by Lisa Smedman
Moaning softly, Richard Villiers, CEO of NovaTech, one of the most powerful corporations in North and South America, sank into a fetal position on the floor while little Rickie Villiers received the beating of his life.
09:53:42 PST
Bloodyguts shivered in the cold wind that blew down the ruined street. The buildings on either side looked like something out of the tridcasts showing the aftermath of the Euro-Wars—empty shells, their windows blown out and roofs collapsed. The sky overhead was the same dull gray as the crumbling cement walls on either side of the road.
Occasionally Bloodyguts heard a sputtering engine and was forced to step out of the street and onto the rubble-strewn sidewalk in order to let a battered-looking automobile or truck hurtle past. The driverless vehicles bumped along on flattened tires. Each was filled with garbage—the crumpled tins, fast food wrappers, and bags of rotting food were the visual representations of the information that was streaming along the city-street dataline.
The data might look like garbage, but it was very much intact. Trid, telecom, and automated data signals were still passing through this section of the Seattle telecommunications grid. The only stuff getting fragged up were the signals that were sent or received by the human and metahuman deckers who were linked to this RTG via direct neural interface. "Tortoises" like Pip were still able to get a signal through—but they were too fraggin' s-l-o-w to be of any use to those trapped inside this virtual pocket.
Bloodyguts and his chummers were on their own.
Bloodyguts was following the icon that represented his track utility. It clicked along the pavement on feet that had been fitted with cybernetic cleats. Unlike the silver-furred German shepherd that formed the tracking core of the smart frame that Dark Father had used, this dog was a solid black pit bull that was bulked to the max with grafted, vat-grown muscle. The dog had the usual cybernetic enhancements of a fighting dog. In addition to the cleats, it had implanted surgical-steel teeth, subdermal armor plating, and a thermographic vision system built into its cybereyes that would have allowed the real-world version of the dog it was modeled after to home in on the heat signature of an opposing dog's jugular. And, of course, it had a brain box—an implanted simsense recording unit that captured the "wet record" of the dog's experience in the pit.
The dog paused and sniffed the air. Then it turned and entered a wide boulevard filled with traffic. Bloodyguts followed, but after a few blocks the road was blocked by a striped orange and black barrier that stretched from one side of the street to the other. A sign hanging from it read: ROAD CLOSED TO LOCAI TRAFFIC.
Beyond the barrier, Bloodyguts saw a normal-looking dataline—a glowing tube of shimmering yellow. It looked achingly familiar and inviting.
"Stop!" Bloodyguts shouted. The track utility paused with its nose nearly touching the barrier, then sat on its haunches and waited, tongue lolling. Bloodyguts walked over to the barrier, wanting a closer look.
Cars and trucks zoomed through the barrier as if it were merely a projected holo image. The vehicles turned into glowing packets of data as they exited the Seattle RTG. But when Bloodyguts approached the barrier, the stripes on its bar expanded with an electric hum to completely block the road like prison bars.
Bloodyguts held his palm a few centimeters away from one of these glowing bars, and its static charge lifted the hairs on the back of his arm. He lowered his hand, not wanting to risk taking damage.
"Well, that's as far as I go," he said out loud.
He looked down at the pit bull. "Go!" he ordered it brusquely. "Search!"
The dog trotted past the barrier as if it wasn't there. As it entered the tunnel that lay beyond, it turned into a glowing ball of light. The glow shot down the tube like a bullet through a gun barrel, quickly disappearing into the distance.
It was now or never. Bloodyguts fingered the dog tag he held, hesitating. Would his utility work as he hoped?
There was only one way to find out. He slotted the dog tag into the chipjack he had sculpted in his persona's temple and closed his eyes.
A simsense recording exploded into life in his mind.
He was a dog, loping on four legs at the speed of thought through a tunnel of light. He sniffed at the data that flowed past him in either direction, sampling it and seeking a familiar scent. There! That combination of characters and numbers was the spoor he wanted. He turned, following it through tunnels that branched, connected, split apart, and connected again. Following it to its source. Excitement built as he reached the end of the line. Saliva pooled in his mouth as he savored the reward that was to come . . .
