Avalon

by Rusty Coats

  Rita's hands twisted in her lap as she listened to the wiry simp who had somehow become the fourth most powerful Digerati boss in the world. From her pupils I could see him waving veined hands, explaining. He spoke with the voice of someone who'd written a term paper on organized crime, not someone who filled the shoes.

  Rita tried interrupting. "Mr. Levy, listen. What happened at The Palms? I've done a little detective work and I think Mr. Van Meter is behind it." The sentence seemed to take all the air in her lungs. "And I think now he wants to move against -- What?" Her voice went small. "No, sir. I don't have any direct proof. But --"

  Levy cut her off with a fit of screaming. Rita kept saying "But" and "Sir" but it didn't do any good. Levy was a mild man, but when he had a tirade, he milked it.

  Until Rita decided she'd had enough.

  "No, YOU look, Mr. Levy! Van Meter wants control of Avalon and he's already killed off your best club. He's also taken out clubs in sectors One and Two, and if I'm not mistaken, he'll try for something in Four. Check the diagrams of the city and you'll see that every target has been on top of major data flow channels. If he ties up Sector Four, he's got the whole shot! Don't you get it?"

  Levy said it then, loud enough for Monk and I to hear: "You're fired."

  But Rita went on pleading while he methodically explained that as of now, her access codes were void and her passkeys to Merlin were wiped. The more she begged him to stay out of Club Troc, the more haughty Levy became, threatening that if Rita tried using Digerati privileges again, he'd have her on a skillet. Levy didn't have that kind of muscle, but when you're getting sanctimonious, you'll say anything.

  Levy killed the connection. Rita's cheaters went dead.

  She slowly slid them off, her eyes focused on nothing. She blinked, looked at me and then hurled her cheaters across the room, where they smashed into the wall beside the Avalon hologram.

  "He thinks Van Meter's bringing them all together so they can fight whoever is planting all those bombs," she said bitterly. "He thinks Van Meter is organizing the Sysops to 'fight their common enemy.' God!"

  "He’s followin' the old protocol," Monk said.

  I nodded. Early on, the Digerati arranged for all meetings between Sysops to take place online in randomly chosen spots to ensure their safety. They knew that off-line, a meeting was an invitation to assassination, either from a fellow Sysop or from a jihad yahoo from the Sons of David. Online, everyone was on equal footing because they all knew the system better than nearly anyone else in the world -- like labyrinth makers meeting halfway through the maze. But that was before the dragon.

  Ferret and two boys had snuck in, their bodies grimy from the tunnels, their bags full of treasure. They stayed near the storage closet, watching us, but their eyes kept going to the unfinished boxes of rations. I followed their stare to an unopened tin marked Choc. Brownie. I picked it up, saw Ferret smile, and tossed it to him. He caught it easily, as if shagging a fly ball, then cut it open with the sharp edge of a ROM disc.

  After cutting it into three pieces and sharing the brownie all around, Ferret reached into his bag and came up with a tarnished silver case, which he tossed to me. I caught it as he had, then snapped it open. Inside was an ID-ROM for an Oregon headhunter named Smithers and, praise the Lord, ten Cyns. I popped one into my mouth, dug the catalyst out of my pocket and lit the pill, drawing the piracetam and other nutrients into my bloodstream with a long inhale.

  I was beginning to like that kid.

  Monk said: "Where's Baxter plug in?"

  "A private pipe in his penthouse," Rita said. "Sometimes he uses the speakeasy under Frye's Bakery, but only in emergencies. He's kind of anal about his suit."

  I reached for my shoes under the sofa. "Baxter's penthouse is a ten-minute Tube ride from here. One way or another, we can keep him out of Club Troc."

  Ferret mumbled through a mouthful of brownie: "Denys no go. Cops."

  Monk flashed the boy a series of hand-signals so Ferret could speak in his native tongue. The boy nodded, dreadlocks bobbing, then let his fingers do the talking.

  Monk turned. "He says they've got datacops guardin' Tube stations all over the city, but double-staffed in the Mission. Says they've got some interactive posters up with your face on them. You've officially been charged with the death of Adam McFee."

