by Rusty Coats
"THANK YOU. YOU SEEM TO APPRECIATE GOOD ENCRYPTION."
My fingers flexed, remembering strands of Icarus. "I do."
"I FIND YOU INTRIGUING," he said simply. "BUT NOT ENOUGH TO WADE THROUGH THIS SEWER OF CODE. SO TELL ME: WHO ARE YOU?"
"A fan." Outside Van Meter's penthouse, the trap stripped away extraneous code, following the plot of Merlin's creation. The first to go was the skyline, which disappeared along a linear plane, as if someone were taking an eraser to the city.
"I DIDN'T KNOW I'D DEVELOPED A FOLLOWING."
"Larger than you think." The International Congress building collapsed on itself. "It’s quite a feat to travel through Avalon without setting off a single alarm."
The walls sighed. "OBVIOUSLY I TRIPPED ONE. I'M HERE, AREN'T I?"
I nodded. "Yeah. I said I was a fan. But unfortunately, I'm also your jailer."
Laughter filled the room. "YOU UNDERESTIMATE ME."
Outside, the Parthenon winked out, replaced by void. The trap doubled back and began sending the streets to oblivion. It was slow-motion entropy, a crude way to catch a master, like burning down a forest to catch a tiger. But then, all I had was matches.
"When it's done with the scenery,” I said, “it'll go for the furniture and that annoying bird. Then the walls and floor. And then you."
"WHAT'S TO PREVENT ME FROM SKIPPING OUT EARLY?"
"Try it."
The army of duplicates shivered as the Plaza of Light went dark. The status screen blurred from LOCKDOWN to DISENGAGE ATTEMPT. The words stuttered on my torn visor as the ghost tried again, then again. The parakeet, suspecting his demise, fanned his green tail feathers. The visor's subscreen winked. LOCKDOWN INTACT.
"WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!!"
"Caught you. And to unplug, you'll have to take off that cloak I've been admiring."
A squeal filled my ears. On newer suits -- since government safety standards no longer applied – the volume might have done some permanent damage. It's how grifters fought down at Sparta. But my fedora was hand-made before haberdashery artists were turned out on the streets, and the fedora squelched the sonic blast. Old hats.
The ghost didn't like that. "WHO ARE YOU?"
The trap ate into Van Meter's desk like a bad case of termites. "Your jailer. If you want, we can cut this short. Step out of your gauze and we’ll be home for breakfast."
"Shit," the parakeet honked, disappearing from the talons up. "Shit, shit, shit."
"WHERE AM I?"
When I started to answer, the dashboard informed me that the ghost had accessed the Location file, which anyone could do within Avalon’s city limits. It was one of the conveniences the Sysops built into Merlin, a binary GPS.
When the answer came back, the universe shook. "YOU FOOL!"
I levitated five meters above the disappearing floor. "Look, Mack. Here's where life serves up one of those lessons to build character. Nobody rides for free."
"YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU'VE DONE."
"Yeah," I said as the walls vaporized, leaving a neon cobweb, "I do."
"YOU WORK FOR VAN METER?"
"I guess Jenny just doesn't like guys who fly free in his clubs. And he especially doesn't like ghosts dressed up in Viking costumes who threaten him with fusion bombs."
"VAN METER HIRED --" Then, quietly: "WHAT?"
I adjusted the fedora's filament against my jaw. "I saw the ROM, pal. Threatening to burn Jenny's empire, starting with Arabian Knights. Empire, empire, blah, blah, blah."
The trap fell on the first wave of duplicate ghosts.
"YOU HAVE BEEN MISLED." Another hundred bogies appeared. The guy was going to prolong this as long as possible. "VAN METER AND I --"
"Are going to have a lot to talk about." I shook my head. "You wrote a good cloak. I admire your work, but it’s my job to take it off you. Just business."
"THERE IS MORE AT STAKE THAN EXTORTION! YOU HAVE STUCK YOUR HAND INTO A HORNET'S NEST AND PLACED ME IN UNBELIEVABLE DANGER."
"You're right." The trap was winning the war against the ghost's replicating program, outpacing production. "With gauze like that, you're looking at three or four counts of treason. Trust me. Still, I’d worry about Jenny first."
