Virtual Immortality

by Matthew S. Cox

  He turned away and kicked a bottle across the room. “How do you know about Cleopatra? Why should I even believe that it’s you?” The rest of his breath slinked off into silence amidst a bevy of obscenities as he tried to hope that someone remained out there he could get even with.

  “I tried to load a DePantser on you in that nightclub… Sent you 50 gallons of booze, kept hitting you with the random teleports…” She continued listing things that had befallen him over the past few months.

  By the time she stopped, Joey had a two fisted grip on her shirt and held her up by it. The glare in his eyes put an end to her recitation of torment. He wanted to wound her in some way, but could not bring himself to harm someone so vulnerable. It occurred to him that she appeared to be quite underdressed for running around a city, and looked more ready for a slumber party than an incursion into a grey zone.

  “Is this some kind of setup?” He dropped her on the couch and took a few steps back. His voice got louder and higher. “This is the last grand prank isn’t it? Cops are going to kick in my door any second and think I’m…”

  He paced around, pinching the bridge of his nose. His voice fell back to a calm, almost beleaguered croak. “Do you have any idea what cops do to a guy when they think…”

  She blushed, pulling her shirt down farther.

  “No!” She yelled. “I swear it’s not that.” She slouched. “My dad’s never home. I don’t have any real friends. I hang out in the net all day, even go to school there.” She picked at her shirt. “I never go outside. Daddy hasn’t done laundry in forever and there’s no clean clothes left, so I just wear these shirts. I don’t get dressed coz I never go out.” She made eye contact again, voice quaking. “They kicked in the door. They didn’t like give me time to get dressed and shit first. Excuse me, Mr. Gunman. Before I run for my life, would you mind if I got changed first?”

  Joey stared. It was almost plausible that her appearance could have come from one panicky sprint through the grey zone. Her starved look could fit her claim of sitting in cyberspace all day long rather than being a street orphan, but how could her family let that happen?

  “What about your parents?” Joey rifled through piles of clothing strewn about the side of the apartment, under the bullet holes in the wall. “Isn’t anyone looking after you?”

  “Yeah, my dad, but he’s always at work. I haven’t seen him in a long time.” She turned on the couch and draped herself over the back to watch him search. “When he’s home I’m either sleeping or in the net and I guess he doesn’t wanna wake me up.” She smirked. “I never knew my mom.”

  The sad stare frustrated him more. For so long he had wanted to harm Cleopatra, now he felt like an ogre. He found a pair of pants that had no appreciable odor to them and threw them at the girl. “So what’s your real name?”

  “Hayley Roth.” She looked at the pants. “Are these yours?”

  “Yeah.” Joey turned his back on her and folded his arms. “Put ‘em on till you can get home. You got clothes and stuff there?”

  Trash rustled behind him.

  “Yeah, nothing clean though.” Her sad tone took on a sudden tone of amusement. “Holy shit.”

  “What?” Joey fought the urge to turn.

  “The legs are too long but they almost fit. These are yours?” She giggled.

  He glared at the wall. Despite her situation, she still found the time to make a joke at his expense. “Guess they shrank in the wash.”

  “Wash?” She lifted an eyebrow and adjusted her shirt to fall outside the black pants. “You want me to believe you washed these? You can look now.”

  She sat and rolled the too-long legs into cuffs.

  Joey frowned; they were bigger on her than her comment made it sound.

  “You’re trying real hard to make me not feel sorry for you, aren’t you?” Joey returned to the pile of clothing to search for some kind of shoes, but found nothing. “Look, let me run into town and get you some sneakers or something. Everything’s filthy out here, you’re going to get sick… or high if you go around barefoot.”

  “Can’t order them?”

  “Delivery bots don’t come out here.” He took a step for the door.

  She limped over and grabbed his arm. “Don’t leave!”

