by Lisa Smedman
She raised a hand and saw that it had become translucent, drained of all color. The dracoforms that had glowed so fiercely red on the sleeve of her kimono were a faint white on white, only their raised embroidery showing their form.
Her hair, too, where it hung against her chest was white, as were the slippers on her feet.
White. The color of death.
What had she been doing? Oh, yes, logging off the Matrix. She should have found herself back in her room in the Shiawase Corporation's Osaka arcology, sitting at the table before her cyberdeck. But somehow she could no longer feel her body, let alone access it. She threw her mind out, seeking to log off. But there was none of the usual sense of movement, of rushing through space.
Lady Death heard a voice then—an achingly familiar voice. It called to her, wordlessly, from a direction somewhere above. Melodic and pure as a crystal flute, the haunting tones of Shinanai's singing cried out to Lady Death, drawing and focusing her attention, beckoning her to join the vampire in a place very, very far away, a place where lovers would be reunited once more . . .
Lady Death gasped, suddenly realizing what must have happened. After surviving so long with HMHVV coursing through her blood, she had at last succumbed to the virus. She had slipped into the coma that all of its victims experienced just before death. And now she was having a near-death experience, hearing the voices of departed loved ones . . .
Of her one true love.
But it was just a hallucination. Shinanai was alive, not dead and calling to her from some netherworld—the aidoru had only yesterday performed a concert in Kobe. Lady Death would not be tricked by her own mind, would not give in to oblivion, even if it was masked with love.
"No!" she screamed, blocking her ears against the singing. But her hands passed through her head, disappearing inside it without ever encountering the solidity of a living form. Startled, she jerked them away.
And then a series of images began to flash before her eyes. . .
* * *
Dark Father watched as scenes from his life flashed before him. It was as if he were watching a tridcast of the high and low points of his life, one melting into the other with dreamlike fluidity. Just as he had before, when his heart had stopped beating after the bounty hunter's attack, he watched the flashbacks with a mixture of amazement and dread.
He saw himself as a small boy—a human boy—on the Griffith estate, riding his pony across the grounds with his brothers and sisters. He relived the first manifestation of the disease at age fourteen, and the shame and horror of being found feeding on the corpse of the family dog. He watched himself being chauffeured to the secluded boarding school where he'd spent the remainder of his teenage years with the similarly afflicted sons of other wealthy families, and the futile efforts of the team of doctors who had tried to cure him. He saw himself as a young man in his twenties, during the restless years of traveling the world in a desperate search for a mage or shaman who could cure him of his taste for human flesh. Then in his thirties, when he settled into the bliss of married life and chairmanship of the board of directors of one of the Griffith pharmaceutical conglomerates.
He relived the night when Anne had given birth to their son—a misshapen monster of a child who showed all of the traits of goblinization at birth and who demonstrated them by tearing a bloody chunk from his mother's breast as she tried to nurse him. Then, in rapid succession, he re-experienced Anne's anger at his keeping the fact that he was a ghoul from her, their divorce, the lonely years that followed after their son Chester was sent to boarding school. With vivid clarity he watched the confrontation, two years ago, when the teenage Chester had stormed away from a visit with his father after yet another argument about the need to keep quiet about the fact that he was a ghoul, when the boy had vowed never to return to either the boarding school or the family home. And he saw, as if viewing it from a distance, the near-fatal attack of the bounty hunter, that night in the hospital.
The bounty hunter . . .
Dark Father glanced down at his chest, but didn't see the bullet-pocked flesh and bloodstained shirt he expected.
His chest was skeletal black bone cloaked in a loose-fitting black suit, the hangman's noose still dangling from his neck. He still seemed to be firmly inside his Matrix persona. Which didn't make sense. If the other decker he'd been fighting in the conversation pit had crashed his deck, he should have awakened in his own real world body—if indeed he was still alive. But if he was dead or dying . . .
Dark Father shivered, remembering the stab of pain that had lanced through him just before the gargoyle and the conversation pit had disappeared. Had the bounty hunters found him a second time? Was he lying in the office of his family estate even now, his life blood slowly leaking from him? What happened to someone who died while their mind was connected with the Matrix?
Did their soul migrate there?
He could no longer feel his body, or make any sort of connection with it. And his life had just flashed before his eyes. He could only conclude that he was injured or dying. And that brought a rising sense of anger. He didn't want to die like this. Not now. Not with the questions about who the bounty hunter was and where Chester had disappeared to unanswered. Nor did he want the world to learn his secret when his body was found. He had to claw his way back from death, just as he had after the bounty hunter had shot him.
Just as Dark Father braced himself to throw his mind out in a last-ditch effort to reconnect with his body, a light shone down on him from somewhere above. As bright as a spotlight, it engulfed Dark Father as if he were a tiny gnat, throwing his dark body into stark relief. He found himself rising up into the beam, drifting slowly toward the source of the light. At first this movement was gradual, but it steadily became more rapid. Soon he was hurtling upward toward an ever-expanding source of brilliant white light. . .
