“We’ve discussed that,” Sly said drily. She paused, getting her thoughts and her words in order. The next question was the key. “T.S.,” she began, “I—”
But Smeland cut her off. “I know what you’re asking,” she said sharply. “Am I willing to go in, right?”
“Not all the way.” Sly felt cold, numb. She clenched her hands into fists in her lap to stop them from shaking. “I need you to run cover for me, T.S., that’s all. I’ll do the main penetration. I just ...” She stopped for a moment, struggling to keep her voice calm and reasonable. “I just need an escort,” she went on, “somebody to watch my back. I don’t think I can do this alone.” Smeland was staring at her, hard. “I’m surprised you can contemplate even doing it at all,” she said honestly. So am I, thought Sly. “Will you help me, T.S.?”
Sly watched as the older woman stood up, drifted to the unidirectionally polarized window that looked down into the street. She wanted to press her case, add more reasons why Smeland should help her out. But, tough as it was to hold her tongue, she recognized that her silence was the most effective persuader she had. She glanced over to Modal and Falcon. Both were watching Theresa, but neither seemed to feel the urge to say anything.
“It’s got to be important, right?” Smeland spoke quietly, almost to herself, without turning away from the window. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be doing this.” She was quiet for another couple of minutes.
“All right,” she said at last. “I’ll run cap for you. To the Z-O SAN, and along the uplink into the habitat’s local system. But no further. Sly. I'll just lurk at the top of the uplink.” She shrugged. “Most of the heavy ice to be cut should be in the SAN, and on both ends of the uplink, right? I’ll get you through that. Once you’re in, there shouldn’t be much ice . . . unless you trigger the Gemeinschaft Bank’s security. And if you do that, all I could do would be die with you.”
Sly let a lungful of air hiss out, realizing only then that she’d been holding her breath. “That’s all I need, T.S.,” she reassured her friend.
“When do you want to do this?” Smeland asked.
Sly wanted to say she didn’t want to do it at all, but what she did say was, “As soon as you can do it, T.S.”
Theresa turned from the window. “How about now, then?” Her expression was grim. “I suppose you need a deck.”
* * *
Sly ran her fingers over the cyberdeck Smeland had loaned her. She recognized the enclosure—a simple, straightforward Radio Shack box. But the electronics, the actual guts . . . The Shack wouldn't have recognized any part of this. Custom work, all of it. And good custom work, too. Sly wondered if T.S. had built it.
Smeland had pulled her own deck out of its reinforced Anvil case, and had it across her lap as she sat, in halflotus, on the floor. It was a custom job, too, Sly could see. The enclosure had come from a Fairlight Excalibur, but she could tell from the key layout and the port configuration on the rear plate that Smeland had made enough modifications to turn the unit into a virtually new deck.
Both decks were connected to a splitter box, and from there to a telecom jack in the wall. Sly stared at that connection. That was the way to the Matrix. The thought tolled in her head like a great bell. The Matrix . . . the Matrix . . . the Matrix . . . She picked up the deck’s “skull-plug”—the small F-DIN-style connection designed to be inserted into the user’s datajack. So innocuous-looking, and yet so dangerous. Through that tiny connection, a decker could project her consciousness into cyberspace. But, also through that connection, any of the multiple threats of the Matrix could worm their way directly into her brain. Sly was shaking again.
Out the corner of her eye, she saw Smeland watching her. “Sure you want to do this?” Theresa asked.
Those were the words, but Sly knew the real question was: Are you capable of doing this, or are you going to fold on me when the going gets tough? “I’m up for it,” Sly said. Quickly, before she had time for second thoughts, she slipped the deck’s plug into her datajack, heard and felt it seat positively into the chrome-lipped socket.
