by Tom Clancy
"Shade couldn't make it," Kalki said. "Some family thing came up, she said. She told me about you… " "Not too much, I hope," Manta said.
Kalki looked at him thoughtfully. "Come on," he said, "we can go in here and talk."
They went in through the Front Hall, and Manta looked up at the great black and gray chandelier, casting its cold light. "It gives me the creeps," he said softly.
Kalki chuckled. "You want creepy, you should try Nine," he said. "That'll raise the hair on your head, all right."
"You've been down to Nine?"
They headed off to the side of the huge space, where there were some benches faired into the stone of the massive walls. "I've been through the gates," Kalki said, sounding bored. "It looked so much like the beginning of Eight, to me, that I decided not to bother. They've gone to so much trouble, hiding the lifts down there, I wonder whether they're worth it… after all, the stuff I've found on Eight so far hasn't been so great. Sometimes I think it's just a ploy by the management to get everyone real excited about substandard stuff."
"The more I see of down here," Manta muttered, "the less excited I am about it."
"Yeah?" They sat down on one of the carved benches, watching people come and go through the great doors. "Shade told me," Kalki said, "that you were pretty sad about things. I see she wasn't exaggerating… "
"Yeah." Manta looked out into the darkness, and then after a moment said, "She said you'd felt this way… "
Kalki nodded. "A while ago now," he said. "It can be pretty tough when you're right down in the middle of it."
"I left some messages in the 'board' area," Manta said softly. "Just to try to get someone to talk to me. No one answered."
"Hey," Kalki said, "life does stink, doesn't it? The trouble is that people bring the outside reality in here with them. Here, you can change things… but out there, no one does anything about the nature of reality, the way people interact with each other. Or don't. No one listens to anything Joey's saying. And why should they? To do that, they'd have to admit the world stinks, in the first place."
"I don't have any trouble admitting that," Manta said. "It's been a waste of my time since I first started noticing things. Now…" He shook his head. "It's like every breath hurts. I'm tired of breathing:"
Kalki let out a long breath. "You have folks?" he said.
This was the painful part, the lying. "My mom," he said. "But she's a druggie. The guy she's seeing…" He shook his head. "We don't see eye to eye. And they're a long-term thing. I'm gonna be 'phased out.' I can see it coming. She's gonna farm me out to some cousin of hers." Manta bowed his head, unable, unwilling to look up to see how Kalki was taking this.
"Sounds rough," Kalki said. "Look, Manta… you've got to believe it. It can get better. Without warning, sometimes."
Manta's laughwas bitter. "Is that the best you can come up with? That just maybe things might get better? The only way that's going to happen to me is if all this stops, if the hurting, and the yelling, and the pushing around, if it all just stops. I've had it. I don't mind being worthless, being in everybody's way, no use for anything, I can deal with that if I'm just left alone. But when they make you that way, and then they yell at you for it, when they take everything away from you and then scream at you for not acting normal, for letting them down-" The words choked off. "I couldn't even give stuff away, gave some of my stuff to the kids at school, the few things I had. They even yelled at me for that." He laughed, that harsh sound again. "It doesn't matter. Those things are safe now."
"You gave stuff away?"
Manta was silent for a moment. "When I realized my mom was going to send me off to Philly or wherever it is her cousin lives," he said, "and I wasn't going to be able to see my friends anymore…" He trailed off. "I knew she was gonna just throw all my stuff away… "
He listened hard to Kalki's silence. His mom had been pretty clear that suicidal people sometimes gave personal possessions away to friends in anticipation of the act itself.
Kalki shifted, and as Manta glanced back at him, he thought Kalki looked uncomfortable. "Look, Manta," Kalki said at last, "this isn't the best place to be having this conversation. You're talking about the most real thing there is… your own existence. But places like this are instead of reality. They can be really attractive, or interesting, but they're not real contact, with real people." He shook his head, glancing around them. "So much of the uncertainty in the world, the pain… I think it comes of there not being enough genuine contact."
