by Ed Greenwood
I saw only the silvery-white sparkling of the snow-covered cityscape in my wake, indistinguishable from sheer nothingness were it not for the sparse shadows that the city’s interior support framework cast in the chill midnight gloom.
The apartment structures on this level bled luxury, and I found myself envying their inhabitants. So much credit, so much opportunity—the birthright of more fortunate individuals than I. Probably fat, jobless. The newest generations of the elite, left over from a long-forgotten age of capitalist prosperity. And the view from up here…
I choked on the dry, icy air.
My implant chimed—a tiny vibration within my inner ear. Unknown caller.
“You’re getting close,” said an amplified whisper inside my skull. The female agent. “Sodexho’s place is the next structure on your right.” As if there were anything besides a forty-five-degree, kilometers-long concrete slide to water-level on my left.
I hugged the stone wall encircling Jed’s apartment complex and crept forward along the narrow shadowed area.
Red and yellow lights illuminated the space beyond a single window in the building, calling to my mind’s eye an image of fire, a pile of burning logs in the middle of an autumn Michigan forest. Tangerine sparks floated skyward on a cool breeze. The edges of a wide, starlit lake shimmered. The brilliant light of a full moon was reflected in the water, its shape broken by the angular cityscape that loomed against the night sky.
A teen wilderness camp. Where I’d met Jed, at age fifteen.
I shook away the memory, not wanting to forget that he’d recently become a murderer. He was a criminal of the highest possible magnitude, and no longer my friend.
“How should I go about getting inside?” I asked the voice in my head.
“Get to that window.”
I hopped the wall and flitted over to the apartment building.
As I peered inside, my eyes were drawn to the mess of zaibatsu computers similar to my own, and the alarming presence of not one, but four broadcast thrones.
“Is the front room clear?”
“Yeah.” I nodded to no one in particular.
“Go on inside. I’ll be keeping an eye on you, but you’re on your own now.”
I reached into my jacket and drew my pistol. With a flick of the switch on the side of the firearm, I set it for short-range EMP bursts. Carefully, I aimed at the electronic panel that operated the key-coded magnetic lock of the front door, and fired.
Electromagnetic energy rippled through the air in an invisible pulse-beam arc, wreaking havoc on the locking mechanism. Lights flickered and died, blacking out the area in front of the apartment entrance.
With a heave, I pushed the sliding metal door open and stepped inside.
Monitors displaying continual streams of raw server data cast soft blue-green illumination, granting me partial sight within the shadowy room. Half-empty beer bottles, muscle stims, and all manner of toxic dart ammunition covered the mirror-like surface of the coffee table near the couch. Electrical cables, fiber-optic leads, and nutrient feed tubes festooned every wall, corridor, and entryway. The entire apartment served as little more than a gateway into the digital parallel universe.
My kind of place.
“Shit,” the Shadowplay agent said, still occupying my head, watching and listening to my every action. Would I ever achieve true privacy again? “That blast alerted a security drone. Shut the door!”
I turned and slammed the locking mechanism back into place.
“Drones aren’t equipped with scanners that can actually detect or measure EMP radiation,” she explained, “but if it sees you with that pistol, it’ll cut its way in and zap you until you’re unconscious.” Legally, UA Federal officers couldn’t bust in without proof of a disturbance, but if the machine picked up a sonic disruption, it might patrol the outside of the complex for the next two hours.
“Fuck. How do I shake it?”
“Just don’t let it see you…and definitely don’t let it get a facial scan on Sodexho.”
I quietly drew the curtains shut.
“Where are you?” I asked, keeping my voice on the verge of silence. I dropped to the floor and crawled toward the darkness that I presumed would lead me to Jed’s bedroom. If I was lucky, I could catch him asleep, knock him unconscious and drag him to one of the chairs for an isolated, secure conversation. Or at least as secure as I could manage.
