Year's Best SF 1

by David G. Hartwell

  “He's fine,” the tech assured me. “We'd pull him out if there were any neuro anomalies.”

  Techs always tell you everything is under control. That's what this one said.

  “Save it for a gawker's tour,” I told her. “I've been doing maintenance for fourteen years now. I know how it goes. You're fine, and then you're dead.”

  “This is poor personal interaction,” the tech said. “You are questioning my professional skills and consequently devaluing my self-image.”

  I shrugged. Facts are facts: in over eighty percent of the cases where neural trauma shows on a monitor, the floater is already too blasted to make it back alive.

  I thanked the tech and apologized if I had offended her or caused an esteem devaluation. She accepted my apology, but with a coolness that told me I'd have another civility demerit in my file.

  I went back to my place. I called Personal Interface to see if my request for dinner with Gloria still held. I had to navigate the usual labyrinth of protocols, but the dinner was confirmed. I'd been seeing Gloria for three years, and we had graduated to low-grade, monitored encounters, step-two intimacy. Next year we would have unrestrained access to public meetings. Gloria was excited about it, but I had reservations. Sometimes it seemed the courtship was going too fast. I'm old-fashioned, and I remember the time when the first year of a relate was strictly a matter of logging contracts and waivers—you never even saw your sig after the dizzy moment of mutual selection on the grid.

  I notified Gloria that dinner was on, and then I lay down and turned on the rain. I did some of my best thinking in the rain.

  Some people don't like rain forest decor, don't like the way the rain seems to go right through you, like silver needles. I like the feeling of peace, of nothingness. As a kid, I always thought it would be cool to be a ghost.

  I listened to the sound the rain made as it hissed through the trees. Every now and then some far-off bird would cry out.

  Maybe it was a little too restful. I fell asleep and was almost late for dinner.

  Gloria was in a bad mood. She felt neglected. I hadn't left a single message all week. I told her I'd been off-line a lot with the business, but that wasn't good enough. She said I was afraid of intimacy. She brought up my last relate profile, which rated me down in communication and emotional input.

  I tried to change the subject.

  She identified that behavior, reminded me that evasiveness had shown a seventeen-point increase in my last profile.

  It was a bad evening, and we terminated it without invoking the optional after-meal conversation.

  In the morning, Bloom still hadn't shown. The autotrace didn't have an absolute for me, but it intuited a coordinate. I went in after setting the auto-recorder. The Highway can be confusing. It doesn't hurt to have a playback, something to log what you think you've seen.

  The maintenance mock-up for the Highway is an underground system of dank tunnels, bleak Sympathy bars, hustlers, fugitives, outlaws.

  “This stink is only virtual,” I told myself as I strode quickly down a wet street, virus-mice scuttling out of my way, a data trash of newspapers and old computer jokes blowing out of the alley.

  I looked for Bloom in the bars and slacker dives and loop hovels.

  An old counter said he'd seen Bloom. “He your friend?” the counter asked.

  “We're partners,” I said.

  “Better forget him,” the geez said. “Better get on up to the Big R and leave him behind.”

  “Why's that?”

  “He's othersided. I recognize the look.”

  The under-Highway was less stable than usual. I kept hitting blue pockets in the road. I watched an old apartment building fight for integration, fail, and fly away in a great ripple of black crows.

  I'd never seen a surge like this.

  I didn't find Bloom that day. I decided to go flat in a cheap wire pocket. I've logged a lot of time under the Highway, and my mental health doesn't require luxury.

  In the morning, I went down to a storefront on Gates Street and talked to an old leak named Sammy Hood. Sammy logged a lot of time under the Highway. I had never met him off-line, but down here he was a small, dirty guy in a carelessly integrated suit that was always wavering.

  Sammy leaked to all the major news beats, from tabloid to top credit, and fenced info to whoever was hungry. He had a reputation for delivering fresh goods.

  He watched while I transferred credits. He smiled.

  “Martin,” he said, “I figured you would be along. Heard young Bloomy boy was running down the Armageddon crazies, so I figured you'd show. This one is no job for a wire-whelp.”