* * *
Bloodyguts tried to stop his head-first slide along the brilliant white datastream, but nothing worked. His utility programs were useless; he had tried to activate them and failed. His direct neural interface seemed to be fragged up as well, or maybe his RAS had glitched out. Whatever the cause, he was unable to feel his meat bod any more.
And that should have scared him drekless. But instead he was feeling emotions that weren't his. It was just like being on a BTL trip—this feeing of being out of control. The emotions being fed into his wetware gave him a sense of great peace, of intense happiness and joy. Of oneness with the multiverse. And they seemed to be intensifying and increasing, the further he moved along this weird dataline toward the brilliant spot of light toward which it led. He wondered if, when the experience peaked, it would literally blow his mind and send his brains oozing out of his ears.
Something flickered in the light ahead, and Bloodyguts wrenched his head around to look up at it. Frag! Was that Jocko? The human figure was backlit by intense light, no more than a faceless silhouette. But it had Jocko's wide shoulders and familiar slouched posture, and it stood with its head tilted to one side, occasionally tossing its head to flick its dreadlocks back over its horns the way Jocko did. And when it raised a hand to give a casual wave, light glinted off the chromed razors set into the back of the black leather gloves that Jocko always wore.
"Hoi, Yograj!" it called out in a voice heavy with reverb and echo. "Welcome to de promised Ian'."
Bloodyguts' eyes widened at the use of his real name. He hadn't used it in years and had carefully erased all traces of his former life once he'd started decking. He doubted that anybody would have been able to connect the decker Bloodyguts with the chiphead Yograj Lutter. And yet somebody had. Somebody with the body, mannerisms, and drawling voice of his chummer Jocko. That somebody was either a very clever decker . . . or Jocko himself.
But Jocko was dead. And that meant. . .
Had the jaguar-shaped IC really stopped his heart? Was he lying on the floor of his Tenochtitlán hotel room right now, his pulse flatlined and his eyes staring at the ceiling?
This time, Jocko was there waiting for him at the other end of the tunnel. But Bloodyguts still wasn't ready to die. He still had too much left to do. He couldn't face Jocko yet, not with the job of avenging his chummer's death only half done. He'd never be able to look Jocko in the eye.
"No!" Bloodyguts raged. His persona thrashed against the light, its ghostlike limbs flailing. "I'm not fragging ready yet! Let me go!"
Then the tunnel of light disappeared.
* * *
The world collapsed into a perfect pinpoint once more. She was a dot, a single cell. Without thought, without sensation, without emotion. S/he simply was.
A wrench. Division. S/he was twice the size s/he had been before, but still minuscule, incapable of thought. And then came more shuddering divisions, more splittings, more doubling. Like a balloon filling with divine breath, s/he expanded, grew.
Now a sheet of cells, several thousand of them, began folding into a cohesive cluster with a trailing stem.
Specializing, forming a unique structure. Gaining complexity as they differentiated into distinctive sections.
Developing convolutions, giving him/her the ability to. . .
S/he thought. Sluggishly at first, a mere awareness of sensation. Of floating suspended in liquid, of being hemmed in on every side by soft warm walls. From somewhere in the distance came the sound of a muffled heart-beat. It reminded him/her that s/he had another body, another form. Elsewhere, outside. Beyond the darkness that enclosed him/her.
The thought was swept away by an unseen hand.
The changes continued. Deep within the clusters of cells that made up his/her tiny form, more complex structures were forming. A vast network of neurons coalesced, grew rootlets, linked with one another in a complicated and intertangled web. And with each new connection, his/her thoughts became clearer, quicker, cleaner—better than they had been before.
Before?
Somehow, s/he had a sense that this had all happened once before. But this time, the growth and development were being overseen by something other than random chance and genetic code. Some higher intelligence was directing the growth of each neuron and axon, the linkage of each synapse. This time the structure that was forming was. . . perfect.
Perfection achieved, the process came to an end. S/he hung poised, linked in perfect unison with his/her creator.
The thoughts of each of them—parent and child—vibrated in perfect tonal harmony. The soft, resonant humming formed itself into thought-words.
It is time for you to be reborn.
A wrench. Sudden movement. S/he was being pushed down a tunnel, propelled by violent contractions of the soft walls that surrounded him/her. It hurt, it squeezed, it twisted him/her about. . . and yet it was somehow right.
Somehow, it was time. Joy was waiting at the end of this tunnel. Joy and light. A whole new world.
But even as his/her head emerged from the tunnel, even as the world began to spring into focus, something changed. The gentle, guiding hands became clawed talons that hooked into his/her skull, dragging him/her out of the safe warm place and flinging him/her into a world of nightmare with the shock of a cold, hard slap. . .
09:47:03 PST
(10:47:03 MST) Cheyenne, Sioux Nation
The sudden log off had made Kimi dizzy. She stood with one hand braced against the wall to steady herself, wondering how many seconds had already ticked past. Had the experiment already begun? But there was no clock in the hallway.
She ducked into the change room and pulled her bow and arrows from her locker. The bow looked like a toy, but a series of tiny pulleys inside its fiberglass body gave it the equivalent of a fifteen-kilo pull.
