Trouble and her Friends

by Melissa Scott

  “All right,” she said, and stood, reaching for the bulky case that stood at the end of the couch. “Shall we get started?”

  “Fine,” Trouble said, and didn’t know if she was glad that Huu was a woman. It had been easier with Carlie, they’d been old friends, and there was no possibility—well, no likelihood—of sex between them.

  “It’s down the hall,” van Liesvelt said. “Last door on the right. I should have anything you need, Doc.”

  “Thanks,” Huu said, and motioned to Trouble. “After you.”

  The bathroom was bigger than Trouble had expected, with room enough between the shower and the sink and toilet for a solid-looking table. Huu set her bag on its white-painted surface, popped the latches, and began lifting out equipment. “Have a seat,” she said, and plugged in a portable sterilizer, then turned to shrug out of her jacket, hanging it neatly on the back of the door. The clean-field lit with a whine as the sterilizer warmed up, and a bright cone of purple-tinged light formed in the center of the table. Huu set a handful of instruments under it, and drew on rubber gloves, white and dead-looking against her dark skin. “And then let me have a look at what you’ve got in there now. What’s your status?”

  “Negative.” Trouble lowered the toilet lid, sat down warily.

  “Tilt your head.”

  Trouble did as she was told, looking down and to her left to expose the dollie-slot. Rubber fingers ruffled the short hair, probed gently, and then Huu took her hand away, smoothing the other woman’s hair as absently as she’d disarranged it.

  “That’s a nice chip you’ve got in there now. Do you want to keep it, or trade it in? I’ll credit you for the balance of what you owe, for a trade.”

  There was no point in keeping the extra chip: it wouldn’t run in tandem with the Prior system. “Make it seven-fifty, and you’ve got a deal.”

  “Six.”

  “Seven?”

  Huu hesitated, then nodded. “Seven.” She turned back to the table, and Trouble heard the whine of an electric razor. “Tilt your head again.”

  Trouble looked down again, and a moment later the razor’s tip tingled against her neck, hair dropping away from around the dollie-slot and down the back of her neck. Huu brushed away the last stray pieces and picked up an injector the size of her thumb.

  “This is going to sting,” she said, and put the tip against Trouble’s skin.

  Trouble hissed at the touch—it was more than a sting, it was a definite jab, a deep stab of pain right through to the bone—but didn’t pull away. The pain was followed by an immense cold, and then a numbness, spreading out from the dollie-slot. It crept up her scalp, tingling at the top of her head, wrapped around her neck, and took in her whole right ear.

  “Jesus,” she said, and couldn’t feel her jaw moving in the right-hand socket. “That was quick.”

  “That’s how it’s supposed to be,” Huu said. She set an instrument tray—also hazed with purplish light—on the back of the toilet, and turned Trouble’s head into position. “Keep still.”

  Trouble froze, and felt the distant pressure of Huu’s arm, her left forearm, against the back of her scalp. Something tickled near the dollie-slot, and, it seemed a long time later, she felt something damp on her back just below the knob of her spine. Metal clashed once behind her head, then again in the instrument tray. She slanted her eyes sideways without moving her head—she couldn’t have moved her head if she’d wanted to; Huu’s weight held her steady as a rock—and saw something like a piece of raw meat, tossed beside the bloodied scalpel. A moment later, Huu’s hand came into sight, laid the thick wafer of the old chip into the tray, and Trouble realized that she had been looking at a piece of her own scalp. There was another brief moment of pressure, and Huu grunted softly.

  “All in. Now I have to attach it. You know the drill, it’s going to hurt, but it’ll be over in a second.”

  Trouble winced—she did indeed know the drill, had done this twice before without it getting any easier—and braced her hands against her knees, digging her nails into the denim as though the extra pain would help.

  “Now,” Huu said, and Trouble felt a fat snap like a giant static charge at the back of her head. She jerked in spite of herself, and the pain ebbed to a dull, distant ache. It throbbed slightly, in tune to her heartbeat.

  “In and on,” Huu said. She took her hand away, and Trouble lifted her head cautiously. The anesthetic was starting to fade; her neck hurt, but not too badly, yet. Huu held out a towel that smelled strongly of antiseptic. Trouble took it, dabbed gently at her head and neck, and brought it away spotted with blood.

