by Rusty Coats
The Cathedral was dead for confession day, with only a few believers in the pews, kissing beads and praying rosaries as the penance candles flickered. Rain drooled off my coat as I knelt and made the Sign of the Cross, watching the people through my eyebrows. Sixteen people. All sinners.
I approached the altar, feeling the poke of their pupils as I passed. At the Virgin of Guadalupe statue, I knelt again, closed my eyes and tried to remember the routine. But before I could ask for redemption, the sacristy door swung open.
He was a short Hispanic padre with benevolent brown eyes and a silver vase of flowers. He stepped between me and the Virgin, knelt, said a short prayer and placed the cut lilacs at her feet. Then he smiled a round, warm face.
"You are in need of a confession, my son?"
"Yes, padre."
He nodded and swept the black hassock away from his feet. I followed him past the sinners until we reached the dark confessional. The padre stepped inside and shut his door. I tripped on the kneeler and fell against the automatic tithing machine.
The opaque screen separating us echoed a stifled laugh. "Insert your card, my son, and then tell me how long it's been since your last confession."
I pulled the stainless fob from my breast pocket, lifted out the shiny ROM and dropped it through the slot. I gave the pad my code and the card hummed in the drive, telling the Lord: Here's Jack Denys, here's how much he's worth, what he looks like and how much he weighs, what he scored in school and all his vaccinations, his prison record and by the way, here's a few things you should keep out of reach. Here's everything worth knowing. Now you're omnipotent, God, but big deal. So's everybody.
A red light flickered, then turned to green.
ENTER AMOUNT OF OFFERING, the screen said, THEN PRESS 'AMEN'.
I ejected the card, slicked the rain out of my hair and typed: 0.00, Amen.
On the other side, the padre's screen bleeped. After a few seconds of heavy breathing, he brought his lips to the screen. "OK, pal. You know the routine. Cough."
"I'm a little short today, padre,” I said. "Can I still make a confession?"
"Looks like you just did, mijo," he grunted. "Now, get lost."
I heard him stand up. Before he could run out, I leaned in close. "Here's my confession: Read your screen again. I'm Jack Denys."
"So the hell what?"
"So Pete Cassady called ahead for me. It's probably blinking at you on that cheap money-zapper. Denys." I spelled it. "Or do you need that in Latin, padre?"
The priest told me to perform an act that would cost double at Delilah's, then slammed his hand on the touchpad. A hidden panel opposite the confessional door slid open and I stepped through, leaving the padre to his lilacs.
It opened to a tiny hallway and a set of stairs. At the bottom, Tommy Jacarta's boys frisked me, wrinkling my clothes and wetting their hands. I smiled at the tallest one, an Italian pretty boy with an emerald in his left ear, and said, "People just can't keep their hands off me today."
He shoved me against the wall and held me still with the modified prongs of a stun while his Irish buddy checked the inner pockets of my coat. He pulled out Van Meter's disc and scanned it on a silver-plated palmtop, then nodded at the Italian, who dug the prongs deeper into my neck. Danny Boy batted my nose with the disc.
"You ain’t one of Cassady’s candy stripers," he sneered. "Word on the street is that you're spooking for Van Meter."
The Italian chuckled. "Tommy ain't gonna like that."
Danny Boy nodded. "Tommy and Van Meter, they ain't getting along so good."
"Feuding, you could say."
"Fyoooo-ding."
I said: "Take this thing out of my neck."
The Italian pushed the prongs harder against my skin. "What for?"
It had been a long day. Maybe I had a chip on my shoulder from getting the piranha treatment. Maybe I'd had too many heaters shoved in my neck. I don't know.
But while Danny Boy was giggling, I slammed my elbow into the Italian's sternum hard enough to hear a crack, jerked my neck away before he could get off a shot and kicked Danny Boy in the kneecap. Then I grabbed the stun out of his hands and gave them both two jolts of lightning, making their bodies jitterbug. It didn't make me very proud of myself, but like I said, it had been a long day.
The noise of the scuffle brought more goons from the end of the hall, stun prongs winking from holsters sewed to the insides of their Stygian jackets. I grabbed the disc from Danny Boy's and got about as ready as you can get for this sort of thing.