"LISTEN.” His voice had become more juvenile and paranoid. “I DON'T KNOW WHO YOU ARE, BUT YOU HAVE TO HELP ME. THEY'LL BE HERE ANY MINUTE."
"They?” I shook my head. “Nobody but me knows you're here but me. You're running the best gauze in Avalon, remember?"
The ghosts flashed like face cards bursting into flames.
"IT WON'T MATTER. WHEN THEY FIND ME, THEY'LL --"
Suddenly the tactical screen on my visor changed. In its place was a window to the control panel in the Administration basement. Monk rubbed his bloodshot eyes, but the expression on his face was anything but weary.
"Jack," he said urgently. "Jack, you've got company."
My scanner showed a swarm of meteors puncturing the skin of Jenny’s office.
The first fireball of code wiped out my trap's erasure line, sending the entire program into a tailspin. I told Monk to reboot the program and watched in the tiny screen as he pounded his fists on a frozen panel.
The next wave ignited the ghost's duplicates. Each stone fell directly onto my prisoner's wraiths, engulfing them in a flash of high-res flame. My tactical screen lit up with fireworks as the meteors fell by the dozens, each one expertly guided. The ghost struggled to duplicate another army to lure the meteors away. But they fell too quickly.
"HELP ME. PLEASE!"
Merlin wasn't answering. Monk ran a bypass, but still couldn't patch in. "Ya better get out, Jack. Somethin' big is comin' down the pipe."
It was already too late.
A pilaster of light pierced the darkness and cut through the grid. And directly ahead, in the center of the column, I saw the color begin to ripple.
The ripples peeled away like onion skins, revealing the shape of a man, broad-shouldered and muscular, his face not yet visible. With each pulse, another skin fell away, the filters melting off and leaving him alone in the center of that blinding light.
When it was done, standing before me was the ghost, stripped of his cloak.
He was naked, his young body smooth as marble, no older than twenty. Without cosmetic coding, scuba suits recreate bodies in Avalon just as they are, duplicating every muscle, bone and curve as your online vessel. Only the head remained blank, like the head of a mannequin before having its face painted. Avalon's citizens programmed their physical features and stored them on ROMs so they'd always appear the same. The ghost had no identity. The light had stripped all that away.
He turned his blank face toward me. When he spoke, no lips formed the words. The sound echoed from the filament in my fedora, a voice two blocks west of puberty.
"Please."
I'd seen enough. Something about this smelled all wrong. I called: "Dump the trap, Monk. Flush it."
But the trap only sputtered. "Your trap just got hit by a virus that's turned the whole thing into a loop, Jack. I can't stop it without destroyin' the whole thing."
I stared at the boy shivering in the void and knew he was right; I'd stuck my hand in a hornet's nest. Van Meter could afford a little extortion until I figured it out. And my reputation couldn't get any worse.
"Dump it all, then," I said. "Let him go."
Monk got to work. "It's gonna take a coupla minutes. So sit --" He glanced at another screen on the panel. The color drained from his face. "Oh, Jesus."
I started to speak when I saw it streak across the digital sky. Toward the boy.
"NO."
A dragon with immense wings and a thrashing tail soared above us. Its eyes flashed garnets and spines rose between the reptilian wings, its scaled skin more brilliant than any colors I'd seen in Avalon. Its torso was emerald, its wings dark lavender and its spines a cold ivory. Fangs winked brass and the scales of its underbelly looked like amber, and hanging from its talons was the ribcage of man.
It pulle
d up at the last minute, and I heard the roar of its wings echo through my fedora. My subscreen lit up, stuttering, then shot a final message across the visor:
MERLIN ACCESS: DISABLED.
The dragon climbed higher in the void. The tracking was exceptional, without so much as a refresher click as it flapped its mighty wings. Whoever had programmed this beast knew their craft better than the boys in Recreation and Revival, who'd developed pterodactyls for the unfinished Parthenon. Our earlier gaming beasts moved swiftly but unconvincingly; at no point did you look at their low-res reptile skin and taste fear.
This was three-dimensional genius. Its talons flexed instinctively, and its broad, veined wings caressed the air. The boy looked manufactured, an online mannequin. And my orb was just a floating basketball. But the dragon looked as if mythology had just punched a hole in Avalon and had sent its ambassador.