He looked down at Manta. "We should get together and have this out," Kalki said. "Not here. Contact between human beings shouldn't have to be mediated by electrons." His voice was suddenly pained. "Or snatched in the few minutes between online experiences and virtual appointments… "
"For what?" Manta said. "This is real enough. You don't have anything to say that's going to convince me. If you did, you'd have said it already." He got up. "Thanks, but-the talking time's over. I know what I need to do."
He took off across the huge "front hall."
"Manta, wait!" Kalki yelled after him, and came after, but Manta broke his connection to Deathworld, and vanished into the darkness.
A moment later Charlie was standing in his workspace again, slightly out of breath, not from any exertion, but from nerves. He glanced over at the readout connected to Mark's "trip wire" routine: glowing letters and numbers hung in the air, zeroed out, showing no attempts to access his space in any way.
Okay, Charlie thought, the trap's baited. Now let's see what happens…
The next morning he came down from the den, yawning, feeling somehow faintly disappointed. Despite the fact that people seemed to have been reading "Manta's" messages on the Deathworld message facility, there were no answers to any of them. And no follow-through from Shade or Kalki. I wonder if I overreacted a little, he thought. Scared Kalki off…
This time his mother was in the kitchen, pouring coffee from a freshly filled pot, and the sound of the front door shutting told him that he had just missed his father. "You're up early," she said, turning as Charlie yawned again.
"Yeah," he said.
"Want some?" his mom said.
"Uh, you don't think it'll stunt my growth?"
She gave him a look. "Nah. That's just a matter of time. I doubt much of anything could do that at this point."
From the cupboard she got down the mug with the double duck on it and the motto EIDER WAY UP, filled it and handed it to him.
"Thanks…" he said, and flopped into one of the kitchen chairs.
They both drank coffee in silence for a moment. Then, "A lot of late nights, the last week or so," his mom said. "Yeah."
"Dad says you're still researching suicide."
Charlie nodded.
His mother looked slightly resigned. "It has a kind of horrible fascination, I'll admit," she said. "Especially when life seems good, and it's difficult to understand how anyone could want to end it."
"Yeah," Charlie said, thinking of the six sets of images in his workspace, people he was not convinced had unanimously intended to end anything. "What's your schedule like today?"
His mother raised her eyebrows at him, plainly noticing the change of subject, but declining for the moment to comment. "The usual day shift, barring emergencies." She looked slightly relieved. "Though you know how it is trying to predict those. You?"
"School as usual," Charlie said. "Nothing exciting."
"Sounds wonderful," his mom said, finishing her coffee. "Look, Dad picked up some ribs last night, I was thinking of doing that thing with the hot sauce again for dinner."
"Yes, please!"
She grinned at him, rinsing out the coffee cup and leaving it to drain, then picking up her work-satchel from where it sat on one of the kitchen chairs. "Okay. Dinner around six, then. See you later, sweetie… "
School went uneventfully. Charlie had left a message with Nick's mom that he wanted to get together with him for lunch, but at lunchtime Nick was now
here to be found. The most highly developed communications systern in history, Charlie thought ruefully as the afternoon went by, and we're still playing Net Tag with each other. Oh, well… I could always drop by his place. It's not that much out of my way home…
He finished his afternoon bio class and headed home after hanging around a little while to see if Nick surfaced. There was no sign of him, so Charlie strolled in an absentminded way through the sweet spring-afternoon, considering neurotransmitter chemistry and the prospect of his mom's hot and spicy ribs. There had been some discussion a week or so ago into exactly why the capsiacin molecule was able to fool mouth tissue into thinking it was injured, and trigger the release of endorphins. Charlie's bio teacher had suggested that there might be some fake neurotransmitter "key" involved. Doesn't sound genuine to me, Charlie thought. If it were, there would be a-
The sound of a car slowing down close to him when all the rest of the traffic was doing forty or better made Charlie turn his head. A big car had slid up beside him, and just as his head was turning its door popped open and someone lunged out, reached out toward him-
It was only the reflexes of the nascent street kid Charlie had once been that now saved him, the thing that even these days sometimes made it hard for him to hold still and let his mom hug him. Don't let them touch you! Touch is control-
He twisted away and plunged off down Morrison Street, away from the car. Charlie heard the whine of the sonic going off behind him, someone actually trying to stun him into collapse-but he was just out of range, and his legs were moving faster than his brain for once. They remembered fear more clearly and immediately than he did, and while the intellectual constituent of the fear was still working its way down from his brain to his adrenals Charlie was already running, running as if the Devil himself was after him, down the street, turn the corner, down the side alley that served that block of Morrison, turn another corner in the opposite direction, run, run He barely felt the concrete beneath his feet, he was running so hard, and though his body was panting with terror and exertion already, Charlie's brain was running ahead of him, planning his escape.