  Joey again felt like a fiend for wishing ill upon her. The way she clung to him made him think she was desperate for human contact. It was obvious that her father neglected her. The requisite psychology courses he slept through at the Mars Academy of Engineering came back to him. The way this girl clung to a total stranger was a sign of attachment issues.

  “Okay, fine… Why would thugs try to kill a little kid?”

  “I’m eleven.” Hayley folded her arms with an indignant expression. “I’m not little.”

  “Answer me one thing.” He grabbed his coat but only got one arm into it before guilt reared its head and he gave it to her. “Why me?”

  Hayley smiled with an impish grin. “I saw your avatar and just kinda thought you took yourself way too seriously… So I wanted to dick with you.”

  He stopped waiting for her to take it and threw the jacket over her head.

  “My word, such language for a child.” Joey’s dad aired his opinion.

  Hayley pulled the jacket down off her face in a panic. “Who was that?”

  Joey fixed her with a steel glance. “I thought that was your work.”

  She shook her head to the negative, trembling. “No.” Her voice floated as a gossamer whisper.

  Joey squinted at the deck. “Don’t worry about it, that voice belongs to someone that would never harm a fly.”

  He would order food when they stopped by her apartment to grab some proper clothing, then he would drop her off at a cop shop and let the system take over from there. Despite all its attempts to appear otherwise, the UCF was a police state. However, the government had a soft spot for kids, as they made great public relations fodder. The nanny state developed around the establishment of the two major cities may have trampled on the civil liberties once enjoyed four hundred years ago, but no one disputed that they took care of children well.

  “Okay… Let’s go. Where is your apartment?” He held out a hand.

  She shivered. “Why? They’re probably still watching it.”

  “You don’t have to make up stories about men chasing you…” He doubted she would have made it this far if professionals were after her.

  “I’m not making it up.” She stomped her foot, paralyzed by pain for an instant. “They kicked in the door.”

  “And you saw them while you were in cyberspace?”

  “Duh… You are supposed to be a hacker, right?” She gave him a look of disbelief and fear at the same time. “I’m a kid! I’m stuck with a lame slow-ass helmet. I can still see and hear the real world.”

  Joey felt like a stooge. Senshelmets were so far removed from ‘serious’ hacking that he hadn’t even thought of it. “Okay… Okay…”

  “I was in the bathroom. I locked the door and ran for the window. They shot at me through the wall.”

  “Look, Kid…”

  “Hayley.”

  “Fine. Look, Hayley… Why would anyone want to shoot you? You’re such a charming person.” He squinted at her.

  She took a step back. “Don’t look at me like that.”

  Joey sighed. “I promise I will not hurt you no matter how much I daydreamed about pissing on the smoking remains of your net deck.”

  She stared agape.

  “That was before I knew you were just a kid.”

  Hayley looked away and down. “I hacked into this place in DC, some government network. I don’t remember the node ID, it said PSEC or something.”

  Joey snapped around to face her. “How in the fuck did you get in there? Shit, I’m not sure I could even pull that off and you’re a little brat with a goddamn helmet? Bullshit.” He took a few steps, struggling with his temper. “Just bullshit. I don’t fuckin’ buy it.”

  She sa
nk back into the couch and rested her elbows on her knees. “I dunno… I just walked in. The mushroom told me to follow him.”

  Joey’s rant stopped cold and he pivoted with a face frozen in rage: one eye squinting with the other wide open. The irrational anger that came from the idea that an eleven year old with a helmet outdid him screeched to a halt. “Mushroom?” A less-than-sane laugh echoed out of him.

  “Yeah. It’s a program on my deck that my dad installed. It tells me where it’s safe to go.” She pointed at a small decal on the side of the cat head that looked like a blue spotted mushroom with eyes.

  “Your child protection software told you to break into a government network?” A strained expression of WTF peeled his lips into a corpse’s grin.

  “It said it was a museum with cool things to see.”

  This stank to high heaven. Joey paced around as he tried to make sense of it.

