by Rusty Coats
The dragon pointed brass teeth toward the surface, poised to plunge, while I mumbled, "I killed you. I killed you in Marigolde..."
"The key word, Jack," Rita said, chewing into the mike, "is now."
"Killed you." Remembering the flames consuming Janak’s body. "Killed you."
"Okay, doll," Rita said, cracking her knuckles in the data glove. "I'm going to pull you into the Leap from here. Just don't get sore if it's a bumpy ride."
The dragon released its invisible perch and fell toward us like a knife.
Beside me, Monk said: "I can't patch out, Jack. I'm in a Neuromantic suit and we're all locked up. It's one of the differences in their suits. They've made other changes -- they scrapped life-level recognition, along with tactile enhancers and cosmetics. But this is the main one. We can't unplug until the dragon is finished. "
That brought me out of the memory of Janak's fiery sprint. "What?"
"Locked up," he repeated. "Security feature on the Neuromantic scubasuits."
I grabbed his arm. "And you didn't remove it?"
He snapped his arm away from me, nostrils flaring. "It woulda corrupted the whole tactile system. Same with the life-level override. Give me some credit, boy."
Rita said: "That means only you can unplug, Jack."
My muscles knotted. The prototype suit made me immune to the Neuromantic security programs, but without a second-tier key, I'd triggered a silent alarm and drawn the dragon. In doing it, I'd blown Monk's cover. And that's a privacy hack's blackest sin.
"So," I breathed, "I get out and Monk dies."
The dragon inhaled, and the rush of digital air into the lizard -- programmed just for show -- sounded like the roar of outer space.
"Get in there," I said, hiking a thumb toward Central Station, "and hide. As long as you can. I'll draw him away."
Flame trickled from the dragon's lips like boiling water.
Rita's voice itched my ear. "What are you going to do?"
Monk paused to argue and I shoved him through the gate. His body somersaulted out of the dragon's path and I sprinted into the empty streets of Avalon.
"I'm going to run."
The dragon watched Monk tumble under the canopy, then turned to chase me up the black-chrome street. I felt Monk's prototype suit tighten around my thighs. Avalon's slick pavement slapped my feet as I ran from Janak's prehistoric alter-ego.
"Like, slalom or something, Jack." Rita coached. "A straight line's an easy target."
I was too breathless to remind her that the shortest distance between two points – specifically, between Central Station and the hardhat tunnel in the Plaza of Light -- was a straight line. But not too breathless to avoid the dragon's eyes. Inside those irises was a neural tapeworm I’d seen kill McFee and the Digerati.
"You can't outrun it, Jack," Rita said. "It's gaining too fast. You'll have to unplug."
"Not yet."
I took the steps to the Plaza of Light three at a time, staring at the empty space beside the Temple of the Human Spirit. In their rush to occupy the City of Light, the Neuromantics had overlooked the WPA uplink depots and Campus keys that allowed me to steal into Avalon while the rest of the world believed it had been gutted. With a dragon on my back, I was down to my last poker chips, and I bet them all on the hunch that the technocrats had also forgotten to seal the hardhat tunnels.
Behind me, the dragon inhaled and the sound vibrated Merlin's core. A goggle subscreen showed two blips moving up a grid, predator and prey. Rita screamed for me to unplug as I ran across the empty Plaza toward the port and called:
"Hardhat Eight-six-oh-four Delta. Run."
The dragon roared a glacier-blue blast of flame. I saw its reflection descending in the mirrored Temple wall, curling past the skyscrapers while I waited for the code to unlock the hardhat tunnel and shoot my digital body across town.
And waited.
"Jack!"
The dragon's blast was like a board breaking across my back and sent me tumbling into the Temple wall. I yelled again at the empty air, "Hardhat Eight-six-oh-four Delta! Run!"
But the code just echoed against a solid wall, unlocking nothing.
The flames splashed across the Plaza of Light. I jammed my eyes shut, knowing that if I opened them, the neural tapeworm would slither through my optic nerve. And the hardhat tunnel stayed locked.
I yelled at Rita to tell me when it was safe to open my eyes. Seconds ticked by as I huddled by the slick wall. Finally, she said, “OK."