Three hit me at once, from about twenty feet out. Nice stuns. Tweak the hardware and you could give it twice the muscle it packed from the factory. If anything, Jacarta's boys were decent mechanics, and half of them had good aim.
The electricity turned my muscles into fresh-caught bass. I flopped against Danny Boy and saw a light so brilliant I thought I'd been bathed in milk. And then my brain slipped out for a smoke.
I woke up in a small apartment, sprawled on a futon and staring at a ceiling covered with posters that should have been in a museum. Most were World Progress Administration posters, twenty years old, ranging from the bold digiscape inviting out-of-work programmers to join the Avalon Project to "Andi-Grav," the annoying mascot of the Supersonic Tube System. The Interactive Arts Project, with its bold Picasso strokes and quotes from H.G. Wells, promised to showcase three thousand years of culture. Whoever lived here was some fan of the U.N.’s stab at stabilization, which had promised so much and accomplished so little.
There were only two hints of failure here. The first was a familiar eviction notice, telling everyone from Compression to Continuity to vamoose. The second had been ripped off a speakeasy. "Notice of Federal Seizure of Any/All Assets on Premises for Violation of International Code #706.3."
The apartment was sparse: a futon, a hydrogen-cell 'fridge, a tiny microwave and a third-generation Mensa. In the corner a tall fan turned its head, showing me its blue blades. No windows, just a sheet rock cell and a few portals to the past.
"Hey, welcome back. How's the other side?"
She was just over five feet tall and wore her black hair like a fringe cap, framing a thin face and eyes like polished pewter. She closed the door with her foot and carried a tray to the futon. The tray had a bowl of thick stew, two blue spansules of adrenaline and a tube of antibiotic salve.
"I'm Rita." She sat down beside me. "And you're Jack Denys."
She was a little too happy about all of that. I said: "Where am I?"
She flung open her arms. "Home sweet home. I've been collecting these posters since I moved out here. I just love that period, don't you? Maybe it's because I was one of the last people recruited for Avalon. They found me in a Sons of David commune in Ohio called Shiloh. Maybe you've heard of it. It's like frontier America. I thought I was going to go crazy there, and then they recruited me with that poster right there. The one with the skyline? I snuck out of Shiloh and signed up and they gave the test and I blistered it, and they said I could write my own ticket in Avalon. Only I couldn't, really, because by the time I got out here, they'd declared it illegal. That was really a bad call, in my opinion. Have you seen the studies? Questionable. Very questionable. But the government was so embarrassed. No wonder they rushed it."
I rubbed my neck and tried again. "Where am I?"
"My apartment," she said petulantly. "Usually the shock from a stun blast doesn't affect hearing, but --"
I grabbed her bicep and squeezed. "Where?"
She winced and pulled her arm away. "Hey, I guess your strength is back, huh? OK. Look. You're in my apartment, which happens to be underneath St. Luke's Cathedral and next door to Tommy's Place, which is a speakeasy, but I guess you already knew that. Those guys hit you pretty hard."
"They earn their money."
"They would've whacked you if I hadn't come out there." Her voice had a beat you could dance to, if you could keep up. "Not that I'm fishing for a compliment. I just want you to know the score, a
nd the score is they wanted to whack you to teach a lesson to Jenner Van Meter. I guess he and Tommy Jacarta are feuding."
"So I've heard." I squirted some salve on my finger and rubbed it over the spots where the stuns hit me. It went on smooth and then numbed the skin. Wonderful stuff.
"Jack Denys," she said, pronouncing my name like she was afraid it would slip off her tongue. "I've read about you. I've archived a lot of pre-Prohibition stuff, anything I could find. Your name comes up. Like the way you dumped that self-replicating cipher on the main feeder to Avalon? It was called Icarus, right? I'm great on history."
History. "You work for Jacarta?"
She shook her head. "Not on your life. The man is way too bloody. His customers are freaks. Hard-core. About three steps up the ladder from orangutan."
I popped one of the blue pills. "But Jacarta's soft enough to let you live here?"
"There's nothing soft about that man." She ran a slow gaze down my chest that yo-yoed back to my eyes. "You know, you look a lot older than I thought."
