by Rusty Coats
The material was cold against my skin, but warmed up as the interwoven material constricted around my body. The silky gloves made data gloves feel like frozen mittens.
"First, they've wiped all the old access codes. All my daemons bounced, like there wasn't anything at the other end." She jerked the suit’s shoulders into place. "It's a nice trick. Even if you made it across the Leap, you'd find nothing but an endless asteroid belt of Flux. Merlin doesn't recognize you as a viable entity, so he treats you like a virus. You could skid along the surface of the Leap for days and never see anything but static -- the same thing you'd find if the Neuromantics destroyed the place."
I felt the audio coils clap against my ears. "I'm waiting you to say, 'But.'"
"But," she said, grinning orange Cogni-Juice lips, "they overlooked the same thing they overlooked when it came to these uplink depots. They cauterized the Digerati accounts, from hooker log-ons to Sysop prefixes. But they left the past wide open."
Exhaustion tugged at her temples, but her pewter eyes were full of fire. "Campus accounts, Jack," she said. "Outdated, archaic, complicated Campus accounts -- they still work. There's almost ten years worth of code history burying those things, everything that happened since the Sysops took control, so much data in Merlin's buffers you could drown in it. But under all that are the old pass keys. Baxter knew they were there. So did the other Sysops. But they never deleted them because, God, I don't know, maybe for the same reason certain convicts keep old encryption programs."
I remembered the accounts. WPA hardhats got a fresh one every week, a sixty-eight-line handshake program that slipped you into the Construction zone. Nasty things. The cantankerous keys were a common gripe at Echo Wharf. The Digerati replaced them when Avalon became a pay-and-play destination, using the credit files on ID-ROMs as account keys. Much simpler. Definitely more profitable. Most folks said good riddance to the old codes. Everyone but a bunch of sentimental Sysops.
"Christ," I said. A kid's first hack on Campus was to break someone else's key. Nothing fun about it, just random digit associations, like putting together a puzzle of jigsaw pieces, all painted black. "I hated those things."
"Don't be such a grump. I thought they were quaint."
"You would."
"Baxter talked about scrubbing the Campus accounts, but couldn't bring himself to do it," she said, still grinning. "So, they just sat in Merlin's buffers. And now --"
"They're forgotten. Just like these places."
"Exactly."
Rita took my palmtop and slotted the ROM that contained my online identity and the source code for Mohican. She tapped in a sixty-eight line skeleton key and said, "This will act like a Trojan Horse. After you pop through the Leap, this Campus key should unlock the door. Once you're inside --"
"I trigger Mohican and Merlin forgets me. And what if the key doesn't work?"
"We keep hacking 'til it fits," she said. "Unless you're too old for that."
I plugged the fiber-optic jacks into the skinsuit’s neck prongs, then hit the Lift button on the beaker winch and the bungee lifted me off the floor. I pulled down the goggles and fired up the infrareds until the goggles flashed: STATUS: STANDBY.
"When I'm too old to hack," I said, "kill me."
"Do you want a trial run?" Rita asked. The goggle resolution needed a tune-up. Rita had orange skin and cobalt hair. "Monk said he hadn't worked out all the bugs."
"No. Just get me in there."
Rita draped a filament headset over her ears and blew into the mike. It came out in my ear. "Once I launch you in, I'll watch you through my cheaters, but you'll lose video with me. The camera uplink in this Mensa is shot."
I opened the Options window and scrolled down the chooser bar, past the icons for my online identity and Mohican. The suit was reading them from the palmtop clipped to my waist; my flight log would record directly to the optic drive of the Mensa. I scanned the two programs to make sure they'd spin in the prototype suit. Both came up clear.
"Let's do it."
She strapped the data glove to her wrist, held the sensor-studded fingerpads to her lips and blew me a kiss. But it was a bittersweet bon voyage; the hollows beneath her gray eyes were as blue as new bruises. She looked away to adjust the cheaters.
"Rita," I called. "What is it?"
She shrugged and drummed her fingers in the air. The Mensa responded, humming as the beaker lights flared. STATUS: ACTIVE flashed across my goggles.
