Shadowplay

by Nigel Findley

  When Falcon had first heard about it, the idea really captured his imagination. He’d been living in Purity, a particularly unpleasant part of the Redmond Barrens, dreaming of someday leaving the plex and slipping over the border into the Salish-Shidhe nation. Only then, he’d thought at the time, would he have any chance to follow the path.

  Then the concept of an urban vision quest had changed his mind. He knew the city; he was raised on its streets. Why should he risk a totally alien environment—the rural countryside of the S-S nation—when he could get what he wanted on familiar ground?

  It was a year now since he’d left home, moved the twenty kilometers or so from Purity to deepest, darkest downtown Seattle. A busy year, not all of it spent listening for the totems singing to him. He’d found a place to squat, he’d joined the First Nation gang of half-Amerinds . . . basically, he’d survived, no mean accomplishment.

  He hadn’t forgotten the vision quest, of course; he could never forget it. When he had free time he put it into research. He was no decker, but he knew enough about computers to access the major public datanets. (That put him a few steps ahead of most of his First Nation chummers, as did the fact that he could read the results the datanets gave him. Most of the First Nationers were illiterate.)

  He'd learned that, historically, many tribes had used drugs to sensitize them to the voices of the spirits. So he’d given that a shot. Energizers, speeders, ataractics, hypnotics . . . over the past year he’d tried most of the major types of drugs. They’d bent his brain the way they were supposed to—sometimes leaving him drenched with sweat, cramped and gasping on the floor of his doss—but they hadn’t opened his soul to the totems. After a particularly bad trip in which the rest of the gang had to physically restrain him from jumping into Elliot Bay, Falcon had decided that drugs were not the path for him.

  Fortunately, it was just about then that he'd found the book. A real book, with paper pages and a synthleather cover. Spiritual Traditions of the Northwestern and California Intermountain Tribes, by someone called H. T. Langland. (He’d never found out who Langland was or even if H. T. was a man or a woman.) The book had been for sale in a little talismonger’s store on Pike Street near the market. They wanted thirty-five nuyen for it, much more than Falcon could afford. But something about the title and the way the book felt in his hands convinced him it was important. So he boosted it, shoved it up under his jacket and just strolled out of the shop. (The talismonger didn’t need it or consider it important, he’d rationalized later, otherwise she wouldn’t have been selling it.)

  The book was heavy reading, full of long words and complex ideas. But Falcon worked at it and had finally come to understand. Langland—whoever he/she/it was— was a sociologist, and had studied how the tribes of the West Coast viewed the world, and their relationship with the spirits and the totems. There’d been a whole chapter on vision quests, which Falcon had read several times through.

  He’d been glad to learn that the city was a valid place for a vision quest, at least according to Langland. But knowing that didn’t help much in any practical way. The dreams still continued, the dreams where he sang and danced to the music of the totems, but he had yet to find his guide or hear the call when in a waking state.

  Slowly, carefully, he raised his head and looked out from under the dumpster lid. The street was empty except for a rat about the size of a malnourished beagle nosing through a pile of garbage near the mouth of the alley. No sign of the Disassemblers. The trolls were probably dragging themselves back to their normal turf, trying to forget about the Amerindian punk who’d made fools of them. With a grin, he reached up and pushed against the lid.

  It didn’t move. Sudden fear drove like an icicle through his heart. Had the hinges jammed? Or was there some kind of locking device he hadn’t noticed? Images of being trapped inside the dumpster until the truck came along to collect the garbage filled his mind. Collection was every two or three weeks in this part of the sprawl, and judging by the contents of this dumpster, Falcon figured it had been last emptied within the last few days.

  No, he ordered himself sharply, calm down. He shifted position, finding some more stable garbage to stand on. Again, he pushed against the underside of the lid. The garbage moved under him, throwing him off balance. He transferred his weight, threw everything he had into it. His back complained, and a lance of liquid pain shot through his ankle. He groaned, tears blurring his vision.