I told her I felt the same way.
"Anyway, he doesn't let me live here and I don't work for him. This is my place, free and clear. Kind of funny, being in this line of work and doing it underneath a church. I mean, sure, the Vatican still uses the VR for missionary work, but that's in the field. A little magic in the bush, right? But being in the same building, sort of, well --"
"Prohibition makes for strange bedfellows."
"I guess." She walked across the room and put her face close to the fan. She closed her eyes and talked into the blades, her words carrying an electric hum. "Icarus. You can still find copies out in the Flux. The feds tried to kill all of them, but it was too late. For a while, it was kind of a cult thing to own a copy, but I guess you knew that." She turned. "It won't work now, of course. Kind of clunky."
"Of course." The adrenaline was viscous and bitter. "You say you work here?"
"Uh-huh. I didn't want to live near Jacarta, but this is where they stationed me."
"Stationed? You're a cop?"
She rolled her eyes. "Do I look stupid?"
I stared at her.
"Ho!" She stomped to the 'fridge and pulled out a bottle of Cogni-Juice, then used it as a pointer. "I don't take that from Jacarta and I sure don't have to take it from you, Mr. Jack Denys. I don't care who you used to be."
That stung. I’ll give her that. "Then who do you work for?"
She gave me a metallic glare. "The Sysops, OK? Mission Substation Three is underneath Tommy's Place. I feed data to Doc Cassady to keep his research money coming, which is what saved your ass. But my real is job is mothering Merlin. Satisfied?"
"No." I grabbed my shirt. "But I can see it from here."
AVALON IV: Merlin
Rita and I had to pass Tommy's Place on the way to Merlin. The subterranean hall opened to a glitzy lobby decorated with holograph portraits of Sparta's reigning barbarians, muscular mutants with detachable hardware at the ends of their arms, from Samurai swords to chain saws. They had names like Carnivore and Maniac Zach, shrill with pubescent ego. Jacarta ran a geek show of slapstick savagery, and the only people who weren't in on the joke were the ones waiting in line.
Inside the lobby the goggle girl grinned, standing behind her extruded aluminum counter in a glitter tutu, showing off her wares. Torchier lamps bounced reflections off the rental specs in the girl’s display case. Behind her stood a rack of datasuits, their colors faded and optic jacks worn ragged. The girl gave me a sly wink.
"Tramp," Rita sneered, pushing me along. "You know what she does for tips?"
"Probably her job."
Perforated steel doors guarded Tommy's uplink station. I squinted through the holes for a glimpse when the doors opened and coughed out six of Jacarta's goons. Behind them was Jacarta himself, and behind him were today's suckers, strapped inside their scuba suits, dangling from the rafters on fiber-optic bungee cables, punching and kickboxing invisible enemies in Avalon's barbarian coliseums.
"Well-well-well." Jacarta held out his thick palms. "How's my little lightbulb, huh?"
I watched the suckers bouncing over Jacarta's thick shoulders until the metal doors shut and said, "Hiya, Tommy. How's tricks in the slaughterhouse?"
Jacarta had skin as dark as black walnut and when he was angry, it glowed like hot pitch. Right now it was hot enough to melt the chunky jewelry on his fingers.
"Why don't you ask Van Meter?" His eyes poked holes in my jacket. Jacarta was one of those guys who never looked you in the eye when he spoke, always jabbing his eyes at your ear or your shoulder. "He oughta know. It's why he sent you."
"He didn't send me."
"He's your boss, ain't he?"
"He asked me to find a needle," I said. "That doesn't make me his property."
"That ain't what I hear."
I shrugged. "Maybe you oughta clean your ears out."
Six heaters showed me their prongs. The goggle girl hid behind the counter. Jacarta stared at my left eyebrow. "Maybe you want to be lit up again."
"Take it easy, Tommy. I didn’t come here looking for trouble."
"No?" He stared at my cheek. "You're doing a good job."
"Yeah. My parole officer says I'm not trying hard enough to rehabilitate myself."
He let it hang there, then pushed the stun prongs aside. He pulled a gold cigarette case from his jacket and offered one to Rita, who turned up her nose. They weren't my brand but I took one anyway, just to be nice. It tasted like fertilizer.