It's a one-way street. They can't get down here easily. And I know this area-
He ran. His lungs started burning, and he ignored them. I thought they were in a hurry. I was right. Too right. Charlie gulped for air as he ran. If they're ready to try a snatch in broad daylight, they're really serious. Got to get online right away. Got to get help. The cops-or better still, Net Force For the cops didn't know him. Net Force did. He needed Mark Gridley, or James Winters, just as fast as he could get to one or the other of them.
Is it the killer himself Charlie thought, or an accomplice? Does it matter? They're right behind me-For he could hear an engine, getting closer. He didn't bother looking behind him. He turned immediately right and plunged across a brownstone's front yard, down the driveway beside it, heading into its paved backyard. There was a Dumpster up against the brick back wall. Charlie blessed its name and that of District Recycling Company, whoever they were. He went up onto the top of it in a rush and from there jumped up to grab the top of the wall, having already seen as he was going up that there was no broken glass embedded in it. Charlie went over the wall into the yard of the brownstone on the other side, paused for just a second to take it in-blind dirty windows, all with security shutters or shades down, another Dumpster, a couple of parked cars- I know where I am, he thought as he plunged out of the yard, into the brownstone's driveway and down to the wall in front of the building and the driveway's open gate. He looked up and down the street. I can't let them catch me out here, where they have the advantage-size, weapons, mobility. If there's going to be a chase, let it be where I have a chance. Not out here!
He ran like a sprinter, terrified that as he got to the corner he would see that car in front of him. Dark blue, a glossy new Dodge sedan of some kind, one of those big ones, they keep changing the names, recent model, Virginia plates- But it didn't materialize. Some kindly fate gave him the few seconds he needed to fly in the door of the WorldGate public Net-access place on the corner. He stood there panting at the front desk, and the guy who manned it straightened up from taking something out of the shelves behind the desk, looked Charlie up and down with an expression of complete boredom, and said, "Yeah?"
"I need a booth!" Charlie said.
The behind-the-counter guy looked at him with a total lack of urgency. "Cash or credit?"
Charlie fumbled in his pocket and came up with, to his shock, not one of the family commcards, but something he had grabbed off the hall table that morning on his way to school, thinking that he might as well use up a little of whatever comm time was on it: a public access commcard. Gulping, Charlie slapped it down on the reading plate on the counter. The guy behind the counter read what the plate and the commcard had to say to each other, and pushed Charlie's card back toward him. "Only got fifty-five minutes on that," he said.
Charlie swallowed. "Which booth?" he said.
"Six-"
He ran down the hallway between the booths, found Six, slid the curved booth door shut behind him, then palmsealed it locked. There he stood for a moment, breathing hard, and then flung himself into the implant chair which was the room's only furnishing. He leaned back, sweating, lined his implant up with the chair's pickup, closed his eyes-
Charlie opened them again on whiteness, and jumped up out of the chair. He was standing on an infinite white plane with a featureless blue "sky" above it, empty of everything except a voice that said, "Welcome to a WorldGate public Net-access facility. Instructions, please?"
