Headcrash

by Bruce Bethke

  I suddenly realized where I was and looked around the bar nervously. Gee, I sure hoped that was a psychic projection into my mind and not a virtual hologram that everyone else could see.

  Relax, DON_MAC thought, it wasn’t a hologram. But for the benefit of us telepaths, would you kindly take your libido outside? Just listening to you makes my prostate ache.

  “Sorry,” I subvoked. I pushed the chip into my dataglove, went back to the bar, and resumed serious drinking.

  0300 UTC Standard Time, 10:00 local. I rolled my virtual Harley Ultraglide down the back streets of BusinessWorld, scanning for the address ♥AMBER♥ had given me. The weight of the virtual .45 tucked inside my virtual black leather jacket was comforting.

  TIME ZONES

  For the benefit of those six wankers out there who are going to check a map and calculate the time zones: did you remember to account for daylight savings time?

  The weight of the matched pair of virtual Fairbairn-Sykes knives lucked into my boots, on the other hand, was a little awkward. And the weight of the virtual M-62 machine gun strapped across my back was downright annoying. But I think it was the weight of the virtual TOW missile launcher slung across the handlebars of my bike that was the real pain in I the ass.

  I didn’t feel good about this. Yeah, Amber had me hooked by the gonads (ouch!) and was reeling me in. But the part of BusinessWorld her message had led me into was not some place I usually went. Like pretty much every other venue in the known universe, BusinessWorld had its hierarchies, its polarities. Yin and yang, good and evil, light and dark, sweet and sour: if the uniform gray corporate blocks from the night before were the up side of BusinessWorld, then this was the sowbug-covered downside.

  ToxicTown.

  Here was the dark heart of the wild, old, prefederalization Net, where nothing went in a straight line, financial card houses teetered in blatant defiance of fiscal gravity, and massive pyramid marketing schemes turned out to be supported, at the bottom, by absolutely nothing at all. It was a place where datastreams jumbled together like a colander full of overcooked spaghetti, incompatible systems stood out like lumpy indigestible meatballs, and the streets all too often ran red with marinara sauce. A place where life was cheap, and sunlight was expensive, and you could never tell when the superhighway might suddenly vanish into a deconstruction zone, to leave you stranded on a narrow old twisted-pair line with the hungry wolves eyeing you suspiciously and licking their chops, their paws, their genitals, and all the other parts of themselves that canines like to lick and that therefore make it very easy to spot werewolves when they’re out in public, such as, say, riding the bus.

  Actually, I rather liked ToxicTown. I’d probably have spent more time there, except my self-appointed mission on the Net was to make noise and raise a stink, and it’s a lot easier to do that when you’re someplace where the stink will be noticed.

  You wouldn’t notice it in ToxicTown. You’d notice the two-bit hustlers, hanging out on the virtual street corners: the InfoPimps, the DataWhores, the dollar-a-go RosiCrucians, You’d notice the virtual graffiti spray-painted on every flat sur face: “Kill All The Brutes!” being the current favorite. For this was a shadowy world of perpetual night, home to shady operators, shady ladies, private detectives, and IRS auditors.

  Fittingly enough I found ♥AMBER♥ on a virtual street corner, leaning against a lamppost, smoking a black Sobranie cigarette in a long ebony holder, her high cheekbones accentuated by the harsh red glare of the virtual sodium streetlight.

  “Hello, sailor,” she said as I brought the Harley to a stop. “Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you happy to see me?” I parked the bike and dismounted; she gave me a long look up and down. “Must be a snubnose,” she decided.

  I hooked my thumbs in my belt loops and gave her my best James Dean. “Heard you been looking for me, lady.”

  “You heard right.” She took another drag on her cigarette, then nodded at a dark, open doorway. “C’mon up to my place, and we’ll talk business.” She pulled the ciggy out of the holder and flipped it away—it landed on a sleeping newsjunkie, who went up in a ball of orange flame—then hobbled over toward the door, her high spike heels clicking out a seductive Morse code on the pavement in perfect syncopation to the torsion of her athletic gluteal muscles under her incredibly tight knee-length skirt. How she could actually walk in that thing, I’ll never know.

