The door opened wider, releasing a sound like multiple epileptic drummers trading chops. Trying not to let my smile slip, I gritted my teeth and stepped into the apartment.
Buddy was so quick in buttoning up behind me that she gave my shoulder a hefty clip with the door.
Then she busied herself locking the dozen or so fastenings that she'd unlocked to let me in. Her preoccupation gave me a chance to look her over.
She was a small woman, short and thin-boned. I knew she was in her early fifties, but she could have passed for at least twice that. When we'd first met, I thought she looked like someone on her deathbed, and she'd looked worse every time after that. Buddy had no muscle tone whatsoever, simply because she never did anything even vaguely physical. And the only -reason she wasn't a tub of lard was because she ate only when she remembered to ... which was rarely. The corpse-like pallor of her skin didn't help, either, but what else could be expected for someone who probably hadn't stepped out of the house in years?
The walking-dead look was completed by her costume, consisting of several meters of gray cloth wrapped sari-like around her form. Although this get-up looked like a burial shawl, I knew the gray fabric was actually ballistic cloth. Buddy's paranoia at work again. Her gray hair was chopped brutally short, and the entire right side of her head was depilated so that nothing got in the way of the three chrome datajacks in her temple.
The last lock secured, she glanced up at me with bright, bird-like eyes. Then she flashed me the lengthiest smile I've ever seen on her sharp face: a millisecond at least. I breathed easier, she had to be pretty near the top of her cycle. With that worry out of the way, other concerns flooded back, chief among them an intense aural discomfort.
"Hey, -Buddy!" I shouted over the background din. "Can you turn the drums down a notch?"
She scowled. "They are down," she snapped. But then she relented. From the recesses of her ballistic-cloth sari she pulled out a remote-control unit, and thumbed a key. The deranged, spastic percussion dropped in volume from painful to merely irritating. I knew enough not to ask again, this was as good as it was going to get.
I followed Buddy as she picked her way through the hallway and into the living room. The floor, like every other available horizontal surface, was covered with piles of printouts, chips in chipcases, experimental breadboard rigs spewing medusa-heads of optical fibers (and even, here and there, real-and-for-true metal wires), tools and instruments, and all the other drek you'd find in any electronics lab or gadget store. In the center of the room, in pride of place, was Buddy's baby: a custom Fairlight Excalibur cyberdeck. It was sitting on the floor, surrounded by a bewildering array of peripheral garbage wired into the deck in some totally incomprehensible way. With a fluidity that belied her appearance, Buddy dropped into a perfect lotus beside the deck, then turned to stare up at me, waiting.
I glanced around for a place to sit down, but Buddy seemed to hold to her old belief that furniture was redundant when you had floors. There was a small table and a single chair, but both were covered in junk.
The floor, then.
Even before I could begin to sit, Buddy scowled with impatience, reached over and shoved everything on the chair to the floor. I nodded my thanks and sat down.
"Well?" Buddy demanded. Even an "up" Buddy was an abrasive Buddy.
"Datasteal," I answered curtly. I knew the best way to deal with her, and had prepared my spiel on the driver over. "Avatar Security Technologies. I want you to crack into their work logs-"
"Avatar's Lone Star. Why them?"
"Did I ever mention someone called Lolita Yzerman?" Buddy shook her head. "She was"-I hesitated- "a friend. Now somebody's geeked her, I want to find out why."
"She was Avatar?" I nodded. "Tap work," Buddy pronounced. "Heard something she shouldn't."
Buddy may be strange, but she sure isn't dumb. Based on just one or two of my remarks, it took her something like two seconds to figure out what had cost me several minutes of skull-sweat. "You've got it," I said. "I want to find out what it was she shouldn't have heard. Can you do it?"
She just snorted at that. Of course she could do it. Paranoid or not, she had the same overblown ego of any decker worth the name. "Will you do it?"
She thought about that for a moment-a long time for Buddy. "Standard rates?"
I thought about my credit balance and sighed. "Standard rates."
