Once he burned her deck, he would track down her real identity and make her life every bit as miserable for a few months as she had made his. He sat in the thinker pose, debating what she looked like in real life.
“I bet that cartoon Egyptian princess belongs to a 300 pound warthog; or even a guy.” That would make it easier, he would not feel guilty at all then.
Cleopatra was a definite pain in the ass as well as an enigma. Not once had she said a single word to him the entire six months she tormented him. The only time he had seen her avatar she seemed startled by it, as if she had not expected him to. His instinct leaned toward her being female due to the strange playfulness. Encounters with her did not give him the sense that she tried to get into a bigger deck contest.
Most males he crossed wires with always had to prove something and got into cyberduels whenever they could. For the most part, he tried to avoid that scene. He kept his exploits to himself so his reputation remained unknown; that way no one saw him as a mark for prestige. He did things for the thrill, or even just to see if he could, and he didn’t care who knew. Joey liked to think that deck jockeys with true skill liked to remain unknown, so they could get away with more and travel unnoticed.
“Time to go hunting.” Joey shuddered with joy at the satisfying click of the M3 plug locking into place.
He closed his eyes and let go of the world around him. Color swam into his senses as his brain reoriented itself away from biological sources of information and welcomed the feed from the plug. The dark cowboy appeared in the virtual recreation of Joey’s apartment―the hermetic ranch house.
A panoramic view of generic placid mountains filled in the windows. One of these days, Joey wanted to modify cyberspace around the outside of the apartment so he could go out on his nonexistent porch and smell the virtual pure mountain air, but he had not had the time. Exterior cyberspace had a nasty habit of rewriting itself in a continuous cycle to emulate the real world; he might have better luck with a fake door and a virtual node.
His pointing finger traced a cyan box in midair that filled in with a VidPhone pane. Kenny answered the call with his house unit and not a net deck, but cyberspace created the image of him standing there.
“Hey man, what’s going on?”
The dark one morphed into Joey. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Some government spook just laid this holodisk on me with some NavMap coordinates that point out to the Badlands.”
“And you want go out there?” Kenny sagged. Somewhere behind him, a plate dropped.
“Everything okay?” Joey had never seen him show an ounce of hesitation before.
“Yeah. I’m fine. I was just thinking of bringing Alyssa with me the next time I made a run, but I didn’t figure on it being quite so soon, and…” Kenny fidgeted.
“And?”
“If there’s government involvement, there could be some nasty stuff in our path. Lot of corps set up facilities out there: no oversight. I don’t even want to think of what the government might be doing out there. We could be heading into a hornet’s nest.”
“I was going to ask Katya to come along; she can scout the place out before we get close. I have a feeling whatever’s out there has been out of the loop for a few years; I’m thinking it’s probably abandoned.”
“One can hope. Let me talk to Alyssa and see if she is okay with spending a few days with some neighbors of ours. I won’t say I’ll go yet, it’s up to her.”
“Okay… Okay… Just…” Joey glanced to the side, biting his lip.
“What? You almost look scared.” Kenny chuckled. “I’ve never seen that before.”
“I’ve never had a rail gun fired at me before. Someone’s hired some heavy hitters to make my ass even narrower.”
“You think it’s connected to that disk?” Kenny lifted an eyebrow.
“All I know is the head of the guy that gave it to me was all over my coat.” Joey showed off the red mark.
“Shit. Okay, I’ll talk to her now. Call me back in an hour or two.” Kenny disappeared as the call ended.
Joey held his hand out with an imperious air of command. It was as overacted as it was unnecessary, and another comm panel opened. Katya appeared in two rings. Her outfit was generic, as cyberspace had no way to know what she wore, and she had not set preferences in her VidPhone. She smirked with a combination of annoyance at being interrupted and curiosity about why he would call her.
Joey dangled a cartoon money sack over her head like a dog treat and whistled at her as if teasing a pet. She rolled her eyes with exasperation and reached to end the call.