“On a rooftop about thirty meters away.” So she had been following me. “Sonar scan shows that Jed—or someone—is crouched behind the door of a small room, probably a bathroom. Careful; he’s lethal.”
Obviously.
I heard the whirring of the security drone’s gyro-propellers as it zipped by outside the door. I craned my head slowly in the dark and saw it hovering beyond the thick pane of fiberglass. It briefly rapped on the window with a tiny mechanical arm, doubtless hoping to draw me into the open for identification, then eventually gave up and moved on down the circular walkway toward the next condominium.
“Once you’ve got him certain the murder wasn’t his doing, transmit this line of gibberish through the public admin lines.” The agent sent a string of alphanumeric code via my implant’s universal omni. I stored it away, knowing it wasn’t something I’d be able to memorize.
I let out a held breath and continued crawling on through the gloom in search of my cowering friend. I popped my head inside the door of the first room I came to, and saw that it was a bedroom. Empty.
The next room was through a half-open slat door a few meters ahead on the left. I slowly crept inside, raising my pistol.
I surveyed the lacquered hardwood floor of the bathroom, saw nothing.
Something hissed, leaping unseen through the cool air. A dart bit into my neck.
Lights out.
I woke to stabbing pains deep within my brain. A flood of distorted sensory perceptions drowned out the world. The loosening of the chains that bound my mind to the flesh of my body felt instantly like freedom, but freedom never seemed to last. A temporary high, like twilight falling upon reality. Then darkness.
The broadcast throne transdermally synced to my optic nerve made it hard to imagine that I somehow lay motionless, still trapped within the fleshy shell of a skull-toting body. That existence now seemed a distant memory, replaced by an orgasmic shot of endorphins that gave way to sight, touch, reality.
A timeless corridor devoid of walls, or boundaries, or any sense of direction.
Interminable beams of ultrathin light hung upon invisible matrices so vast as to be virtually boundless, exploding eternally outward from the center of my field of vision. A veritable firmament of electronic code.
Light materialized.
Earth and her entire surrounding universe had vanished. Reality had been replaced, along with all known laws of the natural world, by a five-dimensional crystalline formation comprised of millions of supermassive geometric data clusters. Jed’s personal kingdom, I surmised from the unfamiliar aesthetic of the program.
The neuroware’s bit rate showed in my heads-up display as running at the optimal level. It had loaded perfectly rendered: a masterpiece among simulated realities. Modular interface, hyperfast transfer speed. Jed had learned the art, no question. But I knew the dangers of private server space. It meant isolation from the outside world. It meant the only order was that of the host.
Eternal chaos, potentially.
The EMP blast had apparently done no damage to the interior of Jed’s apartment complex. And he’d been smart about the situation, plugging me straight in. On a remote network, we’d have privacy. It’d give me a chance to at least make an attempt at reconciliation, so long as Shadowplay trusted me enough to not interfere.
Unless Jed locked me inside, pumped full of tranquilizers.
Or just killed me.
There was really no way to be sure what he might do; he was a murderer, after all.
We stood upon an invisible plane floating just a few meters above the waters of Lake Michi
gan, where the lily pad buttressing the colossal city of Lachiga should have been.
In the distance, the Chicago skyline jutted from the horizon like an expansive set of jagged metal teeth, grinning at its own reflection in the rippling water. The buildings, prismatic and gunmetal-gray, resembled illegal firearms amid the tangled backdrop of the old industrial metropolis.
Jed turned to face me.
His avatar, like my own, had been meticulously fashioned as a representation of his younger, eighteen-year-old self. Thinner. Better hair. Fighting fit.
“It’s been too long, Jed.”
His gaze bore into me, fury restrained behind his cool demeanor.
Or was it my own guilt reflected back at me?
I crossed the transparent surface toward the ghostlike image of a young man who’d once been my friend.
“You fucked me,” he growled, eyes glittering. “Like the little worm you always were—you turned your back on me and everyone else.”