  But the dumpster lid moved. With a creaking of rusty hinges, it opened, slammed back against the building. Falcon vaulted over the side into the relatively fresh air of the narrow street, remembering at the last instant to take the landing on his uninjured ankle.

  He looked around him quickly. No sign of the Disassemblers. Hopefully, the trolls had given up on him and gone back to whatever it was they’d been doing. He breathed deeply, cleared the reek of garbage—and the funk of fear—from his lungs. He looked up at the sky. Framed by buildings, there was a patch of blackness studded with a handful of stars bright enough to shine through the filth in the air.

  And the moon was up, almost full. A perfect night for some of the magical rituals Falcon had read about in Langland’s book. He needed somewhere open, preferably a place close to untouched nature, but where would he find something like that in the midst of the sprawl? Luckily, he knew somewhere that might serve. Favoring his damaged ankle, he limped off.

  * * *

  The small park was one of several that surrounded the massive Renraku Arcology. Dominating the region that had once been Pioneer Square, the great truncated pyramid, with its thousands of silvery-green glass windows, loomed over Falcon, its weight oppressing him.

  During the day, the parks that surrounded the monolith—each a tiny copse of trees ringed by perfectly manicured grass—were “safe zones.” Watched over by Renraku’s gray-and-scarlet-clad security guards, they were places for the shaikujin who lived and worked in the arcology to stroll surrounded by something that resembled nature. By night, however, the security forces pulled back inside the walls and left the parks to the nocturnal denizens of Seattle.

  The park that Falcon chose was at the southernmost corner of the massive arcology, near Fourth Avenue. It was maybe a quarter of a city block in size. Not much, but among the trees at its center he could almost forget for a moment that he was in the midst of the sprawl. He squatted on the damp ground, looked up at the moon riding like a ghostly ship through the scattered clouds.

  Holding his hands out in front of him, palms down as though warming them over a nonexistent fire, he began to sing quietly. The words of his song came from Langland’s book, words in the tongue of the coastal Salish. Although he couldn’t speak the language, the book had thoughtfully provided an English translation, and it was this that ran through his mind. He was only guessing at the pronunciation, and the melody was one of his own creation. But maybe the totems won’t care, he thought. Only what’s in my heart, in my soul, should matter.

  Quietly he sang.

  Come to me, spirits of my ancestors,

  Dwellers in my dreams and in my soul.

  Come to me, guardians, defenders,

  Hear your children calling to you.

  Come to me, spirits of the land,

  Of the forest, and the mountains, and the waters,

  Come fill me with your never-ending song.

  He closed his eyes, let the words of his song resonate through the chambers of his mind. Let the melody carry away his pain, and the memories of the pursuit. Let his mind become placid, like the surface of a mountain lake untroubled by the wind.

  He didn’t know how long he sang. When he stopped, his mouth was dry, his voice hoarse. His knees were stiff and sore, and his injured ankle was throbbing agony. He opened his eyes.

  Nothing had changed. He was still in the small park, not in the land of the totems. He hadn’t heard the call of the spirits. He wasn’t a shaman, just a punk kid hustling to survive in the heart of the sprawl.

  He
looked up. The clouds had covered the moon, and a chill rain had begun to fall. He sighed.

  Stretching his legs, shaking his hands to return the circulation to his fingers. Falcon limped out of the park and vanished into the night.

  3

  2055 hours, November 12, 2053

  This place never changes, Sly thought. The Armadillo was a small, dark bar in the middle of Puyallup, usually filled with a young crowd. She looked around her. As usual, she and owner Theresa Smeland—tonight working behind the bar—were the oldest people there by a decade—or more, in Smeland’s case.

  Smeland caught her eye as Sly walked in the door. The Armadillo’s owner was an attractive, dark-haired woman of about forty, dressed tonight in a plain khaki jumpsuit. The lights over the bar reflected from the three chromelipped datajacks set into the woman’s temple.