“Wait. Dammit, don’t they allow you Russians to have a sense of humor?” The cash bag dissipated into snowing pixels.
“As soon as you do something funny, I will react accordingly.” She folded her arms. “Did you just vid me for that stupid animation?”
“No, I wanted to find out if they programmed you to smile.” He grinned. “Anyway… I got another job. Well… Sort of.”
“Sort of? What does that mean?”
“It’s not from Alex, and there’s no posted payment for it.”
“So you are wasting my time?”
“Couple things. Remember Mr. Exploding Head?”
Katya looked away and ran her hands up and down her arms. “How could I forget?”
“The disk has coordinates that point out to the Badlands. Kenny and I are going to go check it out, I wanted you to come along to scout the place and see if it’s even approachable.”
She looked at him with shock. “Badlands? Me? Are you serious?”
He tried to placate her with hand motions. “Look, I’m not asking you to get into any gunfights or anything like that. I just need to you to poke around the spot at the end of the digital rainbow and see if it’s a fully operational facility or an abandoned shithole.”
“And what if it’s fully operational? Don’t you think they will have guards?”
Joey nodded. “If it is, that changes the game plan. Then I look for a way into their network; or, if it’s too nasty, we walk away.”
She leaned toward him, holding her arms out. “Why should I even consider this?”
“Well… If Kenny finds something to sell, we’ll split it evenly. If we don’t, I’ll give you half of whatever I get for my next job. Minimum ten k.”
“Credits won’t help me much if I get killed out there.”
A Cheshire cat’s smile spread across his face. “Masaru is my next call.”
She glowered, and began pacing. “If Masaru goes, I’ll consider it, but I am not going to do anything stupid.”
“I’d expect nothing less.” Joey bowed like Alex, dripping with faux high society charm.
She vanished into dancing sparkles. Masaru took a little longer to answer than the others and looked irritated when he did appear.
“Hope the girls aren’t too angry that you stepped away for a second. I’ll try to be quick.” Joey was still smiling.
“What is it this time?” Masaru sighed.
“Remember the meeting in the black zone? The disk that I got points to the Badlands. Wanna come along? I could really use your sword out there.”
Masaru had heard stories about the Badlands. Those romanticized versions, along with his lack of real knowledge, made him want to do it as a test of his own skill.
“When are we leaving?”
Joey beamed; he had not expected the rich boy to be so eager to accept. “The only rush on this is the fuckers trying to shoot me. I was thinking tomorrow, maybe the next day? However long it takes Kenny to get supplies and shit together.”
“When you have a firm date, let me know.” Masaru clicked off the call.
Joey breathed a sigh of relief. That had been easier than he expected, unless Kenny backed out. His image returned to that of the paranormal cowboy. The old man’s lips twisted into a dour frown as wrinkles swept through the sparse white stubble on his cheeks.
Now it was time to keep a promise he had made to himself the
other day. It was time to find and put a stop to this Cleopatra nuisance. First, he would check police records, searching for any complaints against someone using that alias. If that did not work, he would start checking the GlobeNet border routers in an effort to match her name to her IPv12 address. Outside, he sighed in disappointment at finding plain city instead of mountain air.
Joey’s brain told his deck where he wanted to travel within Cyberspace. The dark cowboy’s visage disintegrated into shifting columns of cyan light and flashing letters. Elsewhere in the net, the same swirls of light spiraled out of the ground and coalesced into his avatar. With a smirk, he yanked his coattails from where they had become stuck in the side of a building.
The sight of the faux stone rippling back into a hard smooth surface made him laugh. The conglomerate that monitors the GlobeNet frowned upon “teleporting” like that. He could not fathom why they insisted on forcing everyone to “travel’” the old way.
He was better than they were.
The world shimmered as his deck struggled to update what it fed his mind. Buildings shifted in position; black and blue grids shattered through outer coatings of glass and steel as buildings changed height and shape. Raining debris from broken glass stopped in midair, and re-adhered to new forms. One by one, structures stopped moving and skins of steel and glass slid up and over the ebon skeletons. In the span of ten seconds, the entire cityscape had redrawn itself to fit where he now stood. Aside from the stark lack of pedestrian traffic and perpetually neutral temperature, it looked just like the real world.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” His father’s voice echoed from behind him.