She settled her fingers on the keys, powered the deck up. She felt the almost-subliminal tingle in her head as the link between brain and deck was energized. The link wasn’t active yet—no data was flowing, either way—but she could tell, without having to look at the deck’s small display, that it was positively established. She punched in a command for the deck to run a self-diagnostic, saw the columns of data superimpose themselves over her visual field. Unlike when she was actually in the Matrix, she could still see the “macro” world around her, but, being jacked in, the diagnostic data seemed more real, more immediate than the “real” world.
“Fast deck,” she remarked to Smeland. “Good response.”
“One of my proteges juiced it as a kind of practicum,” Smeland said. “My payment for training her was that I got to keep the deck afterward.”
Sly nodded. It was well-known in certain circles that Theresa Smeland frequently took promising young deckers under her wing, and taught them what they needed to know to survive in the biz. Shared with them the technical skill and the professional world view she’d developed over her long career. Some people claimed that Smeland had connections with organized crime, that she was a recruiter who turned over her most promising “proteges” to the Mafia dogs. But Sly had never seen the slightest bit of evidence to support this accusation.
“Do you want a practice run?” Smeland asked. “Just to get the old reflexes back? I've got a drek-hot Matrix simulation I can run on my telecom.”
“No,” Sly said, more sharply than she’d intended. “Let’s get going.” Before I lose my nerve, she didn’t add—and, judging by Theresa’s understanding expression, didn’t have to.
“Fine,” Smeland acknowledged. “Let’s do it.”
Sly took a deep breath, hit the Go key.
And the consensual hallucination that was the Matrix blossomed in her brain.
* * *
I’d forgotten how beautiful it is, was her first thought. So beautiful and so terrifying.
It was as if she hung in space, hundreds of meters above a sprawl of city lights. Above her was a blackness deeper than midnight, the blackness of infinite space. Here and there strange “stars” hung in the sky—system access nodes for the local telecommunications grid—and other constructs that blazed with the brilliant colors of lasers and neon. Below her, datalines—looking like crowded freeways turned into rivers of light-—crisscrossed a landscape made up of countless glowing images and constructs. Some loomed large—the neon-green Mitsuhama pagoda, the Aztechnology pyramid, the Fuchi star—while others were just dots of color from this apparent “altitude.” The tapestry of light faded off into the distance, eventually reaching a “vanishing point” on the electron horizon.
The icon that represented Theresa Smeland in the Matrix—a large, anthropomorphic armadillo with T.S.’s dark, intelligent eyes—blinked into existence beside her. For an instant, Sly wondered what her own icon looked like. Obviously not the familiar quicksilver dragon, the shape she had formerly used to run the Matrix. Now her icon would be whatever Smeland’s protege had programmed into the deck’s master persona control program—its MPCP. Well, it didn’t really matter anyway. What a decker’s icon looked like didn’t make any difference to his or her performance—except, perhaps, psychologically.
“Ready to go?” It was Smeland’s voice, but sounding flat and anechoic. Sly knew that T.S. was sending her words electronically, directly into her brain, rather than speaking them out loud for Sly’s meat ears to pick them up.
She answered the same way. “I’m ready. Which node is it?”
The armadillo looked up, pointed with a forepaw. A bright red circle flashed into existence, ringing one of the brighter “stars” above. “That’s it,” Smeland announced.
“So let’s do it.”
Sly knew that, in reality—whatever reality was—she was sitting in Theresa Smeland’s apartment, tappin
g on the keyboard of a cyberdeck. But that wasn’t the way it felt. According to her sensorium—the sum-total of the sensory data received by her brain—she was hurtling upward into the black sky of the Matrix, faster than a semi-ballistic rocket plane. Her chest felt tight with the terrible thrill of it; her heart beat a triphammer rhythm in her ears.
The node that was their target grew larger, changed from a dimensionless spot of light into a rectangular slab about four times as wide and nine times as long as it was thick. The two large, flat faces looked like they were made of polished, blued steel like gunmetal. The smaller faces burned brilliant, laser-bright yellow. The massive construct, many dozens of times larger than the two deckers’ icons, spun in space, a complex motion as it rotated at different rates around its three axes. Along the construct’s edges, the burning yellow shifted in intensity, constantly flickering, hinting at the huge quantities of data flowing through this gateway to the telecom system.