  “After we got inside, the mushroom told me that it made a mistake and I could get in trouble for going in there so it said I should make it look like someone else did it.”

  Joey glared.

  She stared down, twisting her toes into the floor. “Yeah…”

  “Me? For fuck’s sake!” Joey’s first thought was that the guy with the railgun had been sent to clean that up. “People have been trying to kill me! Dammit to hell.” He kicked another can across the apartment. “If you weren’t a god damned kid…”

  Hayley curled into a shivering ball, crying into her hands. “Please don’t hurt me! I’m sorry! I thought I was just having fun.”

  Joey closed his eyes and fumed in silence. Her terror of him added guilt to his rage. He was an amateur at dealing with children, and this one needed a professional. Still, much of what she said seemed implausible.

  “How did you fake it?” He folded his arms.

  “It wasn’t too hard.” She sniffled and wiped her eyes, then held her hands up and wiggled her fingers. “Like this. I thought about you and the network read my mind. That’s what decks do, duh!”

  “Did you spoof the route uplink paths, or do a buffer underwrite on the interlink node, or splice any of the data packet headers with my net deck’s IPv12?”

  “What?” She scrunched her nose at him.

  Joey’s mental ramble stopped in a mixture of worry and satisfaction. Her reaction to that question made him feel more secure in his own abilities. PSEC node or not, there was no way this girl did that alone; someone had to be shadowing her. Whoever did it had managed to not only infiltrate a government network, but also do it with a helmet-wearing little kid along for the ride―all without being caught.

  “What did you do in there?”

  Hayley shrugged. “Walked around, looked at stuff. The mushroom showed me this data box that had pictures of this place with trees. It looked like an army base that got broken.”

  Joey twisted his lips, thinking of the Badlands coordinates. Broken was a nice word to use there. That made it sound abandoned, which meant it should be easy to poke around. He patted her on the head for making his daydream seem easier and helped her put the jacket on as fast as he could move his hands. The threat of gunmen chasing her got more real in his mind. Someone must have tracked her in the network and came looking for her, thinking she was a real hacker. This kid might have led them here, and Joey wanted some friends around if things got nasty. He slung his deck over his back and grabbed his other stuff.

  “We have to go… right now.”

  Besides, Kenny knew how to deal with kids.

  ayley sat at the edge of the couch, arms wrapped about her deck. Her shivering may have been caused by fear or cold, either of which a valid excuse in that apartment. Something in the urgency with which Joey tossed his way through the scrap heap of clothes made her keep looking at the door and jumping at any moving shadow. After locating a shirt that would never again be wanted as a garment, he shredded it and wrapped it around her cut foot.

  “It ain’t much, but it should help until we can get better.” He took hold of her by the wrist, pulling her to stand. “C’mon.”

  They took just two steps when the door flew inward with enough force to mask a third of the apartment behind a rolling cloud of dust. A huge man who looked like one of the heavies from the Imperial Hotel blocked the exit. Black oval globes spread over his eyes, connected to metal protrusions on the side of his head that appeared to contain tiny sensor suites. The right eye glowed with the shape of orange crosshairs as a gargantuan rifle shifted towards them. Joey swung Haley around by her arm and half threw her over the couch.

  “Bathroom window, now!” Joey pulled his handgun with a practiced cowboy draw and fired.

  He knew better than to try to shoot this behemoth in the chest. That had worked so well last time. He retreated toward the bathroom, clicking off a series of rapid shots in an effort to clip one of the ogre’s cybernetic eyes, or nail him in the head where he had no armor. The first two went high, but the third caught the view module where it wrapped around his head. The bullet tore apart the mechanism on the right side of the skull and shattered the black plastic lens cap, exposing the shiny inner workings; a flat silver plate with a recessed iris. The fourth slug hit him in the center of the forehead. With an audible metallic pang, muted by the presence of skin, it ricocheted off in a splatter of blood, leaving a strip of exposed plastisteel skull.

