by Lisa Smedman
That. . . may be.
"Spirits be fragged," Red Wraith whispered. Then the lights in the cafe went out.
09:56:13 PST
Bloodyguts batted away the moths that fluttered in front of his face. Then he hoisted himself out of the hole, his hands sinking into something soft and wet. Clear liquid soaked his knee as he knelt on the edge of the hole and then levered himself up onto a jelly-like, quivering surface.
He stood on a gigantic eyeball that stared blindly up into a black void. Its pupil was the manhole he'd just crawled out of; Bloodyguts was a mere centimeter or two high, when measured against the scale of the body. It lay stretched out on its back, a glowing grid of datastreams seeming to hold it down like a coarse mesh net. Yet there was nothing to hold the body to; it floated in the inky void, an island unto itself.
The body itself was that of a naked child, its gender not apparent from Bloodyguts' vantage point. Completely hairless, the child had neither eyebrows nor eyelashes. The arms and legs were round and smooth as sausages, and the belly bloated as if filled with gas. The smell of putrefaction hung in the air, making Bloodyguts wince and pinch his nostrils shut. The odor lessened somewhat, but it still made Bloodyguts want to gag.
He'd found his way here from the dilapidated street he'd followed to the edge of the Seattle LTG. While retracing his route, he'd noticed an octagonal manhole in the center of the street. He'd nearly passed it by—until he saw the logo embossed on its rusted iron surface: the eagle-and-arrows logo of the former United States. He'd only glanced at it a moment—just long enough to wonder if the octagon really did represent a CPU—but in that instant he'd felt a warm, happy glow. And he'd recognized that he was being subliminally manipulated by a psychotropic effect.
Bloodyguts knew all about positive conditioning. Developed by the corps to ensure employee loyalty and customer "satisfaction," it was a big part of what made illegal BTL chips so addictive. Eventually the user could only feel good in the presence of certain images, certain icons. Without them, he felt emotionally flat, all fragged up.
Normally, the Matrix was filled with icons—they were used for everything from prettying up a signature at the end of a file to signposts that pointed the way to a corporate system to the framework of a system icon itself. But since he and the others had been trapped here by the Al, Bloodyguts had only seen one other icon—the Fuchi star on the bone of data that Dark Father's smart frame had uncovered. He'd felt a hint of the warm fuzzies then, too. But he hadn't realized why until Lady Death told the rest of them of the file she and Dark Father had uncovered—the one that told the history of the AI's incubation in the Fuchi system computers, after the corp had acquired the Psychotrope program from Matrix Systems.
It seemed the original program had been altered by Fuchi's programmers to include code that caused users—and ultimately the AI itself—to react positively to Fuchi's logo. That positive conditioning seemed to have been a part of the original program, since the AI also induced a happy glow in the presence of the "logo" of the government that had originally funded the Echo Mirage project. Unable to delete those icons, the AI had left them in place, even when they flagged incriminating pieces of data—or important nodes.
Like the manhole.
After climbing down into the icon-flagged manhole, Bloodyguts had followed a twisting maze of tunnels for nearly two minutes—an eternity in the vastly compressed time frame of the Matrix. He'd hoped they would allow him to access some key element of the AI's programming, so that he could try and start sorting out its core code from the virus. Maybe then he could use a disinfect utility in an attempt to heal the Al.
The tunnel had led him here. But he was fragged if he could understand what this corpse represented.
His peripheral vision registered movement. So slowly as to be almost imperceptible, the eyelid was closing.
Bloodyguts backed away, his feet squelching against the surface of the eyeball. It compressed slightly, and as he stepped off onto the cheek, a putrid-smelling tear pooled at the corner of the eye and ran away down the side of the face.
Bloodyguts stared down at the chest of the corpse, and saw that it too was moving. Like the motion of the eyelid, its rise and fall was so slow as to go unnoticed by a casual glance.
He walked to the nose, knelt, and held a hand in front of one nostril. A barely perceptible breeze warmed his fingers. The corpse was still breathing.
It was alive.
