by Rusty Coats
"Don't ask me to brag about your handiwork. You're not that gregarious."
"And you’re not that gullible. Do you really believe I killed him?"
"You were hunting this boy for Van Meter, Jack. Two days later, Adam McFee is found dead in his bodysuit, killed by intense psychotrauma. Online agents confirmed you were the last entity to see McFee alive, in Van Meter's online office. You trapped him and then saw him destroyed. Your hands are bloody."
He dabbed his neck again. "You were right to stay out of Avalon. The death of your parents and the destruction of their work has left you with nothing but vengeance." He waved a dainty hand. "I've seen it hundreds of times. Post-traumatic stress turns good men into demons, like the survivors in China. Drifters and predators.”
He swept a hand at his Tobi, at the ROMs of junkies. "Turn yourself in, Jack. I don't want to see you on my computer. Your mother and I, God rest her, worked right to the end to archive consciousness. We were brothers in Construction. That's why I offered the bounty: You’re a danger to Avalon. And yourself."
I started to stand and stopped. There was something Trojan Horse about what he’d said. You’re a danger to Avalon. New Hope’s mission – like the mission of the Neuromantics, the U.N. and datacops – revolved around destroying Avalon and capitalizing on its dangers. But there was something protective in Cassady’s voice. Not to protect me from Avalon. To protect Avalon from me.
So much for brothers in Construction.
I pointed the heater at Cassady's sanctimonious face. I rubbed the pad of my finger against the trigger, feeling the metal glide over the grooves of my fingerprints, and watched his face turn to sheetrock.
"Jack, I, what is this?" he mewled. "I, Jesus, Jack!"
"Pull yourself together, doc," I said. "I want you to tell me one thing. Just one. And it’s gotta be the truth. Or I'll turn your ponytail into a Tesla coil. Understand?"
A line of sweat sprouted from the widow's peak of his silver hair and trickled down the wrinkles of his tanned forehead. He nodded.
"Good. Now tell me, doc: Who is the dragon?"
His eyes glistened. "Dragon? Jack, I --"
I swept the stun-gun to the left and pulled the trigger. The pincers unloaded a burst that struck the metal file cabinets, electrified them with enough current to make them shudder. The top drawer flew open and crashed to the floor.
Cassady whimpered and I brought the stun back to him, using the jagged veins in his temples for sights. Outside the door, I heard the nurses run for the phones.
"Time's running out, doc. You know I was in Avalon on postcard access the night McFee died, not screaming through the sky on a dragon’s back. So I want to know who you’re working for. Benedikt? Marrs?"
A glint of sarcasm flickered in his eyes. "Oh, Jack. You really have no idea what you're up against." His grin twisted into a barbed hook. "No idea."
"You're the second person to tell me that," I said, remembering Van Meter's blows. "But you're the first person who’s going to tell me what I want to know."
The glint lost some of its spark. "Impossible."
"Freud...." My voice drew out like a blade.
"Jack." He was shaking now. "Jack, they'll kill me."
"So will I."
I unloaded another burst into the file cabinet, spewing discs. Cassady gummed his words. He looked like a bass on the floor of a rowboat, gulping air.
"Who’s setting me up?" The stun shook in my hand. "WHO?"
But I'd pushed too hard. Cassady showed me the whites of his eyes as he swallowed his tongue and fell backward in his swivel chair, making gurgling noises. His eyelids fluttered, then froze as Freud went into shock. The doctor was out.
I cursed into my collar, staring at his slack body. Then, stuffing the heater into my jacket, I threw my fedora over my sweaty scalp and ran, ROM discs clicking as I shoved past the nurses and junkies. The ‘copter sirens were closer now, bleating toward the clinic at the speed of judgment. I hit the fire exit at a full sprint, set off the alarm and spilled into the alley, fell twice, then took off running across the buckled pavement.
Toward Haggletown.
AVALON XIV: Neural Tapeworm
I fell into the confession booth and latched the door, panting. I'd been dodging ‘copters, hiding under rusted girders and crumbling sheetrock. But now I was in St. Luke's Cathedral, sweating against plush cushions, and when the window slid open I barely noticed that the priest wore lipstick.
"Jack," Rita whispered. “I knew you’d come here."
