by Bruce Bethke
I had to move fast, but I managed to snag a few crab claws before the Don dove facefirst into the bowl. Noticing that DON_MAC hadn’t gotten any, I lifted one between fork and knife and offered to transfer it to his plate.
DON_MAC blocked the transfer with his shiny chromium hand. “No, Max. You take it.”
“Too full?” I asked. Then I looked at his metal carapace and articulated limbs. “Too much like cannibalism?”
Don Vermicelli surfaced long enough to speak. “DON_MAC does not eat as we do,” he said. “He cannot taste this food.”
I set the crab claw down on my plate and turned to stare at DON_MAC. “Carrying this role-playing thing a bit far, aren’t you?”
“There is more than one way to become a superuser,” DON_MAC said softly. “I, unfortunately, did it the old-fashioned way.”
Don Vermicelli wolfed down the last of the crab claws, belched loudly, and wiped his face and hands on the napkin. “DON_MAC is too modest,” he said to me. “He was one of the first; one of the best. In many ways he is the father of us all, and does us great honor by his presence.”
DON_MAC shrugged; a strange, clanking gesture to see in a chrome-hulled robot. “My reasons are not entirely benign—”
Whatever he was going to say next, it got lost in the noise. “Boss!” one of Don Vermicelli’s trigger boys screamed as a crowd burst into our corner of Heaven. “Watch out! We tried to stop her, but—” Something seized the trigger boy by the nape of the neck and flung him like a rag doll across the room, to splatter and die against a concrete pillar.
The something was named Eliza.
Two more of Don Vermicelli’s trigger boys tried to block her way. They made it as far as touching her before they burst into flame. A third screamed an incoherent warning, drew his gun, and fired a shot at the back of her white-blond head. The bullet froze in midair, then dropped, smoking, to the carpet.
The shooter was dead and randomized before the bullet touched the floor.
Don Vermicelli held up his hand, signaling his two surviving boys to give it up. “Hello, my bella Eliza,” he said respectfully. “To what do we owe the pleasure of this visit?”
“To this asshole,” she said, pointing straight at me. Then she turned on me, with the icy blue-eyed fury I was coming to know so well. “You just couldn’t listen to me, could you, Max? I told you not to get involved with that Amber bitch. But no, you couldn’t stop thinking with your dick long enough to use your brain, could you?”
I shrugged and smiled. It seemed to be the only weapon I had that worked on Eliza. “Sweetheart, darling, you always said men are dinosaurs. It’s that secondary brain in my pelvis.”
“Argh!” She started to morph into her claws-and-fangs form then, but—by God, I saw the texture mapping sweeping across her skin like crackling snakes of blue electric light, and I reached out with my virtual fingers, and I stopped the transformation of her right arm! She jumped back from my touch, startled—whether because it was painful or because it reminded her of our sex life together, I don’t know—and reverted to her normal aspect.
“Well, well,” she said, when the alarm had drained out of her icy blue eyes. “And now you’re a goddam superuser, too.” She put her hands on her skinny hips, stuck out her lower lip, and puffed out a snort of deep frustration.
Her next transformation was absolutely remarkable to see. She parted her lips, and smiled at me, and the iceberg of anger in her eyes thawed and melted, and she morphed into someone who looked exactly as she had looked a moment before, only this time she was not gazing upon the face of the scum-sucking Antichrist.
She morphed into someone who liked me.
“Max, honey?” she said sweetly. “I know we’ve had some differences in the past, but—” She shrugged, and put her hands together behind her back, and fidgeted and kicked the carpet a little bit, and tried another tentative smile on me.
It worked. I smiled back.
Her face lit up like sunrise over newly fallen snow.
She produced a message chip, put it down on the table, and slid it across to me. “I, uh,” she fidgeted some more. “I’ve got some important things to take care of in real time, right now. But if you could meet me here,” she tapped the chip with an ice-blue fingernail, “in one hour, well—I think you’d find it worth your while. Promise me you’ll meet me there?”
Aw, hell, I never could turn down a woman who looked at me like that. “Sure, honey.” I picked up the chip and pressed it into the palm of my hand.
