by Lisa Smedman
Surrounded by a ring of slavering ghouls, Dark Father skidded to a stop. In desperation he tore open his jacket and turned toward the nearest one.
"Leave me alone!" he howled. "I'm nothing but bone. There's no flesh left on my body. I'm dead. You can't feed on me!"
The ghouls hesitated. Several lowered their hands. But Chester stepped forward, eyeing his father critically.
"If you're dead, then you belong in the ground," he said. The other ghouls laughed and began crowding forward once more.
"I—" Dark Father felt the ground shift beneath him. Looking down, he saw that his feet were buried to the ankles in soil. He seemed to be sinking into the earth. When he looked up, he saw that the ghouls were hesitating. Several were staring in confusion at the ground, as if wondering where Dark Father had hidden his feet. But Chester's attention was still firmly focused on his father.
"Come on," he told the other ghouls. "It's time to finish him."
The ghouls leaped forward, laughing in anticipation of a kill.
Dark Father did the only thing he could think of. He ducked down into a crouch and began scrabbling at the soft soil. Perhaps if he covered himself in earth, the ghouls would no longer see him. It was a desperate ploy and had about as much logic to it as a child thinking that, if his own eyes were closed, no one could see him. But if it was that or death . . .
Amazingly, it seemed to be working. As Dark Father clawed his way into the ground like a hunted animal, the ghouls suddenly looked confused and then began wandering away, one by one. Soon only Chester was left. And then as Dark Father disappeared into the ground, he too vanished.
Soft soil surrounded Dark Father. For a moment he lay still. Then he noticed a light below him. He dug a little further, and a hole opened underneath him. Pulling himself out of it, he climbed up and onto the surface as gravity suddenly reversed itself. The hole he had just emerged through was below him now.
He'd done it—freed himself from the nightmarish confrontation with his son.
But the place the hole had led to seemed little better than the one he had just left. . .
* * *
A buzzer sounded and the soft warm tunnel surrounding him disappeared. Bloodyguts found himself sprawled stomach-down over the back of a galloping horse, just ahead of its rider—an Asian ork dressed in a dirty sheep-skin vest, leather pants, and soft leather boots. One of the rider's hands clenched the back of Bloodyguts' shirt, holding him tight against the saddle. The saddle horn dug into his gut with each jostle and blood rushed to his head, which bobbed loosely between his outstretched arms. Below them, the horse's chromed hooves churned up a boiling cloud of dust. Grit filled Bloodyguts' nostrils, carrying with it the smell of horse sweat.
Bloodyguts groaned and lifted his head slightly. He saw other riders—also orks and dressed much like the first—galloping madly after the horse that carried him, their vests billowing as they caught the rush of air. Although the orks looked as though they had ridden out of a documentary on the ancient Mongols, several sported obvious cyberware.
One had wrap-around mirror shades, and another wore a Darwin's Bastards metamusic T-shirt and military-style combat boots. Each rode a horse that had large white numbers painted on it; similar numbers, in black, marked each rider's sheepskin vest.
They rode furiously in pursuit of the horse on which Bloodyguts was sprawled. The landscape behind them was table-flat, a smooth expanse of bright blue plastic imprinted with circuitry—a gigantic simsense chip. Somewhere an orchestra was playing. The air was filled with the rolling thunder of drums, the clash of bronze gongs, and the shrill of stringed instruments played in a frenzied minor key.
Every last one of the riders was wired for simsense. Each had a rig wrapped tight around his head and a flexible wire antenna streaming out behind; the wet records were being sampled remotely. Bloodyguts saw a similar wire trailing from his own skull, and could feel the pinch of the simsense rig around his temples, where it was snugged tight under his horns.
Anger boiled through him. Frag it—he was being recorded? He tried to paw the simsense rig from his head, but the jostling of the horse frustrated his efforts. The drekkin' thing seemed glued to his skull.
Bloodyguts tried to lift himself up—and nearly slid from the horse. Only the firm grip of the ork kept him on its back.
