“Denial might be why you’re so good at your job.”
Denial? “You trying to shrink me, Chief?”
“I wouldn’t dare. I’ve read your file, Agent Capra. I know why you are…you.”
I seriously doubt that. “Yeah? We should compare notes some time.”
“Over dinner?”
Oh great! The new Chief was flirting with me. When I smiled—a yes and no—an uncomfortable prickle scrambled up my spine, as if Aggie had sparked me right through my coccyx. I backed out of the office and into something that shouldn’t have impeded my exit.
I turned to find one of the finest specimens of manhood I’d ever seen, sprawled on his back in a silk Jimani suit. Not my type at all, in any sense—but definitely beautiful. And despite a strangeness about him, I contemplated taking him home for my mother.
This was the second bloke Aggie had flattened today though; maybe she’d developed a thing against minority groups. Speaking of which, I realised Chief Bascome was also in the passageway; loitering and laughing.
“That better not be directed at me, Chief.”
“I’m laughing at your old codger,” he said, pointing. “Milo Decker.”
“What,” I began, and then ran out of ideas.
“To allay your fears about my ability to assimilate, I do not suffer from space fever or any other stress-induced syndrome and I’ve never been on a Jump Ship,” Decker announced.
“I apprised him of your concerns,” the Chief mocked. I scowled at him.
“But yes, Agent Capra, I was born in 2040 and I have been in space for sixty-eight years, although for me it was more like five.”
Oh—frakn—no.
“I was part of the original Australian Probe Ship Mission.”
“Give me strength!” I begged. “How long have you been back?”
It hit me then, that what was stranger than the thing I’d half-noticed earlier— that Handsome had a full head of hair and no implants—was the fact that this cleanskin was so young.
No, take that back. The huge oddity was the fact that he was a man so young.
“One month,” he was saying.
I turned on the Chief and snarled, “You assigning me a techno-retard as a partner?”
“Calm down. He’ll catch on quick.”
“Realise I sound like a walking cliché, Chief,” I began.
“I don’t mean to be offensive Agent Capra,” Decker interrupted, “but I doubt you could be a walking anything.”
Valuable commodity he might be, but Ensign Decker had just demanded an arse-kicking. I pinned him to the wall before he realised I’d moved. “Your file says you’re eighty-seven-years-old, Decker,” I said quietly. “What’s your calculation?”
“Twenty-three,” he stammered.
“Good, so by anyone’s calendar, you’re old enough to know that it’s unacceptable to say what you just said.”
“Yes, Agent. But you called me retarded.”
“Technologically retarded is what I said. That referred to an educational inadequacy, not your physical appearance. Did not call you brainless, did I?”
“No,” he replied.
“Then do not ever point out that I am legless. Got it?”
He nodded.
“Good,” I said, and hovered off down the hall. “You coming?”
Twenty minutes later I was sitting in my office crash chair, hot-wiring the lead wire from an elderly virtual reality helmet into my TI so I could piggy-back Ensign Decker into Cy-city.
“So, we’re going inside the computer?” he said.
“No. We’re going to use the Terminal Interface to hitch a ride into the matrix of cyberspace and go anywhere we like.”
“Except we don’t leave this room.”
“Of course not,” I replied.
“I’m having trouble with this.”
“They must have had some kind of cyber tech sixty-eight years ago.”
“I’m sure they did,” Decker replied. “But my experience was limited to what was relevant to my training. Preparation for my voyage began when I was six. It was a combo of survival skills and firearm drills, plus advanced biology and stellar cartography. My only personal interest at the time was archaeology.” He shrugged. “I wanted to explore the old San Francisco ruins.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Gone now.”
“Yeah,” Decker grumbled. “Guess I’ll have to learn to pilot a sub to realise that dream.”
“OK, so that was then,” I said, handing him the helmet. “What’s stopped you since?”
Decker smiled. “Since? Agent Capra, you forget that by my body clock I was only gone for five years—during which time I mapped the Margolin quadrant and the entire sector between Allyo and Jajaray.”