Joey whirled at the noise. The turn was sudden, the shock to his mental state severe; he felt a twinge of pain in his knee. His real body had twitched into the table. His old man was standing a few feet away, staring up at one last row of high-rise windows sliding into place. He was there as if nothing had happened, as if he had not been dead for a year on a planet millions of kilometers away. Red-grey flannel shirt and all, he wore the same “I’d smile harder but I lack the energy to get very excited about anything” face Joey remembered.
Joey pointed, his attempt to speak producing an unintelligible babble for a few words before he spat out a fraction of what he thought. “How did you get here?”
“Just like anyone else, I took the shuttle. It was cramped and the food was tepid, but those poor people can only do so much with what they have.”
Iciness spread through his fingertips from the chill that swept down his back. Even his father’s scent permeated this impossible vision; the smell of a person you know well, an ambient fragrance that infuses everything about them.
Things in cyberspace seldom had fragrances.
He did not know what to think; his senses told him something that could not be true. This flannel and khaki apparition should not—could not—be here. Joey opened his mouth but still found no words. His brain fought to come to an understanding of what he saw. His father’s distaste for cyberspace added another layer of impossibility. The man had never set foot in the GlobeNet, not even once.
His dad gave him that same look of appraising concern that he always made when something was not right. “Joseph, what’s wrong?”
The answer formed in his head, but the road to his voice was a long one. He had only just begun to speak when a sensation crashed into him from behind. A feeling that started as a severe impact to the back of the head evolved into a great weight that dragged him to the ground. The terrain gave way like syrup and the liquid sidewalk absorbed him. Overwhelmed with vertigo as if falling and drowning at the same time, he fell. Rapid fragments of sensory input manifested in the form of hot and cold streaks on his body, swirls of color, as well as spikes of random emotions and fragrances.
A hot lance stabbed into his head from just behind his ear.
The pit bottomed out after an eternity of chaos; his downward flight ended with a crash upon a solid surface that brought back all the aches of the previous day. His skeleton, outlined with pain with each beat of his heart, felt like a separate entity within his body. Feverish burning and freezing cold crawled up his arms, forming into a whirlpool of ice that lanced into his skull as if his M3 jack had been replaced with an icicle. Several violent waves of nausea passed through him before his entire body prickled with pins and needles.
A kaleidoscopic blur of color faded into cold grey concrete strewn with trash. A row of small dirty toes, clad in the flaking remnants of pink nail polish, appeared a few inches from his face. A seep of blood worked its way out from under the right foot. Some of the whores in this area occasionally used his place as a crash pad, so the sight of a girl’s feet did not raise any immediate red flags.
“Tequilath ovfer therf.” Joey muttered into the concrete floor.
In his mind, he raised his arm to point, but his body ignored him.
“Joey?” asked a voice, too young to be a prostitute.
He forced himself to focus; the feet blurred and collapsed back into a single image. They were too small to belong to a grown woman. He rolled onto his back, moaning. The agonizing motion felt as if his ribs tore through the tissues of his body. The girl that hovered over him looked like a tween, shivering under a knee length pink shirt with some silly white cat head graphic on it. Black streaks of grime smeared her right side. Hair somewhere between light brown and dark blonde hung straight down her back, and her pale blue-grey eyes stared at him with primal urgency. From the amount of dirt and protruding ribs, he thought street urchin.
“Look kid, go beg from someone else, I ain’t got shit either.” His imminent rant stalled when he noticed what she wore across her back.
A deck; one of the cutesy Neko series ones that had an oval shaped body with two triangular projections on one side that gave the entire device the outline of a cat’s head. The outer edge was pinkish red with metallic flakes in the paint while the interior was white with a pink nose. Crescent shaped eyes gleamed with the iridescence of holoprojectors, and its overall condition looked well used. The fidgeting girl still had the wire to his deck in her hand.
