by Jeff Edwards
Without warning, the void spins one hundred eighty degrees. Vertigo as the grid becomes the ground instead of the sky and we plummet toward it.
Details form below, tiny dots of color clustered around intersections of grid lines.
Still falling. Diving toward the latticework ground. Accelerating.
Colored dots increase in size, begin to assume individual shapes.
Shapes growing, expanding, increasing in clarity and detail until they are building-sized slabs of 3-D monochrome color scrolling below us at breakneck speed.
Still descending, we drop below the tops of the building analogs, careening through canyons of imaginary neon skyscrapers.
Vision blurs as a vicious snap-turn changes our course ninety degrees in a microsecond.
Beads of colored light flash down grid lines, brilliant sparks chained together like electronic strands of DNA riding the laser-fine blue graticules of the net. Subliminal flickers and surges as subroutines rocket from database to database, handing off blocks of information code.
We circle a slender green skyscraper of data. It sits at the intersection of two graticules, grid lines extending from it in four directions.
Despite my first impression, the skyscraper analog is not featureless. Rectangular patterns of lighter and darker green mottle the surface. The variations in shade are subtle and constantly changing as the database sorts and assimilates new information.
“That’s it.” Jackal’s voice in my head. “The number on the back of your trid. It’s a public service line for Pacific Fusion and Electric. I guarantee that PF&E has no idea that their line is being used as a callback service for murder.”
We skim the grid, carving a square perimeter around the PF&E database at a distance of two graticules, perhaps a hundred meters.
Every time we pass over an intersection of two grid lines, Jackal deposits a dense globule of program-code. The globules attach themselves to the intersections and hang there like fat prisms of oily crystal.
We scroll sideways and survey Jackal’s handiwork. Eleven prisms. The twelfth is missing, leaving a single gap in the crystal perimeter.
“What now?” Oddly, although Jackal’s voice sounds like it originates inside my head, my own voice sounds distant.
“We call the number,” Jackal says. “Read the poem, and see what happens.”
Before I can respond, she says, “Okay, it’s ringing. We’re in.”
Her voice recites the strange verse inside my head. “The time has come, the Walrus said...”
Four trains of multicolored sparks shoot out from the base of the skyscraper and race through the grid at blinding speed.
When each of the routines hits the intersection at the first graticule, it fragments into three smaller chains, one traveling straight, one turning right, the other left.
In an instant, four pieces of code have become twelve, all racing away from PF&E’s green data analog in different directions.
Eleven quick flares as all but one of the speeding pieces of code are gobbled up by Jackal’s booby traps.
The last program shoots through the opening in the perimeter.
Jackal screams down the grid line after it.
Our quarry pulls a ninety-degree turn at a junction and changes its appearance dramatically, sparks shift color and intensity. Jackal sticks with it, hurtling through the net at the speed of thought.
“That’s one smooth block of code,” she says. “It just turned itself into a Federal Tax Audit.”
“Can you follow it home?”
“That depends on how smart it is. If it knows we’re on its ass, it won’t go home at all.”
The subroutine changes direction and color three times in rapid succession.
“What if it doesn’t go home? What if it’s a decoy?”
“We catch it and take it apart. I might be able to figure out who wrote it. The little bastard just turned into a diplomatic inquiry from the Dominican Republic.”
Suddenly, we turn left. The program goes straight.
“Why are...”
“Chill!”
We turn right and parallel the elusive subroutine, one graticule to its left and slightly to the rear. It’s harder to see from here, but Jackal manages to follow it through a series of ninety degree acrobatics.
Her reflexes are unbelievably fast. The Cuban mega-amphetamine is pushing her reaction time into the realm of the supernatural.
“If we give it a little breathing room, maybe it’ll think it’s shaken us.” Her voice has a brittle metallic quality. The drug is talking.
