by John Shirley
Danny laughed. “I’m issuing this, for sure, this is funny shit. Yeah let’s role-play big-tall-skinny-blond tycoon lady ... in her exercise danskins or whatever the fuck those things are ... Clunky clothes, sinkitty girl ...”
He was nude, himself, and starting to feel exposed, because of the chilliness in her eyes when she looked at him. Feeling anything bad in a place like this was ... well it was innovative. Or it was a mistake in the program. Didn’t usually happen.
He was feeling a kind of plunge in his feelings, now, as they boat slid into a more overgrown part of the forest, the canopy closing overhead; it was suddenly humid and clammy and yet too hot, at once; mosquitoes buzzed at his eyes ... very unpleasant here ...
“Not ... supposed ... t’happen,” Danny said. His words coming sluggishly.
And then he saw that Claire PointOne’s face was changing. Her right eye was becoming someone else’s eye. Dark-pupiled, epicanthic, Asian. Her lips were divided in the middle, slightly uneven; one cheekbone a little higher than the other. And her whole face, now, seemed a fusion of other faces, maybe four others, and Claire’s, and they steadied into a single face, a face that almost made sense, but then again didn’t quite, and a voice, a phasing chorus of voices all saying the same thing, spoke from the imperfectly amalgamated features: “Boy, you are so brief, so temporary, evanescent, and soon you will wink out. But I have lived a million lives already, I’ve calculated them out, and will live millions more. I can pull you apart like one of these ...”
She reached over and snatched a large dragonfly out of the air and began pulling off its legs and wings, one by one.
“Like one of these,” she said again.
“Rack!” Danny shouted. He was feeling sick, like he was going down a drain and the drain was in his own heart. “Cut this bullshit off! Turn ’er off! Switch out!”
It was supposed to stop automatically, then. But it didn’t. She hunkered over him, the woman who wasn’t a woman, like a flying harpie—then she grabbed him by the throat, and leapt into the air, dragging him up, along into the air behind her. He was lifted, squealing, like a squirrel in the talons of a hawk ...
She flew up, away from the river, carrying him with her, away from the safety of the boat, up through the tree branches, and he thrashed and struggled in her grip and she laughed with five voices ... and she dropped him.
He fell into the tops of trees, dislodging a thousand reeking bats that scratched at his eyes as they flapped past, and he grabbed at a branch and it broke and he fell, cracked a rib against another branch, and it broke too, and he fell again, caught a larger lower branch, held desperately on, sweating, sticky, heart pounding, side aching ...
And looked down to see the Columbian guerrilla fighter climbing the tree toward him, a machete clamped in his mouth. The machete cut the man’s mouth so that it bled but he didn’t seem to care. He wore green fatigues and his hair was shaggy and he had two days beard and a scarred patch of skin where his right ear should be. And he had no shoes on.
Danny remembered this model of guerilla bot. It was a CGF from Combat In Columbia, the first VR shooter game he’d ever played, when he was eleven. Long obsolete, that game. But there was the CGF just as he remembered them. This was the sort that climbed trees, dropped on you from above. Danny was supposed to shoot at the tree-machete bot—but he didn’t have a gun.
“Rack! Shut it off!”
But the guerilla bot came closer, climbing up toward Danny. He clung to the tree trunk with his feet and left hand, took the machete in his other—and, grinning bloodily, slashed at Danny’s leg. Danny leapt back ... and fell, crashing through branches. He landed heavily on his back in deep forest mulch, the wind knocked out of him.
He felt like he had been struck by a dozen clubs in falling. One of the broken branches was beside him, split so that part of it was tilted upward. Through a red haze, Danny saw the guerilla climbing down toward him. Poising on the lowest crotch of the tree, baring bloody teeth, flourishing the machete—and jumping down at him.
Danny grabbed the spike-like broken branch beside him and jammed it upward—catching the pouncing guerilla in the groin. The sharply torn branch penetrated the guerilla’s crotch, spurting blood—there was just the suggestion of digital pixilation about the spurt, the first break Danny’d spotted in the apparent reality of the VR.
