Trouble and her Friends

by Melissa Scott

  Cerise looked at him in disbelief, wanting to say something but not knowing where to begin. Evans-Tindale was going to change everything, was going to destroy the nets as they were, and offered nothing to replace them— A suited woman edged up to the man, handed him one of the two beers she carried, holding them well away from her body.

  “Technies,” she said. “If they can’t have their toys—”

  The music started again, with a wail of synthetic brass, drowning out her words. Cerise shook herself—there was nothing you could say to some people, nothing that would make any difference—and started up the stairs.

  The upstairs room—it had never had another name, wasn’t even officially reserved for a netwalker clientele, though the occasional suit or temp who wandered in from downstairs usually left quickly enough—was much quieter, and she let the heavy door thump shut again behind her with a sigh of relief. There was no music here, just the occasional murmur of voices and the overlapping noise of five or six television monitors, each tuned to a different channel. Most of the little tables scattered across the dimly lit room were occupied by netwalkers who sat alone or in twos and threes, muttering together or with their eyes fixed on the monitors mounted from the ceiling. She recognized some of the faces—Johnny Winchester, for one, scrawny and greying, who had been on the nets since the invention of the dollie-slot, and was syscop, the on-line legal authority, for one of the official public spaces. He’d been to D.C. four times to testify, supporting the Amsterdam Conventions, had argued at the last that Evans-Tindale was better than nothing. I hope you’re satisfied, Cerise thought, and headed for the bar, giving his table a wide berth.

  The bar itself was mechanical, which meant a limited selection of drinks, but Marco didn’t have to pay a fifth bartender. Cerise fed a couple of slips of citiscrip into the machine, and it whirred to itself for a moment before filling a plastic cup with wine. In the dim light it looked more like water, and she sniffed it to be sure before she turned away, There were a few other faces she knew, not many: netwalkers didn’t as a rule congregate in the real world. It took something like this to bring them together, and even then most of them weren’t talking to each other, just sitting and listening to the monitors. She recognized a pair of women from the Arts Round Table, sitting together with a man she didn’t know. All three looked grim, and they had their heads close together; as she made her way past the table, she saw that they had a portable machine set up, and were staring avidly at its screen. Neither of the women were on-line, and the man didn’t even seem to have a dollie-slot; what good they thought they could do, she didn’t know. There was another familiar shape at a table at the back of the room, a rangy man, bearded and scowling, a flashing pin in the shape of his red-hand icon fastened to the lapel of his neat suit-jacket, and Cerise looked hastily away. Bran-Boru, or whatever his real name was, had a reputation for being chancy, and she had no desire to attract his attention.

  Then at last she saw van Liesvelt, skinny and blond and rumpled, even sitting down taller than the others at the corner table. He lifted his hand in greeting, beckoning her over; Cerise waved back, not trying to hide her relief, and came to join them. The others were there, too: Carlie Held still in working whites under his grubby jacket, Arabesque slowly crumpling the fingers of a VR glove—the old-fashioned virtual-reality interface, not good for anything but games and blunt-instrument science anymore—into an ungainly fist, Max Helling with his partner Jannick Aledort at his back, Aledort listening, not quite part of the group, while Helling talked. Max was always talking, Cerise thought, and took the last chair, next to Dewildah Mason, who looked up at her with a wry smile and a nod of greeting.

  “So where’s your other half?”

  “Trouble’s gone,” Cerise said, and to her horror heard her voice crack. She took a sip of the wine to cover it, swallowed wrong, and choked. Mason reached over to pound her on the back, brown eyes wide with concern.

  “That’s what you said,” van Liesvelt said.

  Giving me time to pull myself together, Cerise thought, and nodded her thanks, setting the wine down again.

  “Yeah.” Her voice was still strained, and her throat hurt, but at least she didn’t sound as though she were going to cry.