"Come on. Something's got you jumpy. I want to know before I go in."
Her eyes moved over me delicately, as if she was afraid her stare would chip my paint. "They've already gotten away with it."
The skinsuit had warmed to body temperature, so I couldn't tell where my skin ended and the suit began. I said, "I know."
"Do you? Even if you uploaded the disc to every billboard in the country, who would listen? It's been a war, Jack. And right now the rest of the world doesn't care who wins or loses. They just want it over." She stared at the pale holographic sun. "It's a lousy piece of digital real estate. And if you jack in expecting to bring it back the way it was before Prohibition, you're just setting yourself up. I can't watch you do that."
"Rita." Through the goggles, I saw her glance up. "The Neuromantics ruined thousands of WPA hardhats and killed millions of people, all because they wanted Avalon. Maybe the United Nations knew the truth years ago. At this point, I don't care."
Her eyebrows pinched together. "Then why?"
"Because Van Meter was right when he hired me. I'm the last private eye, the only privacy hack left. And I'll haunt Avalon as long as I live. It belongs to me.” I triggered the goggles and the world went white. “Now send me home."
The binary traffic roared as my body catapulted into the blinding storm of the Leap. Matter to energy to digital matte, transforming me into a body of data, exchanging the A's and D's of DNA for the 0's and 1's of binary.
"Jack!" Rita called. "I'm slotting!"
The Leap stuttered and I splashed into the white pixels of Avalon's shore as Rita loaded the sixty-eight-line Campus key. The code disappeared into the vortex and the Leap flared white-hot. I spun, and for a moment I thought the code had bounced off the keyhole. But then there was a tug at my stomach and then I was flying into the vortex.
At the bottom of the whirlpool stood the stainless-steel door, its motto blazing --
AVALON
City of Wonder, City of Light
In Knowledge, In Community
In Hope
-- and the door was already pulsing with the heartbeat of acceptance.
There was another tug as the door dissolved, Merlin's first handshake before he could jet my digital body downtown. In transit, I keyed the infrared sensor in the goggles, scrolled down the Options dashboard and highlighted Mohican and said: "Run."
The obsidian streets shimmered as the grid took shape and the skyline of Avalon rose from the gray-black nothingness, burning chrome across my eyes. And as the familiar rise of skyscrapers appeared -- the Hall of Nations, with its cantilevered disc of offices rotating above a thin granite stem; the three streamlined fins of the University and beside it, the Library's translucent pearl -- Mohican worked its magic and my digital body became fainter, unraveling, until it disappeared.
"You still there, Rita?"
She answered from a blank subscreen: "I told you it would work."
I was standing at Central Station, where twin anodized-blue coils traded cosmetic jolts of electricity. I told Rita I'd never doubted her as the city finished its miracle of creation. And then my voice cracked and fell in silent pieces.
Avalon had changed.
"Rita," I said, gawking at the incredible lines and edges. The lacquered steel facades and the black-mirror windows. "Do you see this?"
She answered with silence. Then: "God."
I walked drunkenly into the street. "No way they did this in two weeks."
A burst of static. Then: "Or two months."
People filed out of
Central Station, walking past me and through me, but I barely noticed their identical black jumpsuits. Because I was standing in the middle of the street and had run out of excuses for what had happened.
They had finished it.
The Neuromantics had finished building Avalon.
The Hall of Nations, once missing so much programming that offices floated sixty stories above the grid without walls or floors, offered nothing short of Jann Turnquist's dreams. The Parthenon's marble walls stood where two weeks ago there had been only a web of pre-Construction survey stripes. The spire designed to accompany the Library's sphere stood where Danny Marrs had tacked billboards for Midnight Erotica. The Opera Hall had been stripped of teaser screens Van Meter erected to draw crowds to his live-sex shows, restored to streamlined beauty. The half-wagon wheel city, once with as many unfinished skyscrapers as the WPA had unkept promises, was no longer trapped between Construction and Entropy. Entropy lost. They had finished it.