“I couldn’t have known that it was going to turn out that way.”
“You knew there was a risk.” A crook in his brow.
“She knew the risk.”
He came at me, dual fists raised. He soared across the plane of nothingness like a projectile and crashed into my torso. I put up my arms to shield my face, but Jed hammered away at my head and chest. The monstrous force swept both of us into the sky and we spiraled inertly through the bizarre cosmos.
Sickening, were it not for the rush of adrenaline that threatened to give me a heart attack. I bristled at the unfamiliar velocity of free fall.
He kneed me and my stomach lurched. As I bent forward, his fist crashed into my nose, and a stream of blood trailed weightlessly behind us as we continued our flight across infinity.
I grabbed his arm before he could land another hit and then headbutted him in the forehead. I drew my legs up and pushed off him, altering both our trajectories. The space around me ceased to exist while I continued to fall for what felt like an eternity.
Simultaneously, we struck another invisible barrier. The air around us crackled. A lightning storm of rampant electricity formed trillions of multicolored beams of light that crisscrossed and danced around us. After the dizzying spectacle was over, they coalesced to form a coherent representation of some false reality.
I stood, disoriented. I wanted desperately to vomit, but no longer had control over such functions. For all I knew, my stomach had already been emptied. Shadowplay apparently didn’t care what became of me, having let Jed tie me up and plug me into the Net so brashly. Or maybe they were confident in my skills, thinking I’d overpower him and accomplish the task from inside his playground.
Foolish.
The emptiness encased in one facet of the crystalline universe conjured by Jed’s mind phased and shifted to form the bedroom of my former apartment, in the downtown area of the old city. The smell of coffee grounds wafted through the air, olfactory stims brimming with realism that made me instantly thirst for a hot cup.
The buildings outside the window stretched visibly toward the sky that filled the space within the now-three-dimensional map. I turned to meet Jed’s eyes, but saw they weren’t fixed on me any longer.
A beautiful young woman lay sprawled on the bed. Dead.
I’d slept with her—Jed’s girl—but damned if I didn’t feel terrible about it.
Blood seeped from her head—not from a gunshot wound, but from the massive cyst that had burst open at the back of her skull. Crimson stains flecked the white sheets beneath her soft body.
I’d upgraded her implant for a moderator’s module, allowing her access to the most intimate administrative capabilities of the public social Net. Giving her such godlike powers had caused an infection bad enough to rupture her brain stem before she’d even had a chance to try them out online. Cerebrospinal fluids leaked out fast, killing her almost immediately.
“You have no idea how bad you messed things up,” Jed said.
“You split too, man.”
“Not like you did! You could have been tried for murder, had I turned you in. But I covered for your ass, hoping you’d come back to try and make amends. Shit.” He had a point; I could have been put in prison for life—for attempting the implant upgrade, and for accidental homicide. But he’d been a good friend.
He threw a hard punch and caught me in the jaw. I spat blood. Simulated, but all too real.
Doubtless it felt damn good for him.
In some twisted way, it felt good for me too.
“Why the hell did you come after me?” he asked. “Why now?”
The truth was as good a way to earn his trust back as any. “I’m here to help you, buddy. That black ops security network, Shadowplay—they’re right on your trail, man. Listening to every whisper.”
Except in here, where a whisper was really just a sequence of abstract, compressed data being transferred, read, deleted. Stored only in the mind—the most fallible of computer systems.
“You’ve got to trust me,” I pleaded.
“Yeah? Or what?”
“Or we both end up in prison, locked out of the Net for life and banging our hollow heads against the wall of a cement cell for the rest of eternity.”
“And what makes you think you can ever manage that? You can’t even install a fucking implant.” The words stung. My hands felt cold, sticky with blood. Just as they’d felt the night I cradled Jed’s girlfriend—her name was Sasha—in my arms, crying and whimpering her name before bolting out the door and hopping the train to Lachiga.