“That’s quite a bit of space.” I was genuinely impressed. “But I can’t process that you’re a twenty-three-year-old who’s been alive for eight-seven years. Travelling at light speed always was beyond my understanding.”
“Try going offworld for five years and returning to find your little sister’s a great-grandmother,” he said. “I was eighteen when the Australian Mission left Earth. Our Light Ship was at the cutting edge of state-of-the-art; we were so advanced we were still science fiction.
“By travelling at the speed of light, months as you know them passed like days for us. Our voyage lasted five years; but decades went by back here. We thought we’d been contacted by an advanced alien culture when we came across a Jump Ship on our way home. Those things travel at up to six billion kilometres a second. They can flip to Titan and be home for dinner. We felt like dinosaurs.”
“Well, prepare your dino balls for another future shock, kid,” I said.
Decker looked nervous and pointed at my vid-screen. “And there’s really a city in there.”
“Not in there,” I corrected him. “And not even—more logically—in the bio-cell vault which is in there.” I stroked the translucent purple interface deck that shielded the banks of neural gel-cells and my nano-tech maintenance crew.
“Cyspace is out there; everywhere in non-space.” I waved my hands in the general direction of nowhere in particular, trying to find words for a concept that was incomprehensible—until you’d seen it.
“It’s an artificial alternate universe. And yes there are cities there. Our beat is Cy-city or, more often, Downside; a sprawling shantytown of cabo halls, blues bars, data saloons and holo-brothels. It’s in a hundred back alleys off the old Information Superhighway.”
Decker looked like he was in pain.
“It’s like imagining information. Parts of cyberspace are still just stacks of data or ribbons of info; at least that’s what it looks like when you’re trawling. When you access something specific, however, you can actually see it. Although what it looks like depends on how it was stored in the first place. Much of the old stuff is just dry, endless reams of figures, words or images—some flat, some 3D, some holo-fabrications. Like what you’d see on your vid-screen or projected via a holo-imager.
“More recent or imaginative info is like a full-on interactive vid. You can view it unplugged, but when you jack into cyspace, through a Navigation Controller like CC-Fly or ParaWeb, then you see and feel that information as a version of reality.
“For example the stuff you charted on your voyage would appear, all around you, exactly as you saw it, and logged it, in person out there.” I waved in the direction of outer space realising I was giving Decker directions to the same ‘nowhere in particular’ that I’d called cyberspace.
“You don’t see it with your eyes though, right?” Decker said.
“Well, I don’t,” I said, “coz my skull implant is connected directly to my brain’s visual cortex. You, however, will be seeing things the old-fashioned way, coz you have to receive the data via the visor. Assume you’ve at least used one of these before.”
He rammed the thing on his head. “For games.”
“Games?”
“We each have our own skills,�
� Decker stated. “While you’ve been scragging this inorganic ersatz universe, I’ve been flipping through the real thing cataloguing star systems and making contact with new species.”
“Okay, Game Boy; this works the same. Images and sound get delivered via the visor and, just as you once believed you were in the crew lounge on Asimov Base, or fighting the Granks in a space battle, now you will know you’re in Cy-city.
“The cities in cyspace are way more than virtual reality; they are, in a sense, virtually real. It’s the ultimate head-trip coz you’re not confined by a program that generates a game. You can go anywhere that information is stored, and everywhere you go takes you somewhere else, even if it’s just back to the central matrix, which is a misnomer coz it’s not at the centre, and there’s actually more than one of them. Cyberspace is like real space; it has no centre, no edges, and no top or bottom—and it’s an expanding universe.”
“But it’s not real,” Decker was still unsure.
I laughed. “No, it’s not real. But real is a relative term, just like time and space. You of all people should understand that.”
Decker grunted. “So how can you be a cybercop?”
“Why you’d want to be one is a better question,” I said. “When people started spending half their lives in cyspace, for recreation, knowledge exchange, propaganda or profit, some bright spark came up with the idea of creating virtual spaces where trawlers could meet—anonymously, by using avatars.”
