He reached a series of glowing directional arrows that hovered an inch above the ground, a public I/O channel that provided high-speed connectivity between major sections of the GlobeNet. He rode the accelerated connection through several regions until he reached the network segment that contained the club. As soon as he stepped on it, the I/O link slammed to a halt. Glint sparkled from the teeth of a cartoony woman watching him from the corner of a nearby junction.
She had skin the color of creamed coffee and her hair was a thick fluffy mass that hung down to her thighs. The white and gold dress fell somewhere between cute and alluring. Atop her head, a gold tiara bore the image of a comical cross-eyed cobra, with blue bands in the hood. Her oversized brown eyes glowed with happiness at seeing him.
Cleopatra.
His mind racing, Joey assembled pieces of corrupt code intent on frying her connection. He yanked his silver revolvers off his belt and took aim as she blew a kiss at him. Her hand flipped over to wave goodbye. Undeterred, Joey ran the command to send the attack and his fingers squeezed the triggers. The shot went off to the right due to sudden violent acceleration. The guns spat smoky bullets, gouging virtual holes in the street a few feet shy of her bare foot. The moving sidewalk lurched forward at four times its normal speed, turning the city and all the avatars on both sides of him into smears of color.
A split second later, he found himself embedded headfirst in the now crumbling side of a building. Cleopatra had hacked the uplink path, adding a physics process. This, in turn, added inertia, which prevented him from following a ninety-degree turn at that speed. The illusion of stonework broke open to reveal blue and black digital debris inside the hole. Joey slid down from the crater in a river of pain to the pavement below. Chattering laughter drifted into his ears from a bright green cartoon snake and several stars circling around his head. With a dour frown, he seized the serpent and squeezed it until its eyes burst. The little creature, a ‘pet’ construct of Cleopatra’s, was trivial to delete. He turned to stare in the direction it had come from, but a lingering throb in his head was the only trace of her presence.
Chunks of building fell out of his coat and clattered to the ground as he stood. Pieces of debris slid along the ground, drawn up the wall and into the crater where they stacked back into place. The damaged area rippled like the surface of a pond before it became as smooth and hard as the steel it purported to be.
None of the other avatars in the area had noticed his crash, or reacted if they did, providing a small degree of comfort. Cleopatra had made it her mission in life to embarrass him, but this time she failed. Anger pounded the headache deeper into his brain.
His troubles on Mars scared him, but this bitch was just irritating―the kind of irritating that pushed men to action outside their character. Joey balled his hands into fists.
What the hell does this skank want? Why me? If she wants something, why does she always just giggle instead of speak?
None of it made sense.
Probably some lonely/ugly/old/fat chick strung out on Flowerbasket with a deck and nothing better to do.
His train of thought derailed with the sound of screeching tires and automatic weapon fire behind him. The screams of children echoed. He whirled, seeing nothing but the street behind him. Sounds floated off into the distance, gone as fast as they had manifested. So loud, so tangible, like a busload of screaming kids bearing down on him, yet no one else noticed. Other avatars walked past him like pedestrians in the real world, a few sending confused looks at his reaction to something they did not hear.
Compulsion to know where the sound had come from gripped him. The old gunslinger opened his coat, letting a pack of ferrets fall to the ground. They chittered off at supernatural speed. A series of Traceweasel softs went in search of the source. After a cyberspace minute, a report came back that told him an audio-only transmission had entered his deck from sixteen separate sources, as if multiple entities conspired in a distributed bombardment of information. He dismissed Cleo; he did not think she had the skill to multiplex a signal that well. Joey could do it, but it would take days to set up and leave a window of use of only minutes. The wonder of who would go to all that trouble just to send him some creepy sound effects was one more log on the bonfire of WTF that Cleo continued to feed.
A pang of hunger got him moving again; the sooner he did the job the sooner he could eat. The dark cowboy rushed down a street that seemed alien by virtue of what it lacked. It looked real in every way, but the absence of trash, vagrants, ad-bots, and traffic made him feel like he was walking the streets of a city never touched by humans.
