Decker looked nervous and pointed at my vid-screen. “And there’s really a city in there.”
“Not in there,” I corrected him. “And not even—more logically—in the bio-cell vault, which is in there.” I stroked the translucent purple interface deck that shielded the banks of neural gel-cells and my nano-tech maintenance crew.
“Cyspace is out there; everywhere in non-space.” I waved my hands in the general direction of nowhere in particular, trying to find words for a concept that was incomprehensible—until you’d seen it.
“It’s an artificial alternate universe. And yes there are cities there. Our beat is Cy-city or, more often, Downside, a sprawling shantytown of cabo halls, blues bars, data saloons, and holo-brothels. It’s in a hundred back alleys off the old Information Superhighway.”
Decker looked like he was in pain.
“It’s like imagining information. Parts of cyberspace are still just stacks of data or ribbons of info; at least that’s what it looks like when you’re trawling. When you access something specific, however, you can actually see it. Although what it looks like depends on how it was stored in the first place. Much of the old stuff is just dry, endless reams of figures, words, or images—some flat, some 3-D, some holo-fabrications. Like what you’d see on your vid-screen or projected via a holo-imager.
“More recent or imaginative info is like a full-on interactive vid. You can view it unplugged, but when you jack into cyspace, through a Navigation Controller like CC-Fly or ParaWeb, then you see and feel that information as a version of reality.
“For example, the stuff you charted on your voyage would appear, all around you, exactly as you saw it, and logged it, in person out there.” I waved in the direction of outer space, realising I was giving Decker directions to the same “nowhere in particular” that I’d called cyberspace.
“You don’t see it with your eyes, though, right?” Decker said.
“Well, I don’t,” I said, “coz my skull implant is connected directly to my brain’s visual cortex. You, however, will be seeing things the old-fashioned way, coz you have to receive the data via the visor. Assume you’ve at least used one of these before.”
He rammed the thing on his head. “For games.”
“Games?”
“We each have our own skills,” Decker stated. “While you’ve been scragging this inorganic ersatz universe, I’ve been flipping through the real thing cataloguing star systems and making contact with new species.”
“Okay, game boy, this works the same. Images and sound get delivered via the visor and, just as you once believed you were in the crew lounge on Asimov Base, or fighting the Granks in a space battle, now you will know you’re in Cy-city.
“The cities in cyspace are way more than virtual reality; they are, in a sense, virtually real. It’s the ultimate head-trip coz you’re not confined by a program that generates a game. You can go anywhere that information is stored, and everywhere you go takes you somewhere else, even if it’s just back to the central matrix, which is a misnomer coz it’s not at the centre, and there’s actually more than one of them. Cyberspace is like real space; it has no centre, no edges, and no top or bottom—and it’s an expanding universe.”
“But it’s not real.” Decker was still unsure.
I laughed. “No, it’s not real. But real is a relative term, just like time and space. You of all people should understand that.”
Decker grunted. “So how can you be a cybercop?”
“Why you’d want to be one is a better question,” I said. “When people started spending half their lives in cyspace, for recreation, knowledge exchange, propaganda, or profit, some bright spark came up with the idea of creating virtual spaces where trawlers could meet—anonymously, by using avatars.”
Decker shrugged. “You mean you could lie.”
“Yes, you could lie. You could be anybody or thing you wanted—including yourself. You could reveal the you that had zilch to do with an ugly face or a lack of arms, or any real-world signifiers that supposedly describe you but really just label you as a mottle-skinned, bi-gendered accountant.
“Then a pair of tech-heads co-named Breckinridge Fink took the virtual notion, juiced it with imagination, and made it tangible. They established ParaWeb and turned parts of cyberspace into permanent holographic constructs of the landscape of the cyber matrix.
“Breckinridge Fink built Downside, Cy-city, and BerinSpace but it was only a dash before competing NavCons and matrix architects went on-line. Suddenly there were trade regions, cities, and resorts like CaraBazaar and ParisBo. They’re still amazing amalgams of ultra-tech and unfettered creativity, where blissful paradise meets darkest nightmare in the same scape, and where the avenues and edifices are blended fact and fiction. It’s a wondrous hybrid of myth and common reality.”