But not for long. Even as Bloodyguts knelt there, the breathing stopped. As the final breath was exhaled, a tiny gray moth fluttered from the nostril and landed on the back of Bloodyguts' hand. At the same time, a child's voice issued from the parted but unmoving lips.
Operating system shutting down. Input/output connections deactivated. Secondary storage memory shut down.
"What the frag?" Bloodyguts stood up as the eyelid finished closing—and remained closed.
Data transfer has ceased. Subroutine and task scheduling deactivated.
Bloodyguts whirled as something materialized in the air beside him, just over his left shoulder. It was a two-dimensional, cartoonish "help" balloon like those that appeared on a flatscreen computer monitor whenever the user had just keyed in an irreversible and potentially dangerous command. The tail of the warning balloon ended in the body's mouth. The warning balloon—a fail-safe routine—posed a simple question: SHUTDOWN WILL RESULT IN THE LOSS OF MAIN STORAGE MEMORY. DO YOU WISH TO CONTINUE SHUTDOWN?
Two "buttons" were set into the balloon just below the question. The YES button was highlighted in lurid red.
Bloodyguts reached out to touch the button marked NO, only to have the balloon retreat slightly. Cursing, he following it, slapping once again at the spot where it had just been. . .
He stumbled and fell off the chin. Just in time, he twisted like a cat and landed on his feet. They broke through the surface of the skin, and a foul-smelling, white waxy substance oozed up around his ankles. Knee-deep in the putrid material, Bloodyguts looked up at the warning balloon overhead. With a soft ping! the YES button depressed itself. The balloon disappeared.
As his feet sank deeper into the flesh of the corpse, Bloodyguts steadied himself by placing a hand on the neck. He could feel the body's pulse slowing, slowing . . .
"Frag you!" he shouted. "Abort shutdown! Abort shutdown now!"
He ran, his feet breaking the skin at every step, down the chest of the corpse. Reaching the spot over the heart, he began jumping up and down, landing on it with both feet. He'd keep this fragger beating any way he could.
"Don't die!" he screamed. "Don't you fraggin' die!"
As his feet churned the flesh to stinking mush, two more moths fluttered out of the morass. Angrily, he batted them away with one hand. Then he froze as he realized what they must be. He stood, utterly still, in the mess he'd made of the chest. And laughed.
"Bugs!" he shouted. His laugh became frantic, almost hysterical. "Bugs!"
Back when he was a chiphead, Bloodyguts had dossed down for a time with Hannah, a fellow addict who'd been a history teacher before she lost her job, pawned everything she owned to buy more and more BTL, and at last wound up on the streets. She'd been one smart lady in her day, and even after her wetware got glitched by BTL, she was still full of weird trivia. One night, she told him about the first-ever computer glitch.
On a hot summer day in 1945, an experimental computer known as the Mark I had come to a sudden, shuddering halt. The computer had been a primitive monster, measuring an unbelievable two and a half meters wide by seventeen meters long, and was made of steel and glass and filled with moving parts. When the programmers and technicians at the International Business Machines corporation opened it up to find the problem, they discovered a moth jammed inside the machine.
From that day on, whenever something went wrong, the programmers joked that the machine had developed yet another "bug."
The slang word, Hannah explained, had spread into common usage. From then on, anyone with mess
ed up wetware was labeled "buggy."
Hannah herself had been as buggy as they came. She'd been straight—not even slotting—on the day she'd stepped off the roof of the abandoned building where she and Bloodyguts had been dossed down. Whether it was suicide or whether Hannah was experiencing a BTL flashback and thought she could fly, Bloodyguts never knew.
He looked down at the body on which he stood. In the real world, corpses were infested with maggots. And maggots turned into flies, which fit with this system's central metaphor. But the insects that were rising out of the body that represented the AI's operating system were moths, not flies. Just like the bug the programmers had found in 1945.
The iconography had to have been intentional—someone's twisted idea of a joke. Just as BTL had done to Hannah, the moths had driven the AI buggy.
They had to be the virus.
And that virus had to be concentrated in the brain.
Active memory deactivated. Commencing shutdown of main storage memory. Shutdown will be complete in ten seconds . . . nine . . .