  It was as if the air compression in the room had changed, and I felt my ears pop. I don't know why it surprised me. Van Meter doublecrossed me and Cassady signed out a personal bounty on my head and the Neuromantics were using me for a recruiting commercial. The datacops and the federal government were just latecomers to a party where I was the pinata. I wondered if they'd already filled Cell 108 in Jasper.

  All because I caught a ghost. A --

  Ghost.

  I adjusted the suspenders over my bare shoulders and barefooted to the control panel. I drew a last hit off the Cyn and picked up the ROM Rita recorded of Van Meter's conversations with McFee and Cassady. The ones he thought he'd sent to the Flux.

  The ghosts of his past.

  I held it up, letting the stage lights dance across the ROM face until everyone else saw it, until they understood. Then I smiled at Rita.

  "It's couples night at Club Troc," I said. "Want to crash the party?"

  "I thought you'd never ask."

  AVALON XVIII: Club Trocadero

  Monk modified original Administration suits designed for media tours, hot-rodding the tactile and replacing the stock monkeyware with a ninth-generation datapack. It took him less than an hour, humming a swing tune popular on Wurlitzers before Prohibition. Ferret stayed at his side, squatting with his elbows on his knees and then, quick as mercury, dashing into the vault when Monk needed a part. Fifteen years ago, Gretchen and I were Monk's apprentices, sleeping in prototype torso packs to see if Monk could tickle us awake from across town. Now he had an orphan prince who could barely speak but knew the city's secrets better than any datacop. Ferret's end of the bargain was clear. Monk was as close to a father as you could come without scratching a junkie.

  I sat beside Rita at the panel, my eyes going from my watch -- four-forty-two -- to the screen. She'd loaded a bootleg floorplan of Club Trocadero off a ROM the Digerati sent to speakeasy owners, the way Detroit once sent film of new models to dealers.

  Rita flew our point-of-view past the cocktail bar, toward the three-tier dance floor. The online bodies were like wallpaper, slapped into place so Club Troc didn't look like a ghost town in the ad. When Rita moved us into a private room, the same wallpaper faces stared back at us, entangled in a red-light orgy.

  We were searching for Van Meter's private office. And having no luck.

  "This is the whole building, right?"

  She glided us up to the third floor -- traditionally a gay hangout -- and moved us past hundreds of frozen-faced thin men with jawlines sharper than sliced paper.

  "Yeah," she said, "and this is the newest upload. Van Meter updates his ROMs every time he offers a specialty night. Rodeo, Halloween, Caveman Days. Baxter did the same with The Palms."

  Something wasn't right about the floor plan. It nagged me, so I tried to ignore it, hoping it would eventually purr up to my leg like a stray kitten.

  "How long's it been since you went under?"

  "Three months, give or take."

  That surprised me. "Really? You a regular at any of the clubs?"

  She eyed me for sarcasm and found none. "Not really. It's not my style, I guess."

  On the screen, we'd moved to the fourth floor, a long hallway surrounded by theme rooms. The first three were Jungle Rooms: green vines and waterfalls, a soundtrack of tropical birds and monkeys. The second set of rooms was Shoguns, rice-paper walls and bamboo mats, where the geishas were plentiful.

  "I thought you only felt comfortable online. Because of Shiloh."

  "Shiloh." It was as if the word had leaked out. She looked away. "Shiloh."

  "Hey," I said, and reached for her hand, but she pulled away. "S
orry."

  We sat still for a moment, flying through Club Troc's rooms, and I could feel the heat coming off her skin. I didn't know anything about the Sons of David communes, other than what I'd been told in prison. To me, they were fanatics who shed the comforts and pitfalls of the digital age in hopes of restoring some deep communication with Nature. I'd read their material and watched them pray at Jasper, before Prohibition set them free, but I never understood the zeal. They were an interface paradigm I couldn't hack.

  "When we went to Shiloh," Rita began, staring into the screen, "I felt like a piece of me had been cut off and never healed, because everyone kept hugging me and rubbing it raw again. The day Dad decided to go, we snuck out of the house before dawn so we wouldn't wake my mother. Dad said we were going for a walk. He liked reading Yeats while the fog burned off the bluegrass, and I usually went along with my Mensa Mini. He'd read out loud, serenading the sleeping University. And I'd be right there, listening -- 'Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold' -- while I reprogrammed the Mini's operating system, flying through the labyrinths of code. So I guess on those mornings, we were both poets."