  “Calibration next,” Huu said, her voice perfectly neutral, and slipped the head of a datacord into the sterilizer’s field. Trouble looked back over her shoulder, and saw the instrument bag gaping open to reveal the square black shape of an output box, all its telltales lit and the display screen glowing pale grey. “Ready?”

  Not really, Trouble thought, but nodded. “Let’s get it over with.”

  “Right. Look away, please,” Huu said.

  Trouble took a deep breath, and swung around so that she was sitting with her back to Huu. She leaned forward, bracing her forearms against her thighs, and felt Huu’s fingers cold on her neck.

  “I’m beginning now,” Huu said, and Trouble took another deep breath—

  and sprawls out into darkness, like but not the net, blind and deaf and dumb and insensate. The worm in her brain lies dead, and she is nowhere, nothing—and then light sparks, brilliant red and gold explosions across her eyes, surrounding her. The feeling comes next, hot wind and then more, sheer heat, slamming against her body with the hot smell of gunpowder, fireworks, and sound follows, a great inchoate roar that fills her ears to bursting and then reverberates, soundless, in her bones. She would cry out, turn away, but the explosions are already fading to a drab landscape, light grey plane under dark grey sky.

  *Stand up,* a voice says, and she does as she’s told, the flat grey ground spongy under her feet. She hears a snatch of song as she moves, harsh and incongruous—*got nipples on my titties big as the end of my thumb, got something ’tween my legs make a dead man come*—but the memory-music fades as Huu tunes the system tighter. *Walk.*

  And Trouble walks, steps out across the endless and unchanging plane. A wind touches her, gentle at first, caressing her naked body, then harder, stinging slaps against back and thigh and breast. She tastes sand, smells heat and rubber. She keeps walking, and walks out of the wind, the plane tilting underfoot so that she is now going uphill. She lengthens her stride, enjoying the challenge, and the ground gets steeper, so that she’s breathing hard and finally leans forward into the slope, pulling herself up with hands as well. Her fingers sink for an instant into the grey mass, a sensation like dust or fog between them, and she feels the shock of panic, as though she will fall through a barrier that is solid to her feet and legs. Then the slope steadies, first to soft mud and then to the same smooth rubber that she feels under her feet, and she keeps climbing, until at last she tops the hill and stands upright again.

  The plane steadies around her, takes on color and three dimensions. Grass grows underfoot, cool and tickling, and she laughs in spite of herself, feels warmth on one side of her body, and turns to blink up into blue sky and the blinding disk of the sun. She looks down again, and sees a table in the distance, an ordinary picnic table, the kind you see in children’s books. There is a box on it, black, one side open into empty darkness. The pleasure fades, seeing it, and she is tempted, as always, to turn and walk away, ignore that last step, but she knows better. She takes another deep breath, walks toward the table, the sun warm along her right side, the grass cool and dew-damp underfoot, smelling of spring imd acrid growth.

  This is the last step, the thing that all the rest leads to, the final tuning of body and brain and wire. She looks down at the box—there is always the option to stop now, the cybermeds always give you that choice, but it’s a choice to live half-aware,
half-blind, clumsy and grotesque on the net. She’s been on the wire too long to live like that, and she reaches for the box before she can think too long. She slips her hand into the opening, and the world vanishes in a sheer rush of sensation, pure feeling filling every nerve in her body. She throws back her head, and the feeling turns to pain, pins-and-needles swelling to racking cramp to pure fire, an agony swirling through her until she’s nothing but pain. And then it peaks and vanishes, leaving her gasping for an instant before the pleasure starts, rising from the tickle of desire to soaked arousal to racking, orgasmic delight.

  She leaned forward further, pressing her elbows into her thighs, not yet ready to look up and meet Huu’s eyes. The blood-spotted towel lay between her feet, where she’d dropped it, and she fixed her eyes on it as though it was something important. Her crotch was hot and wet, body lagging behind her brain, and she smelled of sex. She could hear the sucking sound of Huu peeling off the rubber gloves, and wanted for a painful instant to feel the other woman’s hands between her legs, gloved fingers pressing into her clit— She took a deep breath, shook that thought away.

