Headcrash

by Bruce Bethke

  Melinda left for her meeting/mating/meating. T’shombe waited until she was gone, and then darted up the steps to STS, saying something about needing more radar chaff for all those potted philodendrons in Melinda’s office. Frank and Bubu took off for the cafeteria, but I wasn’t feeling hungry, so I hiked up to the security office, signed out a key to the freight elevator, then grabbed my toolkit and an equipment cart and headed for Melinda’s old office.

  INFONUGGETS

  You know, while these things are fun and informative and all that rot, they’re also a tremendous pain in the ass to code. So if you don’t mind, I’m going to stop doing them.

  Dead Trees Publishing was headquartered in the east wing of B305 and hindquartered in a row of nice window offices on the third floor. The whole operation was really a lot smaller than you might expect: the bulk of the work in the literary world still takes place in writers’ spare bedrooms and editors’ favorite restaurants (except for young adult franchise books and television series-spinoff novels, which are slapped together by assembly lines of sullen transients in Third World hell holes like Indiana and Upper Michigan). When you go into DTP territory it’s not at all uncommon to see high-ranking executives answering their own phones or big-name authors trying to cadge free drinks, the authors apparently being unaware that MDE’s corporate bar is out at MDE’s corporate golf course.

  Most of the DTP staffers were already out to lunch. Some of them had gone out for food, too. I navigated the equipment cart down narrow aisles between the massive heaps of ancient and as-yet-unread slushpile submissions, put a handkerchief over my mouth and nose to fight off the foul stench of recycled bond paper in the late stages of decaying into cellulose compost, and made it to Melinda’s old office.

  I was under the desk disconnecting cables when someone walked in. It was—actually, I didn’t know who it was. Some blond, crew-cut, baby-faced fat guy who didn’t believe in wearing his ID badge, obviously.

  “Are you from MIS?” he asked.

  I considered my answer. “Yes.”

  “What are you doing?”

  I finished pulling out plugs, crawled out from under the desk, stood up, and remembered to tuck my shirttails in. “Taking this workstation down to MIS. Ms. Sharp wants it in her new office.” I leaned over the top of the monitor and started disconnecting things from topside.

  “Oh,” the fat guy said. “That’s okay, then. I was afraid you were a furniture vulture.”

  I paused a moment and took a closer look at what I was doing. “A what?” Okay, a flathead, not Phillips head, no wonder I couldn’t budge that screw.

  “A furniture vulture,” he repeated. “Y’know, when somebody leaves the company, everything that’s not nailed down disappears from their office before their chair is cold? That’s the work of furniture vultures.”

  “Oh.” I found the right tool in my toolkit and got back on the connector. It came free with a twang and went flying across the room. No sweat. We had hundreds more in the stock room.

  “So,” he said. “How do you feel about having the Crash Test Dummy for your manager?”

  That got my attention. “The who?”

  “No, The Who was a sixties rock band. I’m ta-ta-talking ‘bout M-M-Melinda Sharp.”

  Whatever that last reference was, it went right over my head. “The Crash Test Dummy?”

  “That’s what everybody around here calls her. She could bring our whole LocalNet down just by touching a computer.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. Luckily, we knew how to reboot it.” He shook his head, scratched his chin, and changed the subject. “Also, you might want to take a look inside that thing,” he pointed at the Guava 2000, “before you go hooking it up to anything important. She had some really goofy crap installed on it.”

  “Oh?”

  The fat guy perked up suddenly, turned around, and leaned out the door. “Lori? Are you back from lunch?”

  “Yes, Rich!” a female voice answered from off in the distance. “Whadaya want?”

  “C’mere! There’s a guy from MIS in Melinda’s office!”

  A few seconds later a young woman popped around the corner and into the office. She was short, kind of tiny and pixielike, with straight brown page-boy hair parted down the middle and round eyeglasses about four sizes too big for her face. “C’mon in,” the fat guy—Rich—said to her. “This guy doesn’t believe me. Tell him your favorite Melinda Sharp story.”