  Amber paused in the doorway and looked over her left shoulder at me. “You can leave all the hardware behind,” she winked, “or bring it along, if it makes you feel bigger.” She started up the stairs.

  I dumped everything but the .45 and ran after her.

  Amber’s place was on the top level of the data structure, and it was a seduction pit, pure and simple. Nothing but satin and lace and soft lighting, Frank Sinatra at low volume on the virtual Muzak track, and a bed the size of an Olympic swimming pool. She was standing over by the far windows when I came in. After I closed the door, she threw open the curtains and dimmed the lights further to stand silhouetted against the virtual lights of ToxicTown.

  ROOM DECOR

  That, and a row of manacles along one wall, but I didn’t feel like asking too closely about them.

  Slowly and carefully, with a very clear awareness of exactly how much of a tease she was, Amber peeled off her blouse.

  “So, Amber,” I said between dry gulps. “What’s the deal?”

  “Penetration, Max,” she whispered.

  Oh, boy.

  “Word on the street,” she went on, “is that you’re the best.” I couldn’t quite see what she did next, but I clearly heard the pop of a button and the rasp of a zipper. Her skirt fell down around her ankles.

  Oooooh, boy!

  “And if you’ half as good as they say you are,” she took a small step, and lightly kicked the skirt away, “then you are exactly what the doctor ordered.”

  Ohmygodohmygodohmygodl I threw my leather jacket off and started fighting with all the buckles and zippers and belts and shit on my black jeans. Damn! Why did I have to go for such a complicated retro-techno look? One critical zipper stubbornly refused to budge.

  “Max?” Amber sounded puzzled. Then, “Lights!”

  The room lights came up to normal. I was standing there with my boots half unlaced and my pants around my knees and my smiley-face boxer shorts snagged on my bullet-proof Kevlar vest.

  Amber, somehow, managed to be wearing a black body suit. “Max?” she said, puzzled. Then, “Ma-ax!” as it dawned on her. “I said word on the street, not word on the bathroom wall! Now if you will kindly curb your raging hormones, I’d like to talk to you about business!”

  Fortunately, there’s no such thing as a data condom, so she had no idea of the true effect of her words.

  “It’s pretty simple, Max,” she said, when I was all dressed and not hyperventilating again. “You have a bad reputation.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “No, that’s good. I desperately need someone like you.”

  “That’s good.”

  “No, it’s bad. I wish I didn’t.”

  “That’s not good.”

  “Too bad. It’s my problem, and I’ve got to solve it.”

  “By hiring someone bad?”

  “To get the goods. Exactly.”

  “I’m confused.”

  “Don’t be. It’s like this. The word on you is that, given enough time, Max Kool can penetrate any system in BusinessWorld.”

  “Is that good?”

  “Don’t get me started. My problem is that my employer—”

  “That monster in the shadows last night?”

  “You think that was bad, you should see him in the daylight. Anyway, my employer has some critical files that have gotten into the wrong hands. Worse, these are the only copies.”

  “No backups? That’s bad.”

  “Will you stop that? The long and short of it is, I wan to hire you to get them back.”

  I paused and scratched
my chin. I decided I needed to add a virtual five-o’clock shadow to my aspect. “What’s in it for me?”

  She didn’t even blink. “One million dollars, cash. A hundred thousand up front, and the balance on delivery.”

  I gulped. “Those must be some files.”

  “Only for my employer and the person who’s got them now. To anyone else,” she looked at me sharply, “they’d he worthless.”

  “I’m going to need some time to set this up,” I said. It sounded like the sort of thing a guy named Max Kool would say.

  “You’re going to need more than that,” Amber said. “The system you’re going to be cracking into has some of the best defenses around. State of the art.”

  “No military,” I said quickly. “I don’t do military.” Gunnar LeMat spent a lot of time hanging around MilNet, and some of the stories he told about the military systems were enough to make your toe hair curl.