"You come to my club for needles? I don't get it."
"Neither do I," I said. "But then, I've been out of the haystack for a while."
"So I hear. You did ten years for sabotage, right?"
"They called it treason," I said, exhaling acrid mist and feeling my brain tingle. "And they let me walk after seven. They even gave me this suit."
He studied the charcoal pinstripes of my Tremayne. "They got cheap taste."
I shrugged. "I've seen cheaper."
"This needle," Jacarta said. "Does it sting?"
"No. Just hides. Which stings plenty for people charging tolls."
He shook his square head. "Jenny Van Meter hires a convict because someone's playing peek-a-boo? That don't wash. Maybe this needle comes into his place and stabs a few people. In the middle of a tournament, say, decapitating a title contender."
"Maybe we're talking about a different needle."
“Maybe wipes out an entire bench of fighters, putting an honest club owner in Dutch for his monthly vig. Maybe the needle wants to chisel me out.”
“Like I said, maybe we’re talking about a different needle.”
"Maybe only one of us knows what he's talking about."
We smoked a while. Jacarta was a small-time operator with a clientele of apes who went to Sparta for the same reason libido junkies went to Delilah's, only Jacarta's customers got off by shoving a chainsaw into someone. It turned a tidy profit for Jacarta, who started as a producer for an interactive wrestling show in Detroit when the Digerati seized power, moved to the Pacific Rim and bought his way into one of Avalon's unfinished coliseums. Six months later he had two speakeasies and was renting suits to the mouth-breathers so they could pretend their lives were worth cheering about.
"Boss or not," he instructed my lapel, "you tell Van Meter to keep his paws out of Sparta unless he don't know what's good for him. He'll think needles, all right."
I gave Rita a nudge to start walking and gave Jacarta a tip of my hat. "Tell him yourself, Tommy. I’m sure he’d love to be sassed by a sewer rat who can barely pay his Digerati rent. Or maybe I don't know what I'm talking about."
For the first time, Jacarta met my eyes. His arm shook, pointing. "Out."
"Already gone."
Rita slotted her ROM in the console, tapped her code and pressed her palm against the reader. A flashbar descended, matched her print and the door slid open. We stepped into an elevator, which instantly dropped us twenty stories.
My reflection turned colors. "How many substations?"
Rita rolled her eyes. "Like I'd tell you. Give me some credit, Denys."
The elevator whined and, to distract myself, I tried to remember if I'd ever actually seen Merlin. Few had. The WPA foremen kept Merlin's creators working six-month stints in the sub-basement of the courthouse, separated from the rest of the Project by four stories of fill-dirt. It was supposed to keep them pure, because the entire project rested on their shoulders. Brilliant coders who pulled code out of the Flux to build a city on the edge of entropy, they didn't care about resolution, continuity, audio or vertigo. Merlin was Avalon’s operating system, the natural law of the digital city, and that required the religious devotion of priesthood. For good reason: Merlin's makers – the system operators or Sysops – were creating God.
The WPA planned to scatter substations up one leg of the Pacific Rim, down the other and then around the globe as the Depression waned and Avalon grew from a small virtual metropolis to a city-state larger than most countries. The stations would serve as beacons for Merlin's hive-like brain, decentralizing him to the point that it would be impossible to destroy him, foiling the Sons of David terrorists. Even so, when the Neuromantics convinced the United Nations to dismantle the WPA and launch Wrecking Ball, it looked hopeless. Wrecking Ball was the nuclear holocaust of the new reality, a killing machine that would devour Merlin's soul. Some Project members launched anti-virus programs, trying to buy time. But Wrecking Ball kept coming.
The world's greatest experiment in virtual community was on the brink of becoming binary slag when the Sysops rose up. Millions of people stood to lose jobs and large investments, but the Sysops didn't care about any of that. They cared about Merlin, their masterpiece. So as United Nations undersecretary Leigh Kater told the world that Avalon would be tagged and bagged, the Sysops went to work. They dismembered Wrecking Ball and unleashed Merlin's wrath while the United Nations spluttered. The feat gave them lordship over Avalon, a possession that transmuted the pale and bookish Sysops into the modern mafia known as the Digerati.