When he saw the club, he knew why Alex had that evil smile.
Men came here to encounter other men.
After a few mental acrobatics, his avatar shrank back to normal height and took on the appearance of a nondescript man in a business suit with a randomized face. Joey did not care what he looked like as long as it looked nothing like him.
The virtual three-story building had a white arc trimmed in chrome spanning from the left side up and over the door, connecting the first and third floors. Shadows moving along the white panels hinted at a walkway inside.
The interior network had a public flag, enabling him to walk right in to the simulated lobby. Inside, his eyes watered from the powerful presence of incense. A phantom tickle on his cheek hinted that the virtual stink was intense enough for his body to cry in its sleep. Going from the scent-neutral realm of open cyberspace to a place running custom fragrance software made him cough. A fair number of men mingled around the place accompanied by simulated drinks and a steady stream of music that thrummed in time with the lights.
Joey rubbed his neck while he walked around the room, looking for the object that concealed the access path to the private part of the network. His mind wandered back to Mars, back to the time he had tangled with an MDF security construct that treated him like it was his first night in prison. The violent disconnect caused by a blown-out deck left him feeling as though his left eye was stuck open, accompanied by a ringing in his ears and the smell of burning silicon that lingered for two weeks. The thought of playing Gee-ball with a hangover and a heavy flu felt more appealing than experiencing that again. He had no idea how he had made it out of the cube motel before they came for him; his trip to the starport was still only a nauseating blur.
Alex thought he would be uncomfortable here, but Joey did not care that much about it. He often teased Alex about that sort of thing, but he was such a dandy that he offered an easy target and his reactions made it worth it. Joey scowled at the thought of Alex. He was such a poser, or would Alex insist that it be poseur? The debate made him laugh aloud.
His search took him into the gaming area where several people killed time with various diversions. Dark carpeting filled the place, while wood paneled walls covered in the kind of kitsch usually reserved for trendy bistros ran behind several terminals where men gambled and spent time with their companions. A lone man focused on a video game in the back corner, raising Joey’s eyebrow. The thought of a game that simulated a virtual reality inside an already false world could keep philosophers up at night. At the rear of the section of game consoles, a dull metal door glinted―the access point to the private network. A six-foot-five stack of unrealistic handsomeness with long blonde hair and an expensive black suit leaned against the wall by the door. He smiled and nodded at everyone that walked within a certain distance, repeating the same cycle of movements every few seconds.
A troll.
With a twitch of a synapse, Joey triggered a scan that confirmed his suspicion. Trolls, standard combat constructs, had little intelligence and tended to attack mindlessly when activated. This one scanned as weak. He could delete it with ease, but he needed to be subtle. The entire network, and anyone on it, would know. Starting a fight here could spill into a brawl with every other user in the club’s network trying to score points with the owners for stopping a hacker. Grinning at the unexpected challenge, J
oey approached the door and took up a position at the closest game panel. The digital Adonis turned its head to glance at him and winked.
He returned a pleasant smile and focused his attention on the virtual terminal. Some manner of generic hallway shooter with zombies, albeit uninspiring in design, surprised him with its entertainment value. It absorbed him enough that the troll paid him no attention. By the time a zombie burst from the floor and ended his game, the troll had disregarded him. Joey sent a string of spoofed responses to the GlobeNet geolocator pulse. A technique known as ghosting, it caused the network to lose track of him and made him invisible to anyone in the same segment not searching deliberately for intruders.
Creeping to within an arm’s length from the oblivious virtual man, Joey turned his attention to the door, and got through the pathetic security on the first try. Beyond it, a plain white hallway stretched off into green-tiled infinity. Dozens of brown office doors lined both sides. Figuring the network to be a lot smaller than it appeared, he triggered a Lantern soft. The search process manifested as a pulse of light that shot down the hall, turning many of the doors transparent, before it returned and orbited him.
