Shadowplay

by Nigel Findley

  The way he’d lost the Disassemblers that time was by wearing them down. In any straight race he would lose. So the trick was to throw a couple of cuts and turns into it.

  To his left, he saw another opening, another alley. He almost laughed out loud as he cut hard left, every muscle in his body cooperating like parts of some perfect racing machine. Two more bullets went spang! off the concrete around him, but he didn’t slow down. The trolls were already fifteen meters further back. Another opening yawned, this time to his right. As he rounded the corner, this time he did laugh out loud. Another fifteen meters.

  He didn’t know how long the chase went on, soon losing track of his direction or of how far back the pursuers were. He knew from the echoes of their pounding boots and once in a while the sound of a shot that they were still on him, but nothing got anywhere near him anymore. He was glad for the sounds of pursuit; without that to cue from, his random cuts and turns through the back streets and alleys of Cheyenne might accidentally have taken him straight back into their faces.

  And then it didn’t matter how long he’d been running. All that mattered was how much longer the chase would go on. The cold air was tearing at his throat, searing his lungs. The muscles of his legs burned like fire.

  That was the difference between these slags and the Disassemblers, he thought, listening to the steady sounds of pursuit. These guys were in shape.

  Maybe in better shape than Falcon. He might be opening the gap, but that was purely because of the speed differential. The further he ran, the more convinced he became that they’d be on him the moment he stopped.

  They’d be on him and they’d kill him. Or worse, he thought, remembering what was left of Agarwal.

  He hurled himself around another corner, almost plowing full-speed into an open dumpster. He skidded to a stop.

  Why not?

  He vaulted into the dumpster, sinking calf-deep into the noisome contents. Reaching up, he dragged the heavy lid down. Unlike the ones in Seattle, these hinges weren’t rusty; the lid was going to close all the way. Working quickly, he jammed something under the metal top, leaving an opening almost a hand’s-breadth wide. Then he crouched low, put his eye to the gap, and waited.

  What the frag am I doing? he thought suddenly, the answer hitting him as hard as one of those speeding road trains he’d passed on the nighttime highways. The realization was terrifying. He was acting as though his pursuers were the Disassemblers, him trying to repeat the same trick that had saved his hoop back in Seattle.

  But these slags weren’t the Disassemblers. They were trained fragging security guards, probably military-trained. And he thought he was going to shake them off as easily as some chipped-out homeboy trolls from the docks?

  Falcon reached up, set his palms against the heavy metal lid, prepared to push it open. This fragging stupid detour had cost him too many seconds, too many meters. If he was really lucky, he’d be out of the dumpster with the same lead he’d started with outside the OMI building.

  But he wasn’t lucky. Before he could lift the lid a centimeter, the sound of boots against the concrete became louder, clearer. In panic, he peeked through the gap he’d left.

  The trolls had rounded the corner, were no more than a few steps from his hiding place. All were breathing hard, but none looked trashed. Falcon guessed that, if necessary, they could keep up the chase as long as he could.

  But they won’t have to, will they? He ducked as low as he could and still watch the outside. He struggled to keep his labored breathing quiet.

  The leader of the trolls didn't waste his breath in speech. In the dim light, his hand flashed through a quick sequence of complex gestures. They didn’t mean anything to Falcon, but they were obviously expressive to his comrades. One nodded.

  Then, to Falcon’s horror, the troll walked straight to the dumpster. Reaching out with a hand the size of Falcon’s head, he grabbed the edge of the metal lid.

  25

  2312 hours, November 15, 2053

  Sly checked her watch. It had been a hard couple of hours. After Falcon left, she'd gone back into the Matrix, staying out of areas that probably had serious security, yet digging a little deeper than the first time.

  It was an axiom of shadow work that the best way to find something hidden was not to look for it directly. Instead, you watched other things that might be affected by the item you were after. You looked for unusual reactions, strange perturbations that were not logical. And when you found the perturbations, the chance was good that what you were actually seeing was the effect your hidden target had on things around it. If you looked in enough areas, cataloged enough perturbations, you could often mentally calculate the exact location of your original subject. Someone had once told Sly that this technique came from astronomy, and was responsible for the discovery of one of the outer planets—Pluto, she thought it was. Astronomers had measured strange perturbations in the orbits of other planets, and postulated that they were caused by the gravity of another, as yet undiscovered, world. They calculated where that new world would have to be to cause the measured effects, pointed their telescopes to that part of the sky, and bingo.

  Sly had done very much the same thing, but instead of planetary orbits, she examined the activities of local corporations, specific types of news reports, and activity on public computer bulletin board systems. She looked for patterns analogous to the slight wobbles in a planet’s motion that the astronomers had noted, and she found them. What they told her was that something large and very influential was operating beneath the surface of Cheyenne business activity.

  A large and active shadow community. It couldn’t be anything else.

  Where did the runners come from? she wondered curiously. Did they learn their chops here or were they imports? How many of the Seattle runners who’d dropped out of sight and who she’d assumed were flatlined had actually pulled a quick fade and reappeared in Cheyenne?