I'd been away too damned long.
It turned lazily and began a roaring descent. This time, fire scorched the tips of its nostrils. Its spines glowed like blacksmith irons.
"Monk? Anytime would be good, Monk."
"PLEASE, NO."
Monk slammed his hand on the panel. "I can't access squat, Jack. That thing is suckin' every bit of RAM out of the Pacific Rim. Get outta there."
"NO!"
I looked up in time to see the dragon roar. Flames splashed the surface of the grid and the kid batted himself as the flames seared through his digital skin.
The dragon ascended again, leaving the kid to dance. He screamed an animal shriek, and I realized the kid wasn't batting away a simulation but was actually, impossibly, in physical pain. As if the fire were killing him.
"AHHHHH." His voice was like steam.
The kid fell to his knees, his pure-white body now the color of cinders. Flames climbed around him, pure blue, and I could almost feel the heat on my face. He fell on his back and went into a seizure so powerful he seemed to vibrate the entire grid.
After a while, he became still.
"Jack," Monk said soberly, "you’d better go. It's comin' back."
The dragon dove toward me. I stared into the barrels of its snout and saw fire crackling in its nostrils and then peered into its garnet irises. They began to swirl. Even from that far away, the eyes seemed close, an illusion of distance. A curious trick.
"Jack, take off your hat...."
It was as if the dragon's eyes were hovering a few millimeters in front of me. And the eyes began to pulse, a mesmerizing pattern that was oddly soothing.
"JACK!"
The dragon pierced the ceiling as flames leapt from its snout. The swirling eyes intensified, pulsing images just below the threshold of consciousness, too fast to see clearly but telling my subconscious something important.
"JACK!!"
The dragon's throat constricted, tightening around its windpipe as it sucked air into its lungs. I could almost feel the breeze being pulled into the sky. The eyes swirled more brilliantly and I squinted to see the symbols more clearly.
Fire erupted from the dragon's mouth.
I sat paralyzed as it blazed toward me. I heard Monk stumble from the panel, running. Then I felt a buzzing in my head that became a squeal and that vibrated the sutures of my skull. The pain was impressive.
And then I felt hands on me, jerking me out of the Recaro. But the visor stayed on and my eyes filled with neurological codes my subconscious struggled to decipher.
Monk clubbed me like a grizzly, knocking the fedora off my head. I stared stupidly into his dark eyes, mumbled nonsense, tasted rust and realized my nose was cascading red iron. And then I fell into the dark, warm waters of unconsciousness.
AVALON VIII: Murder
The minutes clicked like cards in a slow-motion shuffle for two days, and I wore out a few handkerchiefs sopping up blood from my nose. Diamond dust scratched my retinas and tremors lit up my nerves with Richter-flashes.
My fedora rang repeatedly, but I left it on the hook. The microchip in the band answered to record a message, but the dialer hung up, only to call right back. You're never so popular as when you don't answer your hat.
Now it was forty hours after I'd seen a dragon and the world was accelerating again. The rain dripping from the corroded drain spouts outside my apartment moved a little faster, as if gravity were waking up. I drank Ephedria and watched it rain, and when the tremors came I balled my fists and counted the veins in my forearms.
Monk’s face was gray when I climbed into the pedicab, the same color it was when I woke up on his sofa with a brain full of broken glass. He'd wanted to nurse me and I'd said no. Hangovers -- from booze or binary -- are a lonely business. And if it was something nastier, Monk would only be a witness. Neither of us needed that.
Now it was beginning to lift. The third handkerchief looked like a leopard; the first two were pure Rorschach. The tremors felt far away now, distant thunder.
When I closed my eyes, I still saw dragons.
My door rattled at noon. I was down to my last pack of Cyns and wasn't expecting company. I pulled the suspenders over my undershirt and barefooted to door. The fan shoved my unwashed hair around as I stared through the eyehole.
"Jack?" Rita rattled the door again. "You in there?"
I raked my hair off my forehead. Somewhere, down in the lobby, Regan Sutter was once again redefining the job description of house detective.
