by Eric Brown
She indicated the mattress. ‘Take a seat. Drink?’
He sat down. ‘I’m okay.’
She upped the lighting and peered at him as she sat on a swivel chair before a desk of touchpads and poured herself a bourbon.
‘Shit, Halliday. You look terrible.’
‘Thanks, Kat. You know how to make a man feel great.’
‘No, I mean it. You oughta stop, you know. It’s no good just cutting down. It’s like a drug. You can’t quit an addiction by cutting down. It’s gotta be sayonara to whatever’s your kick.’
He stared at her. ‘Listen to you.’ He pointed to the spin canisters littering the floor like bowling pins. ‘That stuff isn’t exactly soda pop, you know.’
‘Fuck yourself, Halliday. You know what I’m talking about.’
‘Actually, you’ve lost me.’
She leaned forward. ‘Quit VR, big boy. Get out while you can. Turn your back on it and wave goodbye.’
‘Listen, I can handle it. I’m on a new fitness and health kick. Eating well, cutting out the booze. I’m joining a gym next week.’
She was shaking her head, as if in despair. ‘Halliday, it isn’t your body I’m thinking about. It’s up here.’ She tapped her head.
He mirrored the gesture, mocking. ‘Hey, I’m fine up here.’
‘Fine? Hell, look at society ...’
He recalled this from a year ago, her magpie flitting from one disconnected subject to another. She might come back to her original premise, but it often took time. He wondered if it was an effect of the spin.
‘What the hell has society got to do with me using VR?’ he asked.
‘Can’t you see it, Halliday? You blind? Look at how society’s been affected by the fucking plague. Look at how people interact ... They don’t.’
‘They never have,’ he muttered.
She pointed at him. ‘Let’s take you,’ she said. ‘You got a lover at the moment?’
‘No. But I don’t see—’
‘You got friends?’
He opened his mouth to speak. Casey? Who else? Certainly no male friends, not since Barney died.
‘Well?’
‘So I’m a miserable lonely bastard, but what does that prove? Look at you. You don’t use VR that much, so where’re all your friends and lovers?’
‘Difference is, Halliday,’ she said, staring at him seriously, ‘I chose my lifestyle, but the poor bastards who’re addicted to tanking, they’re affected without even realising it. Their social skills are eroded - their very need for human contact’s diminished by what they experience in the sites. So you think you interact in VR, but what really happens is that you do what you want. It’s a fact, Halliday, that ninety per cent of VR users now don’t choose user-interactive sites - they use sites where they interact with constructs, artificial personas often programmed by themselves for their own gratification. People in VR don’t have reciprocal relationships with other people, with a two-way flow of giving and receiving - they take what they want and give nothing in return. The ability of people to give themselves is being lost, Halliday. We’re becoming a nation of loners.’
‘So you foresee the ultimate breakdown of society?’ he said, sarcastic.
‘Look around you, Mr Private Eye. Don’t you see the breakdown happening now?’
He shrugged. ‘I see what I’ve always seen.’
‘That’s ‘cos you’re too out of it with VR to notice the fucking difference, Halliday.’
He looked around the room, part of him wondering if she had a point. When it came down to it, what the hell did he know, ultimately, about anything?
She hoisted the bottle of Jack Daniel’s. ‘Sure you won’t have a drink, Halliday?’
He shrugged. ‘Go on. Why not?’
She found a chipped mug on the floor and poured, then sat beside him on the mattress.
The alcohol burned his throat. Across the room, lined against the wall, he saw half a dozen cans of spray paint.
‘Tell me. I’ve always wondered. Who pays for all this equipment, the coms and the tank? You pay for all that yourself?’
She stared straight ahead. ‘Let’s just say that it’s paid for, okay?’
He smiled to himself, took a sip of bourbon. ‘How long you been working for Virex?’
She looked at him quickly. ‘Halliday the Private Eye. You been snooping around, doing a bit of detective work on the quiet?’
He shook his head, lips pursed around a mouthful of corrosive bourbon. ‘Just put two and two together. I’ve seen the graffiti. “Virex Against Virtual Imperialism” and whatever. So what does it stand for? Virex?’
‘Know something, Halliday? I don’t know. Honest. It’s just a name the cells have always worked under. I’ve often wondered. VIRtual Experience? VIRtual Extinction?’
‘You in a cell?’
‘Something like that.’
‘So a year ago, the guy you wanted me to locate, Levine? He was a cell-mate, right?’
‘Wrong, Halliday. He was a controller.’
‘So who’d you think wanted him dead?’
‘Who else? The big three. The bastards who ran the virtual empire.’
Try as he might, he just could not imagine Wellman sanctioning the assassination of people opposed to VR.