That was when he realized that something was wrong with the perspective. In the meat world, the troll decker Yograj Lutter stood nearly three meters tall and weighed in at 250 kilos. Yet here he was slung over the back of a short, shaggy horse that was little bigger than a pony. His dangling hands and feet barely reached the horse's belly. In comparison to the ork rider, Bloodyguts was no larger than a child, even though he had the powerful, muscular body of a troll. No matter how hard he struggled, he just wasn't strong enough to escape . . .
Another of the riders caught up to the horse on which Bloodyguts was sprawled. The ork kicked his horse violently, sending it slamming into the other horse's flank. Sparks flew and a metallic whining filled the air as the two horses ground together. Then the pursuing rider drew a monofilament whip and slashed at the ork holding Bloodyguts. As the hair-thin filament snaked out, glinting in the sunlight, Bloodyguts heard a loud, special-effects whoosh and wet tearing sound. Hot blood sprayed onto his back as the rider let go of his shirt and suddenly tumbled backward off his horse, his severed head flying in one direction and his body in another. The other rider leaned in close, grabbed Bloodyguts' shirt in his fist, and hauled him over to his own horse. Whooping his victory, the ork kneed his horse on a new course, wheeling around to escape the other riders.
Bloodyguts shook his head, trying to make sense of it all. This was crazy. One minute he'd been sliding through a tunnel of light toward his dead chummer—the next he'd woken up in a crazed, Asian-western dream. The orks were treating Bloodyguts as if he were a prize cut of beef that they were carrying home to the stew pot. . .
Then Bloodyguts got it. His wetware slotted and ran a distant memory, and he understood the game he'd been dropped into. Years ago he'd seen a flatscreen film from the twentieth century of a violent game played by the riders of the Asian steppes. It was an every-man-for-himself mounted combat in which riders tried to grab the body of a freshly killed calf from one another. The winner was the man who could carry this "ball" outside a designated playing field. The prize for victory was the calf itself, which was roasted and eaten.
Then Bloodyguts saw the dotted lines on his hands and forearms. Just like a carcass of beef, his skin had been marked with lines a butcher would use to make his first cuts . . .
Riders on another part of the field came together in a tussling knot of horses and dust. In an effort to escape another contender who had almost caught up to him, the rider carrying Bloodyguts was forced to swing toward the commotion. Bloodyguts caught a brief glimpse of the rider at the center of the throng, who also had a body draped over his horse. The dreadlocks and horns of this child-sized troll were immediately recognizable to Bloodyguts, despite the simsense rig that obscured the troll's features. Bloodyguts knew his friend was dead, but even so a wash of dread swept through him as he saw one of the rider's whips lash down, cutting his friend's back open in a bloody line.
"Jocko!" he yelled.
Jocko's head lifted slightly—but it may have just been the motion of the horse on which he was carried. Was he still alive? Bloodyguts couldn't tell.
Then Jocko slid from the back of the horse to land in the dust. The riders leaped from their horses, whips raised. As the monofilaments rose and fell, sparkling in the sunlight and sending drops of blood flying, Jocko's body was precisely flayed like a side of beef.
Bloodyguts felt a chip slotting home in the chipjack in his temple. He'd had the chipjack permanently sealed years ago, but somehow it seemed that the plug had fallen away. The chip slid home with a familiar click—and then the agony that Jocko was feeling sawed through Bloodyguts' flesh, cutting him to the bone. He was Jocko, lying on the smooth
surface of the BTL chip that formed the landscape, feeling the monofilaments cut him to pieces. He was dying. Again.
"Noooo!" Bloodyguts clawed at the chip in his jack but was unable to wrench it loose. Instead it broke in two, leaving its circuitry buried in his skull. It throbbed there like a living thing, sending pulses of pain through his body.
He/Jocko lay on his back in the dust, watching his body as it was cut into bloody chunks . . .
His body. No, Jocko's body. No not even that. The Matrix persona that was modeled after Jocko's body.
This isn't real, Bloodyguts told himself. This is a BTL trip. A chip dream. I'm still in the Matrix, and my icon is that of a chummer who is already dead. You can't kill a dead man. And that's what I am. Dead.