Bloodyguts snagged one of the moths out of the air. Holding the fluttering insect in one cupped hand, he activated his disinfect utility. A bottle filled with red liquid—iodine—appeared in his other hand. Yanking the cork off with his teeth, he jammed the moth inside the bottle, then rapidly recorked it, sealing the virus sample inside. He glanced at it just long enough to confirm his suspicions. On the back of the moth, embossed on its wings in a delicate pattern, was the emblem of the former United States: the sugar coating that covered this bitter viral pill, making it palatable to the Al. Slowly, the emblem on the moth's wings began to fade as the "iodine" dissolved it. The moth's wings filled with holes, began to tatter as this piece of virus coding lost its integrity.
Eight. . . seven . . .
He ran back to the neck and began to climb. His feet dug into soft flesh, finding little purchase as it churned into slime. He could only use one hand; the other was clenched tight around the utility. Cursing, he struggled, at last finding a foothold on the Adam's apple and boosting himself up onto the corpse's chin.
Six. . . five . . .
The "ground" trembled underfoot. The head was shrinking! The skull seemed to be crumpling in on itself, the flesh following it with a loud sucking noise. Bloody guts staggered, making his way along the chin.
Four. . . three . . .
The lips were turning blue as the body became starved of oxygen. Bloodyguts wedged himself into the mouth, bracing his back on one set of teeth, his feet on the other. He pushed, opening the mouth wide . . .
Two . . .
And hurled the disinfect utility inside.
One. . .
And then he prayed to whatever spirits might be persuaded to have mercy on a former chippie like him.
09:56:37 PST
INTRUDER ALERT
CODE RED RESPONSE
EXECUTE OPERATION: ANALYZE ICON
ICON ATTEMPTING TO UPLOAD FILES
SCAN FOR VIRUSES
NO VIRUSES DETECTED
UPLOAD DATA
Timea stared at the fixer, her eyes wide with disbelief.
"What do you mean, the doc's not in? When will he be back?"
The fixer—an elf with pasty white skin and the point of one ear missing—shrugged his narrow shoulders. "Dunno."
He slouched in the doorway of the squat, staring out over Timea's head. His eyes widened and narrowed as he focused first on the ork gangers who were stripping parts from an abandoned Ford Americar across the street, and then at the simsense "reality" of the chip he was slotting.
"Gimme back my deck," Timea said. "I'll go to some other street doc."
"Can't," the elf said. "Sold it."
"Then gimme the nuyen you got for it."
"Can't."
"What the frag you mean, 'can't'?" Timea asked angrily. She shifted from one foot to the other, wishing there was a clean bathroom nearby. Being pregnant meant always having to pee—and although the smell coming from the nearby alley suggested that it was used as an outdoor toilet, the odds were that she wouldn't make it out of its dark canyon alive.
"Spent it."
Timea's eyes narrowed. Frag. She should have known better than to trust a chiphead. He'd probably blown her nuyen on whatever it was he was slotting.
"I'll give you cred," the elf said. "Come back in a month or two, when the doc's back."
Timea's heart sank. "I can't," she said. "I'm already past my first trimester. If I wait any longer. . ." She looked up at the elf. "Can't you fix me up with some other doc?"
"Not without collateral."
"Frag you!" Timea shouted. "I gave you the only valuable thing I own. You stupid, null-brained—"
"Frag you too," the elf said. "Now get outta my face, or I may think twice about extending your cred with the doc."
Timea was too street smart to allow the ache inside her to turn into tears. "Fine," she gritted. She turned on her heel and strode away, kicking angrily at the fast-food wrappers and decaying plastic bottles that littered the street.
Drek, she thought, kicking at a bottle and sending it skidding into traffic. Drek, drek, drek. She'd hosed the only chance she had of getting outta this mess. She didn't want to bring a kid into this fragged up world. Her two younger sisters would be no help at all, and her mother was too old and too sick to take care of a kid.
Timea wouldn't be able to work, and no work meant no food on the table. And now that her deck was gone, she couldn't run the Matrix any more. She was trapped here, between a rock and a heartache . . .