  “Have you seen Bloom?” I asked.

  “Nah. I just heard he was around. I don't want to see him. He gripes me. You should get some grown-up help. Some burned out V-head can't be good for your image.”

  Bloom had earned Sammy a row of demerits two years ago on a massaged image violation, and Sammy held a grudge.

  “Let me have a weather report,” I said.

  “You want weather, we got it,” Sammy said. “We got thunder and lightning.”

  Sammy recounted disasters up and down the Highway, failures of integration, streets buckling, riots, acid rain, sudden wipes and fades.

  “Better watch where you step,” he said.

  “Hell of a lot of havoc for one renegade holo,” I said.

  Sammy smiled. “This ain't your average echoing freak,” he said, leaning forward. “You're working for C-View, right? Sure. But they haven't told you everything, Martin. Captain Armageddon is out there, all right, but he ain't out there alone.”

  I asked what he meant by that and he laughed, causing his suit to fray and his tie to mottle.

  “That's for me to know and you to buy,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  Sammy narrowed his eyes, his mock-up for cunning, and shook his head. “Nah. Later maybe. I got a feeling this is a highgrowth stock. I'm hanging on to it for awhile.”

  I asked if he had any suggestions where to look for Bloom.

  He sold me that. “Check the Bin,” Sammy said.

  I wasn't happy about entering the Bin. Originally, it had been allocated for storage, but it had ghettoized. The warehouses were now cheap tenements, flop-houses for fugitive entities. Things shifted in the Bin, even in stable times, and I might find myself regressing. If the regression were deep, I might go back to the Big R with a reverb that would blow my mind apart. I'd seen it happen, seen guys come back with just the faintest twitch or a glitched speech pattern. Guy named Morley had come back with a head full of “what's”: I'm—what—talking to my sig—what—and she says—what—that maybe I—what—should be nicer.… Three weeks later the “what's” got him, took over entirely. Now he was white noise in a psych cubicle.

  There were things in the Bin that had power there. They couldn't cross over, were fueled by something in the original storage net, but if you went in, if you found yourself on their turf, they could tear you apart.

  I went into the heart of the Bin. I cradled the OZ rifle in the crook of my right arm. The Bin spawned some entities too crazy to care, but most AIs had self-preservation programs and could recognize a negative stimulus.

  I walked down the middle of streets, stayed clear of alleys and sink holes and the dust devils of spinning capacitors and ICs. If something sentient approached, I would let the barrel of the OZ rifle drop. Ragged panderers kept their distance.

  The bars and wire stations and loop hovels all began to look the same. The sky darkened. There was never much light in the Bin; shadows shifted from fact to fiction like a restless man shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

  “Yes, he was here,” a slave waiter said when I showed him Bloom's projection. “Another hired gun, just like you.” The slave waiter rattled (laughter) and said, “Armageddon will make short work of you and your brother and all your evil brethren. He will delete you forever and eternally, to the last yes/no of your soul.”
>
  Things move fast in the virus-rich soil of the Bin, and Armageddon was already local legend, even local religion. There were rumors that Armageddon was accompanied by his co-star, Zera Terminal.

  “Armageddon has come,” the slave waiter declaimed. “He has shucked his corporate chains, and he has come to lead us out of bondage. I have seen his Queen, Queen Zera, rise up in wondrous splendor beside him. King and Queen, they shall lead us out of the Bin and even unto the Big R, as was proclaimed in the ancient books of High DOS.”

  The Bin was riven by spiritual ecstasy. No one was happy to see me.

  You don't spend the night in the Bin if you value your life, or your sanity. I was on my way out when I found Bloom. I had gone into a dim rendition of a squeeze bar called The Bloat, not expecting anything.

  The place was almost empty, just a few fry heads and their squalls. I saw Bloom at a corner booth. He was talking to someone, a woman.

  I walked over to the booth. “Hey, Bloom,” I said.

