Avalon

by Rusty Coats

  The WPA brats used the portals after hours, spelunking in the digital city. It made chase games more sporting -- you couldn't scan someone underground, because the holes were extraneous to Merlin's programming. Magic.

  The U.N. planned to seal the tunnels, but the Digerati took over. I banked on the odds that they’d been too busy turning opera houses into brothels to bother. I was right.

  The only problem was this: I didn't know where the gopher hole led. For all I knew, I'd escaped Paulie's goons only to materialize on the bloody tarmac of Sparta.

  Land, ho.

  Darkness crackled and my body emerged in its new locale by degrees. My fingers itched for a Cyn and a shot of Ephedria. Avalon had its shortcomings.

  The last gusts of gravity died. I'd arrived. But something was wrong.

  The room was a vaulted-ceiling nightclub with a circular dance floor that would have covered a city block in the reality next door. Arched doors led to cocktail tables, private rooms and a socializing bar. The decor was a shrine to tuxedos and grace. But now it was different.

  Neon blobs littered the dark room, as if the lights had splattered into jelly. The walls drooped in sheets of nougat. The cocktail tables, chaise lounges, pearl banisters and chandeliers shivered; the vertical and horizontal controls had let go, allowing the images to jitter. The floor had been eaten away by leprosy. Peering into a gash, I saw bitstream rush past. Avalon was Vienna, built on the lapping waters of binary.

  This place had been destroyed. And not by Wrecking Ball.

  I still didn’t recognize the place. The hardhat tunnel had opened inside what must have been a ballroom before it became Dresden. The roof had been peeled open, and Avalon's turquoise sky burned through. If Avalon had wind, it would have moaned here.

  I jumped two cancerous puddles and walked to the center of the ballroom. The damage went deeper than architecture; the grid had been scorched. Motion had been corrupted, too. As I hopscotched floor, my legs tingled, as if they were falling asleep.

  Wrecking Ball was never this good.

  I called up the Location map on the visor and Merlin uploaded the city arc, a dot winking at the tip of the first rung. I recognized it then; this used to be the Youth Depot. We called it the brat room. It was an online daycare center where kids learned how to navigate Avalon without leaving the room, limited to face painting and archive surfing. It worked well until a sixth-grader from Kansas hacked the gates and died in a pubescent splurge, his body crumpled on Avalon's streets like old origami.

  In the center, surrounded by lakes of dissolved code, I opened the Communications screen on the visor, ready to talk to Monk for the first time since I'd walked into town. Monk was a beachcomber. He'd have seen this before.

  But when the face came up in the lower left of my field-of-vision, it wasn't Monk.

  It was Rita.

  "We have some talking to do, Mr. Mandelbaum." She'd set her camera on wide-focus, so I could see her body stretched out, her feet propped on her Mensa, her hair pulled back in a tiny ponytail. Her eyes were dry and tight. She looked exhausted.

  "First, I'm wondering how you got inside The Palms." She kept her hands folded in her lap. "Your profile says you're a Gamma. So you obviously pay your bills. That's great. I love meeting upstanding citizens. It's a little perk I happen to enjoy."

  She didn't know who wore Mandelbaum's skipper suit; she only saw the profile and my digital shadow. But I knew plenty now. Seeing Rita meant this place belonged to Baxter Levy. Rita must be on patrol, trying to figure out what had scorched the walls.

  "But I'm looking at the gateway, and it specifically says Epsilon. Period. You can be the best darn Gamma in Merlin's buffers and you still can't get in here. In fact," and now her face filled the screen, "Gammas can't even see The Palms from the street. For a Gamma, this place is just a long, blank wall. So I'm thinking: How did Captain Crunch get into The Palms? And then I think: Maybe he's the mad bomber."

  She crossed her legs. "Here's the deal, skipper. As you can tell, The Palms isn't in business tonight because someone burned us out. My boss doesn't like that. In fact, my boss has had me sitting in this chair for two days, trying to piece the place together from archives. Ha!" Her laughter was manic. "But those are gone, too. Funny program. It did all this and then it burned itself out. Completely cannibal. Amazing." Her brow creased. "Maybe it's a cliché, but are you returning to the scene of the crime?"