What was the point of trying so hard to better herself, of scrimping and saving to buy a computer terminal and teaching herself decking? What was the point of anything? Her boyfriend had done a fast fade when he found out she was pregnant, she was losing her younger sisters to gangers and drugs, and now her deck was gone, sacrificed for nothing.
There was no point in trying. Frag. There was no point in anything.
She lay on her back in the bathtub. Her sleeve was rolled up; her left arm throbbed from the deep cuts she'd made to the inside of her wrist. The left side of her shirt and pants were soaked in blood. But the pain was fading
. . .
The pain stopped as she left her body. She floated gently above it, staring serenely down at her blood as it flowed down the grimy surface of the tub and into the drain. That's where her hopes had gone, too. Down the fraggin' drain.
But that didn't matter now. A tunnel of white light was beckoning her. Figures called to her from the distance. Her father. Her brother. She turned to join them . . .
The bathroom door burst open. Jabber—her sister's boyfriend—had kicked it in. He stood aside while Timea's mother rushed into the bathroom. The old woman froze in horror as she saw Timea's body, then she turned and shouted something at Jabber. The ork stripped off his T-shirt and handed it to her. Timea's mother bent beside the tub, wadded up the cheap cotton, and pressed it hard against Timea's wrist, stopping the flow of blood.
Behind her, Timea's sister Magdalin mirrored her mother's look of horror. She held Lennon—Timea's newborn son—in her arms. The baby's face was red; his little fists flailed as he screamed. Timea heard his cries as a faint echo. It tugged at her maternal instincts—but not quite hard enough to make her want to give up the sense of profound peace that the tunnel of white light offered. It seduced her, promising rest, freedom, release from responsibility . . .
"Timea!"
Her mother's shout was a soft whisper in her ear.
"Don't you die, girl!" the shout-whisper urged. "Lennon needs you. We all—"
Timea filled in the blank in her mind. They all needed her. Well, she was tired of being needed.
"—love you," her mother said. "We know what a burden you've been asked to bear. But that will change. Jabber's found work and that'll bring in some extra nuyen, and that treatment the street doc gave me has got me up on my feet again. I'll be able to help out with the baby, and so will Magdalin. And Jabber
thinks he knows of a way to get your deck back. . ."
Despite her tranquility, Timea was mildly surprised. Her mother knew about the deck? Did that mean she knew that Timea had been looking for an abortion, too? That Lennon had very nearly not been born?
Her mother choked back a sob. "Oh spirits, Timmie. Why'd you have to go and do this? Just when things were looking up."
Lennon was still crying. Magdalin held him, a question in her eyes. Timea's mother glanced down at the body of her daughter, and nodded. "Let him say goodbye to his mama."
Magdalin lowered Lennon into the crook of Timea's right arm. The baby turned his head, his tiny red lips pursing in anticipation of milk. Then his hands clenched, and he began to wail again.
Timea paused before entering the tunnel of light to stare thoughtfully down at her son. Her sisters could go frag up their lives however they pleased, and her mother was a tough old woman who could take care of herself, now that she'd gotten the treatments she needed from the street doc. But Lennon needed her. He was her responsibility. She couldn't just abandon him. . .
Sensation suddenly returned to Timea as her breasts responded to the baby's cry. Milk soaked the front of her shirt. Then she could feel other sensations—the press of her mother's hands, holding the wadded T-shirt against her arm, holding Timea's life-blood in. The hard, cold enamel of the tub beneath her shoulders. The steady, dull ache in her wrist. The squirming of her infant son against her arm.
The pain—and the joy—of life.
She didn't want to die, after all. She'd make it through—and she'd see that Lennon made it through, too.
Somehow.
Timea's hands were suddenly empty. The corridor with a bright light at one end and forbidding darkness at the other had disappeared. Gone too were Built-It Beaver and the aborted fetus.
She sat on a chair made of bright red plastic that was too small for her. Beside her, on a similar chair, sat a child who looked about six years old with features that were a mix of heritages—Afro, Euro, and Asian. She was wearing a straight jacket whose long sleeves held her arms firmly behind her back. Tears trickled down her face as she used a stylus that was clenched between her teeth to touch the letters of a keyboard whose keys floated in space in front of her.