She flashed me another millisecond smile. "Worth the nuyen," she announced. "You ride along."
"Sorry, Buddy," I reminded her. "No datajack, remember?"
She scowled again. "Still a coward?"
I smiled. "Still a coward."
"Doesn't matter. Picked up something just for you. Trode rig." She pointed to the high-tech junk piled around her Excalibur. "You can ride along, jack or no jack."
I looked askance, surprised that she'd actually gone out of her way to pick up the electrode net. It was more than likely a commercially available set-up intended for use by those who wanted the full experience of simsense without having to spring for a datajack implant. I'd used one occasionally, and probably still had one for my old Atari simdeck buried in the back of the closet, but I'd never thought about using one to ride the Matrix. It made sense, though. The cyberdeck's internal systems were really just simsense circuitry designated to translate the quasi-reality of computer data into a multi-sensory symbolic form that could easily be understood.
I must have been thinking for too long-maybe a second or two. Even on her best day, Buddy's patience doesn't last that long. "Come on," she said. "See the Matrix."
And that, of course, was the fascination. Everywhere you turn, you read or hear something about the "virtual reality" that is the Matrix. But if you haven't got a datajack in your skull, you can never experience it directly, or so I'd thought. And if what they say is true, you're missing out on as rich an experience as if you'd been born without eyes. (In fact, the second-best decker I know is blind, and she'd be ecstatic if she never had to jack out. In the Matrix she can see.)
So the temptation was major. But so was the fear, cowardice, or call it what you will. I'd never had a datajack installed because I didn't like the idea of anyone messing with my mind. I wasn't sure I liked the idea any better if the messing came from the outside via electric currents. The brain's delicate. Induce a current in the wrong place and Dirk Montgomery spends the rest of his life believing he's an orange.
"Did you build the rig, Buddy?" I asked, trying to keep my voice casual.
Buddy shook her head. "Got it from VRI in Cheyenne," she shot back. "One of their latest. Beta test model."
VRI and Cheyenne set some of my fears to rest. The firm's one of the best in the world, and Cheyenne is the source of most of the cutting-edge decker technology going. But "beta test model" didn't inspire confidence. "They've got you looking for bugs?" I asked.
"No bugs," Buddy said with the kind of certainty usually associated with natural laws or stone tablets replete with commandments. "It's the best yet, but too expensive to be commercial. I'm showing them how to make it cheaper."
"So it's safe?"
She snorted. "I tried it," she said flatly. "Didn't slot me up any."
I looked into her death's-head face, saw the impatience building in her eyes, and sighed. I knew the signs. If I didn't go along with her, she'd just close up and I'd get no help from her. The choice facing me was easy to state, but harder to make. Did I risk getting my brain scrambled by Buddy's trade rig, or up and leave and wait for our mysterious X to blow that same brain out the back of my head? Decision, decisions...
It was the thought of actually running the Matrix that made up my mind, I think. I'm a sucker for new experiences. It'll probably kill me one day, but maybe this wasn't that day. I sighed again and nodded. "I'm in," I told her.
Buddy flashed me another millisecond smile, an approving one. I think Buddy likes me, at least as much as she's able to like anybody, and she obviously thought I'd made the right choice. She l
eaned over and scrabbled around in the pile of techno-drek beside her Excalibur. Within moments she pulled out something that looked like a crown of thorns with a few dozen hair-thin optic fibers trailing out of it. The contraption sported some straps and bands to hold it in the right place on the subject's (victim's) head, including a chin strap. Yeah, it was a beta test model, it had none of the ergonomics of current commercial rigs. Buddy held it carefully, almost with reverence, like it was the crown of the kingdom. She got up onto her knees and approached me, ready to place it on my head.