The dragon's neck already had curved for descent. I stood against the Temple wall and ground my fingers into fists. Janak, trained by the Southpaw Organization for guerilla warfare, knew I’d try those old WPA zip-holes, so he would have removed them first. The prey tries to escape, finds its passage destroyed, then helplessly meets its doom. I had run like prey from the dragon, just as Janak had known I would.
Making me forget, for a moment, that I'd returned to Avalon as the predator.
"He's coming back," Rita said, and not too optimistically. "Try to find shelter."
I remembered the disc I'd taken from New Hope, before I knew Cassady was a Neuromantic. Dictating McFee’s autopsy, Freud explained that the tapeworm required direct contact with the optic nerve to work its dark magic. Which meant I could stand here all day while the dragon unloaded its lungs -- as long as I didn't open my eyes.
The dragon descended lazily and slowed as it approached until it was hovering above the Plaza of Light. I clamped my eyes shut, braced for the blast.
"Hello, Jack."
Janak’s voice sounded like carbon, the vocal cords charred from the flames he'd inhaled. The exploding gas tank had burnt him inside and out, but not bad enough to keep him from suiting up to hunt me one last time. A diligent dog, that Janak.
"Hello, Wells," I said. "You're sounding froggy. What's the problem?"
"An old nuisance," he said. "The fight is over, soldier. Your side lost."
The dragon opened its mouth again and a gust of flame shot out. I heard its roar and then felt it slam against my head, chest and thighs, a full-body blast that pinned me to the chrome Temple wall. But I kept my eyes tight and chuckled into the flames.
"Well, there’s the movement and the rebellion. The rebellion’s the only place I feel comfortable."
"But the movement believes in this city’s potential," Janak said. "Its promise. You’d never find the movement dying in an empty street for a lost cause."
"My favorite cause."
"That is why the future sold your seat, Jack." He laughed as flames pounded my ears. "Because you believed paradise should be given away."
"That's a load of crap." Eyes tight. Eyes tight. "The hardhats who built this city didn't kill themselves just so they could hand out passes like birdseed. They built Avalon as something to aspire to. Something to make people forget the lousy Depression, nuclear scabs covering Asia and the Middle East, the Z-10 pandemic and the everything else about this horror show. Something wonderful."
"Isn't it that now? That and more?"
I shook my head in the firestorm. "Not even close."
The dragon gulped digital air and the flames doubled, thrashing me. Then, to add spice to the flames, Janak said, "Your mother knew, From the moment she and Cassady succeeded in uploading four hundred gigabytes of her consciousness, she knew Avalon's true potential."
I rolled across the face of the Temple like an ornery tumbleweed.
"Eternal life, Jack," Janak snarled. "Avalon isn't an Athens. It's an Olympus."
The flames were frenzied now, as if Janak was squeezing the neural tapeworm’s trigger so tightly that it was beginning to bend under the weight of his rage.
"I ... didn't ... know," I grunted into the flames. "you'd anointed ... yourselves."
And then I remembered one of Cassady's sermons from Echo Wharf. "We are on the verge of programming our own afterlife," he'd said. "We've nearly built Heaven, a bandwidth city that will survive longer than steel or concrete, but we
haven't learned to be angels. We need clumsy suits and uplink stations to reach our promised land. But if we can archive our souls in Merlin's web, we will steal God's crown."
"Who else, Jack?" Janak yelled. "Soon we'll fulfill our destiny. Dr. Cassady will lead us into eternity, and then we’ll be gods. That is the true potential of Avalon."
Monk was right. They still didn't have the code to archive consciousness, the one Gretchen had worn around her neck. My mother’s last hope had survived. Yet they had Avalon. And with the full attention of the Tomorrow Crusade, it would only be a matter of time. Justice was that fickle.
"Ah! Dr. Cassady has just communicated that he has your companion in custody. The doctor should make short work of him." The flames rose higher, licking at my eyelids. "As a betting man, I'll wager Dr. Cassady outlives you by a millennia."