  “Not military,” Amber reassured me. “But still, you’re going to need state-of-the-art tools. We can provide them. Cutting edge stuff: experimental interfaces, radical new things light years ahead of what’s available on the commercial market. If you agree to do this job for us, we’ll supply you with everything you need.”

  “Hmm,” I said pensively. “Sounds a little like you also want me to be a human guinea pig. Busting into this system mid grabbing your files is going to be tough enough. Why should I risk my ass on an experimental interface?”

  “Because, darling,” she said softly as she moved in close and stuck her virtual tongue in my virtual ear, “I’m using this interface right now, and I can assure you, the virtual sex is fantastic!”

  Somehow, her body suit vanished. Her breasts were small, firm, and fit my cupped hand nicely; her nipples, tight and dark, thrust between my fingers. As she pushed me down onto the bed and covered my mouth with hers, my hands wrapped around the small of her back, and I slowly traced her muscles all the way down to her lithe, athletic, thighs. My God, if the tactile sensation she was transmitting through my datagloves was any indication, this new interface of hers must be…

  Fade to black.

  And fade back to light, very quickly. As if from a dream, a distant voice was calling me. “Ja-ack!”

  Amber sensed something was wrong. “What is it, darling?”

  “Ja-ack!” Oh no, it couldn’t be. Not her. Not now.

  I sat up in bed. Amber sat up with me, and nibbled my ear. “What’s wrong, Max?”

  “Ja-ack!”

  “I gotta go, babe. No time to explain.”

  “But—my job. Will you—?”

  “I’ll get back to you on that.” I kissed Amber good-bye, and in a halo of light, exited from virtual reality.

  “Ja-ack! Your computer is screwing up my TV picture again!”

  8: WEDNESDAY MORNING, 7 A.M.

  The chirping of my bedside phone woke me. I rolled over, grabbed the handset, put it to my ear, and was rewarded with the ear-splitting squeal of someone trying to send me a fax.

  Okay. That worked. I was awake.

  But the more I thought about it, the more I wondered, why? Why be awake? Why even think about getting out of bed? Why not just crawl back under the covers and wait for the heat death of the universe?

  The phone chirped again. I answered again.

  Whoever was sending that fax, they were persistent.

  I dropped the phone in its cradle, pulled the blankets over my head, and tried to go back to sleep. When that failed, I tried to steer my wandering early-morning imagination into a good erotic fantasy.

  After a few minutes, one started to take form. In my mind I saw a woman (always a good start, that) with long, silky black hair and a beautiful, angular face. She had olive skin and a dancer’s body: tall and slender, yet lithe and athletic. Her lips were thin and expressive; her eyes, like dark pools of ebony water. Her hips were slim but nicely rounded, and her breasts were small, firm, high, and just the right size to fit my cupped hand—

  Omigod. I was wet-dreaming about Amber. And along with that realization came another, which brought me fully awake and sitting bolt upright in bed.

  She was serious.

  The phone chirped again. From idiotic reflex I grabbed it, then winced in anticipation when I’d realized what I’d done.

  No ear-splitting beep this time, though. Instead, there were street traffic noises in the background, and after a few seconds, one hesitant, spoken, word. “Pyle?”

  It took me a few blinks to recognize the voice. “T’shombe?”

  Her relief was audible, and the words came out in a gush, “Oh, Pyle, thank God, I’ve been so worried about you! After what happened yesterday, I feel so bad about that, and then the look on your face as you drove away, I was afraid—”

  “T’shombe?” I was having just a little trouble believing this was for real, and the thought did flit through my mind to try pressing Control-Option-E, just in case it wasn’t.

  “Yes, Pyle,” she said breathlessly, “it’s me. And look, I can’t talk now—I’m calling from a pay phone in a convenience store parking lot. I don’t think the company can backtrace this to me, but all the same I don’t want to stay on too long. I just need to know one thing. Are you okay?”

  I thought it over. “Uh, yeah. I guess so.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  One eyebrow went up; strange thing to ask. “I guess so.”

  “Good.” She paused. In my mind, I could see the way she would bite her lower lip whenever she was trying to work up the nerve to ask a difficult question.