The terrible thing about it all was that the one place where Charlie would have felt safe and at least slightly in control, his own workspace, was the one place he couldn't now go. There was a better than even chance that it had been tampered with somehow, that his accessing it would trigger some tracing facility that would betray his presence here. And that door would only be closed for fifty-five minutes. Charlie had almost no cash on him to buy more time. After that he would have to go out the door, and if they had been able to track him down, one way or another, the people hunting him would be waiting there with some plausible story-
Then it was all too plain what would happen to him, what had happened to the others. If not today, then some other time real soon, at an unguarded moment, he would be snatched. Someone would stuff him full of scorbutal cohydrobromate, either with a FasJect or even just out of a spray can, the aerosol method. And when the drug took, in a matter of a few minutes, when he could not resist, Charlie would be spirited away into some private spot, a hotel room, say, and his "suicide" would be set up. Possibly even with his own cooperation, but in any case, he certainly wouldn't be in any condition to resist. And even bearing in mind what Mom said… in this case, the odds are better than fifty-fifty that they can make you do something you wouldn't normally do. Think of what Nick said about Jeannine and Malcolm…
Charlie swallowed. "Workspace access," he said. "Address 77356936678822-847722-"
He rattled the number off as fast as he could, having to stop once or twice, because it wasn't one he normally had to remember. The whiteness around him flickered-
Charlie found himself standing in the middle of Grand Central Terminal in New York. This was his father's desperate joke about the state of his own schedule, which he described as being like living in Grand Central, though without being able to go downstairs to the Oyster Bar whenever he liked. The terminal's great main concourse was gloriously lit, with sun pouring down in great diagonally striking rays from the tall windows on the Vanderbilt Avenue side. But there were no people in it… and more to the point, to Charlie's despair, his father wasn't in it, either. Normally he had a big desk, made of the same creamy polished terrazzo of the floor, standing just west of the circular information kiosk with its polished brass knob-clock, but the desk was missing.
"Damn," Charlie whispered to himself. There was no point in leaving a message, no time "Home system," Charlie s
aid. "Workspace, new access, address, 77356936678822-8472086633-"
Another flicker. A second later Charlie was standing in his mother's space, which for reasons she had not explained to him was currently a huge stretch of sand just east of the Pyramids. The view was spectacular, until you turned around and saw that the suburbs of Cairo were directly behind you, and in fact you were standing in someone's backyard, with a picnic table and a swingset off to one side, and a lawn that was scrubby not for lack of water, but because some kids and an overenthusiastic dog or two had dug or worn it nearly flat. Charlie looked at the picnic table and saw a scatter of his mother's paperwork all over the top of it, stuff from the hospital, her computer pad, a bunch of flowers stuck in a crude vase that Charlie had made her from clay a long time ago. "Mom?" he said softly.
Her simulacrum appeared immediately. "Hi, honey," she said, but Charlie let out a breath of pure desperation, for she was canned. "Guess what? The best-laid plans have ganged agley after all. I'm going to be late again tonight, sorry… they needed some more warm bodies down in ER, they were short of staff. When you get home, be a sweetie and put some more white wine in the marinade for the ribs, okay? Otherwise, if you need me for something, call the hospital and have them page me, they '11-"
Damn. "Home system," Charlie said, racking his memory, and then shaking his head in frustration, for he couldn't remember James Winters's commcode or the code for his office. "Emergency call. Net Force headquarters-"
Suddenly he found himself looking at a uniformed lady, a cool-looking blonde, sitting behind a desk. "Net Force. How can I help you?"
"This is an emergency," Charlie said. "My name is Charlie Davis. I am a member of the Net Force Explorers. I need to talk to James Winters immediately!"