Who had cleaned up that mess? Jed?
The map shattered into electromagnetic dust. In seconds, a new environment loaded: the central commercial district, right in the dead center of the city floating high above the lake. Gravity reoriented in accord with the position of this new world, and it felt far more real.
“What just happened?” Sudden shifts of this nature never occurred within the true, all-encompassing Net. Jed’s mind was hooked in as the sole overseer, and it was no doubt racing right now. I sympathized, but his lack of control over the meta-cosmos was a problem.
“What did they tell you?” he asked me.
I sighed. “That you murdered somebody.”
He grunted, not sounding surprised and certainly not trying to hide it as a tiny grin found its way onto his lips. “Killed somebody…yeah. Did they tell you exactly who I killed?”
I shook my head.
“A Chief Federator of the Unified Americas, man. A goddamn bigwig politician. Mathis Colangelo, his name was. I’m completely toast, man.”
Damn.
It would be hard to convince him otherwise. I’d never heard of the guy, but Chief Federator was, to my knowledge, the second-highest position an individual could hold within the UA Parliament. Toast indeed.
A basso sound, thunderous and awful, shook the foundations of the nonexistent building beneath our feet and above our heads.
“Where is this place?” I asked.
Jed’s eyes scanned the area as he ignored my question. Then something unseen possessed him. He dropped to his knees, clutched his forehead. He toppled over onto the floor, writhing and howling.
Shadowplay was in the room, I realized. They had to be tampering with the system. Trying, most likely, to shut off his remote network and transfer us into the public Net, where my mod authorization would be beneficial instead of meaningless.
Jed’s image flickered, and then a blaze of white light burned him out of existence.
Seconds later, my own avatar followed suit as the whole world was washed out in a wave of debilitating numbness.
The hands at work in the real world dropped me into the global public Net—right in the heart of Lachiga, not far from where I’d stood moments earlier in Jed’s own private cyber-hell.
The city bustled with the normative mingling and thrill-seeking of beings suckling at the corporate trickle-down of the Net. Hours of labor and online networking bought personal Net time; like me, ever
yone jumped at the prospect of reaping the seemingly endless rewards of the virtual realm.
The only difference was that I’d had a choice. I could have settled for a life beyond the silicon level, but why be miserable? There were enough schmucks to lick the Earth dry from the surface already. I saw no reason to join them in the endless consumption and constant wasting. Not for me.
But where was Jed?
I’m sorry, I sent to his omni.
I stood among the waves of illusory flesh as converging crowds absorbed one another, moving to and fro about the social interzone of Lachiga’s cone-shaped central tower. I waited a long time for a reply.
My implant tingled, the warm sensation feeling light-years distant.
So am I, he finally transmitted. It was her choice, not yours. She never asked for my input on the matter. I’d have told her it was a bad idea, but then she’d have done it anyway.
I started walking, not wanting to draw attention to myself. I needed to begin the memory implantation process. I’d been given the perfect opportunity, even if Jed wasn’t actually in front of me. Maybe it would even speed up the process, being directly linked through a shared server.
Through the menu that lay hidden in the outer field of my vision, I accessed my administrative controls. A small green icon bled into a full-screen app following three rapid blinks of my eyelids, and I toyed with the system’s time parameters. The world flashed by around us, unaware of the change. They weren’t actually moving faster; instead, our experience was being slowed to allow Jed’s mind to absorb information more effectively.
You didn’t kill that man, Colangelo, I said, trying to sound convinced.
“Yes, I did.”
I turned. Jed was standing right behind me, with the same avatar as before. Young, innocent. My best friend.
“You’ve been following me? Or did you only just now show up?”
“I resisted the transfer, whereas you changed hosts willingly. You need to learn how to fight the system if you’re going to spend so much time in it.” He smirked. Little had truly changed about him, other than having become an assassin.
“Why do you think you killed Colangelo?” I asked. “I know you didn’t. Couldn’t.”