Impaled, the man writhed, screaming, sinking further down on the branch, dropping the machete. Danny let go of the branch, rolled over, scooped up the machete. Feeling cracked bones grinding inside him ... tasting blood in his mouth ...
Hoffman stared in amazement at the walls of his DeStressing Room—something had happened to the Yomi rainforest program, its imagery had gone all sharp-edged and acute and violent. It showed, lifesize on the wall, a man dropping on another man from a rainforest tree, getting impaled on an improvised wooden stake ... a spear of wood right up through the man’s groin ... the man screaming and writhing in preprogrammed simulating of blood spurting agony ... There were two figures, one of them, the one on his back wielding the stake, was nude and scratched up, a slender man who looked, somehow, realer than the other figure, his face expressing fear and outrage. A vaguely familiar face.
Hoffman shook his head. Who had transmitted this image to his DeStressing Room—and why? Was it some form of psy-ops attack? Was someone trying to upset him, make him run? Was it a prank? Was it sheer accident?
He suspected, strongly, that it was no accident.
Danny got dizzily to his feet, swiping away a rainforest mosquito. He turned to stagger away through the VR jungle—away from the absurdly dying guerilla.
This is ridiculous, unreal. The bot dying that way would never happen in life. It’s not real. Stop believing in it or you could die here ....
Aloud—was it really aloud?—he shouted, “Rack! Rack Nidd! Switch out! Turn the fucking thing off!”
Monkeys screamed tauntingly in response; birds burst warningly from an enormous growth of ferns ... and the woman with the multiplex face faded in, simply appeared, floating in the air over him, like the Cheshire Cat.
“Better run!” she crowed, her mouth stretching out unnaturally widely, “I can’t let you live much longer little Danny boy!”
“I’m not a boy, you cow!”
“No you’re not. I use the term boy ironically. Because you’re forever boyish, adolescent, unfinished. Yet you are aging ... aging rather badly! Well—that’ll be over soon! No more aging at all! I can’t have that software bandied about the world!”
“What? What about the software? Who are you?”
“Destiny! I am Fate, Kismet, Destiny! Now run! The others are coming!”
She pointed to her left, Danny looked, and saw a phalanx of guerillas coming toward him across a small grassy meadow, a sun-washed clearing in the trees, the light glinting off the guns in their hands. One of them fired and bullets sang past him; two rounds cracked into a tree bole beside him, spitting splinters.
“It’s not real!” he shouted, his voice shaking with a deep existential indignation. But he turned and ran.
His muscles ached; his bones complained. Even the pain is an illusion, he told himself. This feeling of breathlessness. All VR-INDUCED sensation, you fuckin’ duh-taunt! It’s just a first person shooter! Reject its reality!
Then he tripped over a rotting log and fell face first in the richly odorous droppings of some large jungle animal.
Spitting, still clutching the machete, Danny got to his feet, turned—and there was a “Captain Guerilla.” He remembered this bot from the Combat In Columbia game; there were four or five enemy types, all swarthy Columbian communists, but this one was more clean-cut than the others, wearing boots and a jacket with a captain’s insignia and an officer’s hat. He had both his ears, too. But his face was almost the same as the other, though clean shaven, and he gave the same grin as he raised the AK47—
A rage rose in Danny. Rage fueled by shame. “Oh fuck you!” Danny snarled, bracing himself. “
Fuck the real world and fuck the fake! Fuck you and fuck the whole thing!”
And then he rushed the AK47, swinging the machete.
He slashed down hard, cutting deep into the bot’s left shoulder—but the guerilla captain pulled the trigger at the same moment and Danny felt himself slammed in the sternum, thrown backwards, a coldness in his back as the bullets tore right through him ...
He fell onto his back on the mossy forest floor. Someone nearby spoke in Spanish. Someone else laughed.
More stunned than in pain. But he felt his lungs filling up with blood ... Felt himself beginning to drown ... his own body was drowning him ...
It’s not real. It’s not ...
But he felt it. And his body, back in Rack’s place, felt it. Felt his lungs filling, his heart stuttering, his blood pressure dropping. What he felt in VR his body felt, responded to, his physical heart so integrated with this digital vision, this neurological simulation, that his heart’s missing beats in the game was his heart missing beats in life ...