  Once she had a sense of the size and activity of the shadow community, it wasn’t too hard to plug in to it, at least peripherally. Large electronic credit transfers to various sources gave her the LTG number of a local “salvage consultant” and part-time fixer named Tammy. And from her, Sly purchased the LTG number for the local Shadowland server.

  During her search, she’d come across something else, something she hadn't been actively seeking, but interesting just the same. A name kept popping up, apparently the name of someone who was occasionally active in the Cheyenne shadows, an infrequent player but very influential when he did play. Montgomery. No first name, and no further details. Could that be Dirk Montgomery? Buzz on the streets of Seattle said Dirk had made a really big score—the score, the Big One that every runner dreamed of—and had slipped into the light to enjoy his spoils in retirement. If that was true, why was he still hustling? And why was he in Cheyenne?

  She shrugged, then put those speculations aside as irrelevant. It was probably a different Montgomery anyway.

  Sly toyed with the deck’s brain plug, glanced over at the bed where Falcon had been sprawled. To her surprise, she found herself wishing the kid were back. At least he would have been someone to talk things over with.

  The idea of decking into the local Shadowland system frightened her, she had to admit, but she didn’t know why. It wasn’t as if she’d be going up against any ice. (There was ice associated with Shadowland, of course, to protect it from corp and government deckers who’d like to close it down. But as long as she didn’t try anything drek-headed like commandeering the system or erasing important files, she wouldn’t even know the intrusion countermeasures were there.) It was just that Shadowland was symbolic. It represented her old life, the life of the shadow decker. The life that had almost killed her, that had slotted up her mind for more than a year, and that still caused her occasional nightmares.

  Stupid, she told herself. Logically there was no more risk in logging onto Shadowland than in making a phone call. She’d already done something much more risky by trying to
hack into Zurich-Orbital.

  Yes, another part of her mind replied, but then you had Smeland running cover, didn’t you? This time there’s nobody to watch your back.

  She shook her head. She knew that she’d be able to find dozens of reasons—logical or emotional—why she shouldn’t do what she knew she had to. So the trick is, don’t think about it, she told herself. Quickly, before she could change her mind, she snugged the plug into her datajack and typed the first command string into the deck.

  * * *

  Erehwon, the place was called. It was a “virtual bar,” something Sly had heard about but never experienced personally. Back when she’d been running the Matrix for a living, people had talked about creating “virtual meeting places” in the network. But if any such places had actually existed then, neither she nor anyone she’d known had ever visited one.

  Of course, that was five years ago, an eternity when it came to technical developments. Virtual meeting places— forums, discussion groups, and so on—were commonplace, an accepted way of life. Instead of meeting physically around a conference table or using limited intermediaries like conference calls and two-way video, people with datajacks could meet virtually. All participants in a meet would project their persona icons into a selected locale in the Matrix, and then carry on their discussions there.

  The advantages were obvious: no travel time or cost and total physical security (because the participants never had to leave their homes). Some technopsychologists were pointing at the phenomenon of virtual meetings as one of the most significant changes in human society since agriculture replaced early mankind’s hunter-gatherer existence. These psychs believed that the Matrix would eventually spawn “electronic tribes” and “virtual nations.” Membership in a particular social group would no longer depend on physical location, but more on channels of communication. Just as “telecommuting” had changed the work place in the late nineteen-nineties because knowledge workers no longer had to live within commuting distance of—or even on the same continent as—their employer, so this would change other facets of societies (or so said the pundits). While most people in 2053 still thought of “groupness” and “nationhood” in a geographical, location-based sense, virtual meeting places were starting to break this concept down.

  Even with the proliferation of virtual meeting places, Erehwon seemed to be unique. According to the buzz on the Shadowland bulletin boards, it was a virtual club. Deckers could project their icons into the network nodes that made up Erehwon and interact with anyone else who happened to be there. Biz went down, of course, but many deckers from around the world seemed to like just hanging there, conversing with other patrons and simply enjoying themselves.

  The virtual club was crowded as Sly’s icon entered the node. She remained motionless for a moment, absorbing the scene around her.

  According to the sensorium being fed into her datajack, she was standing in a smoky, low-ceilinged tavern. The resolution was good enough that, for a moment, she could almost believe it was real. But then she looked closer at the crowd.

  The patrons of Erehwon reminded her of a group of video-game characters who’d taken a night off and gone out for a beer. The decker icons that filled the place ranged from the innocuous to the threatening to the whimsical, and from the most mundane to the most outre and bizarre. A neon samurai rubbed shoulders with an anthropomorphic hedgehog, while a two-headed dog engaged an alabaster angel and a black gargoyle in conversation. Resolution varied from icon to icon. In some the individual pixels were large, creating a coarse, “jaggy" appearance, and the animation was jerky and imprecise. In others, the rendering was so masterful that they resembled state-of-the-art cinematic computer animation, looking more real than reality itself. Making a quick tally in her mind, Sly estimated the current clientele at about thirty-five deckers.