Cassady had led the Neuromantics to steal Avalon under the guise of a phony plague, just so he could become a sentient immortal in the datastream. And now he had Monk by the short hairs. And I was shading my eyes while Janak pummeled me with the source code of a killer, batting my body against the mirror-finish Temple wall. A wall programmed to reflect code, since digital bodies in Avalon were, to Merlin, bundles of zeroes and ones. And that meant reflecting all code -- an online body, a skyscraper.
A tapeworm.
I patted the Temple wall. "I'll take that bet."
I kept Mohican in the datasuit's Options file, and that made it risky. To key the hybrid encryption code, I'd have to open my eyes and toggle the infrared sensors in the goggles. And that would mean risking eye-contact with the dragon.
With my eyelids still tight, I practiced the movement of my pupils. Up to the Chooser dot on the black perimeter, open the Options file, hold my stare on Mohican long enough to boot the program and then say, "Run." Maybe three seconds worth of eye muscle. But three seconds full of chances to die.
The flames beat against my chest and I held out my arms, stoking Janak's wrath. I turned my face into his fiery stream and called out, “Hey, Wells.”
And opened my eyes.
The world was a white-hot cloudbank of flames that turned every architectural feature of Avalon inside-out, negatives where positives once stood. "Yes, soldier?"
My pupils were on the Chooser, waiting for the infrareds to track my command. The infrared felt lazy, and I worried that Janak's blast had shorted out the goggles. Worried that now that my eyes were open, I wouldn't have the will to close them again.
As the crimson eyes teased, begging for a glance.
"Remember Marigolde? Before you took your shot?"
The infrareds heaved to life, acknowledging my command. The Options window opened, carving a hole in Avalon and replacing it with a dashboard. I bit my lip and scrolled -- slowly, Christ, the infrareds were drunk -- down to Mohican.
"Yes."
Flames tickled my peripheral vision as the neural tapeworm lifted its skirt.
Just a taste. For a full slice, flash us with those jade-green eyes ...
"And I said, 'Here there be dragons' and you said --"
"I said," he gloated as the infrareds toggled Mohican, "'not anymore.'"
I grinned into the flames and said, "Run."
Mohican flashed off the dashboard and launched into the suit's operational systems. The Options bar disappeared from the screen and I found myself staring directly into the dragon's eyes.
I tried to pull my pupils away, but found them locked, as if Janak had wrapped a cable around my retinas and was now beginning to hoist me into his dragon's soul.
Yes. See? See how delicious?
Mohican spread through my digital veins like a transfusion. And I tried again to yank my eyes away -- So delicious! -- but found them falling into a vortex so powerful I was surprised the buildings hadn't been ripped out of their high-res foundations. And my head began to shudder, the seams of my skull threatening divorce.
Rita and Janak were both screaming something – delicious -- when I felt Mohican kick. Like a baby spanked for the first time, it kicked. And screamed to life.
Instantly, the hooks in my eyes weren't as sharp, the firegusts against my chest not as tropical. And now the storm was passing through me as Mohican coursed through my veins and turned my body into a ghost. Revealing a wall of mirrors.
Reflecting a deadly source code and sending it into the eyes of a dragon.
"Wait."
Janak's voice came an instant before the dragon's emerald neck snapped like a whip. And as Mohican turned the last of my body into vapor, the tapeworm nailed the dragon to the turquoise sky.
The reflecting wall had turned the firing beacons of the dragon's pupils into magnetic poles, unable to break the current of code screaming back through the lens. Janak was locked in a deadly loop. Above me, the dragon spasmed, as if caught in the arc of a stun-rifle. Shaking and spitting, its wings slapped digital air as its body fell.
Its lavender wings crumpled as the dragon's body screamed toward the Plaza of Light. The garnet eyes offered only a dusky glow.
I knew Janak was dead before the high-res wad of programming slammed into the obsidian sidewalk. Knew it before the dragon -- the most beautiful piece of online design work I'd ever seen -- detonated in a spray of pixels across the Temple, its files corrupted all the way back to the reptile brain driving its pilot. And even though I knew, I still called out, hoping I could catch Janak's ear before he left this life.
"'Not anymore,' you said." My body cloaked, no one but Rita could hear. But I yelled anyway, as pieces of the dragon's body fell like confetti. "'Not anymore.'