  I thought of how the United Nations claimed Icarus killed people because it allowed them to stay under, undetected, while their neurotransmitters turned traitor. Then I thought of Adam McFee, burning to death in the dragon's breath. And now Rita was asking me if I had returned to the scene of the crime.

  "I guess you could say that."

  Her eyes widened against bloodshot tethers. Then she slammed her hand on her Mensa's infrareds. My Status screen instantly popped up, blazing an orange alert signal.

  Rita had activated a trap.

  "Looks like a bad night for you, Mr. Mandlebaum. First you drop your life level down to six percent, and then you get caught in my trap. Bad luck all around."

  The Status screen analyzed the trap and gave me the bad news. Interwoven binary threads, cauterized at both ends. The trap would hold until its secondary programs burrowed through my account.

  I’d seen enough. I turned toward the hardhat tunnel.

  "Mr. Levy is gonna LOVE this, Mr. Mandlebaum." I jumped a sinkhole and felt the tactile for the left side of my body short out. "Do you know how much money he's lost because of this? What a sight! First the walls collapsed, then the roof. It's like you turned the place to wax. Then the tactile went south. That's when people panicked."

  "Sounds like a helluva party."

  "It's the last one you'll ever see. My boss --"

  "Doesn't know how to run a mafia organization any better than he knows how to kiss a woman," I said, stepping toward the portal. "Levy's the weakest link in the Digerati chain and always has been. He's lucky his squatter's rights lasted this long."

  Rita frowned. "Careful. Mr. Levy can play hardball."

  "He wouldn't know hardball from a hard-boiled egg." I scanned the wall for the portal. Traps had no effect on gopher holes because traps relied on Merlin, and Merlin had a few blind spots. “You should know that by now, Shiloh girl.”

  "You…" Her voice trailed off. She consulted the Mensa, then stared as I tried to shove my hand through velvet wallpaper. "You're not yourself, Mr. Mandlebaum."

  Tactile had been damaged so thoroughly my hands felt like they were gripping clots of rice. Whoever built the bomb knew his stuff; Levy would have to raze The Palms and rebuild. I remembered the threat McFee levied on Van Meter – flames and chaos, a wasteland. He'd been right. This place was a tomb, its life sucked out from every corner, leaving nothing but a puzzle: Either McFee ignited a posthumous firestorm or someone else was wearing that Viking suit.

  "I said that you're not yourself, Mr. Mandlebaum."

  "And I said nothing. Something they don't teach at Shiloh. You should try it."

  I kicked the wall and my foot toed the vacuum of the portal. I put both hands on the wall and keyed the lock: "Hardhat Six-Five-Seven-One-Oh, Alpha, Run."

  The wallpaper became a transparent spider web. Before I fell into the black waters of teleportation, Rita called out: "Daedalus?"

  The name sent current through my spine and I froze, half in and half out of the gopher hole. I hadn't been called Daedalus in almost ten years. Some names you try to forget. But those names never forget you.

  "Abracadabra,” I said. And then the black bitstream carried me home.

  When the binary ocean was gone and the connection to Avalon severed, the world of Monk's lair seemed dusky and muted. Monk moved in slow, painful jerks. He climbed a stepladder, reached into the beaker and flipped the release on my goggles. The eyephones hissed as they came away from my face, opening my eyes to dry air.

  "Smart move, usin' the tunnels," he said. "Surprised you rememb
ered 'em."

  "I'm surprised the Digerati didn’t pour bleach into them."

  "They would -- if they could find 'em. I hid the programming inside a file-transfer protocol. Besides, the Digerati have bigger problems than rats in the walls. As you saw."

  "Flamethrower," I said. "It corrupted everything. Just like the Viking said."

  Monk loosened the shoulder harness and the bungees went slack. My toes whisked the beaker floor, then the balls of my feet hit and my calf muscles came to life.

  "Maybe McFee ain't dead."

  I rolled my shoulder out of the suit. The dioxide bubbles made slick sounds. "No," I said. "If McFee was still around, Van Meter wouldn't have been so brittle and my house detective wouldn't be so dead."

  "So what's that leave? Sons of David?"

