Striper Assassin

by Nyx Smith

  Down the rugged stone steps of a sculptured dataline.

  And into the face of a node like a pair of massive metal bank vault doors. Before the doors stands a skinny little man in a white robe. He holds a big white book. He’s called the Usher and he bows as Neona approaches.

  “Usher,” she says, “I need to see Book.”

  “The Book is very busy, Angel.”

  “Usher, it’s important.”

  “Your membership is expired, Angel.”

  The angel lifts her iconic hands and shows the Usher the treasure she holds, a pile of shimmering gold coins winking with the logo “Two thousand nuyen.” Somewhere a million kilometers away to her backside her meat fingers are racing over the keys, snatching the nuyen from her account, bringing it up.

  The Usher smiles and extends a broad, flat plate. Neona opens her hands. The coins sluice down into the depression of the plate and vanish. The Usher nods.

  “You can go right in, Angel.”

  The doors slam open.

  She skates through, into the claustrophobic alleys of the Exchange. Orange and red datastores like books rise on row after row of shelves till they blur into infinity. Neona skates down the aisles till she spies the familiar icon of what is supposed to be a chubby old man with wispy hair, eyeglasses, and a rumpled suit. A chubby old man, except that he is pure, gleaming chrome and his glasses and suit are electric blue.

  “Book!”

  Book turns toward her, peering at her over the rims of his glasses. The golden angel skates right up.

  “I need some data.”

  “What do you have to exchange?”

  That’s why they call it that, the Exchange. The membership fee gets you in, but you have to tell something to learn something. It can be a high price to pay. This time, the price of her future is the best and only real secret from her past.

  She tells about the run back in Miami, the fixer who set up her and her chums, who got her friends killed and forced her to flee. One day, she’d like to get back at that fragger, but right now she’s got to concentrate on making herself a new life.

  When she finishes. Book smiles faintly and nods. “Interesting data. What would you like to know?”

  “I need to find somebody called Striper.”

  Book stares at her for a moment, then says, “You’ll have to give me more of a handle than that. I’m not a miracle worker, you know.”

  Neona smiles to herself. Book may not be a miracle worker, but he can sort through mega-reams of data like nobody she’s ever met. Nobody and no program.

  “Striper’s a runner. Heavy-duty. You know. A real wetworker.”

  “A professional killer.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Is she chipped?”

  “I don’t know.” The data file from Hammer wasn’t clear about that. “She’s supposed to be strong, and really tough. There’s a report that she got shot up by the cops one time, then just up and ran off. Maybe she uses magic. I don’t know.”

  “Where’s she from?”

  For some reason, she had expected Book to just reach out, pull a datastore book from some shelf, and tell her everything she needed to know. Because that was the way it worked in the past. She decides to speed things up and sends her fingers flying across the keyboard of her virtual guitar. The bitstream of data spirals into Book’s book. That’s everything she knows, all the data from the chip Hammer made her examine: digitized photos, coded police and news reports, and so on, including a lot of what might be only rumor. It’s enough to sketch out an image, but that’s all. If Neona’s going to find Striper, she’ll need a lot more data, hard data.

  “Seattle,” Book says after a couple of moments. “I think we’ll start with Seattle references.” Book leads her around the stacks of virtual datastores. Around and around and around. It’s a while before he pauses and says, “There’s a good chance, say seventy-six percent, that this woman you’re looking for once traveled from Macao to Seattle under the name of Mari Tan, and also from Hong Kong to Manila, Taiwan to Macao, Shanghai to Osaka… Hong Kong to Taiwan… and Osaka to San Francisco.”

  “So that’s like… all over southeast Asia.”

  “China, Japan, the South Pacific, and the west coast of North America.”

  Wow.

  “There’s also an even better chance, say eighty-three percent, that this same woman traveled from Seattle to Los Angeles and Seattle to Chicago under the name of Fallon Sontag.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Data from the Seattle Bureau of Customs and Passport Control. The probabilities I quoted primarily reflect the degree of correspondence between the digitized images you gave me and those registered with the data base. I could tell you the algorithm I used in making the comparison, but let’s just say it’s better than any the government uses and leave it at that.”