"Jack?" Her voice made the speaker buzz like torn cellophane. She hugged her arms tight around a pre-Prohibition dress that showed off her collarbones. Her head jerked, stealing glances of the hallway and chewing her lip. I wondered how she'd gotten from the substation to here; it's not exactly a scenic trail. More like a walk in the zoo, with the cage doors wide open.
I spun the door lock and let it swing. A smile burst onto her lips, but the fireworks fizzled fast as she studied the blood vessels in my eyes and the stains on my shirt. Before she could say anything tender, I said, "Get in here before you chew your lip off."
She stepped across the threshold and I hooked her umbrella on the hat rack, letting it drip on the hardwood. When I shut the door, I realized my apartment looked like a junkie's nest and smelled like a shot glass, and I followed her, kicking Cyn packs and empty bottles under the bed.
"Sorry," I said. "Other than my parole officer, you're the first company I've had."
She smiled nervously and told me not to bother cleaning up. I told her I wasn't bothering and shoved the Murphy bed into the wall, exposing a binder of family-album ROMs, surrounded by bottles, butts and bloody handkerchiefs.
Finally, she said, "I tried calling."
I glanced at the fedora. "I didn't feel like answering."
She shivered. "They're looking for you."
I reached for a Cyn and touched the catalyst to the end. "Who?"
She stared at the ashtray, then at the handkerchiefs and quickly looked away. "Datacops. Neuromantics. Digerati." Her voice quivered. "Me."
"I didn't realize I was so popular."
"You're not, not exactly. Nobody knows it was you with McFee."
"That was his name?"
"You have been out for a while." She nodded. "Adam McFee. He was nineteen. Lived over in New Berkeley."
"McFee." I thought about his marble body glowing on the grid, and then of the firestorm that turned him into digital ash. "What was he, Sons of David?"
"No one knows for sure."
"Van Meter?"
"He's spreading stories about some secret weapon and how he plans to use it on his enemies. He's using what happened to escalate fighting in the Digerati." The quiver in her voice smoothed out its wrinkles. "They'll start choosing sides soon. I guess it had to happen. The Sysops had almost ten years of brotherhood, divvying up Avalon like gentlemen. Now they're getting greedy."
"They've always been greedy."
"Yeah," she said, "but none of them ever did anything like this. It's the buzz of Avalon. Everyone's talking about Van Meter's new security system."
"Va
n Meter?” I shook my head. “Van Meter doesn't have a dragon."
"So it's true." Her voice drifted out like fog. "They said it was a monster, but no one could say for sure. It happened on Van Meter's property, so he's the only one with a visual record of it. From my end, it looked like an icepick stabbed Merlin’s brain."
"Close enough.” I exhaled cinnamon. “Where did it come from?"
"I don't know. After you popped out, I looked through the bitstream, but it's like it never happened. You were running under some kind of garbage encryption --"
"Gee, thanks."
"-- and the kid was running under that hot cloak. I saw the disruption and then the surge as the kid's encryption peeled away. That's why everyone knows his name. When he popped out, Merlin logged his access point, along with his ID. It’s not much."
I crushed out the Cyn. "If Merlin popped him, you could cross-ref his --"
"Flight log, yeah, I know." She shook her head. "It's not that simple. I've got his access point, his name and about sixty lines of his user profile." She dug through her purse and pulled out a small ROM wrapped in rice paper. "Here's a bio. A partial one. Not the ones the Neuromantics are using for the commercials --"
"The Neuromantics?"
"A marketing tool." She bounced her head in Zamora's sing-song style. "He was an intelligent young man with a promising future. He --"
“Was a junkie.” I grabbed the disc. "But he didn't deserve what he got."
"Neither did you."
I waved my hand in front of the Mensa’s infrareds and slotted the ROM. I set the hat upside down on the Mensa, so I could see the visor without wearing it, still gun shy.
The bio was short and peppy, like a blurb in a high school yearbook. It opened with a title screen of his name and education. He'd embedded a voice-track and some video. His handsome pink face and brown hair were scarred by the tear in my visor.
"Hi," McFee said. His voice hadn't shrugged off the soprano notes of puberty. "I’m Adam McFee, six-oh-seven, twelve-ninety-two. Access level Ceres."
It went on for a few more minutes, the drivel people put into their profiles, the annoying find-me-sexy garbage that had infested network profiles for fifty years.