  "I don't know. I've got more questions now than before. How long was I under?"

  "Five hours."

  "Christ. Five hours. Not much to show for my nickel."

  I stepped out of the waist harness and turned around to see the slack scuba suit, crumpled inside the sepia-stained beaker. It looked impossibly crude -- an ugly lump of prehistory that couldn't possibly connect anyone to a place so fantastic, so beautiful.

  "Ya found plenty. The Palms is burnt, and it ain't comin' back. That kinda muscle don't come from an extortionist. Your Digerati moll could tell you that."

  He pulled himself up by the beaker cables. "Get some sleep. And while you're sleepin', chew on this: Who'd want Levy out that bad? The Sysops coulda bought him out. They didn't need to burn the place to the ground."

  He limped off the stage. Then he turned and smiled, embarrassed.

  "You know I gotta ask."

  I lit a smoke and said, "Suit felt great, Monk. Perfect fit."

  AVALON XIII: Freud’s Bounty

  It was Chip Day at New Hope, and the junkies were lined up for six blocks in the morning haze with their bedrolls and broken spirits, waiting for Doc Cassady to replace the microprocessor in their bracelets, babbling like bath water going down the drain.

  "James took the bait, saw the world. Help a brother?"

  "Hummed out on the broken rail. Seen time."

  I walked past, listening to their synapses skip and stutter. Lost causes, beyond rehab. Cassady's solution was a narcotic fog delivered through bracelets that rode on so many wrists you'd think they were a fashion craze.

  "Prepositions and suppositions, your honor."

  "My God. My God. My God."

  At the front of the line I found my old pal Ray, guarding the door. When I stepped up to the glass, recognition crossed his pitted face. He reached into his jacket for the stun and I held up my hands, saying, "No ROM, Ray. I'm empty. How's business?"

  He tried to string a sentence, using all his facial muscles to do it. Finally, he blurted: "Doctor Cassady said to keep you out. He said you got no business here and that if you tried to come in, I got permission to smoke you."

  I pushed my fedora back. "Sounds serious, Ray."

  Ray nodded. "Doctor Cassady said you killed a man in Avalon for the Digerati."

  The junkies went as quiet as widows at a wake.

  "He told you this?"

  "He uploaded your bio to four thousand rehab centers. There's a reward for you."

  I scowled. "I haven't seen a warrant."

  "No warrant. You're a danger. Doctor Cassady posted the bounty himself."

  So much for old Campus friendships. I'd come to ask about SDS and CNI, to see if either of them caused instant death. Now I find out Freud, the man who once told me that Icarus was the world's only hope against tyranny, had just declared me fair game, and had ponied up the kill fee. The day had turned ugly, just like that.

  "Imagine that, Ray. A big reward on my head and me walking in broad daylight. Walked right up you and not a soul came after me. Why is that?"

  His breath clouded the glass. "Maybe they were saving you for me."

  I turned to stare at the junkies, and they buried their faces in their coats. The clouds opened and a band of sunshine came down on six of them and they moaned.

  "That right?" I called. "You guys selling me out?"

  The junkies forced their bodies into the cracks in the sidewalks and whimpered.

  I turned back to Ray. "Quite an army."

  He sniffed. "Whaddya expect? Junkies."

  I stared hard into Ray's muddy eyes, until I saw the filmy irises stutter. After thirty seconds, his eyes flicked away, meek and broken. I said, "Just like you, Ray."

  He shoved the door open, pulling the heater from his jacket. The pincers winked in the sunlight. But as he stepped up, I grabbed the frame and slammed the door shut.

  The pane hit the stun coils and exploded, tossing ingots of glass into his face. He howled and brought his hand up to bat away the shards. This was a mistake. Ray scraped the pieces into his skin, and they drew a lot of blood.

  His stun fell and let out a shocker that crackled against the pavement. The lightning reached up, grabbed Ray and turned out his lights.

  I grabbed his heater and stepped over his body. Chip Day had been postponed.

  "You can't do this, Jack." Freud’s voice was patronizing and amused. "In a few minutes this building will be surrounded with datacops, and then where will we be?"