“I’m waiting for the but,” Decker said as I leant over to adjust the audio flaps on his helmet.
“But it is beset, naturally, by that parasitic by-product of all human endeavours.”
“What’s that?”
“Crime,” I snarled. “And more varieties of it than you’d ever think possible. I might be a cybercop, but when I enter cyspace I’m going where there is no law. My badge, your new badge, no badge, same thing. The rules, such as they are, are loosely guided by a century-old free-market code of honour that is just that: an honourable, civilised kind of thinking. And ‘thinking’ is the only truly operative word, concept and act in the whole of cyspace. It’s a region that works cleanly and honestly—in its intentions.
“Bad elements, however, turn up wherever there’s a buck to be made or a drek to push around, so we are tolerated coz we proved ourselves to be useful. But until the NavCons ask for an official SIP Corps presence, we’re merely bounty hunters or secret agents, using cyspace just like everyone else does, to get or pass info. Don’t be fooled, though; it’s as dangerous for cops in cyspace as it is on any streetside posting.”
I jacked Decker’s tracer lead into my TI deck to check the calibration. I hadn’t used something as hokey as a VR helmet in decades.
“When you enter any cyspace city or resort,” I continued, “you sling on a Cloak, or adopt an avatar, of anything you like. While there you can eat, drink, talk, or listen to a rantan band; you can have mind-blowing sex in a holo-brothel, without risk of disease; you can even pick a fight and have the crap beaten out of you if that’s your quirk.
“If you’ve got an implant, like mine, you’ll actually feel and taste it all. Your avatar will bleed and bruise, but the experience leaves no mark on your real body at home in its crash chair. But, coz your brain thinks it’s real, your endorphins get triggered, your adrenaline pumps, and up goes your blood pressure. If your heart can’t take it, your brain will shut it down. If your mind can’t take it, then there’s a tank-load of cybertherapists listed in the Yellow Files.”
Decker shifted uncomfortably in his seat.
“You should be nervous, Decker. Life is strange enough out here, but our beat trawls the seriously weird. Have I put you off yet? Or are you going to lower your visor and take a look for yourself? Make up your mind, Ensign Decker, coz I’m going now.”
The noise that followed me into the matrix told me Decker was right behind me. He sounded like he’d been thrown out of Jump Ship that was still warping through space.
“Fraaakn-ell!”
My left hand keyed in the cords for Downside, and as the public entry point for the town materialised around us, I accessed my Cloak and chose an appropriate avatar for my new partner.
“Turboshit, what a charge!” Decker exclaimed.
The permanently rain-slicked main street reflected the neon-lit, forever night-time world of Downside. Tonight, that being a relative term, the footpaths of Bernezlee Alley were crowded with trawlers of every description, and there was music, conversations, arguments, and laughter spilling from every establishment down the strip.
“Close your mouth, Decker, you look like an idiot, p
articularly considering how you’re dressed.”
He looked down, then swivelled to catch his reflection in a window. He had to search for himself coz the person who looked back at him was not only barely dressed, but didn’t look a bit like him.
“What is this?” he demanded.
“Apollo,” I replied. “Thought you’d look good in a toga.”
“Yeah?” he snarled. “Well, I like your legs, Agent Capra, but who are you supposed to be?”
“Incognito! As are you, Ensign Apollo,” I responded tartly.
Whatever Cloak I adopt, and this time I’d chosen a fem-punk variation, I always grant myself killer legs, so I decided against punching Decker in the mouth for mentioning them again. I headed off down Bernezlee towards the Bender. A sleazy nightclub was always the place to start.
“There’s one thing I still don’t understand.” Decker trailed after me.
“Just one?” I reacted involuntarily to the vibration of my plasma-phone. I raised my real arm long enough to hear my mother snapping: “Jane, this really is urgent,” then waved the call off.