  “What else you got?”

  “Well, let’s see.” Book looks into his book, adjusts his glasses. “Mari Tan is listed as Han Chinese, twenty-three years of age, black hair, brown eyes, one point seven meters tall, fifty-six point five kilograms in weight, a citizen of China and resident of Hong Kong, and a dealer in antiques. Fallon Sontag is listed as twenty-five, brown hair, hazel eyes, one point seven meters tall, weighing fifty-nine kilograms, a citizen of Seattle and a freelance media snoop.”

  “Sounds like two different people.”

  “I imagine that’s the idea.”

  Neona doesn’t doubt it. The idea of a bogus ID is, after all, to let a person go around like someone other than who she really is. The trick, Neona guesses, would be to paint a picture close enough to fool the Customs inspectors, but different enough to really frag up a computer-based search for comparisons. A minor difference in vital statistics might do it. The kind of search some hokey government office might run probably wouldn’t use digitized images because it would eat up too much memory and too much processing time.

  And, come to think of it, Neona wouldn’t be surprised if Striper the person corresponded to neither of her supposed physical descriptions, that of Mari Tan or Fallon Sontag. More likely, the real Striper was somewhere in between.

  “Which identity’s more recent?”

  “Didn’t I say that?”

  “You said Sontag’s twenty-five—”

  “And Tan is, or was, twenty-three. The Sontag ID is more recent.”

  “Do you think both IDs are bogus?”

  “From you, Angel, I’ll take that as a legitimate question, rather than a sassy remark. Yes, I think they’re both bogus. Did you ever hear of a killer having a real ID?”

  “Not lately.”

  “Well, there you are.” Book checks a few more datastores. “The Mari Tan identity originates in China, in Beijing, so you can forget about getting more on that ID. Not even the Chinese know how to penetrate the bureaucratic morass of their government data bases. As for the Fallon Sontag identity, there are some possibilities. Have a look at this code.”

  Book hands her a book, a pulsing red virtual datastore. The pages swirl with alphanumeric characters, but they’re sweet sweet music to the golden angel. She recognizes the style of the code at once. “This is Kidd Karney’s One-Oh-One-Oh!”

  “I’d say that’s probable.”

  The original Matrix mon and cyberjock—Kidd Karney—what a shock, and a good one, too. Kidd Karney was one of the first real ramjammers she ever met, and they’re still friends, good friends too. Kidd Karney helped her escape from Miami. He taught her what real Matrix-running was all about. Now she finds that the very same decker almost certainly wrote the code that created Striper’s bogus Fallon Sontag ID.

  Her luck is definitely on the rise.

  24

  Neona wastes no time exiting the Exchange, pausing only to make Book blush a strobing orange and red by giving him a kiss and a hug. She’s on through the Bazaar and Hassan’s Arch in no time flat. Kidd Karney’s node is just a flash and a half away by satellite. She hurtles down into the LTG for
Reno, Nevada, and starts hunting through the constructs blazing to the horizon with garish lights. Along one narrow alley she finds a neon carnival tent bedecked with a dozen flashing signs advertising the “meanest decker in the Matrix”. A construct like that is easy to miss in the Reno LTG, all the more so because half the deckers on the local grid imitate Kidd Karney’s style.

  A squeeze of the big fat red nose of the animated clown standing in front of the tent puts her through the door.

  And into a cage…

  The bars of the cage are black and sizzling with code-red security IC. Sizzling too are the chains and manacles that seize the golden angel’s wrists and ankles and tug her spread-eagled up off the floor. The whole node takes on a reddish hue as the color encompasses her icon. It feels like a swarm of little bugs with creepy-crawler legs are skittering all over her meat body somewhere a billion klicks away to her rear. The feeling makes her squirm. The virtual effects may be red but the ice is pure black, the blackest. It’s a virtual trap with electron teeth. Kidd Karney has been known to brain-fry the occasional corporate decker who finds the datapath to his tent. There’s nothing to do now but wait, wait and twitch.

  “Dammit, Kidd!”

  And exclaim.