She was looking at him.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘You’re working for Cyber-Tech now, right?’ she said.
‘Hey, I should employ you. Could use a partner with your ability.’ He tipped his mug and swallowed, grimacing. ‘How’d you know that?’
‘We have monitors, people who swim in the cyberverse ocean, disguised, of course. We call ‘em sharks. They make it their business to scavenge information, keep an eye on all the big operatives.’
‘You’re not the rag-bag collection of misfit anarchists and anti-capitalists I took you for.’
‘I’ll consider that a compliment.’
‘So what else you know?’
‘About you? Oh . . . That you use a semi-private site, with a construct of a kid you once knew.’
He felt his face burning.
‘That you have almost a third of a million in the bank. That you haven’t worked for six months.’
‘What do you know about the case I’m working on now?’
She shrugged. ‘Not much. Just that a Cyber-Tech employee went walkabout, and big shot Wellman himself got you in to track her down. Which,’ she went on, ‘is probably why you dropped by today? Or am I wrong and it’s really just a social call to see how I’m doing?’
‘You’re right. I have a lead, a code I need to crack. I’ve tried accessing it myself, but all I get is an access denied warning.’
She hung her head between her legs and laughed.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.
She looked up, still shaking her head. ‘Think about it, Halliday. You want me to help you help the people who I’m fundamentally opposed to in political principle ...’
‘That’s a long way of telling me to go take a flying fuck, Kat.’
She stared at him. ‘What’s the code?’
He told her.
She nodded. ‘I’ll do it.’
‘What’s the catch?’ He cocked an eye at her. ‘What about those principles?’
‘No catch,’ she said. ‘Just fifty thousand dollars to make me forget my principles, okay?’
He whistled. ‘That’s a lot of dollars to pay for something that might not lead anywhere.’
‘That’s the deal, Halliday. Fifty thou if I can break the code. Take it or leave it.’
Fifty thousand dollars ... He could always charge it to Wellman. So why not? It might not lead anywhere, but then again it might provide him with the break he’d been looking for.
‘Okay, Kat. Fifty thousand it is.’
She jumped up and crossed to a swivel chair beside a bank of consoles. She sat cross-legged, a pair of headphones clamped to her ears. Halliday drew up a chair next to her and watched as she bega
n work.
She pulled a touchpad onto her lap and tapped in the code. The screen on the desk exploded with colour, illuminating the room. Against a bright blue background, white script scrolled at a rate too fast to read.
From time to time Kat reached out and touched the screen, and the script changed, scrambling and snowing down into a rearranged configuration.
Kat regarded the screen and twisted her lips. ‘Mmm . . . Access denied to casual users. It’s a code I’ve never come across before, Halliday. It has nothing to do with any of the VR operatives I’ve had anything to do with. But there’s a thousand smaller fish out there. I’m trying to break the code down into its individual properties, trying to find out where it came from.’
She pushed herself across to another burning screen and ran her fingers over the touchpad. She scanned the text that appeared.
‘Technically, it’s not on-line. Every potential user who employs the code goes through an elaborate filter, and then gets shunted into a private matrixing system.’
She turned to the monitor, reaching out to touch the screen.
It detonated with a sudden flare of colour, an explosion of orange, followed by green; a hundred subliminal images flashed in a dizzying rush.
She looked across at Halliday. ‘I’ve connected with the site, but I’d advise against going in there.’
‘Where is it?’ he asked.
She laughed, gestured. ‘It’s just...out there, Halliday. It’s impossible to learn anything about the site, other than its matrix configurations, which wouldn’t mean anything to you. Thing is, it’s protected with so many guard systems and alarms that they obviously want to keep whatever’s in there a secret.’
‘There’s no way of getting a visual representation of the site on screen?’
She shook her head. ‘No way, José.’
‘What about getting me in there? Can you do that, Kat?’
She stretched, cracked her fingers above her head, considering. ‘I can get you in there, but like I said I wouldn’t advise it. It’d be ve-ry risky. You’d be detected sooner or later, even if I employed all the shields and decoys I can. I’d give you a couple of minutes, three tops, and then the alarm bells’d start ringing and you’d be chased by the electronic equivalent of the hounds of hell.’
‘I’ve got to try it.’
‘Listen, when I mean it’s risky, I mean it’s like dangerous, you know? It’s loss-of-life scenario I’m suggesting here. I had a friend, he was burned bad once, only good luck got him out in time.’
‘If I get in and out inside a few minutes...?’
‘Easier s than d, Halliday. See, these guards and alarms don’t announce that they’re coming after you, don’t tap you politely on the shoulder and say, “Excuse me, there’s the door...” They sneak up and start burning, right back to your brain in the tank.’