"And damn, Janak. Damned if you weren't right."
AVALON XXXI: Hocus Pocus
The technicolor shrapnel faded behind me as Merlin terminated the connection with Janak's corpse. I ran along the Avenue of Intellectual Pioneers until the Library's pearlescent sphere loomed above the horizon. I stared at Turnquist's crystal ball of frontier architecture, wondering how many treasures had escaped Wrecking Ball's wrath. But mostly, as the sphere grew closer, I wondered if, like so many others killed by programmer's disease or Snap overdoses, the virtual bodies of my parents still haunted Avalon, their ivory husks frozen on the digital longitude where they'd died. That nightmare had soured me into a sworn celibacy of the virtual city, a celibacy I'd abandoned only to find myself, now, running straight into the graveyard.
"If we can find out where Monk's patched in," Rita said, "I might be able to override his suit's security and hack him out. But not without pegging his uplink depot."
The Neuromantics were still hidden behind the virtual doors as I sprinted across the anodized-red patio surrounding the Library. The convex wall rose over me, swelling until the sphere's milky skin blocked the turquoise sky.
In the center of the Library opening stood Dr. Paul Cassady's virtual body, his black uniform decorated with the chevrons of Neuromantic nobility and his muscles swollen from an overactive programming ego. One arm hung at his side. The other held Monk by the throat like a lightning rod.
"That's twice," he sighed, "you've killed my best Southpaw."
Monk kicked the two full-length legs he possessed only in Avalon while his hands grappled with Cassady. And I remembered what Monk had said about Neuromantic suits. They'd removed the safety override in the life-level programming. If Cassady strangled Monk to death, there wouldn't be anything virtual about it.
"That's twice," I panted, "he had it coming."
Cassady stroked his silver hair. "I'm curious to know your impressions, Jack. Seeing Avalon in full glory must be a dream come true for you."
"Sorry, Freud. It’s a little hard to look past all the mass murder to appreciate the architecture.”
"Too true. It's a bloody road we leave behind us. A tragic waste of talent and an unfortunate loss of life. But then, no one said evolution is painless."
"I might need a Neuromantic pamphlet to understand how faking a plague helped purify our gene pool. I’m sure you have one handy."
&nbs
p; His eyebrows cocked, regarding me, then casually switched Monk's neck to his left hand. "The last Denys who told me like that tried to expose my agenda. And she quite nearly succeeded. If Janak hadn’t killed his entrusted Surgeon General, your mother's testimony to the United Nations would have sunk us."
"And saved millions of lives."
"It would have destroyed the voyage of our consciousness to a post-molecular level," he lectured. "It would have crippled us before we could take our first timid steps toward a future beyond the limits of mortality."
For once I wished I could spit in Avalon. "This isn’t Echo Wharf, Freud. And I’m not the tithing type. So save your sermons, huh?"
He shook his head. The twisted cable of his ponytail whipped perfect angles. "You never fully appreciated this place, Jack. Avalon fulfills a subconscious prophecy as old as the first mud bricks of civilization. 'City of Wonder, City of Light.' We wrote that on the digital gateways, but I doubt many hardhats realized Avalon has been mankind's dream since our dawn. Olympus. Canaan. Valhalla. This is the utopia we sought when we climbed out of the trees and into the caves, from the caves to the fields, from the fields to the cities. This is an architectural duplicate of what every religion constructs on the other side of the grave. Plato spoke of this place. And Christ. Yet no one -- no one -- ever had Eden in his grasp. Until now. I could not let that slip through my fingertips."
I stepped into the great lobby at the end of the portal. The Library was designed according to Jann Turnquist's concept of architectural eternity, the only building in Avalon built in open defiance of physical laws. The labyrinth spiraled forever, creating digital matter as needed and branching through an interconnected web of oral histories and archaeological artifacts, linked like old hypertext.
"What's your death toll today, Doc?" I asked. "Three million? Six? How many billion neurotransmitters did you burn out with those junkie bracelets?"
"If your goal is to confront me with my crimes in hopes that I repent," he sneered, "you have led a wasted life. I regret nothing. The intelligent Construction workers joined us after Prohibition. The others were sacrificed without malice."