  “You’re likely to be sore tomorrow,” Huu went on, heedless, or, more likely, Trouble thought, diplomatically blind and deaf, “and you should run at quarter power for a couple of days, let yourself get used to the new interface before you try to go at it full on—but you know the drill, you shouldn’t have to worry about it. The calibration’s good—”

  Trouble snorted and stretched to pick up the towel. It ought to have been good, the way she was feeling.

  “—perfect to four decimal places, so you shouldn’t feel too much difference from your old system, except the speed. Pickup should be a little more precise, too, so you might want to spend some time playing with your precision tools before you actually use them. Swab the incision with alcohol a couple times a day for the next month—I’ll give you a dummy plug, if you don’t have one.”

  “Thanks,” Trouble said, and accepted the flesh-colored plug, larger and broader-headed than the usual jacks, that Huu held out to her.

  “It’s a good system,” Huu went on, and dumped the contents of the instrument tray into van Liesvelt’s sink. “I think you’ll like the way it’ll run now.”

  “Thanks,” Trouble said again, and pushed herself to her feet. Her jeans were damp between her legs, flesh swollen and unsatisfied. Over Huu’s shoulder, she could see the water in the basin tinted faintly pink, the piece of scalp sticking to the side just below the waterline. “I think I want a drink.”

  She had several. Van Liesvelt had defrosted several entrees, his usual prodigal generosity, and she had some of each as well, as though the food and the alcohol would help ground her. Huu ate with them, devouring noodles and broth with confident pleasure, and she and van Liesvelt spent most of the time debating the relative merits of Stinger and Monaco bioware. Trouble let the familiar talk wash over her, letting herself adjust to the aftershocks, the occasional frisson of unrelated sensation as the swollen scalp around the new implant triggered a reaction. It would take a day or two to settle down fully, and she would use that time to rest, recuperate, stay off the nets and see what could be done in the real world to locate this new Trouble. Once the incision was mostly healed, she would go back on the nets, and start looking in earnest.

  She slept better than she’d expected—Huu had left her with pills and strict instructions—but woke with the kind of dull headache that left a person fit for nothing but the lowest grade of television. She had at least half expected it, treated it with more of the pills and a day spent sprawled on van Liesvelt’s couch, staring at shopping channels without really seeing either the products or the perky, high-breasted women pitching them. Van Liesvelt ignored her, busy with his machines, gone first into local space composing some small utility, and then out in the net itself, but she was too sore, too tired and aching, even to feel envious. They had dinner delivered, from the Indian restaurant on the edge of the District, and Trouble relaxed into the familiar taste of curries and thick, greasy breads.

  By the second day she felt better, so much so that she borrowed van Liesvelt’s setup and took her first steps back onto the net. She tuned the brainworm as low as she could, barely a ghost of the usual sensations, but even so, her skin crawled and tingled, itchy with extraneous sensations bleeding in from the healing incision, and she logged off almost at once, swearing to herself.

  “Want a cup of tea?” That was van Liesvelt, standing in the doorway of the little room. It was barely more than a closet, windowless and stuffy, warmed by the banked hardware, and Trouble felt suddenly trapped, claustrophobic.

  “Yeah, thanks,” she said, and, mercifully, van Liesvelt moved his bulk out of the doorway.

  “I was thinking,” he said. “If this new Trouble is in the business—not just farting around, I mean—then there aren’t that many people left who’d have anything to do with it.”

  “That’s true,” Trouble said, and followed him down the long hall to the kitchen.

  The kitchen itself was unexpectedly bright, overhead lights and electric kettle plugged into the main work island, bright-orange cords stranded through the room’s central volume. Outside the double window, the sky was brassy-white, a few more substantial clouds floating above the general haze. They overlooked the alley and the attached garages, low sheds jutting out into the rutted street. The doors were strongly reinforced against thieves, and most were brightly painted, garish against the dull stone. The kettle whistled, and van Liesvelt poured the tea, set the mugs solemnly on the long table.

  “So,” Trouble said. “Who’d you have in mind?”