Joey sat up and squinted at her. Now he knew what happened, this kid had unplugged him. He entertained the thought of choking her with it, but the panicked desperation in her eyes stole the anger right out of him. He leaned forward to rub his head and noticed she had left a trail of bloody footprints from the door.
“Are you Joey?” The anxiety in her voice grew.
“Yeah.” He squinted, continuing to rub his head. “How the hell do you know me?”
“Please, I need your help.” She fell to her knees and wrapped her arms around him. She cried into his chest, trembling. “They’re trying to shoot me.”
oey’s arms hovered at his sides, unsure of how to react to the presence of a child. No matter how hard he stared at the ceiling, no answer waited there about what to do. He made an awkward grimace, reacting to her as if she were an unwanted contaminant in his environment.
It’s… touching… me…
“Who… What?” He patted her on the back. “Calm down, kid.”
She sat back, still clinging to his hand. “They broke in my door and tried to kill me.”
Living out here, Joey had seen enough people experience brushes with death. If this girl was faking, she was damn good at it. Joey took hold of her by the wrists and stood up, leading her to the couch where he backed her into a seated position in the most trash free spot.
“Wait here.”
“Don’t let them get me!” She curled into a ball on the couch.
Joey did not respond within the moment it took him to grab a cloth, wet it, and return to sit on the floor by her. He pulled her foot into his lap and found a cut about midway down the outer edge. It would not do her any good to evade these supposed gunmen if she died of some amped up infection from whatever horribleness dwelled in the roads after hundreds of years of chemicals and neglect.
He dabbed at the cut. “Who’s after you?”
She grabbed the cushions, wincing. “I don’t know.” She yelped as he hit a tender spot. “They were huge. One had a gun that was bigger than me.”
“Why didn’t you go to the police?” He dropped her leg.
She fidgeted, breaking eye contact. “I dunno.”
Even Joey could tell she had a definite reason for coming to see him. He placed one hand on her shoulder and lifted her chin with the other, forcing her to meet his gaze. Her fear was real, but her rationale was not.
“Why do you think I can help you? I’m not a cop.”
She cried, looking even guiltier. “I kinda thought you’d be bigger. Um, meaner, with lots of guns and stuff.” Her gaze shot to the door at the sound of passing footsteps.
Joey stood and tried to walk off the pain of the abnormal disconnect. “Bigger? How do you know me?”
She drew her knees up to her chin and wrapped her arms around her legs, wearing the look of a kid that just got caught doing something bad. “I’ve seen you on the net.”
“I see a lot of people on the net… I don’t remember you.” He stopped walking long enough to arch his back and stretch a little.
She looked down at her feet; her voice fell to a timid whisper. “I’m Cleopatra.”
Joey turned as if he had just taken a hundred pound raw salmon across the face. He stared at this scrawny little kid on his couch as his face contorted with confusion and anger. This girl was malnourished, dirty, clad only in an oversized shirt, and carrying a battered net deck; how could this be Cleopatra? He leapt at her; the look in his eye made her guard her face with both arms and shriek. Rather than hit her, he pulled her head to the side, checking for a jack and found only a faint wisp of fruity scent clinging to her hair.
She had no plug.
The scented shampoo cast serious doubts about her status as a street urchin.
“Please don’t hit me!” She shrank into the couch. The rage that filled his eyes at the sound of that name scared her. “I had nowhere else to go for help.”
Joey stared aghast at this waif in his apartment. How long he had daydreamed about the awful things he would do to some anonymous woman named Cleopatra once he found her. The payback for the six or seven months of torment she had visited upon him in the net was supposed to have been legion. There was no way he could hurt the frail child in front of him. Pity collided with his abject frustration at not being able to make anyone suffer his revenge. The impact of those thoughts exploded in a frustrated scream of anguish that made her jump and stare wide eyed as she tried to burrow deeper into the couch.
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