  “Evans-Tindale?” Helling asked. He was a thin, feral-looking man, a little older than the rest of them. He’d been on the net for years, had more business connections in the shadows, knew more about buying or selling black-market programs and data than any of the others. Cerise sometimes thought he only stayed friends with them because they were all queer, and the old-style netwalkers still didn’t approve of him, wouldn’t approve of him no matter how good he was because of it. She suspected he’d taken the risk of the brainworm for the same reason: the old-style netwalkers wouldn’t respect his work once he’d gotten it, but then, they hadn’t ever respected him. The brainworm did give you an advantage on the nets, let you use the full range of your senses, not just sight and sound, to interpret the virtual world. The old-style netwalkers claimed to hold it in contempt, said that it was a crutch, something for second-raters, but Cerise suspected, had always suspected, that they were just afraid. The worm entailed risks: implantation and direct-to-brain wiring was always tricky, could leave you a mental cripple if the operation went wrong, and the oldsters had never quite been able to face that possibility. The dollie-slots and the associated implants didn’t touch the brain, ran along existing nerves—less of a risk, and more of a challenge to use, or so the oldsters said.

  “Trouble wouldn’t just run away,” Arabesque said. She set the VR glove down on the dented tabletop, curled her own hand over it, matching finger to finger. Her skin was only a little lighter than the black plastic, and both were like shadows in the indirect light.

  “She said she would,” Held said. He shook his head, laid his huge hands flat on the tabletop. It was hard, seeing them, to believe that he was as good a cybermedic as he actually was; harder still to believe that he was qualified to install and modify brainworms. Or at least he was qualified in the EC, where he’d trained: the worm was still illegal here, and there wasn’t any chance of legalizing it now that Evans-Tindale had passed. “She said from the beginning she wasn’t going to stick around if Congress overrode the veto.” He shook his head, and pushed himself back from the table. “Anybody else want another drink?”

  Van Liesvelt shook his head, and Mason said, “Yeah, thanks, Carlie.” She held out a glittering strip of foil, and Held took it, turned away toward the bar.

  “That wasn’t all she was bitching about,” Arabesque said, and gave Cerise a hard look. “Last time I talked to her, she said you two’d had a disagreement over a job.”

  Cerise made a face. This was the part she hadn’t wanted to think about, the part she hadn’t wanted to remember: she’d been warned, and she’d miscalculated badly. “There’s a new corporate space, with new IC(E). I didn’t recognize the system, but I thought we could crack it. Trouble doesn’t—didn’t agree. But it’s interesting IC(E).” She could almost see it, taste it in memory, a massive cylinder of glass, light spiraling slowly up its side, to drift down again in a faint haze, hiding the codes that make up the real security. She had never seen IC(E) that tight before, could hardly wait to try to crack it….

  “What was the company?” That was Aledort, leaning forward a little further over the back of his own chair and Helling’s shoulder.

  “I don’t know yet,” Cerise answered. “I told you, it’s a new space to me.”

  “Better hold off a while,” Helling said. “You don’t know what’s going to happen under Evans-Tindale.”

  Van Liesvelt nodded agreement, for once unsmiling. His mustache looked more ragged than ever, as though he’d been chewing on it.

  “I can’t believe Trouble just left,” Mason said.

  “Neither can I,” Arabesque said, and Cerise glared at her.

  “I told you what happened. We’d been talking about the job—”

  “You c
an’t call it a job,” Helling objected. “If you don’t know who made the IC(E) or what’s behind it, it’s not a job.”

  Cerise ignored him. “And she said she wasn’t going to do it, it was crazy with the second vote coming up. She said if Evans-Tindale passed, if they overrode the veto, she wasn’t going to stay on the nets. And when I came home this afternoon, she was gone, and all her equipment with her.”

  “Jesus,” van Liesvelt said.

  “I called about three,” Held said, reappearing with two glasses. He handed one to Mason, along with a couple of plastic slugs, and reseated himself next to van Liesvelt. “So I guess she was gone then. I’d just got out of surgery, heard from a guy in the waiting room.” He shook his head. “Man, I couldn’t believe it. They won’t sign the Conventions, and then they turn around and pass this shit.”