  Lori looked at Rich, then looked at me and flashed a close-mouthed smile that suddenly transformed her into someone who was awful darn cute, in an elfin sort of way. “You know that ‘Sad Computer’ face you get when you try to boot a Guava 2000 with a nonsystem diskette in the drive?” she asked me.

  I nodded. “Yes?”

  “Melinda was working late one night, and she forgot she had a diskette in the drive. When she came in the next morning—” Lori stopped, and looked around to see if anyone else was listening.

  “Go on,” Rich prompted.

  She flashed that elfin smile at me again. “Well, what I heard was a blood-curdling scream, and then Melinda came running out of her office in an absolute panic. When I asked her what happened she said, ‘The face of Satan is on my computer!’”

  Rich broke into a belly laugh then and just about fell down. Lori covered her mouth with one hand and snickered.

  “The face of Satan?” I asked.

  Rich was frantically waving for Lori’s attention. “Tell him what you did! Tell him what you did!”

  Lori looked around again, then said, “So I went into her office, ejected the diskette, rebooted her computer—”

  Rich broke in. “And told her to burn sage to exorcise the evil spirits!” Rich exploded in another fit of laughter, sagged against the doorframe with tears running down his face, and fought to regain control of his breathing.

  Another woman came around the corner. “What’s all this then?” She was blond, about six feet two, with ice blue eyes, a strong chin, a faint but visible mustache, and a body sculptor’s build. I vaguely recognized her, from my time in DTP as a contract temp. Krya, Kyla, something like that. Kyra, I decided.

  The way Lori responded to Kyra’s entry, I abandoned all hope. “We were just telling,” Lori turned around and checked my ID badge, “Jack here, our favorite Crash Test Dummy stories.”

  “Oh,” said Kyra, nodding. Her voice was strangely deep and reedy. “Well be sure to tell him about the time that lovely black woman from his department—what was her name?”

  “T’shombe?” I suggested.

  Kyra shook her head. “No, that’s not right. Anyway, I may as well tell it. Melinda was having computer problems, and this delicious black woman came up from MIS, and when they worked through it together, it turned out Melinda was doing something where she was supposed to answer yes if she’d made a backup copy, and she hadn’t made the copy but she answered yes anyway, and the woman from MIS—oh, what was her name?”

  “T’shombe,” I tried again.

  Kyra shook her head even more vigorously. “No, definitely not that. Anyway, this woman from MIS told Melinda that the problem was she’d lied to her computer, and it hated her. So forever afterward Melinda talked very sweetly to her computer, and promised it nice things, and told all of our new employees how important it was to never lie to their computers.” Kyra let out a little laugh at that point; it came mostly through her nose and sounded like a walrus trying to snort golf balls through a vacuum cleaner hose.

  “That’s a good one,” I said as I pointedly checked my watch. “But if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get this thing,” I laid a hand on the Guava 2000, “set up in Melinda’s office by the time she gets back from lunch, so…”

  So I got back to work. With an audience. Kyra left, Lori left following Kyra, Rich staggered out into the open office and wandered up and down the rows of cubicles, laughing like a loon and telling everyone where I was. I must have had ten or twelve more people pop into Mel
inda’s office while I was working there to express sympathy, or tell me a new Melinda story, or (worse) retell one of the stories I’d already heard. It was pretty bad.

  Except for the young, peroxide enhanced, Overdressed For Success woman who told me how lucky MIS was to get Melinda, and how sorely she would be missed by DTP. I thought the woman was being sarcastic with me, up until the moment she started reading me the sonnet she’d written to mourn Melinda’s departure.

  It’s hard to fake that kind of awful sincerity.

  Once I got the Guava 2000 disconnected, locked down for travel, and on the cart, that still wasn’t the end of it. I had people following me down the halls, talking about Melinda and telling me their departments were switching to adding machines and typewriters. The last one followed me all the way to the freight elevator.

  It was Christiansen, from Dynamic InfoTainment’s R&D group. After everyone else wandered away, he slipped an unmarked CD-ROM into my shirt pocket. “A little sympathy present from the gang,” he said softly. “A couple of the programmers stayed late last night and made a special game for you. Enjoy it when your new boss is not around.” The elevator chimed, and the door opened.

  When I turned around again, Christiansen had vanished.