If I was going to back out, now was the time. Frag, of course I wanted to. But I kept my jaw clamped shut. Buddy gently set the rig in place on my head. It was like some horrible parody of a coronation. The tiny, thorn-like electrodes pricked my scalp, and the straps felt cold and alien against my skin as Buddy tightened them. The rig was a little heavier than a lightly armored helmet, and the balance was different, making me feel top-heavy. As I got used to the sensation of having this thing on my head, and struggled to quell the acidic churning in my stomach, Buddy settled herself back into full lotus, the soles of her scrawny feet toward the ceiling. She picked up the cyberdeck and settled it comfortably in her lap. Then she took the jack by the end of its optic fiber, and slipped it into one of the three sockets in her right temple. The jack settled home with a metallic snick that I found profoundly disturbing. Buddy's fingers flew across the keyboard, running some kind of diagnostic, I suppose.
After a few seconds that seemed like hours, she looked over at me. "Ready?" I didn't trust myself to speak, so I just nodded.
"Okay," she said, "Phase one." She hit a key.
Chapter 6.
And I was struck blind. Frag, what a freaky, terrifying sensation. I'd always imagined that blindness must be like an engulfing blackness, but this wasn't like that at all. Blackness is an attribute of something, blindness is nothing. I hated it, and I feared it. I heard a mewling sound, and realized it was my own voice.
"Stay frosty," Buddy told me, her voice as crystal clear and reassuring as I'd ever heard it. "That's just clearing the stage. Now it's show time." I heard the faint click of a key-press, and the reality of the Matrix burst into my brain.
How to describe the Matrix? Scientists call it a "consensual reality," a virtual reality. I'd experienced a diluted form of "virtual reality" during Lone Star training, anyone who's been in a flight simulator or even played some of the better trideo games has. I thought I was prepared for the Matrix. I thought it would be like a simulator, but more so: different in degree, but not in kind.
Wrong! My belief that a simulator had prepared me for the Matrix was as naive as the kid who thinks that seeing a soft-core movie lets him know what a romp in the hay would be like. In even the best simulator, you know deep down inside that you're in a simulator and not where your senses are saying you are. But in the Matrix, you're there, and you fragging well-know it. To hell with the fact that my meat body was still sitting in Buddy's doss. I-the I that matters, the I that usually inhabits that meat body-was in the Matrix, and that's all there was to it.
My first impression was of size. The Matrix is big. As big as a world, as big as a universe. There's a horizon, but it's a long was out, and it's an artifact of perspective, like the "vanishing point" of art and not of curvature, as in the "real" world. (In fact, the distance has the strangest sensation of non-linearity, if that makes any sense. It's like-and here I really feel the inadequacy of words-the further away something is, the faster distance increases. Like the Matrix is mapped onto some non-Euclidean space. Or maybe not.)
My second impression? The Matrix is beautiful! The pitch-black sky is crisscrossed by intermittent beams of light in more colors than have names, each looking solid as steel. The "ground" is black, too, with the same kind of network of intersecting lines. And scattered throughout the space between are big glowing icons that represent nodes within the Matrix. I could pick out the shapes of the ones nearby-a perfectly mirrored sphere, a ruby-red pyramid, an image of the Space Needle, a pagoda glaring in eye-piercing green-but the ones more distant were just specks of light. Toward the electron horizons, the discrete icons blurred together until they looked like an impressionist cityscape shining into a starless sky.
And that was when I realized exactly where I was. If the image of the Space Needle was to scale, I was way the frag up in that black sky, maybe a few thousand meters up, with nothing below but a dizzying fall to whatever ground there was. My first impulse was to look around for Buddy, and that's when I got my second major shock. I couldn't control my body (if I even had a body here, I certainly couldn't see it). My mind was sending out the orders to turn my head, but my angle of vision didn't move. It was as if I was paralyzed.
I'll freely admit it: I panicked. I called out, "Buddy!" and was only slightly reassured when I heard my own voice.
Then Buddy's voice sounded in my ears, as close and immediate as if she were standing right behind me. "Null perspiration, chummer," she said. "I'm here." There was something different about her voice, but at first I wasn't sure what. No matter what phase of her cycle Buddy was in, her voice always had an edge of tension. Not now. For the first time since I'd known her, Buddy sounded relaxed.
Good for her. I was far from relaxed. "I can't move," I almost shouted. "And where are you?"