Decker shrugged. “You mean you could lie.”
“Yes, you could lie. You could be anybody or thing you wanted—including yourself. You could reveal the you that had zilch to do with an ugly face or a lack of arms, or any real-world signifiers that supposedly describe you but really just label you as a mottle-skinned, bi-gendered accountant.
“Then a pair of tech-heads co-named Breckinridge Fink, took the virtual notion, juiced it with imagination and made it tangible. They established ParaWeb, and turned parts of cyberspace into permanent holographic constructs of the landscape of the cyber matrix.
“Breckinridge Fink built Downside, Cy-city and BerinSpace but it was only a dash before competing NavCons and matrix architects went on-line. Suddenly there were trade regions, cities and resorts like CaraBazaar and ParisBo. They’re still amazing amalgams of ultra-tech and unfettered creativity; where blissful paradise meets darkest nightmare in the same scape; and where the avenues and edifices are blended fact and fiction. It’s a wondrous hybrid of myth and common reality.”
“I’m waiting for the but,” Decker said as I leant over to adjust the audio flaps on his helmet.
“But it is beset, naturally, by that parasitic by-product of all human endeavours.”
“What’s that?”
“Crime,” I snarled. “And more varieties of it than you’d ever think possible. I might be a cybercop but when I enter cyspace I’m going where there is no law. My badge, your new badge, no badge, same thing. The rules, such as they are, are loosely guided by a century-old, free-market code of honour that is just that: an honourable, civilised kind of thinking. And ‘thinking’ is the only truly operative word, concept and act in the whole of cyspace. It’s a region that works cleanly and honestly—in its intentions.
“Bad elements, however, turn up wherever there’s a buck to be made or a drek to push around; so we are tolerated coz we proved ourselves to be useful. But, until the NavCons ask for an official SIP Corps presence we’re merely bounty hunters or secret agents, using cyspace just like everyone else does, to get or pass info. Don’t be fooled though; it’s as dangerous for cops in cyspace as it is on any streetside posting.”
I jacked Decker’s tracer lead into my TI deck to check the calibration. I hadn’t used something as hokey as a VR helmet in decades.
“When you enter any cyspace city or resort,” I continued, “you sling on a Cloak, or adopt an avatar, of anything you like. While there you can eat, drink, talk or listen to a rantan band; you can have mind-blowing sex in a holo-brothel, without risk of disease; you can even pick a fight and have the crap beaten out of you if that’s your quirk.
“If you’ve got an implant, like mine, you’ll actually feel and taste it all. Your avatar will bleed and bruise but the experience leaves no mark on your real body at home in its crash chair. But, coz your brain thinks it’s real, your endorphins get triggered, your adrenalin pumps and up goes your blood pressure. If your heart can’t take it, your brain will shut it down. If your mind can’t take it, then there’s a tank-load of cybertherapists listed in the Yellow Files.”
Decker shifted uncomfortably in his seat.
“You should be nervous, Decker. Life is strange enough out here, but our beat trawls the seriously weird. Have I put you off yet? Or are you going to lower your visor and take a look for yourself? Make up your mind, Ensign Decker, coz I’m going now.”
The noise that followed me into the matrix told me Decker was right behind me. He sounded like he’d been thrown out of Jump Ship that was still warping through space.
“Fraaakn-ell!”
My left hand keyed in the cords for Downside and, as the public entry point for the town materialised around us, I accessed my Cloak and chose an appropriate avatar for my new partner.
“Turboshit, what a charge!” Decker exclaimed.
The permanently rain-slicked main street reflected the neon-lit, forever night-time world of Downside. Tonight, that being a relative term, the footpaths of Bernezlee Alley were crowded with trawlers of every description, and there was music, conversations, arguments and laughter spilling from every establishment down the strip.
“Close your mouth Decker, you look like an idiot; particularly considering how you’re dressed.”