  The hits knocked the assassin back a pace. Joey wasted no more time before he turned and ran. He reached the bathroom in time to see Haley’s legs disappear up and out of the window as if she took flight. Climbing became kicking and screaming.

  “Fuck… Fuck… Fuck…” Joey scrambled over the toilet to the window. “An hour ago, I wanted to kill her… Fuck irony.”

  Despite knowing that if one of those things had gotten their hands on her, he could not do much, he gripped the frame and pulled himself out into the alley. Sometimes having the physique of a bulimic teenager proved to be an advantage. The window sat right at ground level and his chest scuffed along the pavement as he slithered out and rolled to his feet. A normal sized man in a black velvet coat held Hayley a short distance away.

  While not an ogre like the one inside, this man was more muscular than Joey. His eyes hid behind a plastisteel plate mounted to nubs embedded on the sides of his head. The tiny optical sensors on the armored visor gleamed pink and green in the darkness. His lapel bore a small octagonal pin, gold, with a stylized W in the center. He fumbled to pull a handgun out of a belt holster, but Hayley had a desperate hold on the weapon; keeping it down despite having her hair clenched between the fingers of his other hand.

  As soon as she saw Joey, she drove a fist into the man’s groin, and then jammed her elbow into his gut. She gasped as her entire arm went numb from the impact of her funny bone on body armor. The nut shot got his attention. His hand jerked her by the hair to the left. She turned into him despite the pain and drove her knee into his nether bits. He raised his arm to smash the pistol into her face.

  Joey’s objection rang out from his sidearm.

  Two shots, one to the neck and one to the upper lip, sent a spray of blood out to the rear and took all the strength out of his fist in an instant. She shoved into his chest, knocking the body away, and closed her eyes. Joey gawked, wearing a silly grin, amazed that for once, he shot someone and it worked. Hayley made a deliberate effort not to look at the falling man, and rushed into Joey’s side. He took her hand and ran with her around a corner to the end of the alley.

  Despite it being late afternoon, the combination of the smog and the giant derelict buildings covered the street with night. Within the deepest shadows, dozens of faces lurked. A sea of gleaming augmented eyes, blinking lights, and the occasional cybertattoo drifted in the black. He felt their stare upon them and did not want to linger in this area with a little girl. The usual crowd would leave her alone, but with all the Sector 12 gangers here, he did not want to take chances. They would think nothing of killing him to get to such a prize.

  Some
walked out of the dark to get a better look at the pair as they ran by. He sprinted for another two blocks before turning just to throw the assassin off. The route took them in the general direction of civilization, but he did not want to risk a straight line and a shot in the back. Fear of the man that kicked in his door added speed to his stride. The shot to his eye would cost upwards of forty thousand credits to repair; he would no doubt be quite upset. Joey had no plans to discuss the matter with him a second time.

  Hayley wound down fast. After five blocks, he had gone from leading to dragging her. Bloody smudges on the ground said the improvised bandage was saturated.

  “Come on.” He pulled at her arm.

  “I can’t.” She cried.

  This girl spent so much time motionless in the net that her body had not reacted well to all the running. He picked her up, cradling her to his chest, and ran himself winded. When he could go no further, he stumbled into an alley out of sight, carrying her behind a pile of large metal crates that blocked view from the street. He set her down, sitting on a crate, and flopped next to her. She crawled into his lap, clinging and shaking.

  Joey held his arms up as if someone had spilled child on his shirt. He made a pained face, as if afraid to touch her. After a moment, he let one arm settle on top of her shoulder and her trembling waned.

  “I don’t wanna die.” A scant trace of her voice drifted through a whisper.

  Joey leaned his head back, searching for answers in the smog. Whoever those men were had already started her punishment for misbehaving in cyberspace. Almost certain that the assassin had lost them at this point, he allowed himself to breathe.