  "Cooling in a coroner's 'copter." I dug the pincers into his neck. "Same as you."

  His silver-mesh suit had two blots on the lapels from where I'd dragged him out of the chip room and into his office, and one spot on the seat of his pants, where he'd needed some convincing from my left shoe.

  "I, ah, get your point," he said slowly. "Why don't we talk about this?"

  His eyes flicked to a nurse outside the glass office door. I dug the pincers into his jugular until I saw his blood throb and said: "Don't."

  "OK, OK." His hand flashed an old medic signal for standby and the nurse disappeared. "You win, Jack."

  "I've won nothing. I'm in an office with an old friend who put a personal bounty on my head for something I didn't do." I shook my head. "You think you know people."

  I shoved him into his chair and flipped the switch for the liquid-crystal glass. The windows became milky and opaque, giving us some privacy.

  "That won't do any good." He dabbed his neck with salve. "There are six cameras in here. If you hurt me, my nurses will call the police -- if they haven't already."

  "Maybe they'd rather just watch the show."

  "Your level of hostility suggests psychosis, Jack."

  I pulled off my old fedora. "Thanks, doc. I knew you'd want to help. You always were helpful. That's why I know you'll let me read the coroner's report on Adam McFee."

  He spread his arms across the desk. "Jack, you're talking about confidential police matters. I simply can't release that information."

  "You gave it to the Neuromantics, and they used it for commercial fodder. Zamora's all over the bandwidth with it. So don't give me that confidential noise."

  "They," he growled, "are not hired goons or Digerati killers. They are working in society’s best interest."

  "You finally join up, Freud?"

  His eyes were mirrors, reflecting nothing. "I'm battling the worst evil loosed upon our species in its history, Jack. Before this is over, I'll call many people my ally. I'm fighting a plague. What are you fighting?"

  "Secrets,” I said, staring into the bowl of my hat, at the torn visor that had delivered enough online voodoo to nearly put me into a coma. “What else?"

  I pulled myself closer to Cassady's Tobi. Before he could protest, I'd accessed his mainframe with a right-hand concerto and began scanning the new files.

  "You can't do that! It's --"

  "I'm a taxpayer." I waved the stun-gun. "I figure some of this is mine."

  The Tobi spat up a list of familiar names on the small screen. Sly and Saito and Jedson and Kim Soonh, WPA brats who once flew; addicts now desperately lost.

  Cassady huffed as I gave the keyboard another solo, slipped on the fedora a
nd folded down the visor. Then I killed the Tobi screen and beamed the data into the hat. It made reading tougher, but it kept Freud from seeing which files I'd accessed.

  "Is your personal goal today to break as many international laws as possible?"

  I scrolled the list. All were recent additions to Cassady's databanks, all autopsies. Dead faces hovered against a curtain of raw data, each face linked to a coroner's report. Peyton Douglas was an SDS case, brought in DOA, Julia Vasche had drowned in a puddle while fixing under the bridge. Twenty-seven autopsies in the past two days.

  None named McFee.

  Six files came up empty. No faces in the visual field, no weight in the buffer. But a close look showed the files had no visible properties, but had mass. Lots of mass. And beneath the fedora, I grinned. Cassady was using encryption. Old-school stuff, code so ancient it had moss. I should know. I'd written it.

  "Jack, I can't release any information," he repeated. "My lips are sealed."

  I accessed the file through a back door and then McFee's pink face scanned across my visor. The title screen gave a three-dimensional mannequin of McFee with transparent windows to his internal organs and blue spots to highlight points of trauma -- two large blots in the cerebellum. Reptile brain, they called it, mainframe of the mind, where evolution buried the operating system.

  A toxicity meter at the bottom of the screen showed no poisons or narcotics, other than traces of Snap. The deathblow had come from Avalon itself.

  Cassady had six encrypted files. While he fumed behind his desk, I dropped a ROM into the secondary drive and recorded the six files onto the disc. Then I tapped a crude seek program, searching for all other encrypted files to download.

  "Reptile brain," I said, folding up the visor. "What happened, doc? Someone hack this kid's motor functions?"

  His eyes flared. Cassady had a lot of attributes. A poker face wasn't one of them.