  Frank, Bubu, and T’shombe were back by the time I got down to the department. Frank and Bubu seemed to think they had some gimmick worked out to deal with the VMX error logs, so working together we yanked the Solaris from Melinda’s office, installed the Guava 2000, and did a little exploratory surgery while we were at it. Melinda’s old computer did have a lot of gibberish files on it, as well as a number of add-on interface ports that seemed to serve no useful purpose, but we just shrugged, closed it up, and put it online. It was ready by one o’clock.

  As a result Frank figured we had some time to spare, so I loaned Bubu the CD-ROM Christiansen had given me, made a quick stop in the men’s room, and hit Vending Machine Hell for a little triangular shrink-wrapped sandwich and a can of Coke. By the time I got back, Bubu, Frank, Charles, and T’shombe were all deep into virtual reality and clearly doing something exciting. I tried to ask Bubu what the game was like, but all he would say was, “Get your goggles on and dive in here, kid! You’re gonna love—ouch! Where the hell did that—? Frank! Behind you!” Bubu punched out with his left hand, while raising his right hand and squeezing his trigger finger as fast as he could.

  Standard gun ‘n’ run stuff, I figured. I ran back to my cubicle, pulled on my videoshades, audio headset, and datagloves, and dove into the game. Reality melted and ran down the walls, and was replaced by—

  Reality?

  I was wearing my VR gear, sitting in my cubicle, and playing a game in which I was wearing VR gear and sitting in my cubicle?

  The phone rang. I answered. It was T’shombe.

  “Pyle,” she said breathlessly, “I know what you’re thinking. This is not some kind of initialization failure. Your friends in Dynamic InfoTainment have concocted a virtual reality scen—”

  There was gunfire in the background behind T’shombe. I heard Bubu shout, “Hah! Got one!”

  “Pyle?” T’shombe came back on the phone. “Listen to me: you are not in B305, you are in a virtual reality scenario of B305. Now, check your desk—there should be a gun in the top drawer. Grab it, and get the hell out of there! We’re holed up in the lunchroom and—”

  There was a burst of automatic gunfire in the background, and a voice I didn’t recognize screamed.

  “Hurry!” The phone went dead.

  Wow. Either reality had gone nuts, or T’shombe was telling me the truth through a virtual reality simulation of my phone, or that was a VR simulation of T’shombe giving me the background story line through a VR phone, or else—

  Wow, again. The folks in Dynamic InfoTainment had really outdone themselves this time. This game definitely did some serious messing with your head. I dropped the phone, pulled open the top drawer of my desk. There should have been paperclips, Band-Aids, and a half-box of cough drops in there.

  Instead, there was a large black automatic pistol. I hesitated a few moments, wondering if I should actually virtually touch it.

  And about then is when I heard the characteristic snuffling of a giant pig-demon in the next cubicle. I snatched the gun out of the drawer, bailed out of my chair, and hit the ground running. The pig-demon met me in the hallway.

  Only it wasn’t a pig-demon. It was a giant Melinda demon. A fanged, horned, over-dressed blond monster, with eyes like fire and tits the size of torpedo warheads. She advanced on me with a harpy’s shriek, fresh blood dripping from her upraised talonlike fingers.

  I brought the pistol up and pumped half a clip into her. It seemed to work. I didn’t stick around to see if she got back to her feet again—the pig-demons will sometimes do that—but instead turned and ran down the hall in the other direction.

  Two zombie security guards emerged from the hardware room. I popped them before they could get their weapons up and grabbed their ammo as I ran past. That’s the nice thing about virtual reality; all ammo fits all guns, and you never have to stop to reload. I checked my stats: ammo 42, health 100%, armor 0.

  Well, it was dicey, but I’d have to risk it. I turned around, charged through the multiplexer snakepit, and sprinted for the stairs.

  Someone was emerging from the stairwell door. I almost blasted him before I realized it was Frank. “Are you for real?” I yelled at him.

  “No, better!” Frank yelled right back. “I can climb these goddam stairs without stopping to wheeze!” That didn’t seem like something a personality simulator would say, so I ran over to join him.