His heart beating slowly, as he lay there on his back, slowly—then fast, missing a beat ... the sky glimpsed through the trees pixilating ... the edges of the fronds overhead growing low resolution and dark ... His mind losing its ‘rez’ too ... Couldn’t feel his legs or hands ...
“Rick ...” he said. “Oh my brother. I’m sorry. Rick ... Mom ... why ya ... why ya have to ... Rick ... I’m sorry ...”
Low rez. Image too dark. Too dark. Adjust brightness ... adjust brightness, hode ... adjust brightness ... It’s all ... too ...
“Goodbye, little Danny boy,” came the strange, chorused voice close to his ear. And it was the last thing he ever heard.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN?
MIGHT BE BAD LUCK—BUT YOU PROBABLY WON’T BE HIT BY A TRUCK
“What?” Targer looked sharply at Rack Nidd. “You said he had the thing. I assumed you meant he had it with him, right there, on stick.” Targer was standing with Rack and the brawny, dark skinned Slakon-liaison LAPD back-up Officer, Sergeant Tonio Bleeker, the three of them staring down at Danny’s body. The body of the one-time rock star was twisted in the filthy VR webbing; blood trailing from the corners of his mouth. Eyes staring. Bruises on his bared chest.
“No,” Rack said. “I didn’t say that. He said he was going to take me to it. I didn’t know what was going on in there, I had earmites in, I was listening to a tech-cast. I heard him yell some but people yell in VR all the time and I couldn’t tell what the fuck he was saying. How’d I know he was gonna die? He never did before and he’s done my V-rides a lot. I don’t understand how the program he was running got into the system, anyway. I looked at some clips after it went through and—I don’t recognize any of it. He was supposed to get ‘Sweet Island Girl’. He got some kind of variant on an old First Person Shooter. Old thing called Combat In Columbia. Those old games, even if you get ‘killed’ you just get a black-out and respawn or it’s game over, and you go and get yourself a fucking beer. I mean—I’ve heard of people getting stuck, getting so identified that they, you know, die in VR, but that’s rare, that shouldn’t have happened, it’s not something we ... That I ...” The robot scorpion on his shoulder was stalking back and forth, chittering something. Rack hissed at it, “Quiet, Jiminy, goddamnit!”
“Whatever program you use here—it’s all illegal,” Targer pointed out.
Targer was slapping an RR stick in his hand—recoil reversal. It was also an electric prod, if he activated the charge on the metal-capped end.
Rack was looking at the RR stick. Then up at Bleeker, the backup cop, in uniform, assigned to help Targer; a broad-shouldered Chicano/black man with short, immaculately shaped hair, a small mustache, a luminous LAPD RULES OK? tattoo on the back of his right hand, and an auto-shotgun held loose in his left.
“The ambulance is coming, Mr. Targer,” Bleeker said. “But this boy’s been dead too long. Already starting to stiffen up. Nobody going to bring him back.”
Targer nodded. “Well, now. Is it the dead body that smells in here, Officer Bleeker, or is it this scumbag of a V-rat hook-in here?”
“Too soon for the body,” Bleeker said with a straight face. “I think it’s our scorpion boy here we’re smelling.”
Rack’s eyes flicked back and forth between them, taking in the expressions on their faces. He backed away, toward the filthy curtain, his robot scorpion capering on his shoulder, hissing. “Hey—this ain’t my fault, hode. And you owe me, I found the hode and called you—you can search his place, search his snapper. . .”
“His snapper, from his satchel? The one that was completely wiped?”
“What? I didn’t wipe it!”
“I just checked it, the thing’s been wiped.”
“I didn’t do it but that model, hode, it can be wi-wi’ed.”
“And who did the wireless wipe?”
“I don’t know! Whoever fed him that sick killer program maybe, there’s shit comin’ in here from outside that shouldn’t be—okay, uh, I’m gonna leave you guys to it—just ... just transfer the reward to my account ... I’m gonna ...” He backed through the curtain into the loft’s main room.
“Seems like he’s rabbiting outta here,” said Bleeker. “And him a suspect in illegal VR, with a dead V-rat on the premises.” It was, really, a kind of suggestion—and a query.