He looked down, then swivelled to catch his reflection in a window. He had to search for himself coz the person who looked back at him was not only barely-dressed, but didn’t look a bit like him.
“What is this?” he demanded.
“Apollo,” I replied. “Thought you’d look good in a toga.”
“Yeah?” he snarled. “Well I like your legs, Agent Capra, but who are you supposed to be?”
“Incognito! As are you, Ensign Apollo,” I responded tartly.
Whatever Cloak I adopt, and this time I’d chosen a fem-punk variation, I always grant myself killer legs; so I decided against punching Decker in the mouth for mentioning them again. I headed off down Bernezlee towards The Bender. A sleazy nightclub was always the place to start.
“There’s one thing I still don’t understand,” Decker trailed after me.
“Just one?” I reacted involuntarily to the vibration of my plasma-phone. I raised my real arm long enough to hear my mother snapping: “Jane, this really is urgent” then waved the call off.
“If you can get beat up here and there’s no mark on your real body, how was Strong killed here?”
“There’s a wicked illegal little device called a Rat Gun that gives a badarse electric shock or, if it hits just the right spot, a synaptic power surge. If a drek with one of those takes a dislike, you’re fried toast in seconds. The last thing you’d ever see, while lying in a Downside gutter, is these neon lights. But your body, and a skull full of soup or dust, will be found in your crash chair at home still jacked into your terminal. Just like Jimmy.”
“Do these murders ever get solved?” Decker asked.
I thumbed myself. “Best clean-up rate in the Corps. Hope you’re not gonna ruin my record, Ensign.”
“Hope you’re not gonna spend our entire partnership being patronising,” Decker remarked amiably.
Five minutes later we were sconced in a Bender booth, waiting for a drink and listening to a very bad rantan artiste.
“What is he trying to do?” Decker asked.
“Can’t do it, that’s his problem.”
“Is it supposed to be music?”
“You sound like my mother. Yes, this is supposed to be music. Not this bloke though; he should be refried.”
&nb
sp; A five-note chime announced the return of our bartend Beano, a snake-skinned rogue who growled at Decker, “Sit back, mavrak.”
“Righto,” Decker snarled back.
I glared at Decker then smiled at Beano. “He’s a virgin,” I apologised.
Beano grunted: “K’n tourists,” and slid back to the bar.
“What’s with him or whatever that was?”
“He’s a bartend. It’s his prerogative to be mean as batshit—if he wants.”
Decker tasted his burly and curled his lip. “Seems pointless if you can’t taste it.”
“Pointless to you, maybe,” I shrugged. “Tastes vivid to me, like riko juice and deepsouth bourbon.”
I scanned the patrons for the tag-signs of my snitches. The crowd this night was a spicy mix of mean-faced dealers, xotic-limbed hosties looking to score, club ragers, and chronic barflies. The latter were lazy dreks who’d missed the point of trawling and only ever came to drink and ogle.
“Incognito?”
“What?” I asked.
“Sorry. I didn’t know what to call you,” Decker said.
“Incognito’s good,” I smiled. “Did you want to call me something for a reason?”
“Yeah. I was wondering how you lost your legs. Bascome said it was in the Border War but…” Decker recognised my expression for what it was. He took a breath and pressed on regardless. “It’s just that I don’t know anything about that conflict, not having been here and all. It must have been hell to deal with, I mean…”
“The war or the legs?” I squinted at him. I had no intention of letting him off the hook for asking such a personal question so soon in our relationship. It didn’t matter that I felt remarkably comfortable with this young man. I rarely took to anyone quickly, but Decker possessed a strangely intimate quality. Either that or I was drunk.
“Both, I guess,” he muttered. “I mean how do you deal with a physical loss like that? And, um, what I did hear about the northern trenches was…scarifying.”
Poor bastard still had a lot to learn about social etiquette, so I gave him a point for refusing to pretend he was sorry about broaching an inappropriate subject.
Heiresses of Russ 2012 Page 14