  We were hovering in one of the Romulus Rooms now. Gay men with olive branches wrapped around their heads. Rita's fingers twitched in the glove.

  "That morning, we walked out to the arboretum and didn't stop at the white rocks. It was late September and turning cold. Dad had been told two months before that he'd been replaced by interactive discs and that he could stay only if he took a part-time assistant position. It was a bad couple of months, lots of arguing between Mom and Dad, but I thought we'd patched up. But we kept walking, and I began to notice that his backpack was bigger than usual, and that he was wearing hiking boots instead of sneakers, and that he wasn't carrying his Yeats. I didn't say anything until we reached the edge of the campus, when he stopped at a farmer's market. They were setting up, unloading food from carts, and you had to watch where you stepped because of the horses. I asked where we were going. And he lifted me up into one of the carts and said, 'We're going home.'"

  She licked her lips and I noticed that she'd bitten through the skin. I gave her my handkerchief and she dabbed the blood, pressing tight.

  "There were others huddled in the cart, and I recognized them from the weekly poetry readings at our house. I looked at Dad, hugging the Mini, and asked where home was. A woman from Dad's sonnet class eased the Mini out of my hand, stroking my hair, and before I knew it, she'd handed the Mini to my father. I screamed as he smashed it on the metal butt of the horse cart.

  "The first blow shattered the case and the second destroyed the screen. He kept slamming it into the metal and I screamed while Dad’s student stroked my hair and kissed my cheek and told me 'Shhh, sweetie, shhh.' When he was done, his hands were bloody from the sharp edges in the motherboard and the Mini in splinters."

  She rubbed her nose with the hand in the dataglove, moving our point-of-view in circles on the screen. "So that was Shiloh. Seven years of everyone stroking my hair and kissing my cheek, trying to love everything away. They thought I was possessed, I guess. 'That's Rita. She was a hacker.' 'So young? Poor dear!' Seven years of that. Everything I loved was evil, even my mother."

  Monk yelled something at Ferret, who was deep in the vault, and that broke the silence. Rita keyed the controls again to finish our tour.

  "So when I finally broke free to work for Levy," she said, "I went crazy. I mean, I was logging into Avalon every night -- Club Troc, The Palms, even Luthor's. The nastier it got, the more I liked it. It felt like revenge."

  She stared bolts into my eyes. "When you do something, Jack, do you ever wonder if you're doing it for yourself or if you're doing it to spite somebody?"

  "All the time."

  "Really?" Her dataglove had paused us, mid-flight.

  I nodded. "Here's a secret: I haven't felt like Jack Denys since the feds took me to Jasper. I feel like I'm steering some programmed online body through the motions. And I don't know who I'm doing it for. Or why."

  She stared at me and I felt stupid for pulling back the curtains that far. So I looked away and let my eyes plow into the hologram of the city. And when her hand touched mine -- folding her fingers over the calluses of my palms, the first time she'd touched anyone since Shiloh -- I didn't turn around, didn't let her see my face.

  And then I said: "Hey."

  Because I was staring at the hologram, at the five-story University tower called Ballantine, long ago converted into Club Trocadero. And then I stared at the bootleg grid of Van Meter's four-story tower of uptown sin. And then back to Rita. And I laughed.

  Hiding in plain sight. Something only a privacy hack would find funny.

  We were suited and ready to launch with two hours to spare. That gave Rita and me time to case the joint while Monk hacked Merlin's uplink codes so we could interrupt Van Meter’s Digerati powwow.

  The dioxide bubbles inflated against my skin as the suit booted, warm and familiar. In the booth beside me, Rita adjusted her sleeves until the fabric pulled tight against her body. I stretched and flexed, feeling the cables tug.

  Monk shuffled onto the stage, carrying his tailor kit and two ROM discs. He turned Rita around and sutured the waistline with a flash of stitches, opened the optic drive and loaded her disc. Then he moved to my beaker, swung me around and inserted the ROM into my pack.

  "First a rear admiral and then a busty dish," I said as he loaded the ROM. "I'm afraid to ask what's next."

  Monk patted my shoulder. "I think ya might like this one." He glanced at the wall clock and said, "Ten after six. Seal the helmets and let's shoot ya across."