  Momentarily, a bullet-shaped roller coaster car with a leering demon mask of a front-end comes roaring out of one of the two black sculptured datalines at the rear of the tent, screaming to a halt in front of the sizzling cage. Kidd Karney likes dramatic entrances. Tonight, he’s in his sheik get-up, wearing a hat like a golden pillow with tassels, a flowing robe, all kinds of sparkling jewelry and funny shoes with curling toes. With him in the rear of the roller coaster car is a bevy of absurdly voluptuous bimbos garbed in bellydancer outfits and fawning over him like slaves.

  “Hoi, Angel!”

  “Hoi yourself!”

  Kidd Karney points a remote. The sizzling stops, the manacles release, and the front of the cage swings open.

  Neona skates over to the roller coaster car. Kidd Karney waves her into the rear-facing seat, which she hates, but there’s no room to spare on the front-facing seat, even though it’s as big as a bed, because of all the bimbos. Neona barely has time to sit down before Kidd Karney shouts, “Here we goooooooooo!”

  The car hurtles ahead into blackness, looping upside-down and around, whipping through curves with a demon’s fury, turning backward, spinning like a top. It’s heart-attack city. Neona screams. Kidd Karney screams louder. The bimbos scream even louder. The car hurtles around a curve and suddenly they’re all flying right out of the car, landing on massive pillows in a room like a desert sheik’s tent. Neona takes a moment collecting herself. Kidd Karney and the bimbos of course land in a luxurious sprawl. The bimbos shift from screaming to fawning without missing a beat.

  “Glad to see you’re still in the trons, Angel.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” Neona replies, just a bit breathlessly. “I need your help with something.”

  “Heavies still coming on?”

  “From Miami? No, this is new. I’m on a run.”

  “Spreading some nuyen around?”

  “Yeah, I got a little to play with.”

  “Zero sheen, muchacha. I just slotted mucho dinero with my Johnson. Took a run down Yucatan way. Got coin to spare. What kinda goose you lookin’ t’douche?”

  Kidd Karney had a way of phrasing things sometimes, ranging from the genuinely weird to the monumentally disgusting. Sometimes, it was cute. Other times, it was just odd or disgusting. “I need some data, jammer to jammer, you know? You wrote some code, made this Striper babe a bogus ID?”

  “I did?”

  “No question.” She runs her fingers across her keyboard guitar, cuts a few quick riffs. Kidd Karney lifts his head like he’s taking in pure ruby tunes from the alphanumerics that spiral down to encircle him.

  “Nova code,” he says finally. “But it ain’t my One-Oh, Angel.”

  “You gotta be yakking.”

  “Uh-uh,” Kidd Karney replies. “I never even heard of X. Striper? Whoever. But I’ll tell ya who did write the code.”

  “Who?”

  “The ebon boy.”

  “Who?”

  “Jammer called the Dodger.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Ain’t you heard the handle?”

  “Should I?”

  “Well, he’s only a silicon god, a ram-jam-thank-you-ma’am coded-to-the-max cyber hero, coming on with lightning fingers and killer chips from hell! Are you a Mona Lisa or what? You never heard of the Dodger? Where you been living, lady?”

  “Well, how would I find him?”

  “Find the Ghost in the Grid? You don’t find him, babe. You post bulletins. Dear Dodger, I’m a teeny-weeny decker doobie. Please write home. End of message.”

  “He must be slick.”

  “If you gotta ask, don’t ask.”

  “Where do I post?”

  “Try Seattle.”

  That again. It’s beginning to look to Neona like Seattle might be the key to this crazy puzzle of tracking down Striper. By the end of another frenetic roller coaster ride, she’s more or less convinced of that.

  Satellite links to Seattle RTG.

  She takes a wide sweep of the local grids. Kidd Karney clued her in about the most likely virtual hangouts, networks, and bulletin boards to try. She leaves messages for the Dodger.

  Nothing much happens.

  She runs down a few leads on her own. What little she uncovers merely confirms that Striper’s Fallon Sontag identity originated in Seattle about two years ago. Sontag comes complete with SIN, address, telecom number, social security, med plan, et cetera, et cetera.