I inhaled incense and listened to the prayers of the sinners. "Where's the padre?"
She made a rustling noise and held up a hassocked leg. "He had an epiphany."
"Amen."
She dropped the leg. "Besides, his idea of a welcoming party wouldn't have improved your mood. Jacarta's given his boys orders to hunt you down."
"Jacarta will have to stand in line."
The hush of the cathedral rolled over us. "You look very nice today, Rita."
She smiled sweet, shy lips. "You're keeping some rough company these days, convict. I'm sure half the skirts in Haggletown look like goddesses to you."
"Maybe." I fanned out Cassady's discs. "But I only share my silver with you."
She glanced at the discs stamped NEW HOPE. There was mischief in her eyes.
"The padre would have given those to God." She keyed the touchpad and the hidden door slid open. "I'll go him one better. I'll give them to Merlin."
We passed the arch to Tommy's Place without talking, but could have blabbed away: Tommy's Place was empty, the bungees hanging like dead ivy.
"It happened the same night Baxter's place burned." Rita's eyes went frosty, like old light bulbs. "RageFest. Forty contenders for the title and twelve thousand people plugged in on full immersion, maybe another forty thousand on postcard access."
I whistled. I didn't know Sparta pulled that many customers.
"RageFest is Tommy's bankroll. It pays his rent, his protection, everything."
I shagged the cigarette case out of my Tremayne. "How'd it happen?"
"A contender named Broadaxe was in the ring with Gargantuan Gary, the champ from last quarter. Broadaxe is nobody, a ringer from Tommy's speakeasy in Fresno. Gary gets Broadaxe in that hold of his, you know, squeezing with his third and fourth arms, and Broadaxe's prosthetic arm explodes. High-res shards everywhere. Great geek potential. Everyone thinks the match is a done deal. And then it happens."
"What happens?"
She tugged at her hair. "The shards from his arm. Part of the show, right? Wrong. The shards are scattershot pixels of neon. And then they started growing, like pods. Pods of acid. They ate through resolution and continuity, even tracking. And then the whole room exploded." Her eyes were vacant. "Complete flame-out. Jacarta lost the admission and his betting book. Sparta's a wasteland."
"Like Levy's club."
"Maybe worse. While Merlin ejecting everyone, the bomb chewed through the tactile programs. You can only go in on postcard access now. Go full immersion in Sparta and you'll get the old punching bag."
I inhaled cinnamon, remembering. When Monk's drones in Tactile were ironing out bugs, the crash-test dummies called Avalon "Punching Bag" because touch lacked continuity. Lean against a wall and the tactile programs would feed your scuba suit garbage -- pressure against your thigh, a sharp knock to the head. The program knew what to do, but didn't know where to do it. Touch was the cherry of Construction; without being able to feel Avalon, the city was just another head-trip. That went double for Prohibition industry.Tommy Jacarta was out of business.
"How do I fit in?"
She rolled her eyes. "The kind of lip-service you're getting? People think you're capable of tearing the whole city apart."
"And you?"
"Maybe I'm waiting for you to live up to your press."
I exhaled mist. "Story of my life."
"Yeah, well, I --"
She never got to finish. Tommy Jacarta kicked op
en a secret door to his office, hidden behind the hologram of Hacksaw Hank, and he was roaring like a derrick on fire.
"So! Back to twist the knife, eh?"
My wrist bumped the heater I'd lifted from Cassady's guard, stuffed inside my Tremayne, and my fingers voted for gunplay. My brain was smarter. Jacarta's heater was already drawn, his finger curled around the trigger.
I spoke to Rita without moving my lips. "Elevator. Access codes. Can you key them from here?"
"Everything but the palm-scanner."
"Do it."
Jacarta's dark skin pulsed, a black barrel with eyes that couldn't decide on a point of focus. The heater in his hand couldn't decide, either. It twitched at his side.
"My boys treated you too nice. They lit you up and let you go. I even let you go, 'cause I respect you. Anyone who does time in Jasper, they got my respect."
Rita's hands squirmed under her jumper. I could hear the faint bleeps as she keyed the codes in her palmtop, muting the speaker by pushing it against her breast.
"We're on the same side, Tommy."