A picture pops into my head. An image of the two of us sitting in a shabby room in Iron Betty’s little cult haven. My body is perched on the bed, unconsciously bobbing and weaving in time to our perceived maneuvers through the net. Jackal’s eyes are closed, her fingers fluttering across the keyboard. Her lips are pulled back in a skeletal grin, the rictus of the Cuban speed riding her brain.
It is the illusion of flesh.
Reality lives in the DataNet.
The routine dodges and mutates. It becomes a subscription pitch from a long distance company. A prize notification from the State Lottery Commission.
Jackal whistles inside my skull. “There it goes. I think it’s headed home.”
The program pulls a final identity shift and shoots into the side of a towering red slab of data.
Jackal shears off and we climb away from the grid until the red analog is the size of a child’s building block.
“What is it?”
“An AI,” Jackal says. “A big, ugly one.”
“Who does it belong to?”
A rectangular field of alphanumeric data pops into existence, superimposed over the image of the net. Bright green numbers and letters flit and shift as the data runs through a sort.
After a couple of seconds, the data field vanishes, leaving a single line of green characters: 29503.3>>13296.4>>55703.6>>LADG.
“The mainframe’s right here in LA,” Jackal says.
“How can you tell?”
“From the grid coordinates. The last four letters stand for Los Angeles Data Grid.”
“Can you find out who it belongs to?”
The rectangular data field reappears, and more numbers and letters flit by. “It’s registered to somebody named Henry Clerval.”
“Excellent,” I say. “See if you can get an address.”
“Hold up,” Jackal says. “The name is phony; I guarantee it.”
“How do you know?”
“Nobody uses their real name in the net,” Jackal says. “Not when they’re pulling something illegal. If the owner of that AI is half as smart as I think he is, the registration will lead through an elaborate system of fronts, blinds, and re-posts that ultimately dead-end in some data-haven. Maybe Key West, or one of the other Florida Pirate Republics.”
“So how do we track him down?”
“We take the direct approach,” she says. We bank suddenly and plunge toward the red slab.
“Jackal... I don’t think this is a good idea.”
The slab grows larger rapidly.
“Jackal, don’t do this.”
She ignores me. Perhaps the drug is totally in control now.
The analog looms like a rectangular mountain until it eclipses the entire net.
I steel myself for impact when we slam into the side of it.
The sensation is abrupt and strange. It reminds me of diving into a pool, an instantaneous and painless transition from one plane of existence to another.
The world is a dark scarlet blur seen through a candy apple lens set for soft focus. Vaguely perceived shapes shift and slide in the blood-tinged darkness. Vermilion walls of logarithms. Dense ruddy strata of information. Vertical helixes of glowing red coals smolder in towering fractal spirals. Platelets of data swim through a medium of plasma in a carefully random crossfire of information exchange.
Another field of alphanumeric data appears in front of my face, digits str
eaming by in a blur of digital static.
“I’m not even trying to get near the core data,” Jackal says. “I’m just skimming, trying not to attract attention.”
Suddenly, we seem to lurch, and the interior of the analog goes dark. Plumes of data recede, and are sucked into the faceted sides of the AI’s data structure like a video of blossoming flowers run at high-speed in reverse.
“Oh shit,” Jackal says. “We’re busted.”
“Get us out of here!”
“Yeah... I think you’re right.”
We pull a high-gravity turn that would be impossible in the real world.
Rainbow-hued lightning bolts leap from the dark heart of the AI construct to strike at us.
Jackal zigs and zags at random intervals.
Searing bolts of energy sizzle by us at incredible speeds.
Chrome bubbles the size of my fist begin to appear in our wake.
The rainbow lightning strikes one of the chrome spheres. Then another. Jackal is dropping decoys, logic traps to attract the lightning.
The ruse works for a half-second, then the AI learns to ignore the spheres, and the lightning reaches out for us again.
Four white sparks, identical to our own matrix image, appear around us and shear off in divergent directions.
The lightning spreads its attention between the five of us.