"All those times," Rita said, "I thought Merlin was hallucinating. The Palms burned down, the tactile programs chewed themselves to pieces and the soundtracks were warped. But Merlin kept seeing activity, almost as if the place was haunted."
I turned toward the Temple of the Human Spirit shining from the Plaza of Light, nodding stupidly. "They must have been working on this since day one of Prohibition."
"Right under our noses."
I stepped through the bodies of pedestrians. "Or over your head."
Another burst of people arrived, strutting past in Neuromantic jumpsuits, and I felt another bullet fall into the chamber. The black Crusader uniforms -- those unisex body suits covering them from neck to ankle while they marched toward utopia -- were datasuits. From the start, every Neuromantic was wired for immersion, even while they burned down the speakeasies. So, obvious. So well concealed.
"No wonder Van Meter wanted to cut a deal," Rita said.
"Burning out the Digerati must have been for appearances. The Neuromantics already ran the city -- only at access levels so high even the Digerati couldn’t see them."
Avalon wasn't a program you could erase with a virus. It existed even beyond the computational limits of Merlin, a destination that always would honor its namesake, because some would find Avalon and live within its walls, but most would call it a myth.
"My God," Rita breathed. "It's the most beautiful place I've ever seen."
"It was supposed to be."
I wandered the streets, marveling at finished architecture and the Neuromantics bustling past. But after walking the entire protractor's arc of the city, I returned to the sputtering coils of Central Station and found one face that didn't belong in a monkey suit.
Monk was posing as a techno-janitor in the promised land. He'd opened a huge window in the air to reveal the system's diagnostics interface, and busied himself moving icons on the screen. It looked good, but accomplished nothing. Digitally speaking, Monk was shuffling cards.
But under Mohican, he couldn't see me. And without the coordinates for where he'd patched in, I couldn't send him a subverbal message. I'd found him, but I couldn't do anything -- unless I unplugged Mohican and risked phasing in.
I cracked my knuckles and told Rita, "If you've got any brilliant ideas, chirp up."
The audio coils hissed as Rita keyed the mike. "That depends. If they trace your data stream back here, do you feel like running through the tunnels in that datasuit?"
I shrugged. "Guess I'd have to."
The static came back. "Then change your clothes and phase in."
I called up the Cosmetics subprogram and traded my charcoal suit for a Neuromantic uniform, using a snapshot program to steal the design from a pedestrian. When I was done, the preview showed me from the back in the clothes of my enemy.
"God," Rita said. "You know how you look? You --"
"The last thing I need is to know how I look."
Rita snickered while I put the final touches on the Neuromantic Jack Denys. Then I uploaded the image to a standby buffer and told Rita to get serious.
"Think about what you're doing," she said. "And tell me who's not being serious."
I keyed the infrared sensors on the goggle dashboard. Then I ducked behind the base of a Tesla coil, highlighted Mohican on the subscreen and said, "End program."
Rita stopped laughing.
I phased in slowly, as if my body were emerging in a shuffle of exposures, the air mutating into flesh frame by frame. Click-click-click, solid lines and varied hues replaced the lumpy gray blob that had invisibly carried me through the city. Click-click-click, bright honey-brown hair grew over my temples and jade eyes emerged from empty sockets.
The subscreen flashed: Mohican disengaged.
I held my breath, waiting for the squeal of an intruder alarm or the tendrils of a trap. The Neuromantics had locked the doors to keep people like me out, but good security systems don't put all their faith in padlocks. They save some for a guard dog.
When none came, I stepped out from behind the coil, into the flow of Crusaders. Monk was still shuffling transport codes on the diagnostics screen and didn't see me coming. I leaned in and said, "Got a cigarette, Mack?"
He turned slowly, like he expected me to sucker-punch him. But when his eyes hit mine, he smiled. "Fresh out." He patted his pockets. "Left my last pack for a friend."
He held the grin, but now his hands were working, sly fingers curling and palms cupping, like leaves tumbling against his flat online belly. I stared into his high-res eyes, but followed his fingers with my peripheral vision. Monk repeated the sequence three times before I recognized the swift jerks of a sign-language dialect called Audubon, used by Peruvian eco-warriors a half-century ago.