She chuckled. (The Buddy I know does not chuckle.) "Stay frosty," she told me again. "Course you can't move. I've got the stick, you know what I mean? You're just a passenger. See?" to prove her point, my field of vision shifted as though I were turning my head from side to side, up and down. "And where am I? I'm here, and-if we're being precise-you're not. You're just kind of tapping into my senses. Got that?"
I didn't answer for a moment as I struggled to bend my mind around the concept. Then, out of the blue, I picked out an image that did the job for me. In Lone Star training I'd operated a surveillance drone, the kind usually designed to be run by riggers-another datajack connection-but the Star had manual-control systems as well. You put on a headset, complete with vid-screen "goggles" and stereo speakers, that connects you with the drone's "senses." As you drive it around with a little hand-held control until, you see and hear everything the drone does. That's basically the situation I had here, except the control unit was in Buddy's hands, not mine. I could live with that.
"Got that?" The repeated question had Buddy's familiar impatient edge to it. "Got it," I replied.
"Okay, so here we go." She chuckled again. "Hang onto your brain cells, and enjoy the ride."
It was like being strapped to the nose of a missile. We tipped over and accelerated straight downward at a speed that was absolutely ludicrous. Just as we were about to plow into the ground, we pulled up, then dived headfirst into a glowing light-beam. As the bright blue brilliance engulfed us, we accelerated even more. Though I knew my body was sitting, safe and sound, in Buddy's apartment, it felt as though the speed was tearing the breath from my lungs.
The speed run lasted only seconds before we burst out of the glowing data pipe. Immediately before us was a huge Matrix construct that I recognized instantly. It was the box-like Lone Star building, with the enormous five-pointed star on its side and its gold mirror finish reflecting all the lights of the electron world.
"We're here," Buddy informed me unnecessarily. "Welcome home," I muttered. We drifted closer to the Lone Star construct, and for the first time, I could see "my" body reflected in the gleaming surface of the star. It was really Buddy's body, of course, or more precisely the icon she'd chosen for herself. What I saw was a beautiful woman in her early twenties. Her body was slender, almost perfect, her expression warm and caring, her flowing hair the color of polished ebony. The woman was dressed in an elegant evening gown that glowed the brilliant green of laser light.
Was this how Buddy pictured herself? The idea was grotesque, ludicrous, until I realized how tragic it was. Of course this was how she saw herself. It was probably how she'd looked when young, when still a rising-s
tar researcher. And probably still did in her mind's eye. What about the walking-dead body the rest of the world saw? That was just a prison, chummer, a prison of flesh that young girl's got herself trapped, in. No wonder Buddy spend most of her time in the Matrix. It was the only place she could be herself.
The shining gold star opened in front of us like a curtain drawing back. I'd been too busy with my thoughts to see what Buddy had done. I mentally shook myself, forcing my attention back to what was going on around me. When we stepped through the wall, we came into a corridor lined with doors that seemed to stretch away to infinity. With the institutional gray of its walls, ceiling, and floor, it might have been a real hallway in a real office building except that the "doors" were actually barriers of shimmering light. We cruised down that hall at a comfortable walking speed. "Where are we?" I asked.
"The Avatar directory in Lone Star's datastore," Buddy said. "When stuff gets transferred from Avatar, this is where it ends up."
I wanted to look around nervously, but of course I couldn't. I knew I wasn't really there, yet the sense of being inside the Star's facilities was decidedly uncomfortable. "What about security?"
"We came in the back door," she explained. "There's heavy security on the front end, but once we're inside, it's only trivial drek."
"Why? That doesn't make sense."
"Sure it does," she said. "If you've got a really hot security system on your office door, are you going to load your desk drawers with alarms too?
Too much security degrades system responsiveness."
I knew I was distracting Buddy with my questions, but I couldn't let it go. "Then how did we get in here so easily?"
"Back door," she repeated, her tone impatient. "I know the chummer who did the security for this part of the system. I taught him all he knows, and he's an unimaginative little slot. Always uses the same tricks."
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