“Oh, goody!” She giggled, clapped her hands, and just about shivered with excitement. And then, to complete my already profound amazement, she darted around the table, parked her skinny little butt in my lap, and threw a tight hug around my neck and gave me a tongue-kiss on my right ear. Icy chills ran wind sprints up and down my spine.
“The best part of being a superuser,” she whispered as her hody turned to powder snow in my hands, “is that the virtual sex is absolutely fantastic!” I tried to cop a quick feel, but a blast of arctic wind came gusting through the room in that moment and her slender body flowed away in the cold, crystalline wind, literally slipping through my fingers, leaving me with just the memory of her icy kiss upon my lips and the faint echo of her words in the voice of the wind:
“Only this time, you get to be the newbie.”
And then she was gone.
I blinked. Recovered. Started thining with the brain in my head again. Closed my gaping mouth and put some effort into remembering where I was. Don Vermicelli was ignoring me, looking at the smoking shoes his incinerated boys had left behind, and—between bites of seppie ripiene—shaking his head sadly. DON_MAC was leaning back in his chair, sipping a Pennzoil & Lime and regarding me with red, unreadable, photoelectric eyes.
I smiled at the robot. “Well? What d’ya think?”
“I think,” DON_MAC said slowly as he set his drink down on the table, “that I have never before seen anyone so totally controlled by his gonads.” Abruptly, he stood and pushed his chair back. “Walk with me, Max.” He turned, made some gesture of farewell to Don Vermicelli, who looked up from his gamberoni aglio olio long enough to give us a half-hearted wave, then strode quickly and purposefully away from the table. I peeled off my napkin, threw it down on the table, and had to run to catch up with him.
DON_MAC was waiting for me at the a-grav tube out of Heaven. I joined him, and together we flooped down the tube. “Max?” he said, while we were in transit. “How long have you been hanging around Heaven?”
I thought it over. “In real-time terms?” DON_MAC nodded. “About three years.”
“You even designed some parts of Heaven, didn’t you?”
I shrugged. “Nothing important. The phased-space room, and some of the trapdoors in the Jobs Memorial Lounge.”
“That’s all? I thought you did the pterodactyl nest.”
“I refined it. Cowboy Bret did the original code.”
“Ah, yes,” DON_MAC said, nodding slowly. “The legendary Cowboy Bret. Was he the one who showed you how to find Heaven?”
I shook my head. “Nope. Never met him. I had to figure that one out on my own.”
“And before you did so, you were hanging around on the Net for—what? Three years? Four?”
I worked through it in my head, fished up some unpleasant memories from junior high school, and came up with a different answer. “Closer to six.”
We hit the bottom of the a-grav tube. DON_MAC stepped out, into the Marketplace of Ideas, and I followed. With just a quick backwards glance at the gorilla—yes, it was still a Cubist mess, but it also was starting to make obvious sense to me—we set off walking at a brisk pace through Third Level East.
“Tell me,” DON_MAC said without looking back, “now that you know what one is, have you ever actually met a superuser before?”
That didn’t take much thinking. “Well, you and Don Vermicelli, of course. And it’s pretty clear that Eliza is a superuser.” Another thought clicked into
place in that moment. “And I suppose Amber must be one, as well.”
“But have you ever run across any others?” DON_MAC asked. “Anyone who seemed exempt from the laws of virtual reality? Anyone who consistently made you sit up and say, ‘How the hell did he do that?’”
That answer took a good deal of thinking, and of sifting through old memories. The thinking slowed my walking pace, and I had to scamper to catch up with DON_MAC. “Not that I can think of,” I said. “I’ve heard of a few who probably—”
DON_MAC stopped abruptly, before a virtual door, and I almost collided with him. “Ah,” he said, “the Ranting Room. Do you ever visit the Ranting Room, Max?”