Then he yelped with pain as he slammed nose-first into a wall. The tunnel he had been following had abruptly ended in an empty void. He'd homed in on the right LTG address, but he couldn't access the cyberdeck that was connected to it. He growled, anger and confusion boiling inside him, and snapped his teeth at the empty air that hung just beyond the truncated walls of the tunnel.
What the frag? What had happened to his deck? What had happened to him!
Bloodyguts worked furiously, programming on the fly. He ordered the track utility to home in instead on a slave node—one that had come in handy when he'd done a pre-run recon of the Comfort Inn he'd chosen as the jackpoint for his Matrix run.
This particular Comfort Inn hotel still relied on the anti-quated cleaning drones that had been all the rage a couple of decades ago—but that had gone out of favor after one of the automated floor scrubbers at the ultra-posh Maria Isabel Sheraton in downtown Tenochtitlán had run amok, disfiguring and blinding a visiting Salish-Shidhe council member by spraying her with scalding soap. Each of these "robot janitors" included a rudimentary guidance system that allowed it to be directed by the human or metahuman cleaning staff. The machines were dog-brained in the extreme, but they had their uses. Before starting his run, Bloodyguts had slaved one of the vacuums to his deck so that he could use it to scan the hallways of the hotel where he had dossed down. He just hoped the connection was still alive.
The pit bull's nose quivered as it picked up the scent once more. There! The characters and numbers matched. Panting with excitement, it leaped forward and clamped its steel teeth on the glowing ball that was the slave node . . .
Bloodyguts opened his eyes. A grainy, monochromatic rectangle—a palm-sized monitor screen—had appeared in the air in front of him. Beside it hung the control icons that switched the vacuum's suction on and off, and that directed its movements. The monitor showed a view of a hotel hallway. The tiled floor that was closest to the vidcam was in sharp focus, but the light fixtures in the ceiling were a distant blur overhead.
Bloodyguts reached out and stubbed one of the icons with a fingertip. The view in the monitor shifted as the automated vacuum began to roll down the hall. Bloodyguts panned the view left and right, looking for his hotel room.
The image bounced at regular intervals as the vacuum bumped over cracks between tiles, then finally came to rest on a door bearing the number 225. The door was open slightly—not a good sign.
Swearing softly, Bloodyguts used the vacuum to nudge the door open wider. It took a moment or two before he had the cleaning unit angled so that its vidcam lens picked up the view he wanted. When it did, he thought his heart would stop.
Maybe it had, he reminded himself. Maybe the arrhythmia that the Azzie black IC had induced had flatlined him, after all.
There was his meat bod, sprawled on the floor of his doss in an untidy heap beside the chair he'd been sitting in when he jacked into the Matrix. His cyberdeck lay on the rug beside him. A fiber-optic cable snaked from it to the telecom outlet he'd used as his jackpoint, and from the deck to Bloodyguts' temple. But the power-indicator light on the cyberdeck itself was out, and the deck itself was . . .
Dead. Something had fried it, big time. A wisp of smoke rose from its melted circuitry.
Frag! Some sort of gray IC must have slagged his deck. But if that was the case, how come he was still able to access the Matri
x? He angled the vacuum's vidcam up and down, trying to get a better view . . .
And saw movement. There, squatting beside his prone form was Jose, the Azzie rebel who was to have met Bloodyguts at noon. He must have come early, found Bloodyguts on the floor, and concluded that something had gone wrong on the run. The kid, an Amerind dwarf in his late teens, was staring at Bloodyguts' meat bod with a puzzled expression, absently scratching his bearded chin. His other hand held an Ares Viper—a nasty matte-black pistol with a built-in silencer.
Bloodyguts sent the vacuum creeping forward, trying to get a closer look at his meat bod. Its eyes were rolled back until only the whites were showing, but he was relieved to see that the chest was still rising and falling. He hadn't flatlined and gone to some sort of Matrix limbo, after all. He was alive. Hooked up to a cyberdeck that had flatlined, yet was still accessing the Matrix. Which could mean only one thing . . .
He had become an otaku.