I can see the outer wall of the construct, a crimson dividing line between life and death.
One by one, the rainbow lightning destroys the false images. We become the sole focus of the AI’s attention again.
Jackal continues her random changes of course and altitude, but the wall is still too far away. We aren’t going to make it.
“Stalin, jack out. Now!”
Somewhere, in a seedy little room a million light years away, my hands snatch the induction rig off of my head.
The world snapped into existence, the net instantly relegated to the status of a silicon-generated fantasy.
Jackal’s hand leapt off the keyboard and reached for the power switch on the matrix generator.
At the instant her finger touched the switch, something went through her like a surge of electricity. Her body stood up on its own, galvanized by some unseen force. Her back arched sharply and made a sound like ten people cracking their knuckles at once. Her hands flopped around like two fish tied to the ends of her wrists. She fell to the carpet and lay still.
I scrambled to hit the switch that Jackal had been reaching toward. The lights on the matrix generator winked out.
The odors of burned circuitry and singed flesh permeated the air.
A trickle of blood ran from Jackal’s left nostril and down her cheek to drip on the carpet.
I dropped to my knees and felt the side of her neck for a pulse. It was weak and rapid.
Her eyes fluttered open, stared at the ceiling for a second, and then drifted closed again.
I looked around wildly. I honestly didn’t know what to do. I knew some first aid, but I was ninety percent certain that the damage was to Jackal’s brain. What’s the first aid for that?
I grabbed the corner of the bed sheet and worked at staunching the stream of blood from her nose. I was about to yell for help when I heard feet pounding down the hall toward my room.
The door swung open. It was Surf.
“Jackal got zapped,” I said. “Some kind of neural-feedback overload, I think. You’ve got to help me get her to a doctor.”
Surf’s electroptic eyes zoomed in on me and he stood without speaking for a couple of seconds.
“Are you deaf?” I shouted. “Go call an ambulance!”
Surf bent down and gently unplugged the ribbon cable from the back of Jackal’s head. “Ambulances don’t come out here,” he said. “Anyhow, they couldn’t help her. She needs a special doctor. A skull-mechanic.”
“Do you know where to find one?”
“Yeah.”
“Call him; tell him we’re on the way. And call a taxi. Have it meet us at that strip mall across the street.”
“We’ve got a car,” Surf said. “I can drive her. And I’ve already got somebody calling her skull-mechanic.”
“Then help me carry her,” I said.
Surf reached down and slid his hands under Jackal’s armpits. His vid-camera eyes locked on me again.
“What in the hell are you staring at?”
“You act like you actually give a shit,” Surf said. He lifted Jackal’s upper body.
I managed to lift her legs. “What is that supposed to mean?”
We started shuffling toward the door.
“Of course I give a shit. She was working for me when this happened. That makes it my responsibility.”
Surf looked over his shoulder and maneuvered to clear the door jam as he backed out of the room. “Don’t see that very often,” he said.
His mechanical voice managed to convey a tone of confusion. “People who hire jackers don’t usually treat us like that. When something goes wrong, they walk away and leave our bodies to rot where they fall. Then they go hire somebody else until they get whatever it is they’re after.”
“I don’t care what you’re used to,” I said. “That’s not how I do business.”
CHAPTER 27
The sign hovered above the boutique, an animated hologram of two heads, one male, the other female. In the space of about ten seconds, both faces morphed from outright homeliness to vid-star perfection.
The words ‘Second Looks’ wrote themselves above the faces in fancy platinum script, then silently exploded into a million pinpoints of rainbow-colored light. The ugly heads reappeared, ready to repeat their fast-forward evolution to beauty.
“This is the place,” Surf said.
He steered his car, a Focke-Wulf hover-sedan that was probably older than he was, around the corner and into a narrow alley behind the building.
As we turned the corner, Jackal’s head lolled forward. A quiet mewling sound came from somewhere deep in her throat.