  “Pyle,” she said, “I want you to promise me two—no, three—promise me three things, okay? Promise me you won’t do anything—reckless, will you?”

  I had absolutely no idea what she meant. “Sure,” I said.

  “Good,” she said. “Now, you know that Mexican restaurant on the corner of Warner Road and Highway 61?” I made an affirmative noise. “Promise you’ll meet me there, at seven o’clock tonight?”

  That took a second to sink in. “Are you serious?”

  “Absolutely. I want you—no, I need you, to meet me there at seven o’clock tonight. Promise you’ll show up?”

  Well, I will be damned. “Yes!” I said, with more enthusiasm than I’d thought possible.

  “Good. And finally,” she paused, and drew a deep breath, and dropped her voice down to a soft, gentle pitch. “Jack? I know you’re going through a rough patch right now. But always remember, no matter what happens, there are people who love you, Jack. Promise me you’ll remember that?”

  I gulped. If T’shombe was trying to tell me what I thought she was trying to tell me…

  “Yes, T’shombe,” I said in the most sincere, sensitive, masculine yet caring voice I could muster. “I promise, I—”

  “Good.” She let out a small gasp. “A cop car just pulled in here! I’ve got to go. Don’t call me at home; don’t call me at work. But remember, tonight, seven o’clock. You’ll be there?”

  “Yes, T’shombe, I will be—”

  “Good. Bye.” The line clicked and went dead. I hung up.

  Well, well, well. Maybe it was just the afterglow from my fantasy about Amber, and maybe I was misunderstanding T’shombe completely, but thinking back over what she’d said, I didn’t think so. Jack, old boy, I said to myself, this day is definitely off to a promising start.

  I was still floating on clouds when my phone chirped again. Dreamily, I answered. “Hello?”

  “G’morning Jack!” Gunnar barked out. “I got your message! Sorry to hear your bad news, and as for the power tool you asked about borrowing, forget it! But on the positive side, I’d say this means you’re free for breakfast today, yes?”

  “Yes?” I echoed. I was still trying to absorb “G’morning.”

  “Right, it’s settled then! Get dressed, and get your ass out here! I’ll expect you at oh-nine-hundred, and you can tell me all about it when you get here. Got that?”

  When Gunnar is in his manic ph
ase, the only thing to do is go along with the flow. “Got it.”

  “Then, ciao!” He broke the connection; I hung up my phone. But all the while I was shaving and dressing, I stayed near it, wondering who was going to call next on this remarkable morning. Bubu? Amber? Ed McMahon? The pope?

  No. Just that dolt who was still trying to send me a fax.

  Joseph “Gunnar” LeMat flipped the bacon in the frying pan, then directed his attention to the English muffins in the toaster. “Now, let me get this straight,” he said as he tripped the lever by hand and popped the muffins up. “This drop-dead gorgeous babe—”

  “Amber,” I said.

  “—who’s been blundering around MilNet for the past week,” he plucked the hot muffins out of the toaster with his bare fingers and quickly dropped them onto a plate, “wants to recruit MAX_KOOL to break into a computer and steal some files?”

  I took the plate from him and started buttering the muffins. “To retrieve some files,” I said. “She claims they were stolen from her in the first place.” Once the base coat of butter was down, I laid on a thick top coat of Schwartau cherry preserves.

  Joseph prodded the bacon one last time, then started lifting it out of the frying pan and spreading it out on a paper towel to drain. “And she’s willing to pay you how much?”

  “One million dollars,” I said as I carried the muffins and the coffee pot out to the breakfast table on the sun porch. LeMat’s consulting business was doing well—or his ex-wife came from old family money and had him paid a lot to end the marriage, it depended on when you asked him—so LeMat lived in a nice house hidden in twenty wooded acres on the western shore of Lake Minnetonka. The view from the sun porch in the morning was spectacular. “One hundred thou up front, and the rest on delivery.” I had to move the carafe of tomato juice and bowl of scrambled eggs to make room on the table, but everything fit.