The dwarf froze, as if sensing something. Then he swung around. His eyes widened as they took in the robotic vacuum. He raised his pistol and sighted directly into the monitor screen. Two bursts of flame shot out of the barrel of the Viper in rapid succession as he fired . . .
The monitor screen and its icons blinked out of existence.
"Frag!" Bloodyguts cursed. His connection with the robotic vacuum was broken.
But he still had his tracking utility. Whistling, he called it back. After a second or two, a glowing ball of light zoomed down the datastream toward him, zipped under the barrier—and materialized on the street beside him as the pit bull.
This time, he gave it another LTG address to home in on: the Osaka arcology where Lady Death lived.
Of the other four deckers, Lady Death was the only one whose jackpoint could offer a view of the outside world. Red Wraith and Anubis had jacked in from locations that were unmonitored, and Dark Father had flat out refused to let Bloodyguts try to get a real-time view of his meat bod. Only Lady Death had logged on from a location that was covered—to the max—by surveillance cameras: the Shiawase Corporation arcology in Osaka, Japan.
Bloodyguts fed the track utility the new LTG address, then sent the dog through the barrier once more. He closed his eyes, and the dog tag that he'd inserted like a chip in his temple gave him familiar simsense-like feedback: the utility reached a dead end, butted up against it a few times, then gave it up and sought out the nearest slave node. It took Bloodyguts only a moment or two to find the right security camera. Then he was looking down at Lady Death's meat bod from an overhead angle.
Red Wraith was right. She was just a kid.
The girl didn't look anything like her Matrix persona, aside from the fact that both were Asian in appearance. She was small and slender, a waif with short dark hair that framed her chin, and cheeks that were rosy red with the glow of youth. She wore an expensive-looking pair of sea-green silk pajamas and lay on what looked like a hospital bed. A cluster of attendants in crisp white stood nearby, fussing over monitors that were linked to the teenage girl's body with fiber-optic cables and trode patches.
Two tense-looking men in suits—obviously security staff—stood guard at the end of the bed. Just behind them was an Asian man in his late forties. He looked as though he had just gotten out of bed—he too was wearing silk pajamas and slippers. His hair was uncombed, but he gave the impression of dignity and practiced poise, just the same. He stared at the bed, a grim expression on his face. Bloodyguts couldn't shake the feeling that he had seen this man somewhere before . . .
With a start, he realized where. This was Tadashi Shiawase, president of the whole fraggin' corporate shebang—
CEO of the Shiawase Corporation. What was his interest in a teenage decker? Why had his staff gotten him out of bed at—Bloodyguts did a quick mental calculation—nearly three in the morning, Osaka time?
Bloodyguts angled the sec cam to get a look at the equipment that was connected to the girl in the hospital bed.
They seemed to be monitoring her vitals—pulsing lights on the screens indicated that Lady Death's meat bod was also still very much alive.
Her cyberdeck was nowhere in sight. But—and here was the curious thing—a fiber-optic cable connected her datajack to a plug on the wall. She was plugged into the Matrix without any deck to serve as her interface. Which could only mean one thing. She too was an otaku.
Bloody guts could only guess at what had happened. Someone had found Lady Death hooked up to what appeared to be a non-functional deck, and decided to unjack her. Since she had been accessing the Matrix at the time, even without a deck, she suffered some form of dump shock. In the ensuing panic, someone slotted the wrong cable into her datajack—and discovered, to their amazement, that she went back on line.
Which would arouse great curiosity . . .
And which would also explain why Lady Death had inexplicably disappeared, earlier, back when they'd first accessed the Fuchi database via the gravestone.
Bloodyguts nodded silently. He wasn't surprised that Tadashi Shiawase had been roused from sleep. His corporation was heavily into computer engineering. Perhaps his corp spies had heard reports of teenage deckers who ran the Matrix without a deck and were keen to meet one of the otaku. Lady Death's meat bod certainly fit that description.
Bloodyguts watched for a second or two longer, trying to decide if he could use the arcology's security system to get a message to the outside world. In theory, it should be possible. But he wasn't sure what good it would do. Even if the arcology was in the heart of Seattle—not thousands of klicks away across an ocean in Japan—he doubted that anyone he contacted would be able to respond in time. Lady Death had said that the AI controlling the pocket universe they were trapped in was about to self-destruct.