  “I was on my way back from campus,” Mason said unexpectedly. She had been a student at a real college, still held an extension card from the university. “I was waiting for the commuter train, there must’ve been twenty of us, and this guy—I hardly know him, his name’s Bill something, or maybe Paul. Anyway, he comes up to me and says, ‘You’re on the nets, right? Did you hear they overrode the veto?’ And I looked at him—I still can’t believe I did this—and I said, ‘You got to be kidding. That can’t be right, you must’ve got it wrong.’ And he says, ‘No, they’ve got the monitors on in the pizza place’—there’s a pizza place right next to the train station—‘and they broke into the soaps to make the announcement.’ So I went over there, and sure enough, the monitor’s on, and the screen’s showing the vote count. And I just stood there. I thought for a minute he’d gotten the story backward, that we’d won, because the numbers were so high for Evans-Tindale, but he hadn’t. They’d overridden it, no question. No appeal, no nothing. I damn near didn’t bother getting on the train.”

  “I was on the net,” Helling said. “I—” He stopped, glancing over his shoulder at Aledort, who was scowling, and began again. “I’d just drifted back into the BBS, riding the stream, and I thought—I don’t know what I thought. It felt like an earthquake, everybody trying to log on or off or to do something, all at once. I mean, the ground shook.” He waved his hands in the air, miming the motion. “Literally. I couldn’t keep my balance for a minute. And then everybody starting talking, shouting, and I ran for the nearest node and got the hell off the system.” He shook his head. “It’s still crazy out there. I got back on before I came over here. I thought maybe somebody would be talking sense out there, but it’s insane. Half the old spaces are shut down, the BBS is clogged solid with traffic, there’s new IC(E) in half the corporate spots I looked at. It’s just crazy.”

  “Miss Kitty shut down the saloon,” Cerise said. “And left some very nasty IC(E) behind her.” She didn’t need to add any more to it: they all knew Miss Kitty, did business with her, and knew Cerise as well.

  “Well, she was in a really bad position,” Helling said. “Under the new laws, my God, everything she traded in was felony material.”

  “Wonderful,” van Liesvelt said. “I have to admit, Trouble’s got a point. It’s not exactly going to be safe, staying in the shadows.”

  “Only if you’re not careful,” Cerise said.

  Arabesque nodded. “Yeah. It changes how we do business, ups the risks and the stakes. My God, you know what we can charge now?”

  “Yeah, and end up like Terrel,” Mason muttered. “Serving five-to-ten for a so-called armed robbery—you just better be very careful what you carry in your toolkit now.”

  There was a little silence, and then van Liesvelt said, “I was over on the Euronets when the news came through. I’d just told a couple of old friends there was no way the override would happen. It took me twenty minutes, realtime, to work my way back to home node. I thought I’d have to hit the safety before I found a way through the traffic.”

  Cerise whistled under her breath. Twenty minutes in realtime, not the subjective time of the nets, was ridiculously long. Usually one could make one’s way from one side of the nets to the other—traveling twice around the world in the process—in that time.

  “What in the world,” Mason said, “are we going to do now?”

  “Do?” Arabesque fixed her with an angry stare. “Pretty much what we’ve always done, that’s what we’re going to do. Cracking was always illegal, don’t kid yourself, ’Wildah. We’ll just have to be more careful—and that’s all.”

  “I don’t know,” Held said. “I think it’s different.” He shook his head. “Very different.”

  Van Liesvelt nodded in morose agreement, and wiped beer out of his mustache. “I was wondering about Europe, heading there, I mean.”

  “The real business—most of the real targets, real data, data worth money—is still in U.S. jurisdiction,” Helling said. “Or can claim it is. And they’ve explicitly overruled appealing to Amsterdam Conventions. It’s in the law.”

  “Fuck,” van Liesvelt muttered, and took another swallow of his beer.

  Cerise said, “I’m with Arabesque. We got to stick with it. What else can we do?”

  “Go straight?” Helling murmured, with a curl of his lip.

  Held laughed without humor, and Arabesque shook her head. Van Liesvelt said, “Not likely.”