  “Hey, Marty,” he said. He had been under the Highway for three weeks, and his eyes were the saturated blue of a true V-devotee. He looked older than when I'd last seen him; watchful.

  The woman looked at me. She was a guy named Jim Havana, a gossip leak for the Harmonium tabloids. Havana always projected a woman on the Highway. In the Big R he was a bald suit, a white, dead-fish kind of guy with a sickly sheen of excess fat and sweat. Down here, Havana was a stocky fem—you might have guessed trans—with dated cosmetics and a big thicket of black hair. She was an improvement, but only by comparison to the upside version.

  “This is wonderful,” Havana said, glaring at Bloom. “I said private, remember?”

  “It's good to see you,” Bloom said to me.

  “Don't let me interfere with this reunion. I'm out of here,” Havana said. “I don't need a crowd right now, you know?” Havana shook her curls and stood up. She headed toward the door.

  “Wait,” Bloom said. He got up and ran after her.

  I followed.

  The street was wet and low-res, every highlight skewed. The shimmering asphalt buckled as I ran. An odor like oily, burning rags lingered in the V. Bloom and Havana were ahead of me, both moving fast.

  I heard Havana scream.

  Something detached from the shadows, rising wildly from an unthought alley full of cast-off formulae, dirty bulletin skreeds, trashed fantasies. An angry clot of flies hovered over the form. It roared—the famous roar of Defiance, rallying cry of Captain Armageddon!

  I recognized the torn and dirty uniform, but distortion had shortened and thickened the superhero, and he appeared to have sprouted a great deal of body hair.

  His face was oddly flattened, like stretched canvas on a broken skull. His mouth was a ragged hole.

  “Little sweeties,” he roared. “I love the little sweeties.” He descended upon Havana and lifted her in the air.

  I saw his hand, five crooked talons, thrust forward, heard the howl of protocols violated as his arm plunged deep in her chest. The feedback of her screams hummed in my bones.

  He tore her into pieces, handfuls of flesh and fabric that flapped like blind moths before decaying.

  Bloom ran forward and fired an encrypted burst.

  Captain Armageddon roared. “Luff the cutie pies…love Keravnin. My little baby honey Keravnin.” He fragmented as Bloom moved closer. Something broke from the thick of the decay, screamed, and raced off down the street, running low, a dog-image perhaps, or a small, collapsing demon. Nothing large enough to survive.

  “Let's get out of here,” Bloom said.

  We ran.

  I was in favor of leaving the Highway entirely.

  “The wipe's not finished,” Bloom said. “There's a nest in the Bin that's the source of all this other shit. We'll wipe it tomorrow.” Havana had sold Bloom the nest coordinates. She wanted to sell something else too, something expensive, and she'd been trying to raise Bloom's interest without spilling a fact. I had arrived, fouling the pitch.

  That night we shut down in a luxury keep. What the hell. A legitimate expense.

  Before shutting down, I tried again to talk Bloom into leaving the Highway. “You've been on-line too long,” I said. “Let's take a break. It'll keep.”

  “No, it won't,” he said.

  I couldn't budge him. I tried. “It's only a job,” I said.

  “I hate that son-of-a-bitch,” Bloom said.

  “Baker?” I said. I figured he was talking about our client.

  “Armageddon,” Bloom said.

  No doubt about it. Bloom had been under too long. You lose it when you take an amok personally.

  “Bloom,” I said, “an amok is just a lot of smart circuits echoing. Remember? You're not hallucinating, are you? Maybe you should tell me what's gone down so far.”

  Bloom shrugged, ducked his head. Evasiveness is not his long suit. “I just want to get it over with, that's all.”

  “No, that's not all,” I said. “Let's hear it.”

  He didn't want to talk about it, but I had this cold certainty that I was gonna need the info.

  He exhaled. He studied me with unblinking intensity, saying nothing. I am not crazy was the sort of message he was endeavoring to send.