Smeland’s armadillo icon was hurtling directly at one of the LTG SAN’s large faces. Sly close on her tail. Without slowing, they both plunged into the seemingly solid surface. The universe twisted in on itself, flipped inside out around Sly. She knew she’d experienced this shift hundreds of times before, but the last time had been five years ago, and the emotions forget. Fear knotted her stomach, squeezed a low moan from her throat. Then they were through, into a different section of the Matrix.
Just for a moment. Another transition, as they plunged through another system access node into the regional telecommunications grid—the “long-distance” trunks of the world’s telecom systems. Again the universe flipped and spun.
And they were out, rocketing over a black plane. A part of the Matrix without constructs? Sly wondered.
But no, there were constructs, just not many of them, and in unfamiliar locations. In the Matrix she was used to, the “ground” was covered with system constructs and datalines. In this strange “world,” however, the constructs hung overhead. Maybe two dozen of them, no more, too distant for her to make out any details other than their colors. By the intensity of their light, she guessed at the immense power of the computers they represented.
She looked to the horizon, at first unable to see any dividing line between the “ground” and the “sky.” But then her brain made sense of what she was seeing. There was a horizon, invisible, but defined by the massive, inconceivably distant constructs it partially occulted. They looked like fortresses, huge, blocky things, brutal in their simplicity of design, but, if this had been the “real” world and the horizon at its normal distance, those constructs would have been many times the size of the largest mountains.
“What are they?” From the tenor of her voice in her own ears, Sly knew she’d spoken out loud.
Smeland’s reply, direct into her mind, was calm, reassuring. “They’re major military systems, government systems, the UCAS Space Agency ... the big boys.”
“We’re not going near them, are we?”
Her friend’s chuckle sounded clearly in Sly’s mind. “Not a chance. Our destination’s just ahead.”
With an effort, Sly tore her attention away from the massive, distant system constructs. Contrary to her initial impression, there were a few constructs on the “ground”—small, dimly illuminated, probably shielded as much as possible from prying eyes. Smeland’s armadillo icon was leading her directly toward one of these, a blue construct that looked like a radio telescope or large satellite dish.
“That’s it?” Sly asked, ringing the construct with a circle of light the way Smeland had done.
The armadillo nodded. “Doesn’t look like much, does it? But that’s the SAN leading to Zurich-Orbital.” Smeland paused for a moment as they hurtled on. “Have you ever done a satellite uplink before?” she asked.
Sly shook her head, then quickly remembered Smeland wouldn’t be able to see the gesture. “No,” she answered. “Anything I should watch out for?”
“Time lag’s the big thing,” the decker answered. “Light speed delay. As little as a quarter of a second if we've got a direct line of sight from the satlink station to Zurich-Orbital. As much as half a second—or even more—if we have to sidelink to other satellites to make the connection.”
Half a second? In the Matrix that was forever. “Okay ...” Smeland picked up on the hesitation in Sly’s voice. “It’s not that bad,” she said reassuringly. “Both these decks have chips to compensate for the delay. It’s there, but you won’t notice it unless you get into a scrap. In cybercombat, no utility in the world’s going to help. You still won't feel the time delay as a delay; it’s just that your reaction time will be for drek.”
They began to slow as they neared the satlink system construct. It looked more like an impressionistic rendering of a satellite dish. Sly saw now, rather than the real thing. Its structural members glowed dimly with a deep blue verging on ultraviolet. Individual elements flickered as data passed through the system.
But there was something else there, as well. Small, dark spheres glided back and forth along some of the structural members, like beads on the wires of an abacus. When she watched individual beads, their motions seemed completely random. But when she expanded her attention to include the whole system, she couldn’t escape the feeling that there was some pattern to their movement. “What are theyl” she asked.