I screwed up my face into a distasteful expression, licked my lips, and tried to find some way to be polite about it. “Well, I, er, uh—-”
“It’s Fruitcake Central,” DON_MAC announced. “Home to the most idiotic, hare-brained, addle-headed thinking on the planet. For example, tonight,” he touched the menu card next lo the door, and it glowed to life, “the Church of Vegentology is conducting a memorial service for the Australian wheat harvest, followed at 0100 UTC Standard Time by the PPLF.” He paused, looked at the menu card slightly cock-eyed, and thumbed the card until supporting data was displayed. “The Portly Persons’ Liberation Front will be issuing a call for aspiring terrorists to help them with their campaign of radical door enlargement. Then after that we have a meeting of the FWRA—the Future Welfare Recipients of America—who are splitting their time with Men Victimized by Vasectomy, and following that the president of Scatophiliacs Anonymous will give a talk on ‘Getting Your Shit Together.’”
SCATOPHILIACS
People who really know their shit.
DON_MAC considered that last one a moment, grimmaced, and released the menu card. It faded back to darkness. He turned to me. “Do you know why the Marketplace sysops continue to maintain the Ranting Room, Max?”
INFONUGGETS
Okay, that was the last one.
I shrugged. “Cheap laughs?”
DON_MAC slowly shook his metallic head. “It’s a safety valve, Max. Any open society must offer its members a safely valve—a way to vent any idea, no matter how looney—without fear of retribution. Take away that safety valve, and the only viable alternative is a police state, where all ideas are rigidly controlled.”
Okay, that seemed to make sense as far as it went, but I was having trouble connecting it to the idea of superusers.
I’m telepathic, remember? DON_MAC thought. I’ve also been a superuser for almost fifteen years. And for as long as you’ve known me, I have been a bar fixture in Heaven. Doesn’t it occur to you to wonder why a superuser would want to do that?
“Okay,” I said, not bothering to subvocalize. “I’ll bite. Why?”
“Because the superuser community is not an open society,” DON_MAC said softly. “With the power you now have, there are some ideas that are too dangerous to be spoken aloud. All it would take is one reckless superuser to completely ruin the architecture of the Information Superhighway, or destroy the fabric of virtual reality. A few malicious superusers, working together, could bring all of western civilization to its knees.”
Kind of attractive thought, that. Oops. Waitaminute, the guy I’m walking with is telepathic. Er, I didn’t really mean—Abruptly, DON_MAC pivoted and started walking down the east corridor again. Look at the left wall, Max, he instructed.
I followed and looked, although I didn’t really know why. I mean, I’d been down this corridor a hundred times before, and all there was on the left wall was—
A hidden door. Just exactly like the secret door to Heaven.
“DON_MAC?” I subvocalized.
Don’t go in there, Max, he answered. Remember our teenage mujahadin? The khyberpunks? We had to give them their own room, just to keep them out of trouble. I jumped back from the door as if it was electrified and ran to catch up with DON_MAC. Another door appeared on my left.
“This one?” I subvoked.
Don’t waste your time,he answered. That room’s full of young kids who like to clown around with liquid nitrogen.
“Huh?”
Cryopunks.
I left a bit of the skin from my fingers frozen to the doorknob, and ran to catch up with DON_MAC again. We passed another door.
“That one?”
Even worse, DON_MAC thought. That room’s full of wankers who are pathologically into code-breaking and math puzzles.
“Who?”
Cipherpunks.
Argh! Stifling a horrendous groan, I caught up with DON_MAC just as we passed yet another door. I fought to keep my silence.
It didn’t help. A splinter faction from the home-brewing group, DON_MAC observed as we passed the door. These fools are ideologically committed to creating fruit-based beverages.
“Let me guess.”
Ciderpunks.
I fell down to the floor, kicking and screaming in pain, but had to cut the hysterics and get back to my feet when I saw that DON_MAC was going on without me. We passed another hidden door.
This one actually looked rather promising. I stopped and took a closer look.
Oh no, Max, DON_MAC warned me, whatever you do, you do not want to go in there. That place is full of young guys with no social lives, no sex lives, and no hope of ever moving out of their mothers’ basements. These are guys who relate to hardware better than people, who still build and fly model rockets, and who show up for the sneak preview showing of every new science fiction film. They’re total wankers and losers, who indulge in Messianic fantasies about someday getting even with the world through almost-magical computer skills, but whose actual use of the Net amounts to dialing up the scatophilia forum and downloading a few disgusting pictures, You know, cyberpunks.