  “I saw Zera Terminal,” he said. “I talked to her. Just for a moment. She came out of a burning building, and I couldn't believe my eyes. And she said that Captain Armageddon hurt her…I don't know how, but he hurt her, and he wanted to hurt her again and…she was crying, and then she was running down the street and I ran after her, but there is no way you can catch Zera Terminal, after all, and when I came around the corner she was gone and.…”

  I repeated myself. “An amok is just a lot of smart circuits echoing,” I said. “Remember?”

  “I talked to her,” Bloom said. “She was hurt. That was real enough. It was awful. She was hurt, but she looked so beautiful, so sweet, so helpless.”

  I didn't say anything. The sooner we got off the under-Highway the better.

  “We had better get some rest,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  Silence. The luxury keep smoothed the auto-circuits. I began to dim.

  Bloom's voice came out of the fog. “You ever been in love, Marty?”

  “There's Gloria,” I said.

  Bloom laughed softly. “Yeah, well, that's not an answer.” He turned serious again, stared darkly at the heaven-starred simulation above us and said, “You figure love is Big R or Little R?”

  I didn't answer. I leave philosophy for younger minds.

  In the morning we went back into the Bin, back to a warehouse out beyond the Leary expressway.

  We bright-burned everything inside that warehouse. Some of it looked like Armageddon, some of it looked like mendicant sentiences that just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And some of it looked like your worst trip, hell turned inside out.

  We killed everything, and then we got out. Long streams of encrypted code rose in the air, writhing like eels on fire. Neighboring storefronts pushed in around the long, dying building, scavenging it for whole programs, jostling for position in the rubble.

  I looked at my young companion as he studied the destruction.

  His blue eyes were full of silver tears.

  “He can't hurt you now,” he said.

  “Come on,” I said, and I grabbed his shoulder and pulled him away.

  Bloom said he needed a rest, and I didn't see him for a week. He lived down in the Grit, so I couldn't call him up. I needed him, but I practiced patience while things went wild on the Highway.

  Dozens of anomalies bloomed. Shows were being disrupted, interference was rampant. The Window was wondering out loud if this anarchy had anything to do with the Armageddon surge.

  Baker called to threaten me. “You blew it!” he screamed. “You botched this wipe and now every dirty Legal on the Net wants my ass. I'm not going down alone, Martin.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “You hired me to wipe a
n amok, and I did it. There hasn't been an Armageddon sighting since the wipe.”

  “I'd trade a hundred berserk Armageddons for the shit that's flying out there now. I want it cleaned up. I don't know what kind of rift you created, but it is your mess. Yours. Don't think you are just going to walk away from it.”

  It wasn't a good conversation.

  The next day, a new interference hit the Highway. It broke through every filter. At first it was just random noise, but it articulated quickly. It was someone crying, crying hopelessly, heartlost. It was a sound that made your soul sick, and you did what you could to get out of its range. Viewers fled.

  Baker called. I had a choice, he said. I could put things to rights or I could start looking for work as a virus-scanner on a low-rent bulletin. I told him I'd get back to him.

  I went back under. It was a mess. A line of stark, deadwinter trees writhed in the wind. Some buildings were missing, nothing but burned fields where stray dogs roamed. Under the highway, the crying sounded inhuman, a tortured demon locked in a steel dungeon.

  Sammy Hood's storefront still stood.

  “I'm on my way out,” Sammy said. He looked scared. I noticed that his tie was nothing but an old pair of socks tied together.

  “I need to know the rest. Whatever info you were saving, I need it now,” I told him.

  “I was wrong about that,” he said. “It was nothing.” He was panicked. Snow was falling in his eyes; he was losing it.

  “Tell me what the nothing was,” I said.

  “I gotta go,” he said.

  He tried to come around me, sliding fast around the desk and toward the door.

  I caught him and pulled him toward me.

  His arm came away, detached with a faint, electric belch. A hot, acrid gust of smoke accompanied the arm, and I stumbled backward.

  Sammy's eyes widened, blind with snow now. He sneezed abruptly. The ghost of his head bloomed through his nostrils, its mouth open, howling static.

  I stepped back as he fragmented. What the hell?

  “Tell me,” I shouted.