“Ice,” Smeland said flatly.
The word felt like a cold dagger, slipped deep into Sly’s abdomen. “Gray?” she whispered. “Or black?”
The armadillo shrugged. “I can’t tell from here.” Smeland paused. “Do you want to go on?”
Black ice. Killer ice. Images flashed through Sly’s mind—memories of claustrophobia, of choking, of a cramping pain in her chest.
The last time I faced black ice, I died. It stopped my heart, suppressed my breathing ... If somebody hadn’t jacked me out—immediately, without a second’s delay— I’d have flatlined for sure.
Five years old the memories were, but still as vivid as if it had been only yesterday. This is what I’ve got in common with Agarwal, she told herself. We both faced the gorgon and lived ... but just. They’d both come away with their lives, and with the unshakable belief that they were living on borrowed time. That the next time they faced black ice, they would surely die.
Sly felt pressure on the back of her skull and neck, like somebody had placed a hand there and had begun to squeeze gently. She recognized the feeling. It was her body’s warning of the onset of a fugue—a pseudoepileptic seizure, where her brain temporarily went into cold shutdown. She forced her body to relax, to breath slower and deeper, drawing in the life-giving oxygen her brain needed. Slowly the pressure on the back of her neck began to recede.
Smeland’s armadillo icon was watching her. “You okay?”
“I’m frosty,” Sly answered brain-to-brain, knowing her voice would contradict her words all too clearly.
“Your call,” Smeland said again. She turned back to the satlink construct. “Let’s see what we can do about getting past these buggers.”
The armadillo opened its arms in a slow, sweeping gesture. Dozens of tiny, mirror-bright spheres appeared—icons representing some kind of masking utility, Sly thought—and drifted toward the construct.
The small beads that were the intrusion countermeasures programs changed their pattern of movement, speeding up so that they became blurs. The mirror spheres drifted closer.
And gradually, the ice beads slowed down, resumed their regular slow motion. Sly felt a strange tightness in her shoulders, knew that the muscles of her meat body were rigid with stress.
The masking utility seemed to have worked; the ice beads showed no unusual activity whatsoever. Side by side, the two icons moved closer to the system construct behind the screen of mirror spheres. Still nothing. They were close enough to reach out and touch the midnight-blue construct.
“Ready?” Smeland asked. And then she grunted, “Uh-oh.”
Before Sly could respond, the ice bea
ds picked up their pace again, flashing back and forth along the structural members of the construct. Faster and faster they moved. An electronic whine rose in pitch and intensity, climbing the frequency spectrum, driving into Sly’s ears like an icepick.
A dozen of the ice beads burst free from the construct, hurtled toward the two deckers.
Sly didn’t even have time to scream before they struck.
16
0717 hours, November 14, 2053
Falcon was bored.
At first the concept of watching two deckers at work had fascinated him. Like everybody who’d ever watched the trideo, he knew something about the Matrix, but had never hung with anyone who dived brain-first into it for biz. He’d imagined it would be exciting, tense, with the dedicated decker hunched over her deck, while her friends kept nervous watch, wishing they could help but knowing they were unable to do so.
At least, that was the way it looked on the trid. But of course, on the trid there was always the tense soundtrack, the fast-paced camera cuts back and forth between the decker’s sweating face and the anxious expressions of her chummers.
In real life, without the cinematic tricks, it was just two women tapping away at keyboards. About as exciting as watching people in a word-processing pool, the ganger quickly decided.
Well, maybe not quite that bad. Now and again one of the women would grunt or mutter something to herself or to each other. Falcon wasn’t quite sure which. But an electrifying high-energy media extravaganza it wasn’t.
Modal seemed to have the right idea about how to handle things. The thin elf was slumped bonelessly in a chair, one leg dangling over the chair’s arm, fast asleep.
That’s what I should be doing, Falcon told himself. He was exhausted; his muscles ached, his skin was sore, and his eyes felt gritty.
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