He thought of Kim, shot dead in a shallow grave north of Nyack ... He had no choice, really.
‘I need to go in.’
She nodded. ‘Thought you might say that. Okay. I’ll be with you all the way, talking you through it. You’ll be able to hear me, but won’t be able to reply. I’ll be monitoring things from this end, trying to detect strikes before they’re launched. But look, don’t sue me if you end up brain dead, okay?’
‘Hey, I trust you. You’ll get me out alive.’
‘You sound pretty confident, pal.’
He smiled at her. ‘If you don’t get me out in one piece, Kat, how will I pay you?’
She pointed across the room to the jellytank. ‘Just take your clothes off and get into the tank, Halliday.’
He stripped, his back turned to Kat. He attached the leads to his arms and legs, then pulled on the faceplate.
Kat glanced up. ‘I don’t know what you’ll see in the site. There might be anything in there. Could be you won’t be able to make sense of it visually. The readings I have here are all over the place.’
He gave a thumbs up signal.
‘And another thing before you go,’ she said. ‘You won’t be yourself in there, for obvious reasons. I’m inserting you in some kind of disguise. Thing is, I don’t know what, yet. I’m cloaking you in a mimic program. So you might be anything, any size. Good luck, Halliday.’
He stepped over the side of the tank and placed his foot on the surface of the gel. It resisted his pressure initially, then gave suddenly and oozed up his leg. He brought his other foot down, then sat and lay back. He sank through the gel, lying on his back and staring through the visor as the warm amber goo sealed over him.
‘I’m putting you through, Halliday.’ He heard Kat’s voice, tinny, in his ear. ‘Three, two . . .’
One by one his senses departed. He was blind and deaf, and then his sense of touch deserted him. He was an intelligence, nothing more, afloat in an infinite dark void.
On his ear-piece he hard, ‘... one. Inserting!’
He felt a sudden heat in his head as he made the transition.
He was surrounded by silence, a silence that seemed to stretch away from him for ever. The sensation was more than the mere absence of sound. He felt the absolute quietude as his eyes might apprehend a vast ocean, stretching away in every direction. The more he thought about it, the more he came to realise that it was more than just that he was failing to detect any sound: the silence existed within his head, an utter and perfect peace.
A voice shattered his meditation. ‘No sign of anything nasty yet, Halliday.’
The words echoed, reverberated away into the distance like thunder.
He was surrounded by darkness, but a darkness pierced here and there by minuscule points of bright light, like a starscape.
He moved towards the nearest light, and only then realised that he was in possession of a physical form.
He was enclosed within the chitinous armour of some kind of insect, in control of a body he knew was tiny but which, from his own perspective, seemed entirely normal. Without conscious thought he steered himself towards the rapidly expanding light in a blur of furiously fanning wings.
As he flew, he was aware of other insects moving towards the light, and then, in the distance, a million others heading in the same direction. Except, when he looked again, they were not insects but insect-shaped objects, reflective with oleaginous jet surfaces. On the thousand facets of every bodily surface appeared scrolling columns of numerals. He twisted his eye-stalks and saw with wonder that he too was no more than an aggregate of alpha-numerics, a constantly changing series of chitinous screens comprised of a million sequencing calculations.
‘So far so good,’ Kat’s transistorised voice told him, from another world entirely.
Ahead, the insects were flying into the closest ball of light, hugely expanded now and radiating a fiery effulgence like the sun. Without slowing, one by one the insects disappeared into the light, as if this were their sole mission in life.
He approached the ball of light, so huge now that it filled his entire field of vision. All he could see, other than the glow, were the specks of jet that were the other insects, winking out of existence as one by one they hit the light.
He felt no fear; it seemed right that he was moving in concert with the million other numerical insects. He soared towards the surface of the sun, and was consumed in a great actinic blast that seared his vision and filled him with elation.
He was no longer an insect, he knew. He had adopted a human form now, an amorphous figure without identity. He beheld before him a rolling idyllic landscape of hill and vale, the clichéd default geography of some third-rate fantasy site.
A woman stood before him, naked. She walked forwards, across a sward of emerald grass, reaching out to him as if in greeting.
Then the woman, until that second merely the essence of womanhood, a female paradigm upon which individuality had yet to be bestowed, changed in an instant.
Kim stood before him, wearing the scarlet dress he knew so well. Her long jet hair hung past her high cheeks, and her large, bro
wn Oriental eyes looked out at him with concern.
The sight of her was like a physical blow to his solar plexus.
‘Hal,’ she said, stern, almost accusing. ‘You shouldn’t be here.’
He reached out, took her hand. Her fingers were so warm, so real. ‘How ... ?’ he began, wondering at the coincidence of finding her here.