“If you can get beat up here and there’s no mark on your real body, how was Strong killed here?”
“There’s a wicked illegal little device called a Rat Gun that gives a badarse electric shock or, if it hits just the right spot, a synaptic power surge. If a drek with one of those takes a dislike, you’re fried toast in seconds. The last thing you’d ever see, while lying in a Downside gutter, is these neon lights. But your body, and a skull full of soup or dust, will be found in your crash chair at home still jacked into your terminal. Just like Jimmy.”
“Do these murders ever get solved?” Decker asked.
I thumbed myself. “Best cleanup rate in the Corps. Hope you not gonna ruin my record, Ensign.”
“Hope you’re not gonna spend our entire partnership being patronising,” Decker remarked amiably.
Five minutes later we were sconced in a Bender booth, waiting for a drink and listening to a very bad rantan artiste.
“What is he trying to do?” Decker asked.
“Can’t do it, that’s his problem.”
“Is it supposed to be music?”
“You sound like my mother. Yes, this is supposed to be music. Not this bloke, though; he should be refried.”
A five-note chime announced the return of our bartend Beano, a snake-skinned rogue who growled at Decker, “Sit back, mavrak.”
“Righto,” Decker snarled back.
I glared at Decker, then smiled at Beano. “He’s a virgin,” I apologised.
Beano grunted: “K’n tourists,” and slid back to the bar.
“What’s with him or whatever that was?”
“He’s a bartend. It’s his prerogative to be mean as batshit—if he wants.”
Decker tasted his burly and curled his lip. “Seems pointless if you can’t taste it.”
“Pointless to you, maybe.” I shrugged. “Tastes vivid to me, like riko juice and deepsouth bourbon.”
I scanned the patrons for the tag-signs of my snitches. The crowd this night was a spicy mix of mean-faced dealers, xotic-limbed hosties looking to score, club ragers, and chronic barflies. The latter were lazy dreks who’d missed the point of trawling and only ever came to drink and ogle.
“Incognito?”
“What?” I asked.
“Sorry. I didn’t know what to call you,” Decker said.
“Incognito’s good,” I smiled. “Did you want to call me something for a reason?”
“Yeah. I was wondering how you lost your legs. Bascome said it was in the Border War, but…” Decker recognised my expression for what it was. He took a breath and pressed on regardless. “It’s just that I don’t know anything about that conflict, not having been here and all. It must have been hell to deal with, I mean…”
“The war or the legs?” I squinted at him. I had no intention of letting him off the hook for asking such a personal question so soon in our relationship. It didn’t matter that I felt remarkably comfortable with this young man. I rarely took to anyone quickly, but Decker possessed a strangely intimate quality. Either that or I was drunk.
“Both, I guess,” he muttered. “I mean, how do you deal with a physical loss like that? And, um, what I did hear about the northern trenches was…scarifying.”
Poor bastard still had a lot to learn about social etiquette, so I gave him a point for refusing to pretend he was sorry about broaching an inappropriate subject.
“The legs thing is not a subject for today, Decker. Okay? S’pose it is a good bar story—how I lost them in a swivel grenade blast—but there’s nothing you need to know about that. And what you might want to know is a matter of public record. Go look it up. Also, I have no intention of helping you comprehend a near decade of bloody warfare by letting you inside my head.”
Decker’s Apollo-visage smiled a genuine apology; so I smiled back.
“Besides, my ringside account wouldn’t give you an objective view. You’d just get my anger, my gunsight, and my nightmares. And believe me, you don’t want to know about my nightmares.”
Or my escape. That incredible dance on the edge of utter abandon. I took a swig of burly. I hadn’t told a soul about that imagined passion with my exotic lover. Weird that it was the second time today, and the first time in years, it had come to mind. The memory felt like a coiled snake of pure elation had shifted in my chest.
“History is never objective,” Decker said. “It’s always written by the…”
“The winners, I know. And we were the winners, so from me you’d get double-subjective, coz personally I think we should’ve walled the Raven Brigades into their precious enclaves afterwards. They’re a scourge, liable for more life damage on this planet than any other group since humans first stood upright and worked out how to whack someone else over the head with a rock.”