  Sly smiled, nodded a greeting. She and Smeland used to be friends. Maybe not close, but better than acquaintances. At one time they’d also been comrades, fellow runners, but that was before . . . Just leave it as “before,” Sly told herself sternly, squelching the thought. As she and Theresa had one thing in common before, they had another thing in common now.

  Sly raised her hand, flipped it to indicate a small booth at the back of the bar. When Smeland had a moment, she’d stop by the booth with Sly’s regular drink to spend a few moments in conversation.

  Moving toward the rear of the room, Sly looked around. The Armadillo had little to distinguish it from any other watering hole in Puyallup, or anywhere else in the plex, for that matter. Low ceiling, well-worn composite-tile floor. Small tables and banquettes covered in frayed red terry cloth to sop up spilled drinks. Classic angst-rock issuing from cheesy speakers as background music—something by Jetblack, Sly noted. And a couple of old-tech trideo screens, which the patrons were more or less uniformly ignoring.

  The patrons were perhaps younger than the denizens of other, similar bars in the sprawl. And perhaps drinking a little less hard, as though conversation were more the focus than getting wasted on alcohol. Indicative, maybe, but not enough to really set The Armadillo apart from other drinking establishments.

  But then Sly let herself hear the hum of youthful conversation. That was what made The Armadillo what it was, and what made it one of her favorite places to hang. In other bars, the patrons would have been boasting of their conquests—sexual and otherwise—of the night before, yapping on about sports, arguing over politics, trying to score whatever was most on their minds at the moment. The Armadillo had some of that too, of course. But most of the conversation was about biz. A very special kind of biz.

  The Armadillo was one of the premier decker bars in the Seattle metroplex. Everybody there, including Sly herself, had at least one datajack installed in his or her cranium, and some had as many as four or five. (Just for show? Sly wondered. Or can they actually keep track of that many data channels at once?) Reinforced Anvil travel cases containing cyberdecks were everywhere—on tables, leaning against chair legs, or clutched protectively in laps. Most of the first-string and the up-and-comers hung at The Armadillo, called it their base of operations: the console jocks, the Matrix cowboys, the bit-bashers.

  For a moment, Sly let herself slip into reverie. It didn’t seem so long ago that she’d hung out at another bar like this. Not The Armadillo but its equivalent, the Novo Tengu in the Akihabara district of Tokyo. She remembered the earnest conversations and arguments—sometimes fueled by sake, but more often just by passion for the subject—about the arcana of the Matrix and the philosophy of cyberspace.

  Even now, even after having been “off-line” for more than five years, she still enjoyed listening to decker talk. Most of it was at the down-and-dirty, bits-under-the-fingernails level: techniques for dealing with the latest generations of ice, novel new hacks on old utilities, new ways to “juice” a cyberdeck to squeeze more performance out of it. The biz—in terms of both hardware and software, and with regard to the underlying theory—had advanced almost unbelievably. So much that a lot of the talk around her might as well have been in Elvish for all Sly could decipher of it.

  But deckers still wrestled with the same philosophical questions that had so intrigued her in Akihabara. Ghosts in the Matrix, those rare and strange constructs that seemed to have no relation to deckers or to normal computer system functions. What were they? Artificial intelligences—AIs—even though the corps claimed nobody had successfully created one? Or mutating viral codes that had “gotten smart” in some kind of electronic analog of biological evolution? Or maybe they were the personalities—the “souls”—of deckers who’d died in the Matrix?

  That’s what four elves were discussing at a table near the booth Sly had chosen. Keeping her eyes carefully averted, she eavesdropped hungrily.

  . . and what is it that’s ‘you' in the Matrix?” one was saying. Sly pegged him as the oldest, an “elder statesman” of perhaps twenty-three. “It’s your persona programs, right? And they’re running on your cyberdeck, right? So what happens when the ice crashes your deck? The persona programs stop running. And that’s it: there’s no more ‘you’ in there to be a ghost.”