  Cerise allowed herself a sour smile, acknowledging the pun—the one thing they all had in common, besides the brainworm, was being gay—but it faded quickly. Going straight, moving out of the shadows into the bright lights of the legal world, the legal nets, would be difficult: they, none of them, had the corporate connections to become the sort of consultant that would let them go on paying their bills, and none of the other jobs that were open to freelancers were particularly challenging, or particularly well-paid. And corporate employment…. Unconsciously her mouth twisted again as she tried to imagine herself, any of them, fitting into the polite, restrained world of the corporations. If any of them had been suited to the corporate life, he or she would already be part of it. The perks of a corporate job were too good, despite the risk of layoffs, to be passed up lightly.

  The noise from the monitors changed, flared briefly, and then settled to a single voice. Cerise turned in surprise to see that the three monitors in her line of sight were now tuned to the same channel—so were they all, from the way Jerry Singlar’s voice coalesced out of the hubbub. Singlar was one of her least favorite anchors, an ex-cracker gone to the bright lights with a vengeance, a man who pretended to know and love the nets even as he proved he didn’t understand anything about them. She made a face, but did not look away. The others were looking at the monitors, too, not just at their table but all across the room, and the talk faded quickly, leaving only Singlar’s voice crackling out of the half-dozen speakers.

  “—commentary. The override of the presidential veto of Evans-Tindale has brought consternation to the nets, a result not unexpected among those of us who have walked the nets for the past decade. Despite attempts at self-policing, the nets have long been a lawless place, a haven for a criminal minority as well as for the law-abiding majority. This situation has become impossible to tolerate, as the depredations of the so-called crackers, descendants of the criminal hackers of the twentieth century, have become the center of a criminal economy that rivals the Mafia in scope and enterprise.”

  Arabesque made a rude noise, half laughter, half spitting, and Mason waved her to silence. Helling muttered something under his breath that sounded like, “I wish,” and Aledort laid a hand on his shoulder.

  “This economy, which thrived only by the absence of law, has spawned a number of subcultures, all dangerous in their own right. But the most dangerous of these, the one that has caused the most talk and the one that the Evans-Tindale will do most to control, is that of the brainworm. These untested and potentially deadly implants—far more dangerous than the common dollie-slots, because the brainworm requires placing hardware in the brain itself—have contributed to the spread of the cracker culture by giving the
se hard-line criminals access to a new technology that is unbeatable by people equipped with only ordinary, and legal, implants.”

  “Oh, bullshit,” Cerise said.

  Held said, in the voice of a man making an old, and losing, argument, “The brainworm is legal in Europe, and there’s no more cracking from the Euronets. And people don’t die from installation there, either.”

  “It figures,” Arabesque said, with suppressed fury, “it just figures they’d try to blame the worm.”

  “It’s easier than writing intelligent laws,” Helling said.

  “They have laws that make sense,” van Liesvelt said. “All they had to do was sign the Amsterdam Conventions….”

  “Oh, shut up.” That was Johnny Winchester, weaving to his feet at the center of the room. He stumbled slightly, nearly overturning his table and tipping his beer so that it slopped over the edge of the glass to form a slowly spreading puddle on the tabletop. “Jerry’s right, if you people hadn’t brought in the worm, gone cracking with it, none of this would’ve happened.”

  “Bullshit,” Cerise said again.

  Arabesque said, “Dream on. They’ve been looking for an excuse to crack down for a hundred years.”

  “Yeah, and you people gave it to them.” Winchester stared accusingly at them. Behind him, the spilled beer began to drip off the edge of his table.

  “Fucking wireheads,” someone else said, from the darkness behind him.

  “Hey, people,” Held said, voice dropping into his best street-doc register. “This hurts all of us.”

  “And there are plenty of people cracking without the worm,” van Liesvelt said, not quite quietly enough.

  There was an ambiguous murmur from the rest of the room, not agreement, not rejection, an undirected anger that made the back of Cerise’s neck prickle with sudden fear. She had heard that note before, on the streets when she was fifteen, running with the gangs, the sound of a group looking for a scapegoat; she had never thought to hear it here, among the people of the net, and never directed at herself. She looked around the room as though for the first time, seeing the majority of pale faces, male faces, sitting for the most part alone or in twos and threes: nothing like her own group, none of the easy realworld friendship. She had never before seen so many of the others together off-line.