  Time keeps slipping by.

  What she really should do, Neona decides, is check out the Philly LTGs for references to Sontag. It’s the best lead she’s got for the moment. She blasts through the links, up and down, and hurtles down into the Central Philly grid. As she streams past the mammoth, pulsing disk of the SmithKliner system construct, she spies an unusual figure, a little black boy in a sparkling cloak of silver, standing right there on the datalines in front of SmithKliner. Isn’t that supposed to be the Dodger’s icon?

  The ebon boy?

  It’s too much of a shock for her to react in time. She streaks on down the lines, then doubles back. As she rounds the curving façade of the SmithKliner disk, a voice speaks to her from behind, from right behind her shoulders.

  “Thy voice is loud, yet sweet in my ears. Angel with an axe. Yea, dear lady, I have come to hear thy song.”

  She stops, turns around.

  Nothing’s there.

  “What…?”

  Suddenly, the voice is coming from right behind her again. “Fair lady, have thee no music to play for me?”

  “Where are you?”

  She turns again, and again there’s nothing to be seen, no icon, no clue as to who or what she’s talking to. The voice again comes from her rear. “Prithee, play for me, Angel. Play and explain thy summons.”

  This is incredible, unnerving. “What are you doing? Stop it! Stop it!”

  She turns and suddenly he’s there, right in front of her, facing her, the ebon boy in his silver cloak. He bows with a flourish of his arm. “Forgive me, dear lady.”

  “What?” That’s all she can think of to say. She blurts it. She’s too busy wondering how this small iconic figure came to be in the Central Philly LTG. That’s the impossible part. The messages she left for Dodger requested a meet in Kansas City. How could he have traced her to Philly? Through satellite links and everything? That was more than just wiz decking. More like magic.

  “How… how did you find me?”

  “Modesty forbids the necessarily complex explanations.”

  “You’re… you’re the Dodger, right?”

  With another bow the ebon boy replies, “At your service.”

  Neona opens her mouth to reply, but then a thought occurs. She doesn’t want to play this like she played with Book and Kidd Karney. Dodger�
�s not a chummer of hers. He’s an unknown quantity. Who knows what connections or secret agendas he might have? She should play it careful, maybe just a bit cagey. Just in case.

  “Ummm,” she says. “I guess you don’t know me…”

  “A lady of such dazzling electron beauty could not long escape the notice of any true gallant of the Matrix.”

  “Yeah?” What a concept. She wonders where the slag learned his lingua. It’s like nothing she ever heard before. “Well, I’m a chum of Kidd Karney.”

  “Verily.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, right! And Kidd Karney said, he thought… well, maybe you can help me out. I’m trying to contact this wiz runner called Striper. I’m working go-between for somebody… who wants to hire Striper.”

  “Why come to me, lady Angel?”

  “Well, I heard Striper’s based in Seattle. And so are you. And, I mean, you’re the Dodger, right?”

  A little bare-faced admiration never hurts. From what Kidd Karney said, and what she’s seen for herself, Neona figures that the Dodger could find just about anyone he might want to.

  A few moments tick past.

  The ebon boy just gazes at her. There’s nothing about the icon to suggest what the Dodger might be thinking. “At last,” he says.

  “Huh?”

  “Fair lady, allow me to guide your search.”

  “Oh… well, great!”

  “Pray, take my hand.”

  She hesitates over that, but what choice does she have? Search the Philly LTGs for a connection she may never find? Better to take the ebon hand of chance in hopes that the Dodger will lead her right to the source, directly to Striper.

  One touch and it’s like they’re welded together.

  For a moment, it’s panic time. She realizes she couldn’t pull free even if she tried. She feels a tug and suddenly the grid’s hurtling past, becoming a blur that resolves into blackness. She has no idea where they’re going, but it’s faster than she’s ever gone before. She’s helpless and squirming. She feels like a billion creepy-crawlers are running all over her body, only this time they’re on the inside, all throughout her insides, even inside her head, behind her eyes, and she can’t stand it. She’s twitching convulsing, crying out…