After checking several doors, he found a room with a floor drawn in the harsh lines of black and white checkerboard tiles. A row of filing cabinets, zeroes and ones folded into an artifact from offices of centuries past, stretched to a distant point where everything swirled together into a grey mass. The dark cowboy pulled an old-west style lamp out from under his coat, holding the burnished brass box aloft as he walked among the rows. Light from the digital lamp rendered the file cabinets transparent, revealing data tiles within the first twenty only. The rest represented unused storage space.
A pattern search for the name David Stone came up dry. An onyx panel scrolling with amber text appeared. Automated security had detected his intrusion, but could not locate him.
With a growl, he set about enduring the tedium of an in-depth file scan that took about thirty seconds per drawer. The job reached a level of agonizing boredom that made him question the payoff.
When he found the security vids, he dragged the drawer open, ten meters out into the room. Above it, a neat string of featureless chrome tiles rotated. One by one, they stopped spinning as the deck read their contents. The silver surfaces melted away to images of what they contained. Joey wallowed in the drudgery of it until a digitized voice startled him eighteen tiles in.
“Unauthorized presence detected, initiating combat protocol.”
The twin brother of the door guard spoke with a voice that conjured up an image of the most boring bodybuilder to ever live.
Running into a monster like this in reality would have made him run without a second thought, but not here. Here, Joey smiled. The big man leapt, flying across the filing cabinets and landing in the space where Joey had been an instant before. A barrage of harmful data took the form of a massive fist; the attack detonated one of the cabinets into thin digitizing strands that changed from metal to pure light, then to evaporating sparks of energy.
The guard turned on him, answering his impish grin with a frown. It lunged again but Joey disappeared. When the troll recovered, the dark cowboy stood across the room with a revolver leveled off. After a pause long enough to grin, he fired. The gun spat a small skull made of smoke, wailing its way in a straight line to the oaf’s chest.
Spreading from the impact point, waves of force expanded through the white tuxedo shirt like ripples through the surface of a pond. The center rebounded and spat a geyser of virtual blood that changed from red to white, melting into pixilated debris in midair.
The guard staggered and pounded his fist into the tiles, sending a tsunami of data along a floor and ceiling that moved like syrup. Hanging fluorescent lights swayed from its passing and several of the cabinets fell askew. Joey levitated over the attack, firing both guns as he rose.
The troll staggered as its head burst into a geyser of black data fragments. With a scream that drowned in a digitized roar, the large figure fell into a slush of black, white, and blonde shards, skittering like broken glass across the floor. The image map of cloth and skin flickered away to plain silver, and the chunks dissolved.
He was once more alone with his search routine.
Joey flipped his guns over his fingers and slid them back into their holsters. “Well that was almost interesting.”
After an intolerable wait, one of the data tiles grew larger than the rest, lighting up with a yellow border. He took the tile from the drawer; his caress caused a series of display panels to render above it. The object held hundreds of hours of holo-cam recordings.
One such video showed David Stone at a table with another man. They smiled and shared a drink, seeming far more interested in each other than a pair of buddies out for a drink. When they kissed, Joey nodded to himself at the five thousand credits in his hands.
“You might say I’m a bastard.” He spoke to the object. “But he’ll be happier when the dust settles.”
alfway through the club, a minute movement caught Joey’s eye from the direction of the door. An object rocketed toward him, a cartoony green snake flying at him like an arrow―another hacker trying to backdoor some code onto his system. His defensive cringe caused his deck to react, trapping the incoming file in a quarantined memory address.
He caught the snake out of the air before it hit him. A frown spread across his face as he recognized it as Cleopatra’s work. His glare deepened at the realization that she tried to load a Depantser soft onto his deck to degrade its performance. If a cyberspace avatar had pants, which his current avatar did, the animation lived up to its name. Given his current surroundings, his face darkened with rage.
The amateurish attack had Cleopatra’s stench all over it, and did not speak well of her skills. The serpent salted the wound of his failure to locate her.