  We did. The helmets came down and the visors flared, the infrareds running self-diagnostics while we waited. My fingers flexed inside the gloves while Rita performed a series of yoga stretches, a graceful marionette.

  Monk's face appeared in the subscreen. "No tricks this time," he said, but his voice was muffled. I pounded the helmet, rattling the faulty audio coils. Old suits.

  "Van Meter's guards will cancel your flight if they detect a bounced signal. So I'll dial up Bobby McGee's speakeasy on Polk. He's a gambler, runs a lot of book out of there. His ports have self-sealing back doors, so it'll look like you came direct from him."

  Monk spun the seat of his stool until it was so tall he looked like a church organ player. The Mensa gleamed. "Connection’s clear. Looks like it's a little crowded tonight, so watch your step."

  There was a blur as our bodies were transmitted across town to the Irishman's hideout, and then Rita and I tumbled into Avalon like a pair of loaded dice.

  Saturday was Avalon's busiest night, with enough tactile sensations bouncing across the web to tickle the Earth. The daisy chain of Mensas that made up Merlin's hive brain hummed on Saturdays, running full-tilt as hayseeds converged on Avalon, eager to blow their paycheck or government aid on a fetish or a fantasy.

  In the data pipes, the people were backed up for light years, inching forward. Experienced travelers hopscotched through shortcuts while newbies burned up their precious online time in a congested pipe. In the Leap you could feel them but not see them, shoulder-to-shoulder in the narrow passageways, their data as compressed as a kidney stone. Avalon offered no odor, of course. But still: You didn't have to be Digerati to smell the sweet scent of fools parting with money.

  Rita and I emerged at Central Station, materializing in the mass-transit lobby with a crowd of other travelers. It once had been decorated with a travelogue of man's ascent to civilization, from cave cities to the wagon-wheel metropolis of Avalon. Now the walls burned advertisements for tonight's specials. A circle of muscular men in feline masks with erections the size of cricket wickets -- Another Standing O at Kitten Kaboodle. Half-price Tuesdays, except on legal holidays.

  "Hurry up, Mack," a voice groused behind me. "I only got fifteen minutes left on my monthly. After that, my hourly rate kicks in. Move it."

  He was another mail-order hardbody with a bulge in his shiny trou
sers the size of a squash. Looking over his shoulder I saw at least six other desperadoes in the same get-up, guys who could afford a handsome body but bought their faces right off the rack. Forgetting the old adage: In Avalon, everyone is pretty.

  "Don't worry, punkie," I said. "You're --"

  "Jack, don’t start anything." Rita said, squeezing my hand. I turned to see her and grinned. Rita's virtual body looked a lot like her real one: Short and slender, with black hair and a pixie's cheekbones. The only difference was the mustache.

  My smile broadened. "Yes, sir."

  "You'd be amazed how much easier it is to get around this way."

  The lunk behind us had become distracted by Delilah's -- Saturday was salt-lick night -- and the guys were lined up eighty deep. Van Meter was a marketing genius.

  "Jack." She was staring at me, her pixelated eyes a little too bright, too perfect.

  "What?"

  We surged toward the door. "You. Your body."

  I held up my arm and saw a black shirt rolled up to the forearm, a curved-face Bulova like the one I left on Monk's sofa -- a nice touch, watches, an extra forty lines of code but worth it. No manicure. No admiral stripes. So far, so good.

  We'd come to the doorway and the sky opened around us, a big bowl of blue-green perfection. The club lights pulsed, a happy hour that never ended. The little man that was Rita steered us away from the crowd, over to the corner of Sector Four, the old University wedge. The Physics building was at the point, a mirror-finish monolith of black lacquer. When I stared into the wall, the person I'd least expected stared back.

  Daedalus. Me.

  "Where?" I asked. The reflection stood frozen, as if stuck out of time: thin cheekbones, the angle of the jaw, forehead sweeping back to yellow-black bumblebee hair, eyes that knew no wrinkles and a mouth not yet hammered into a perpetual frown. A reflection I once saw more frequently than any in glass, a Jack Denys ten years gone.

  "You kept copies," Monk mumbled. "I slipped one into my tailor kit before the datacops cleaned out your room."