“Oh gosh, no,” I said quickly. “I’d never want to hang around with those geeks.”
Eventually, the junction of the east and south corridors came into sight. Just before we entered the common area, DON_MAC stopped before a door that was hidden a bit better than the rest.
“Max,” he said, “this is very important. Remember how I told you that the superusers are not an open society?”
“Yes?”
“And by now, I expect you’ve figured out that it was we superusers who built the original Heaven, as well as all the other virtual live-traps?”
Well, no, I hadn’t figured that one all the way to the end, but I wasn’t going to let DON_MAC know it. And besides, that term—live-traps—was a bit disconcerting.
“New superusers are evolving all the time,” DON_MAC said. “Lately we’ve been getting a lot through the Sacroiliac Neural Induction Device, but even before that appeared, wild talents were constantly popping up on the scene. That’s why we built and continue to staff the live-traps, and why you’ve never seen a wild superuser. Because it’s my job to identify, assess, and collect nascent superusers before they learn their full potential.” DON_MAC punched a spot on the wall, and the hidden door swung open, revealing a lightless void beyond.
“Ah,” I said, comprehension dawning at last. “Then you’re like a midwife, helping to bring new superusers into the world?”
DON_MAC clamped one massive chrome hand on the nape of my neck, the other on the seat of my pants, and lifted me clear off the floor. “No,” he said, “I’m more like a game warden, helping to decide if you’re rabid and should be destroyed.” He stepped back, took a massive swing, and heaved me head-first through the open door, into the endless black void beyond.
“If it’s any consolation,” his voice echoed after me, “it’s nothing personal!” I fell forever to the lightless center of the earth, tumbling and screaming all the way down.
14: MAX_KOOL IN HELL
Blackness. All about me was silent and without form, empty chaos floating on the null and void…
“Hullo,” a pleasant female voice said, “and welcome to Hell. Would you like a drink?”
My eyes popped open. I was sitting i
n a large, hellish, red, leather-upholstered, actually rather comfy wing chair, in—
Well, a room. A nice room. One of those sort of elegant, dark-paneled drawing rooms you see in BBC dramas that can’t afford to spend any money on sets.
I blinked. Everything stubbornly continued to be there and nothing seemed the least bit Cubist, so I blinked again. About that time I noticed my clutching fingers were digging holes into the arms of the chair, and so, slowly, I relaxed.
“Hullo?” the woman said again. I pried my attention off the chair and the room, and looked at her.
She was—normal. Disturbingly normal. A pleasant smile, grayish-blue eyes, and a plain face, neither radiantly beautiful nor conspicuously ugly. Long, straight, brown hair, parted in the middle, with a hint of gray here and there and a touch of curl at the ends. Her only jewelry was a simple pair of gold hoop earrings: other than that she had no facial piercings, no electronic implants, no exotic makeup, no gravity-defying hair. I pulled my view back from her face and glanced over the rest of her. She wore a simple, nondescript, brownish sweater, a pair of baggy gray slacks, and brown flats. Neither thin nor fat; if I’d had to guess at her age, I’d have put her anywhere between thirty and fifty, and no more specific than that.
And then it struck me. She was wearing perfume. Innocent and floral, yes, but I could definitely smell it.
“Hullo?” she said a third time. “Er, you are the new lad that DON_MAC sent down, aren’t you?” She spoke with a pleasant, educated, upper-crust British accent.
I gulped, licked my lips, and found my voice, in my throat, right where I’d left it. “Yeah,” I got out. “Max Kool. I—” I lifted my right hand off the armrest in preparation for offering her a handshake, noticed that my hand was shaking enough all by itself, and went back to gripping the armrest. “Where did you say we are?”
“In Hell, of course.” She smiled sweetly, took my hand and patted it gently as if it were a nervous hamster, and said, “There, there. Don’t be alarmed. Everything’s fine. All the interesting people end up in Hell, sooner or later.”