“Easy to say with hindsight,” Decker nodded. “But back before the Raven Corporation was so blatantly manipulative, they—”
I snorted. “Rackers! You do need a history lesson, Decker. Manipulative is how Raven Corp began; genocidal is how its brigades ended up. That we didn’t know about it for half a century just shows how deceitful they were. But let’s start with the World War, precipitated by the fuel crisis… Oh, but you were here in 2047, weren’t you? So you’d remember—bad war, good result; coz it led to the International Power Pact.”
“I was seven.” Decker grinned.
“Oh, reality check,” I groaned. “I wasn’t even born then, and now I’m ten years older than you. Okay, so as a kid you were oblivious to the rumour, later proven, that the fuel crisis was facilitated by the Raven Corporation.
“Then, after you left earth, the United Nations’ Eugenics Moratorium was abandoned after a decade of legal stoushes over the ‘right to free trade’ bankrupted the UN. The resulting Gene Trade Disputes, while an obvious outcome of an economic system with no controls, were just legal money-spinning clashes of ego and marketing between the world’s largest gene-makers like the US Genofactory, EuroGene, and Raven Corp.
“But, having opened the market to free trade, these egos then tried to control it, but buggered themselves by not noticing the emergence of an international black market, orchestrated by the secret Raven Corp Brigades.
“The once morally respectable Gene Trade took a backseat to the truly free but illegal street trade. And in a decline reminiscent of the previous century’s drug wars, the gene trade soon degenerated into armed skirmishes, then major border conflicts, and finally the full-blown Gene War of 2060.
“The latter made the Gene Traders, especially Raven Corp, rich beyond belief, but even their wealth couldn’t protect them when one of their own, that lunatic Ferry Barcolin, let loose the Mantaray retrovirus in 2063. And you do know the result of that, Decker, coz of what you are now you’re home.
“But,” I continued, making the most of the soapbox I hadn’t intended to climb on, “out of every parcel of man-made shit—and
I used the word man quite deliberately—comes something good; and in 2067 we got the very best that civilised human beings could come up with: the Alpha-Omega Accord.
“The AOA enabled First Contact, the Interplanetary Exchange, unprecedented techno-progress, world peace until—and again after—the seven-year Border War; which was, of course, initiated by feral remnants of the Raven Brigades.
“These are the bare dry facts, Decker, and all a matter of historical record. You want colour? Go to the holomuseum. Maybe if you stick around long enough I’ll tell you my legs story. Until then it’s personal, and it’s history—much like my actual legs.”
Decker looked like I’d beaten him around the face with an old-fashioned encyclopaedia; and then he smiled. No idea why that delighted me as much as it did. It was very disturbing.
“It was Second Contact,” he said.
“What?”
“Your wonderful Alpha-Omega Accord enabled Second Contact. Our Probe Ship made First Contact. We traded with the Creons, lived with the Benin, hired several Avanirs as pilots.”
“That may well be, Ensign—but if the Jump Ships hadn’t found your vessel out there beyond the Belt, we’d never have known what you did or who you met.”
Decker smiled again. “Except for the strange stories those other spacefarers would’ve told about our passage.”
I shrugged. “True. But right now—apart from warning you that one of my way-weird snitches is about to join us—there’s only two stories we need to know about each other in order to bond. And they are that you are one of only four thousand human males on this planet with viable sperm; and I am Lambda Capra Jane of the Alpha-Omega Clan.”
My snitch was a tech-trader called Zippo Farqar. Tonight his avatar was a scaly humanoid with antlers and piercings. He sat, I ordered him a stinger, he sniffed at Decker.
“Weird one, this.”
“True,” I agreed.
“No. I mean frak’n weird,” Zippo insisted.
“How do you recognise each other if you’re always switching avatars?” Decker asked.
Zippo sniffed again. “Pheromones.”
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