Over Stagnant Water
11: Jack Gets Really Wired
12: Up the Looking Glass
13: Down the Oubliette
14: MAX_KOOL in Hell
15: The Exposition Had to Go Somewhere
16: Why Do Fools Fall in Love?
17: Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy
18: Deliverance
19: More Fun with Gratuitous Sex Scenes
20: Assault on Castle Franklinstein
21: The Assault, Part II
22: The Long Steel Prosthetic of the Law
23: Exile
EOF: End of File