Concentrating his will against the powerful sensory stimuli, Bloodyguts shut down his senses one by one. Sight, hearing, smell, taste—until only the pain remained. Then that too was blocked. He hung for a moment in the void of nothingness, balancing on the brink of blissful oblivion, then concentrated on ejecting the chip from his jack. He felt it slide free—with aching slowness at first, then suddenly popping free, all in a rush. He waited a second more, then allowed his tactile sense to return. He felt no pain. Encouraged, he allowed his other senses to return one by one.
Then he opened his eyes and looked around him.
The ork riders, their horses, and the chip-flat landscape had all disappeared, popping out of existence while Bloodyguts hung suspended in a world without sensation or time. He had crashed that chip dream—logged off from it and found another, less painful reality for his soul to occupy.
But it didn't exactly welcome him with open arms . . .
09:48:27 PST
Lady Death stood in a vast cavern whose high ceiling reflected the red light of fires that erupted in flickering jets through cracks in the stone floor. Streams of blood wound their way between these fires, entering and exiting the cavern through gloomy tunnels, and sulfurous yellow smoke obscured the air. The walls echoed with the screams and cries of the damned.
They were everywhere: perched on stone stalagmites, curled in fetal positions on the hard rocky floor, or beating fists or foreheads against walls in an effort to dull their agony. Some were submerged in the stone floor, with only grasping hands or quivering feet showing above its surface, trapped like living flies in amber.
They were humanoid figures having neither distinguishing characteristics nor gender, smooth and gleaming as if they had been dipped in molten chrome. Their heads were hairless and their faces identical; they had eyes, noses, ears, and mouths, but all looked the same. Only their voices differentiated adult from child, or male from female. Agony echoed from every tongue: groans, shrill screams, or low moans.
Lady Death shuddered. She would have gone back to face the vampires again, but the door had disappeared the moment she locked it shut. Although their screams caused her to wince, the damned seemed to offer no real threat.
They were oblivious to her, each wrapped in his or her own private hell. They stood, sat, or lay in place, faces distorted and mouths open and screaming.
Was this the Matrix? It had to be. If she had died, the gaijin hell was the last place she would have expected to wind up. Her parents had schooled Hitomi in the Shinto religion; she'd rejected it and considered herself an atheist. The only way she'd have wound up in a scene out of Dante's Inferno was if someone else had programmed it and put it in her path. The vampires and hotel/hospital room had been drawn from her own fears, but this place was someone else's nightmare.
"So Ka," she whispered to herself. "I am in the Matrix. But where? And what does this represent?"
Although the damned themselves looked like standard USM icons, the landscape they inhabited did not conform to universal Matrix symbolism. It looked custom-designed, like a sculpted system. The rivers of blood had to be data-streams, just like the sand ripples in the Shiawase system. The stalagmites were probably datastores or subprocessing units, and the tunnels system access nodes or input/output ports. But it all felt so real. The heat from the fires was causing rivulets of sweat to run down her temples and back, she could smell the heavy stink of sulfur, and her mouth and nose were dry from breathing the hot air. The screams . . .
Were those other deckers? Lady Death moved cautiously toward one. She chose a small figure; by the size it was a child about half her age. The kid was lying on the cavern floor and kicking her legs, beating at her body with her hands.
Lady Death knelt down and touched the child's shoulder. . .
She was lying on her foam mattress in the squat and it was dark. Outside she could hear angry shouts and the sound of automatic weapons. Light slanted through the boarded-up window beside her. Something was on her bed
—something nearly as big as her. Its eyes gleamed red in the dim light and its pointed ears twitched. Its mouth opened wide, grinning, and its hairless tail lashed back and forth. It sniffed at her, whiskers twitching, as she lay tangled in her torn woolen blanket, terrified and unable to free herself or kick the gigantic rat away no matter how hard she thrashed her legs. Then it bit. Warm blood flowed down her calf as its sharp teeth worried their way into her flesh. She cried out for Ma, but Ma wouldn't come. She was in the next room with a "customer" and that meant she was busy. And now more devil rats were pouring in through the cracks in the wall, dropping from the ceiling onto her mattress, crawling up through the ventilation shafts, pushing the board away from the window to get inside, chittering with evil laughter, coming to tear and rend and gnaw at her, smothering and suffocating her until she . . .