Jacarta waved the heater at the lights, the counter, the perforated steel doors with nothing inside. "I'm here trying to collect my thoughts while my boys hunt you down. They're probably tearing your place apart right now."
"They'd be late. Someone beat them to it."
His eyes poked holes in my left shoulder. "You got a lot of enemies."
"They should form a club and collect dues."
He chuckled. "You got a lip, Denys. I'm about to kill you, and you give me lip."
I shrugged. "You dance when you can."
Rita's pocket peeped. She squirmed a little more.
Jacarta examined the case of his heater. "Maybe you should tell me why you wrecked my place and who you're working for and all that. Little death confessional."
"I don't do bombs, Tommy. I’m a cloak man. Maybe you should run the flight logs on Broadaxe instead."
His eyes stabbed my forehead. "I did. He's nobody. Someone slipped a bomb in his code. Someone like you."
Rita tugged at my sleeve. "Got it."
I flicked the Cyn toward the chrome ashtray; missed. Jacarta watched it arc, then raised the heater and said, "On second thought, I don't care who you're working for. If it's Van Meter, fine. He'll feel some heat of his own. But my guess is you're flying solo, some vendetta." He waved the stun. "Tell your skirt to move. I got no beef with Levy."
I turned to Rita. "When he draws a bead on me, scream and run for the elevator."
"You'll be right behind?"
"Just make sure your palm hits that screen."
"I love you."
"Kiss me."
She flinched. Then: "Okay."
I pulled her toward me. Her head tilted with a labored effort, as if their hinges hadn't been oiled. Her jaw quivered, but when I lowered my lips to hers, her eyes closed their soft drapes and her mouth opened to the touch.
"That was sweet," Jacarta said, then motioned her aside. He adjusted the voltage, aiming at my head. "Let's just max it out, see how long the battery lasts."
"You're shooting the only guy in town who wants to figure this out more than you do," I said. Rita started backing away. "But hey. Knock yourself out."
"See you in the next reality, wiseguy." His finger tightened on the trigger.
"Danny Boy!" Rita screamed, pointing at the church. "What happened to your eyes?!" And she bolted for the elevator.
"Huh?" Tommy glanced to find his goon. My legs took the opportunity and ran.
She was twenty paces ahead when Jacarta came at us, the heater sputtering in his hand. Bolts of electricity flew past us, exploding the dado-rail lights.
Rita's hand slammed into the palm scanner hard enough to sprain her wrist. The aquamarine screen ran a light bar over her palm, reading the Naska Lines of her. And then the elevator door opened.
"Denys!" Tommy yelled. He shot a burst near my feet and I watched the current scoot down the tile and I leapt for the elevator door. I crashed into the wall, my shoulder taking the worst of it. Rita tapped the console, ordering the doors shut.
Jacarta stopped and steadied the stun with both hands, taking very careful aim. The doors would be too slow. He smiled. I stared at the coils as he pulled the trigger.
The bolt crisped the bristles of hair above my left ear, misguided by Tommy's poor vision. And he let out a mournful roar as the doors sealed shut.
In the cramped safety of the Mission Substation, I went to work on Cassady's discs while Rita mined Merlin's buffers to find how many brothels and bloodsport arenas had been destroyed. The Mensas hummed like tight muscles.
The first ROM was the autopsy disc from Cassady's Tobi. I broke the encryption and a title page appeared on my visor, listing sub-topics -- McFee Autopsy, McFee Background and Dr. Cassady Credits & Analyses, the third being the largest file.
I plunged into the full content of the ROM. Cassady stood on a metallic stage with his hands folded in front of him, his silver ponytail shining. His face was less ruddy, the eyes more brilliant. I chuckled. Cassady had given himself a Dorian Gray facelift.
"Today I offer the autopsy of Adam McFee, whose death is the most remarkable development in the arena of immersion technology since the first cases of Synapse Decay Syndrome and Chronic Neurotransmitter Imbalance." Cassady's hand swept over a small console and McFee's image was replaced by charts marking the deaths associated with SDS and CNI, showing the outrageous curve that, once presented to the United Nations, destroyed the WPA. "To date, these conditions have killed more than twelve million and rendered an estimated thirty million Class-Four addicts, in need of constant care. But today, I offer a development that poses an even greater threat."