“Can’t have him running,” Targer said, answering the almost unspoken question. They couldn’t have Rack running around, talking or posting or texting about the semblant decrypt software. That would not please Mr. Grist.
They followed Rack out, caught up with him trying to go out the loft door. Targer hit him in the right shoulder with the RR stick, fairly hard, and the technology doubled the impact so that Rack was sent spinning—the robot scorpion clinging, hissing—to fall on his side. He lay there groaning. The robot scorpion climbed onto his back and hissed, made threatening motions at them with its stinger.
“You know, I hear if you give those little pet robots a charge, they get all kinda funny and forget who their friends are,” Bleeker said.
“That right?” Targers switched on the electric prod function of his RR stick. He hunkered just within reach of the scorpion, as Rack tried to get to his hands and knees, and reached out, touched the scorpion with the electrified tip. Sparks flew and the robot scorpion did a backflip, ran back and forth, giving off little wisps of smoke—and spasmodically slapping its stinger down into the nearest target. Which was Rack Nidd.
Rack shrieked and writhed and yelled at Jiminy but it was over, pretty quick.
“So he does have poison in that thing,” Bleeker said, watching Rack’s convulsions. “Thought he might. Never sorry to see these guys check out.”
“Might’ve been a little precipitous,” Targer said, stepping back from the robot scorpion as it ran toward him. Watching as Bleeker crushed it under his boot. “Maybe I shoulda waited and asked some more questions.” Thinking that he’d killed Rack as much out of revulsion, as anything. And frustration. Letting the ex-rock star die—putting Danny Candle out of reach. Now there were more imponderables. Loose ends. “He might’ve known something more about where that memstick is. If there is one.”
Rack had stopped convulsing. Targer nudged the hook-in with the toe of his boot. He was dead.
“We can try to find out where he’s been staying ...” Bleeker suggested. “Search the place. This one and then ... wherever this Danny has been.” He cleared his throat. Added in a low voice, “Might help if I knew what the software was.”
Targer chuckled. “There’s an old saying about, ‘If I told you ... ’”
“Oh, you’d have to ...” Then, it seemed, Bleeker realized that, despite the chuckle, Targer wasn’t kidding. “Whatever. Just tell Mr. Grist I’m doing my all, here. I’d like to work closer to the company one of these days. I need better benefits than I’m getting where I am ...”
“I’ll tell him. Let’s toss this place and then see what we can do about tracing the road-killed party a
nimal in the back room...You said there was an ambulance coming?”
“Yeah. You don’t want it? Figure it’ll scare your man away?”
Targer shook his head. “Actually—he sees his brother loaded into an ambulance that might bring Candle rushing right into our hands.” He tapped a wrist talker. “Mike? You there? Any sign of Rick Candle?” “No sir.”
But Rick Candle was there.
It had taken some time to find out where Rack was currently holed up. People on the street were reluctant to give up the information. Candle had bruised his knuckles finding out.
Had headed over here quick as he could. Gotten within a block of Rack’s, that warm, misty evening, and he’d seen a guy he figured for a Slakon operative. He’d seen him, four years back, somewhere around their security operations. Mike something.
So Candle had skirted the block, found a back way into a moldering SRO hotel across from Rack’s. Now, hunched against the rain, hands in his coat pockets, he was watching from the black-tar roof, catty-corner from Rack’s place.
Thinking maybe he should get in there, whatever it took. But some instinct told him it was no use.
Somehow, he knew Danny was dead.
There was an empty spot in him. It ached like the hollow you pulled a tooth from. Usually he had an awareness of Danny, just the Dannyness of him, of his brother being around somewhere in the world, in that spot.
Now that place inside him was empty.
Maybe just anxiety, worry, my imagination, he thought.
Kenpo would be skeptical. “That kind of thing, too subjective, might be real, might not, best to ignore it, at the level we function on,” Kenpo had said, once.
“Ignore it,” Candle muttered, swiping wet hair out of his eyes.
But he knew. Danny was gone. So he stayed where he was, letting the knowledge smolder. It wasn’t a flame yet. But it would be. And then he’ d do something about it.