"Get them off me!" Lady Death screamed. "Get them off! Takukete! Help meee—!"
She tore her hand away. She stood, shaking, for several long seconds. Shudders ran the length of her spine and tears streamed from her eyes. She looked down at where the girl lay thrashing and could still feel her terror, even though she was no longer experiencing it first-hand. Horrible.
She looked around. If she touched another of the deckers, what other nightmares would she experience? She didn't want to know.
Lady Death knelt and dipped a finger into one of the streams of blood. She braced herself for more horrific images, but instead her mind was filled with a stream of meaningless data. Word fragments echoed in her ears, kaleidoscopic images flashed before her eyes, meaningless clumps of English letters and pseudo-Japanese kanji characters scrolled rapidly past, and fragments of tactile sensation assaulted her. The blood was a data stream—but one that seemed hopelessly scrambled. She flicked the blood from her fingers and the sensory jumble cleared from her mind.
She stood and touched one of the stalagmites instead. It seemed solid, its lumpy limestone formation like an upside-down ice cream cone. If it was indeed a datastore, it wasn't giving up any of its secrets. Unless . . .
Lady Death pushed against the tip of the stalagmite. She felt it give a little, and pushed harder. A crack appeared just below her hand. The tip shuddered and felt as though it were about to break off. . .
A jet of reddish-orange flame erupted at Lady Death's feet. She jumped back, but it licked at her kimono and set a corner of the fabric on fire. Lady Death smacked at it with her hands until it went out, then contemplated the black singe mark that was left behind. Had she just been attacked by IC? Had she just activated some sort of defensive utility? She could no longer tell what was going on. She could not feel her body in the real world, nor did she have a sense of which utilities she had loaded and ready to run.
As an experiment, she tried to activate one of her programs—an analyze utility. She had been expecting it to fail, so she was startled when a theater-style spotlight appeared in her hands. She shone its bright beam on the jet of flame and waited for the returning flow of information. It appeared in her mind as a page from a script: The pan of the blaster IC is being played by hellfire. Its role is to attack any who would cause the leading player harm. It is a minor character of low rank.
Lady Death shut the spotlight off an
d stood, lost in thought. Gray IC then—black would have been assigned a more prominent part. But the "leading player"? Was that the sysop for this system?
Something moved in her peripheral vision. Lady Death spun around, her kimono whirling. Then she backed up slowly, concealing herself behind a stalagmite and trying not to draw the attention of the figure that flowed out of one of the walls like a ghost. Like the damned that surrounded her, it was a humanoid figure, but unlike them it was neither smooth and featureless nor metallic. Instead it seemed to be composed of swirling red mist. Jets of flame showed through its translucent body as it moved past them. It paused a moment, then moved further into the cavern with a sure stride, despite the fact that its legs ended in stubs several centimeters above the floor. Drops of red fell from the ends of these stubs onto the stone, where they hissed and bubbled as the heat evaporated them.
As the figure drew closer to where Lady Death was hiding, she could see that it was a man. His hair swept back from a high forehead and his chin and cheeks were dark with beard stubble. He wore a loose-fitting robe that looked more like a shroud, a tattered reddish-brown fabric the color of dried blood. He balanced on his three-quarter-legs with the poise of a martial artist and his arms were raised in a defensive posture. He glanced warily around the cavern he had just entered, eyes flicking from one to another of the damned.
Then they locked on Lady Death. She tried to duck back behind the stalagmite but wasn't quick enough. The ghost man had seen her. Frantically, she tried to ready a defensive utility. Would the ghost attack? What would her best defense be? Should she hurl an attack program at it before it could—
"Wait!" the ghost man called out. "Don't go! Who are you? Where are we? What system is this?"
Lady Death paused, confused. He didn't sound hostile. He seemed as confused as she was. But maybe it was a trick.
She activated one of her utilities. Miniature jets appeared in the bottom of her wood-block sandals, lifting her a fraction of a centimeter from the floor. The extra speed and maneuverability they provided would add precious milliseconds, should she have to avoid this other decker—or whatever he was—in combat.