After I send this file to Alex, I’m coming for you, bitch. He bristled with indignation that she would dare use a newbie’s technique on him. You’re way out of your league.
He had had enough. Joey closed his eyes and let the disconnection command pull him out of the GlobeNet. The dizziness of the transition came over him and the comfortable neutral temperature of cyberspace gave way to a chilly apartment awash with the sour smell of decay. With a teary-eyed gasp, he pulled the M3 plug out of his head.
He tried to walk around the room to get his blood moving, but ended up in a clumsy spiral ballet that resembled a doll with a stuck knee joint. Only an hour of real time had passed, though his body objected to spending a night in a contortionist’s sleep before being draped over a chair in the near death of cyberspace. Cold tendrils of numbness possessed his right leg; it refused to do anything but bombard him with pins and needles. A scream slid through gritted teeth as he pulled himself over to a pile of clothes and sniff-tested a series of shirts. After a few horrendous failures, he settled on a black one with a dull grey ankh covered with circuit lines. He could not tell if it lacked stink or just had less than the surrounding area.
Crawling past the couch, he snagged his NetMini from the heap and hit ‘repeat last connection’ before tossing the device to his other hand. A moment later, Alex Hunter’s head floated before him above the rainbow glow of the device’s holo-emitter.
“That was quick, Joseph. Shall I assume that you didn’t linger for a drink after you finished?” Alex’s voice dripped with patronizing insincerity.
“Here’s your damn file.” With a flick of Joey’s thumb, a nugget of information sailed a hundred miles in less than a second.
The glimmering head turned to the side with a nod of approval. “My my. What’s got you so testy? You may be a cretin, but you do good work.” Ephemeral chimes sounded as Alex poked at his terminal out of sight. “Your payment is in your account. Oh, by the way… I have another job if you are interested.”
Joey wanted a decent meal, not the rattle of Alex’s voice between his ears. “I’ll think about it.”
The illus
ory head spiraled around the NetMini as Joey tossed it back into the pile of debris on the couch; the spinning voice faded into a protesting chipmunk as the head shrank away to nothing. Something metal hit the floor and rolled, displaced by the impact. He rubbed the bridge of his nose as the loud noise aggravated his headache. The clamor mutated into whirring as a metal lid spun around, wobbling with increasing speed upon his brain until it settled still upon the concrete.
“I gotta get out of here.”
As much as he did not want to admit it, Alex was his best ticket away from this hole that passed for an apartment. It took him a few minutes to hunt around for his black duster coat; a garment that looked more like it belonged in the old west than in the modern age. After fixing his hat, he collected his deck and tossed it in a practiced maneuver over his shoulder. It hit his back just as the retracting cable snapped closed into the case.
It took Joey heaving all of his hundred-and-sixty-five pound body into the door to get it to release its grip on the floor, and he squeezed himself through the narrow gap it afforded. Outside, the air blew crisp, offering only a mild improvement in smell over the stagnant interior. Like everyone else in this part of town, the sun kept itself out of sight. It would be dark soon, but Joey did not mind. The denizens of this forgotten place ignored him. He did not have tits, did not look like he had anything worth taking, and most important of all―he kept to himself.
Some of the locals had even become friendly with him, especially after he had invited them to partake of the fifty gallons of synthetic tequila that appeared mysteriously at his apartment last month. He later discovered that Cleo ordered it as a prank, and of course put his name on the bill. It proved easier to erase the bill than get rid of the booze. Even with the help of the dozen or so people that hung out on the corner, more than half of it remained a month later. The mere thought of it churned his gut.
The bike was a chimera of disparate parts; naked steel held together by a handful of screws and a lot of hope. The superconducting battery and in-wheel motors worked, even if the frame felt like it was two speed bumps away from complete disintegration. It sat just outside the door, a dam in the river of passing detritus, catching the odd paper scrap or rolling can against its wheels. Picking a plastic bag off the seat, he kicked an aluminum canister out from under the wheel before throwing his leg over it and settling down.
Virtual Immortality Page 5