The ROM skipped to a sterile autopsy room, where four smocked men flanked Cassady. McFee stared milky marbles at the droplights, his body crisscrossed by longitude and latitude lines to show the smock boys where to slice. He had been shaved from scalp to stern; the lack of pubic hair made him look like a child.
The first minutes were a dull bit of carnage. Cassady explained the routine tests to determine the boy's health, dispelling theories of new toxic shock or other trendy killers. But when Cassady sent his crew after the brain, things perked up.
"Route the edge," Cassady said. "The avalanche would have started in the mesolimbic dopamine pathway and radiated out."
"Yes, sir."
The smocks opened McFee's skull. They loaded a small scoop of the antebellum into a scanner and it spat out the boy's DNA, providing a genealogy more detailed than the Smithsonian work Stan had assigned me. Then the surgeons’ eyes
When they reached the cerebellum, their eyes lit up like Chinese nukes. It just looked like brain to me, the jellied fist of motor functions. But for them, the boy's cerebellum was a nugget of gold.
"My God," one said. "My God."
Then my visor did a strange thing. It carved away the autopsy room and replaced it with a window to the place I least expected to see: Van Meter's office.
McFee stood in the center, frozen in a pilaster of white. Cassady's travelogue picked up just as McFee began to tremble. The grid of the room was gone, leaving only he and I, but with postcard access, my body wasn't visible -- only a hovering orb of light. I winced, because the only sound was the boy begging me to let him go.
"As we see," Cassady's overdubbed voice said, "McFee writhes but cannot escape. In seeing this," and a grid popped up, showing the flight log from McFee's scuba suit: Terminate Attempt Aborted; Function Unavailable "we know the boy is locked in Avalon and unable to remove himself from the virtual plane. This is due to a trap set by Mr. Jack Denys, hired by Jenner Van Meter to find McFee. The trap used a flaw in McFee's encryption to snare the boy, teleport him to Van Meter's virtual office and lock out the boy's attempts to escape while it peeled away the levels of gauze covering him."
I snorted. Cassady made it sound so simple.
"The boy's encryption has been stripped. He is now recognizable by Me
rlin and all higher-function programs," Cassady said. "Laying him bare was necessary, as the neural tapeworm is refracted by high-level encryption."
Another screen opened, also from McFee's flight log. It showed the status of his health – heart rate, muscle response and neural activity.
And then the dragon appeared. My spine went rigid at the sight of those emerald scales and bright spines, at the sheer beauty of such a terrible thing.
"As the deliverer approaches, we see the boy's brain showing a slightly agitated state. Slight palpitations, galvanic skin response, high-level survival mode. He is in a fully instinctual state of mind. This is important because, as we'll see shortly, the victim himself opens the channel to the cerebellum. The tapeworm then enters, as if invited."
Knowing what came next didn't help. The dragon fell like a Technicolor hammer, opened its mouth and blasted the boy.
"Now we see the instant effect of the tapeworm," Cassady said. On the screen, the boy began writhing, screaming that long, lonesome "NO" until his voice clocked out. "McFee's body is highly charged as the 'flame' courses through his eyes and into his neural network. He has stopped pleading; the first function to be suspended is the capacity for speech. The second to go is muscle control, as you'll see in his flight log."
The log showed temperature rising in the boy's lap as McFee wet himself.
"As the code winds through neural channels, McFee becomes immobile. His eyes are dilated and unfixed. He is in a state of suspended animation." He paused. Then: "And now you'll see breathing suspended as well."
The flight log showed his pulse speeding up to two hundred twenty beats per minute, his breathing erratic as his body plunged into a state of panic. And then, just as his pulse began accelerating again, McFee's lungs simply stopped inflating.
"McFee is now dead. Time from exposure to the neural tapeworm is three minutes, seven-point-eight seconds."
I rubbed the stubble of my chin. The blast did to the boy's motor functions what Wrecking Ball tried to do to Avalon. It attacked higher functions first, then went straight to the genetic switchboard and pulled all the plugs. No short-circuit in the suit, no strangling. Just a blast of code, read by the eyes, digested through the cortical cells and rocketed into the cerebellum. On a computer, the virus would have been Tinker Toy.