  “LOOK OUT!” he shouted, as he brought up a shotgun the size of a bazooka and pointed it straight at me. I dove to the side; the shotgun went off with an enormous blast and the Melinda-demon came raining down in large chunks.

  “This is the only thing that really stops ‘em,” Frank said, as he surveyed the bloody wreckage that was the demon and patted the barrel of his shotgun. “We’ll have to find you one of these. The pistol just makes ‘em mad.” He pivoted quickly, popped off another shot, and splattered a zombie security guard against the far wall. “We’d better move.” He turned and started back up the stairs. I followed him.

  “What’s the scoop?” I yelled as we cleared the first floor.

  “Bubu and T’shombe have barricaded themselves in the company cafeteria!” Frank answered. “I volunteered to find you and bring you back! We’re in deep shit; I think—” Frank crouched low, fired, and the corpse of something that I believe was a mutant marketing manager came tumbling down from the next landing.

  “I think Bubu brought us in at Level Five!” Frank said. “There’s zombie guards everywhere, and more Melinda-demons than you can count!” The door at the second-floor landing burst open, and a trio of green-camouflaged things came through. Frank and I shot them to pieces, then he lobbed a plasma grenade through the open door and kicked it shut. The satisfying whump! of the grenade explosion was followed by some very convincingly rendered inhuman screams.

  We kept climbing.

  “Charles manifested here as a small Sherman tank,” Frank explained. “He went off alone to scout the east wing and wound up in a running fight with some kind of flesh-eating bookworms. His last report said he’d run into a sort of gelatinous monster that came from the slush pile. We think it got him.” Frank stopped, motioned me out of the way, and then fired a few shots down the stairwell behind us. “At least that’ll make the bastards keep their heads down,” he muttered.

  “There was some kind of horrible mutant cross-breed bird/swine thing in the cafeteria!” Frank said as he resumed climbing. “Bubu guessed it was a turkey ham.” He stopped at the landing, peered cautiously around the corner with gun ready, then lowered it and continued climbing. “T’shombe manifested on the second floor. She said it was just crawling with giant, writhing, person-eating philodendron vines.” We reached the fire door at the top of the stairs.


  “There’s an Uberman on the other side of this door,” Frank whispered. “It basically appears to be an unkillable ogre, but luckily it seems to be sleeping most of the time. The idea is to run like hell and hope it’s asleep when you start your move.” He checked the load status of his shotgun, then smiled at me. “Ready?” I nodded. Frank kicked open the door.

  The Uberman wasn’t asleep.

  A giant razor-edged 6-Iron chopped Frank’s legs off at the knees before he’d made it two steps. I emptied my pistol into the Uberman, but it didn’t seem to notice or care. It just bent over Frank’s screaming form, clamped its massive hands onto his head, and—oh, yech, I’d seen this before and received it a few times myself, now it was going to crush his brain to a pulp—

  No, worse. “Lucky thing I found you,” the ogre said in what was clearly the real Scott Uberman’s voice, stepped down an octave. “I’m having this problem with my desktop computer—” Dragging Frank by his hair, the ogre started shuffling hack towards its office.

  “SHOOT ME!” Frank screamed. “For God’s sake, shoot me!” I clicked my empty gun a few times and shrugged helplessly.

  Somehow Frank found the presence of mind to unhook his ammo belt and throw it clear. “Take my shotgun!” he screamed as he vanished through the doorway. “Save Bubu and T’shombe!” The Uberman’s office door slammed shut with a sound like the very gates of hell.

  I picked up Frank’s shotgun, slung the ammo belt over my shoulder, and set off for the cafeteria.

  The trip to the cafeteria was pretty grim. I killed quite a few security zombies and mutant marketing managers along the way, picked up another twenty rounds of shotgun ammo and something that looked like an antitank rocket, but nothing to launch it from, and blew away about six Melindas. The trick, I discovered, was to get in close enough to make a one-shot kill, but not so close that they could grab you with their razor-sharp fingernails and fasten their lampreylike mouths on your—never mind where they fastened, just trust me, it drained health points fast. I staggered into Vending Machine Hell after one attack and discovered that eating the little triangular sandwiches also cost me health points.