Unsafe, his hands said. Conversations monitored.
I kept my hand low, as if my suit itched, and flashed: I follow.
He nodded and said, "This zip station is givin' me fits. Can ya help?"
While his hands said: About time you got here.
"Sure." Trouble, Marigolde. Found Gretchen, found Mother's code for archiving consciousness. Janak killed Council members, Sons of David falling apart. But they didn't get Mother's code. Rita and I barely escaped.
My hands fumbled and I had to spell some words; Audubon was clunky code.
"Then help me reconfigure these codes." You know about Cassady?
Rita's voice broke in, brushing my ears. "Still clean, Jack. I'm not reading anything in your data stream."
I nodded thanks and moved across from Monk. The screen floated between us, a transparent sheet decorated with bright blocks of code, which we could hook and drag with our fingers. We used the screen as a decoy to flash hand-signals to each other.
I know he faked SDS, CNI. Sold us out for Neuromantics.
Monk pantomimed work on the Station codes. For starters. Anyone who doubted him wound up with a bracelet so he could keep his secret. Key is Ramona's code. Once Neuromantics learned consciousness could be uploaded, they started planning a takeover. But they still don't have that code, and they want it badly. Very badly.
"This thing is a mess. Who designed this?" How'd you find out?
"Some Digerati screw." Common knowledge here. Security high. They're jumpy.
I glanced behind him at the Neuromantics filing out of the Station. It looked like quitting time. Is it because they're a year ahead of schedule?
"Good riddance to 'em." More than one year. They're still vulnerable. With fusion bombs in Avalon's pipes, they could hold data highways hostage if someone blows their cover. Last-ditch stuff. They know they still might fail.
"Amen." Don't look vulnerable from outside. Rita used an old Campus key to get me here. Not many people know those things still exist. We --
"Wait," he said out loud, grabbing my arm. He glanced over his shoulder, panicky. His hands were almost too fast to follow. Where are you patching from?
I told him we'd patched from an abandoned WPA depot in the city. This came as a relief; Monk was doing the same. In f
act, his hands said Ferret and the other kids had fanned out across the city in search of old depots. Other kids were harvesting datasuit components from Neuromantic trash fires. So far, Monk's orphans had hunkered down in twenty depots and mapped another forty, digging in like revolutionaries. The depot I'd used was one they'd flagged for parts, since none of them could reprogram the Mensa. Rita chuckled; her stock just kept going up.
Monk bragged about how Ferret and the boys had stolen sixteen Neuromantic jumpsuits and that he'd modified one to fit his disfigured leg. I shrugged and signaled that he shouldn't have bothered, since his prototype suit worked so well.
His hands stopped moving and fell to his sides. He gave my costume a squint and flashed: Only Neuromantic suits work.
Rita's voice burst in. "Jack, I'm getting something here."
I shook my head. Obviously not. I'm here.
Monk ran his fingers over his scalp, then flashed: Neuromantic suits have two-tier passport keys. First opens Leap gate. Without second --
"Jack. I'm not making this up."
Rita's voice had distracted me from Monk's hands. Without second what?
I glanced behind him and realized that I'd been too busy staring at his nimble, brown hands to see that the flow of Neuromantics had stopped. Central Station was empty again, as if it had been padlocked from the outside. I turned around and saw that the streets were emptying. The Crusaders were scurrying for digital shelter.
Rita's moan filled my audio coils with dread. "Oh, God."
Monk noticed our sudden solitude and dropped his hands. He said, "Without the second, you're targeted for extermination."
Above us, the emerald mouth of a dragon roared.
AVALON XXX: Dragon Fall
The roar scattered the remaining Neuromantics like black leaves before a heavy wind. Digital doors slammed as Monk and I watched the dragon silhouetted above the skyscrapers, its long neck pointed toward the sky, but the lizard wasn't fooling anybody. I was its target, and Monk would probably join me in the last dance simply because he stood too close.
Rita's voice chirped in my audio coils. "Merlin's securities haven't launched a tracer, so we're safe in this depot as long as you unplug. Like, now."