When the AI crashed, the ultra-violet system that Bloodyguts and the others were inhabiting would disappear.
There'd be no chance of a graceful log off—they'd simply be dumped. They'd face not only dump shock, but also the psychotropic after-effects of having been in contact with the AI Just like the elf woman whose suicide Bloodyguts had witnessed earlier, they'd be mentally hoop-fragged. Maybe even enough to commit suicide.
In the high-speed world of the Matrix, the end could come mere seconds from now.
They couldn't wait around for the cavalry. They had to act. Right fraggin' now.
09:54:18 PST
Timea crouched behind a partially deflated rubber ball and peered into the building in front of her. It was modeled after a doll house, with one side left open to expose three stories of interior rooms, but was as large as a normal house. The building looked as though it had been constructed from scraps of packaging found at a dumpster. The walls were made of tattered bits of faded cardboard, the windows were chunks of broken glass, and the chimneys that crowned the roof were the sawed-off necks of plastic bottles.
The furnishings inside the house were macabre. Timea could see chesterfields made of slabs of rotting meat that had been crudely stitched together with surgical thread, and chairs and tables made of bones joined together with razor wire. The interior walls looked as though they had been painted with a wash of blood. The curtains were funeral shrouds, and the doors that divided the rooms were hinged tombstones.
Just in front of the opening to each room, floating in the air like day-glo snowflakes, were a series of warning symbols: the yellow skull and crossbones that meant poison; the blue dissolving hand that symbolized corrosive or caustic materials; the crimson flame that warned that a product was flammable; and the yellow three-petal flower symbolizing radiation.
Inside each room sat a battered-looking toy: teddy bears with stuffing leaking out through worn patches; plastic clowns whose paint had faded away to murky pastels; Battle-bots whose fists and heads lolled on rusted springs; and a CuddleBunni Playpet whose plastic fur looked as though it had been singed by fire.
The icon Timea had followed to this place—a doll made of faded pink plastic with matted yellow hair—was in equal
ly rough shape. Its arms and legs looked as though they'd been chewed by a dog, and one of its glass eyes was missing. It was dressed in the ragged remains of what had once been a red and white checked dress.
The doll approached the open side of the house, pushed past a radiation symbol that rotated like a turnstile, and entered a room on the ground floor. Then it dropped into a couch, its arms and legs splayed as if it was a toy that some child had carelessly cast aside.
"That looked easy enough," Timea muttered. But she knew she was kidding herself. The warning icons had to be IC of some sort. They might let one of the inhabitants of the doll house pass, but they'd slag a decker for sure.
Timea had already done a quick analysis of the doll icon. She suspected that the other toys were much the same: program frames—multi-utility programs that roamed the Matrix on their own. Some were "dumb"—they crashed as soon as the decker controlling them logged off the host or system they were occupying. But the "smart" ones remained intact whether their creator was logged on or not.
She was on her own here. After Dark Father had reappeared through the mirror, bringing with him a decker he introduced as Lady Death, the others had agreed to separate, gather what data they could, and hook up again at the Seattle Visitor Center database at 9:55. If Dark Father could find his way back to that node, so could the rest of them—or so they hoped.
Dark Father and Lady Death had disappeared back into the Fuchi star to seek out more information on the virus that the corp had used to infect the Al. They hoped to find the "trap door" they'd talked about. Red Wraith had gone off on his own to see if any military or government database fragments had been used to construct this pocket universe—presumably he was searching for more data on Echo Mirage.
Bloodyguts had opted for action. An expert at accessing and programming slave nodes, he was trying to make contact with the outside world.
Timea agreed with his philosophy. Gathering data like the others were doing was fine, but all it gave you was a mental bone to chew on. Like Bloodyguts, she wanted to do something concrete. The minds and bodies of the kids at her clinic were on the line. She'd sent them into the Matrix, and she was responsible for their well-being. And so she'd decided to try to directly contact the AI that had trapped them here.