  ”Unless the persona programs are still running somewhere else,” another suggested.”Like on another CPU in the system.” The first shook his head, about to argue, but the speaker kept on. “Or maybe it’s the ice that does it. You asked ‘who are you in the Matrix?' The answer’s the same, in or out of the Matrix. It’s your sensorium, the sum total of your experiences. Why couldn’t some black ice read your sensorium, kinda like reverse sim-sense? And then copy it somewhere in the system, while it’s killing your meat body? Your body’s gone, but your sensorium still exists. A ghost in the Matrix.”

  For the first time the third piped up. “No,” she said sharply, “your sensorium doesn’t still exist. It’s just a program emulating your sensorium. It’s not you, it’s software pretending to be you.”

  The fourth elf, silent, merely watched the conversation fly back and forth like a tennis ball.

  “Meaningless distinction,” the second pronounced. “Not to me,” the third shot back. “Anyway, I think the ’ghosts’ are just parallel-processing Boolean networks with medium bias.”

  “Or sparsely connected, or maybe highly canalized,” the first decker countered.

  And then they were off into the depths of arcana, talking about “the transition between chaos and order” and “attractors” and “state cycles,” concepts beyond Sly’s understanding. Mentally she detached herself from the conversation, smiling to herself. The words and details were more sophisticated, but the ideas were no different from the ones she and the other Tokyo deckers had been tossing around half a decade ago.

  Sly liked The Armadillo, but not just for the conversation. It was a comfortable atmosphere. There wasn’t the barely concealed undercurrent of violence she felt in most other bars, particularly those where gangers and samurai hung. Sure, sometimes people got too drunk at The Armadillo, started throwing their weight around. But the patrons were people who used their brains as weapons, not big fragging guns and cyber-enhanced muscles. If there was a fight—a rare occurrence—nobody got killed, or even badly hurt.

  More to the point, nobody hassled her. She knew that most of the patrons simply discounted her as a “null-head,” a non-decker . . . and something of a fossil. Those few, like Theresa Smeland, who knew Sly and her background also knew enough not to discuss it, not to raise disturbing ghosts. If she wanted to hang with deckers even though she didn’t punch deck herself anymore, that was wiz with them.

  Apart from the ambiance, Sly found The Armadillo a good place to do business. Over the last couple of years she’d arranged almost a dozen meets with various Johnsons at the bar. Just like tonight. She patted her pocket to reassure herself that the chip carriers and her pocket computer were still there. Checking her watch, she saw it was just shy of twenty-one hundred hours. Her current Mr. Johnson would be showing up any minute, hoping to collect the data she�
�d dredged up from the Yamatetsu data files on Maria Morgenstern.

  She frowned. Louis had finished his run three days before, but Johnson had said it just “wasn’t convenient” to meet sooner. That puzzled Sly, even worried her at a deeper level. Johnson had been really eager when he’d given her the contract. He wanted whatever dirt she could find on Morgenstern—not now, but right now. She’d gone to Louis immediately, even paid him a ten percent “rush” charge to do the run at once. The conclusion was obvious: Mr. Johnson had needed the dirt either to make a major move on Morgenstern or else to prevent the lady from doing the same to him.

  And now he was backing off on the importance of the whole thing. Did that mean things had changed, that getting a handle on Morgenstern just wasn’t significant any more? And if so, did it mean he was trying to get out of paying Sly for what he no longer needed?

  Sly looked up from the table, on which she’d been tracing complex geometrical shapes. Smeland was making her way through the crowd, carrying two pony glasses full of amber liquid. Sliding into the booth across from Sly, she set the glasses down in front of them.

  “Hoi, T. S.” Sly knew that for some reason Theresa hated her given name. “How’s it happening?”

  “Biz?” Smeland gestured vaguely around at the patrons, the bar. “Oh, it’s happening. Nothing much changes, y’know.” She smiled. “And you? How’re the shadows?”

  Sly shrugged, echoed Smeland’s words back to her with a grin. “Nothing much changes. Still looking for a way to get out of them, into the sunlight.”

  “Oh, I know, honey.” Smeland put her forearms on the table, leaned forward. “How’s the vacation fund coming? Almost there?”