I gently guided her head back to my shoulder and pulled her slack body closer to mine.
Surf pulled up short of a service door in the rear of the surgical boutique. The old car settled onto its apron with a groan.
“What are we doing here?” I asked. “I thought you said she needed a skull-mechanic.”
“Lance is a skull-mechanic,” Surf said.
He climbed out of the car and knocked on the back door of the boutique. “The cosmetic surgery stuff is a profitable side-line.”
The door was opened a lot more quickly than I expected, by a man in a lab coat. He was ludicrously handsome, his features nearly perfect, with just enough rugged imperfection thrown in to keep him from looking feminine. It was a calculated beauty, the sort of face you’d expect to find on someone who worked in a surgical boutique.
He looked up and down the alley before motioning us inside. Surf helped me lift Jackal out of the back seat and carry her into the clinic.
The treatment room that the man led us to smelled like every hospital I’ve ever been in: the burnt-ozone scent of ultrasonic sterilizers reinforced by the loamy earth smell of active-enzyme disinfectants.
Two of the four banks of florescent lights in the ceiling were turned off.
“You can put her there,” the man in the lab coat said, pointing to a powered form-fitting couch that reminded me uncomfortably of a dentist’s chair.
We lowered Jackal’s limp body onto the couch.
The man pulled a vaguely pistol-shaped instrument from the pocket of his lab coat and leaned over Jackal’s body. He parted her eyelids with thumb and forefinger and used the strange device to stare into one of her eyes, and then the other. “Been playing rough again, Gwen?”
“She crossed it up with an AI,” Surf said.
“I figured as much,” the man said.
He looked up and pointed toward an equipment cart crammed full of electronic gear that would have looked at home on Tommy Mailo’s workbench. “Wheel that
over here, will you Mr. Stalin?”
I pushed the cart to within his reach. “How do you know my name?”
He fished something out of his pants pocket and handed it to me. It was a copy of the trid that Bobbie had carried. “This is you, isn’t it?”
I felt myself stiffen. “Yeah, it’s me.”
The man nodded. “When someone is on the run, his picture gets circulated around the face clinics. Usually, there’s a fat reward attached. Makes it hard to change your face without anyone finding out.”
I unzipped the front of the bomber jacket as casually as I could.
“Whoa, Stalin,” Surf said. “You won’t need the gun. Lance is a friend.”
The man he’d referred to as Lance smiled a little and turned to fiddle with the equipment cart. “He’s right. I could use fifty thousand marks, but I’m not greedy enough to sell out a friend of Gwen’s.”
He unrolled a thin coil of cable and clipped a sensor to the tip of one of Jackal’s fingers. He slid Jackal’s blue sweatshirt up far enough to paste a self-adhesive electrode to her sternum. Two more electrodes went on either side of her forehead.
He punched a couple of keys on one of the scopes, and a pattern of blue lines appeared. “Her sinus-rhythm is normal, but accelerated. Skin galvanics are a little out of whack. BP is up, but not out of control.”
He squinted. “Has she been using amphetamines again?”
“Yes,” I said. “Something she called Zoom.”
“That’s what I thought,” Lance said. “Looks like she got lucky, not much organic damage. She’s not going to flatline.”
He looked at Surf. “I’ll take care of her from here.”
Surf nodded. “Thanks, Doc.” He looked at me. “You need a ride somewhere?”
I shook my head. “I think I’ll stick around.”
Lance frowned. “Now that I know that Gwen’s not in serious danger, I need to finish up some other jobs first. Mid-afternoon is my busiest time. I’ve got a penis enlargement, a face job, and three breast-reductions on the books.”
“Three?” I asked.
Lance smiled wearily. “I call it the Vid-Star of the Week Club. Last week, it was Tori Caplin. Everybody wanted a pug nose, perfect teeth, and boobs out to here. Now, Tori’s out, and Britannia King is in, and it’s a long straight nose, pointed chin, and practically no breasts at all.”