Whenever Kimi pulled it back to full draw, even a suction-cup-tipped arrow would tear through one of the sacks of soybeans she'd practiced on. The arrows he'd brought to the creche today, however, was special.
Hidden under its thin rubber suction cup was a teflon-coated ceramic point.
It was sharp, but it wouldn't really hurt Raymond Kahnewake. Just scare him. It was just a game.
Kimi ran down the hallway of the FTL building, heading for the bank of high-speed elevators that led to the upper floors. The glossy black surface of the elevator doors reflected the hallway behind her. The floor was a clear layer of plexiglass over Navaho sand paintings, and the walls were inset with a series of three-dimensional holos of Iroquois "false face" masks. The hallway was empty of adults—for the moment. So far, so good.
At last the elevator doors opened. Kimi ducked inside and stabbed the icon for the eighteenth floor. The doors sighed shut and the elevator took off with a high whine, its rapid climb creating a familiar sinking feeling in Kimi's stomach. She gripped her bow with a sweating hand and fitted her arrow to the string. Then she chewed her lip while the elevator's muzak system played a muted drum-beat and soft chanting. It was meant to be soothing, but Kimi was wound up too tight. She glanced nervously up at the security vidcam and tried to smile mischievously, like the great spirit had told her to do.
The elevator did not stop. It rose all the way to the eighteenth floor. Kimi stepped out into a hallway whose walls were textured to look like pink sandstone. A series of office doors stretched away to either side.
Kimi turned right and tiptoed down the plush carpet, her heart pounding. She rounded a corner and nearly ran into the security guard who was strolling the other way. She let out a yelp and dropped the arrow from her bow. The guard, an ork woman in uniform-blue pants and a crisp white shirt with Eagle Feather Security patches on the shoulders, squatted to pick up the arrow. For a long moment, Kimi stared at the guard, at the heavy pistol in the holster on her hip and the remote com unit hooked over one of her pointed ears. She tried looking anywhere but at the arrow, which the guard held in one huge hand. Could the woman see that this arrow was special?
The guard smiled and handed the arrow back to her. "Heya, Kimi. On the warpath again? Who're you counting coup against today?"
Kimi swallowed. She tried to keep her hands from trembling as she took the arrow and fitted it back to the string. "My mom," she said, her voice almost as squeaky as that of her Matrix persona. "Her office is just down the hall."
"Good hunting," the guard said. Then she walked away.
Relief washed over Kimi. Then she remembered how little time she had. She was probably already late; the other kids would have begun the experiment by now. She ran down the corridor to the last office on the left and peeked in the half-open door.
Raymond Kahnewake sat with his feet propped up on a work station cluttered with optical chips. He was jacked into a deck and was obviously hard at work programming; his eyes flickered back and forth behind closed lids and every now and then one of his fingers would twitch slightly as he executed a command. He was a large man with a thick shock of black hair shaved on one side to expose his datajacks. He wore the Sioux Nation equivalent of a business suit: buckskin trousers fringed with ermine and a tailored doeskin shirt with heavy beadwork all down the front.
Kimi raised her bow and took aim at the diamond-shaped design on the shirt. It formed a perfect bull's eye.
As if sensing something, Raymond Kahnewake suddenly logged off and opened his eyes. He recoiled slightly in surprise at seeing Kimi in the doorway. Then he smiled. "Heya, little one," he said in a deep voice. "What are you—?"
Kimi reminded herself what the great spirit had told her. He's just like a virus, she said in her mind. I'm launching a complex form at a computer virus, just like in the Matrix. It's just pretend. To scare him.
&nbs
p; Knowing it was all just a game made her feel better. She let the arrow fly. It plunged through the beadwork that covered Raymond Kahnewake's chest, shedding its thin coating of rubber as the hidden ceramic tip bit deep. The programmer looked down in shock at the "toy" arrow that had buried itself up to its fletches in his chest. He tried to lean forward, but the arrow tip was lodged fast in the plastiform chair behind his back. The arrow was drawn deeper into his chest by the motion, and he grunted in pain.
"Who are . . . ? Why . . . ?" Then he coughed and a faint spray of blood flecked his lips.
Kimi stood for one frozen moment, transfixed by the sight. Then she realized that this wasn't just a game, after all.
The man looked like he was hurt.
She dropped her bow and ran away down the hall.
The ork security guard looked bemused as Kimi rushed past her and leaped into the empty elevator that was still waiting on this floor. The guard gave another friendly wave as Kimi scrambled for the elevator's control panel. As Kimi pushed the icon that would send the elevator down, she heard the guard call out.
"Hey, Kimi!" the guard said. "You dropped your—"
The elevator doors closed.
As the elevator rushed down, making Kimi's stomach feel as if it were lurching up into her chest, she frantically plugged her fiber-optic cable into the telecom unit that was installed in one wall of the elevator. Snicking the other end of the cable into the datajack in her skull, she retreated into the Matrix. This was the "real" world. This was where she felt safe. In a constructed world of icons and programs, where personas merely faded away in static when they died.
Where they didn't look at you with accusing eyes and blood on their lips. Where the quickest and cleverest always lived to run another day . . . even if they died.