  To her right was a long oak bar, “the juice bar,” one of the features that set Erehwon apart from other virtual locales. It was a Matrix construct, but it served a very real purpose. Deckers could send their icons up to the bar, where they could order “buzzers.” In terms of icons, the drink icons appeared as beers, highballs, or shooters. In actuality, however, they represented small and simple utility programs that produced slight and temporary biofeedback loops in the minds of the deckers partaking. These loops produced various psychological effects— generally a mild euphoria—that partially mimicked the effects of alcohol. Although Sly had no intention of experimenting with buzzers tonight, she had to admit the concept was attractive. One could get the pleasant buzz of drinking without any hangover, and theoretically, simply abort the utility at any time to be instantly “sober” again.

  She started to circulate. Even though nothing here was “real,” and individuals' icons could—if both wished it— pass through each other without interference, old habits died hard. She threaded her way through the crowd, careful not to bump anyone’s elbow or tread on anyone’s foot.

  It took her a few subjective minutes to find the icon she was looking for. A bare-chested Amerindian warrior with the head of a pearl-white eagle, he was sitting at a small corner table. In front of him were three empty beer mugs, indicating that he’d been doing buzzers. He looked up as she approached.

  “Moonhawk,” she said.

  The finely rendered icon blinked its eyes. “Do I know you?”

  For a moment Sly wished she’d been able to visit Erehwon as her familiar quicksilver dragon icon. That icon had something of a rep, possibly even one that spread as far as Cheyenne. But of course she was limited to the icon in the MPCP of Smeland’s deck—a rather uninspired female ninja.

  "No,” she answered coolly. “But there are people in Cheyenne who know you. They say you’re good.”

  The eagle-headed warrior shrugged. “Good enough, maybe,” he said laconically. “Who gave you my name?” Sly smiled, shook her head. “That’s not the way they want to play it.”

  Moonhawk shrugged again. “So talk. What do you want?”

  "Tools of the trade,” she said. “Utilities. A couple of pieces of hardware.”

  “Why come to me?”

  “Buzz says you’re the man.”

  "Maybe.” Moonhawk studied her briefly. “Hypothetically speaking,” he said after a moment, “if maybe I was able to help you out, you’ve got the nuyen?”

  Now we get down to it, Sly thought. “Hypothetically”—she stressed the word ironically—“I’d have the nuyen.” She ran a quick display utility that produced a wallet fat with banknotes. She waved the wallet-construct under Moonhawk’s nose, then made it vanish again.

  “So, again hypothetically, what’re you looking for?” the fixer asked. “What utilities? What hardware?”

  “For utilities, I want it all,” Sly said firmly. “The full suite: combat, defense, sensor, masking.”

  Moonhawk chuckled. “You ain’t wanting much, are you? What’re you doing, refitting a whole slotting deck?”

  That’s just what I’m doing, she thought, but only smiled.

  “Any particular style?" the fixer queried. “You into music, colors, what?”

  “Doesn’t matter to me. You give them to me, I can use them. They’ve just got to be hot. Hypothetically speaking, of course.”

  Moonhawk snorted. “What hardware?”

  “A phase loop recourser.” When the fixer didn’t respond immediately, she added, “A PLR.”

  The icon’s piercing eyes widened in surprise. “A who!" Then he laughed. “Chummer, you’re out of date. Way out of date. PLRs don’t do squat against the ice they’re writing now. Any black ice worth its name’s gonna go through a PLR like it wasn’t there.” He laughed again, a harsh bark of cynical amusement.

  Right then she was thankful that her icon wasn’t well enough rendered to show her embarrassment. “Then all I need is an off-line storage chip,” she said, keeping her voice as level as possible. “Two hundred megapulses. And a microelectronics tool kit. And that’s it.”

  “And that’s it,” he e
choed. “Well, omae, it’s your lucky day, considering we've just been talking hypothetically. I know a guy knows a guy who’s got some utilities he'd be willing to part with.”

  “They’ve got to be hot.”

  “Nova hot,” Moonhawk assured her. “It’s all rating six and up”—he shot her a doubtful look—“if your deck can handle it. Class act all the way, all from IC Crusher Systemware. You do know ICCS, don’t you?”

  She didn’t. Even the software companies had changed since her day, but nodded knowingly. “He’s got the hardware too?”

  The fixer nodded. “You interested?”

  “I’m interested,” she confirmed.

  “Okay then,” Moonhawk said briskly, suddenly all business. “How soon you need them?”

  Sly hesitated. The sooner I get the utilities, the sooner I don’t have any more excuses. She forced the thought away. “Soonest,” she said firmly. “Tonight.”

  The hawk-headed icon hesitated. “Rush might cost extra.”

  “Bulldrek,” she told the fixer firmly. “If your friend of a friend’s got the stuff like he says he does, he’ll want to unload it as soon as possible so he can get his hands on the nuyen, right? And if he doesn’t have the stuff on hand. I'm going to go deal with a serious fixer. Do we understand each other, Moonhawk?”

  The fixer glared at her for a long moment, then his expression cleared. He chuckled. “Okay, okay, hang easy. It was worth a try, right? Give me a tick and I’ll set up the meet.”

  The icon froze, like a single frame in a movie. Sly knew the fixer had suspended his Matrix connection while placing another call.

  It didn’t take long. “You’ve got a meet,” Moonhawk announced. “At oh-one-thirty. That soon enough for you?”