  Van Liesvelt shrugged. “The usual suspects. Dieter, the Snowman—”

  “I heard he was out of the game,” Trouble interjected. “In fact, I heard he turned state’s evidence about a year back.”

  “You should know better than to believe everything the syscops tell you,” van Liesvelt said, grinning. “He got caught, all right, but beat the rap. They put the story out on him out of spite.”

  Trouble nodded. “What about Devil-boy?”

  “Gone legit.”

  “That does narrow it down.”

  Van Liesvelt nodded, fished the teabag out of his mug. “Yeah. It’s pretty much Dieter, and the Snowman, and Jimmy Star and Fate.”

  Trouble pulled out her own teabag and took a wary sip of the spicy, bright red liquid. “I don’t know about Dieter, I heard he mostly deals viruses.”

  “Oh, no,” van Liesvelt said, his voice suddenly accentless, mimicking Dieter’s thin tones, “not viruses. Never viruses. Just code fragments.”

  “My ass,” Trouble said.

  “Not to my taste,” van Liesvelt said automatically, and Trouble lifted her middle finger at him. “So, Fate or the Snowman, or maybe Jimmy Star. I think you’re right about Dieter. Do you want me to see what I can find out?”

  Trouble made a face, but had to admit the logic of the suggestion. She wasn’t ready yet for that kind of netwalking, and she didn’t have time to wait until she was better, not with Treasury on her heels. “Yeah. Anything at all would be useful.”

  “Do you want to listen in?”

  Trouble hesitated, tempted, but shook her head. Even just lurking, using the brainworm on its lowest setting to follow van Liesvelt’s activity, would be as bad as walking the net on her own. “Let me know if you find anything,” she said, and van Liesvelt nodded.

  “I’ll do that.” He picked up his mug, and wandered away again, only apparently aimless. Trouble watched him go, bit back her irrational jealousy. She hated the attunement period, hated not being able to walk the nets as freely as she normally could. You survived three years off the wire, she told herself firmly. You can put up with this. She picked up her mug, and went back into the living room to investigate van Liesvelt’s collection of tapes.

  He had a lot of anime, typical of a netwalker, and one in particular that was familiar, an old favorite of Cerise’s: americanime, surreal, qu
eer, and violent. She put it in the player, settled herself on the couch to watch, wondering if she would like it as well without Cerise’s commentary. It was old-style, the drawing mannered, elongated, improbable figures against sweeping, computer-managed backgrounds, but the conventions were easy enough to relearn, and she watched, caught up in spite of herself by the stylized plot and people. The latter were real enough, netwalkers she had known and admired years before drawn larger than life, made heroes, and she remembered, suddenly, Cerise talking about the filmmaker. She—it had been a woman, Trouble remembered—had been a netwalker back in the glory days, when the nets had just opened out, before she’d retreated to anime. The brainworm had been very new then, the risks outrageous; safer to draw and dream, Cerise had said.

  “Got it,” van Liesvelt said from the doorway, and Trouble looked up sharply, automatically muting the player. “It’s Fate.”

  Trouble touched a second button, shutting down the entire system, and stood up. “Is it, now?”

  Van Liesvelt nodded. “And he’s taking some heat for it—gone to ground, they say, but I know where his bolt-hole is.”

  “What kind of heat?” Trouble asked.

  “Treasury’s been interested in him, subpoenaed all the files on that board he runs. Plus local cops set watchdogs on the system—I heard from Kid Fear that Fate’s spent most of the last few days taking potshots at them.”

  “Kid Fear?” Trouble lifted an eyebrow at the name, and van Liesvelt shrugged one shoulder.

  “I know. It’s either fifteen or pretending to be.”

  “Is it reliable?”

  “So far.” Van Liesvelt shrugged again. “You think we should have a few words with Fate?”

  Trouble smiled slowly. “I think so. In person.” Fate—his real name was Kenney, Lafayette Kenney, or something like that—was notorious for hating to work off-line, so much so that it was rumored that he had once turned down a million in citiscrip because it would have involved too many face-to-face meetings with the client. The story was probably an exaggeration, but it summed up Fate’s attitude pretty well. “You sure you know where he is?”