Psychotrope

by Lisa Smedman

  He saw exterior views of the Aztechnology arcology itself: open-air terraces, expanses of gray stone, rooftop missile batteries, streetscapes, helipads, the gigantic quartz-crystal friezes on the side of the main building.

  After a dizzying moment or two, Bloodyguts zoomed in on the view he wanted: a street-level loading bay in which a large truck was parked. Its swamper was just pulling his empty forklift away from the open rear door of the truck's trailer while another man entered information into a data-pad on the wall. In another moment both exited through a door that led to an adjoining corridor.

  Bloodyguts skipped rapidly between vidcams, trying for a better angle of view. This was his third attempt to penetrate the Azzie host system. Twice before he'd been dumped; only his intrusion counter-countermeasures biofeedback filter had saved him from serious dump shock. It looked as though he was barely in time; the truck was just about full. Bloodyguts consulted his time-keeping utility. It was just over thirteen minutes before ten a.m., local Seattle time. If the Azzies kept as fanatically to their schedules as usual, the truck wouldn't roll until ten on the nose. He still had plenty of time. Assuming that this was the right truck. . .

  The securicams swung into position, giving Bloodyguts a view inside the trailer. Pay data! The rear of the truck was filled from floor to ceiling with hundreds of packages of optical chip cases, bound into neat blocks by shrink-wrap plastic. All of the chips inside the brightly labeled cases were legal simsense—the Azzies didn't sully their hands selling illegal BTL, despite the corp's origins as a drug cartel back in the twentieth century. All of the recordings on these chips had been filtered through an ASIST Peak Controller and none of them had the capacity to flatline anyone or permanently frag up their wetware. But Bloody-guts was going to melt them to glass, just the same.

  It wasn't the signal strength of the chips that Bloodyguts objected to. It was the recordings that had been laid down on them. These ranged from the relatively tame—sports events with plenty of mayhem and bloodshed (court ball, for example) to "extreme splatter" recordings that were outright kill fests. Gladiatorial combats in which both animal and gladiator were wired for simsense, allowing the user to experience the wonders of polyPOV sampling. Or "hunter and prey" games in Aztlan's northern desert, in which the user got to be inside the heads of each of the hunted in turn, and could guess which would be the last one alive. The recordings were little more than snuffsense, capturing in gory detail every agonizing moment until the poor drekker who'd been coerced into one of the target roles flatlined.

  Not so many years ago, Bloodyguts had been a fan of that sort of thing. He'd frothed over the Azzie tridcasts that were pirated into Seattle via the Deathstar-9 satellite, and had eventually graduated to a more "real" experience—the wonders of simsense slotted directly into his datajack.

  From there he'd moved on to BTL—better than life dreamchips that provided both the baseline sensory track and the raw emotive tracks of the simsense "performers." And raw they were: the elation of victory, the agony of defeat.

  Fear, bloodlust, power, and domination—and the sheer and absolute terror of knowing that your life is leaking out through the hole they just tore in your gut and that there is nothing—nothing—you can do to avoid your imminent death.

  Bloody guts had become a brain-burner, a chiphead, a jackhead. He'd done anything for that next chip, for the nuyen to pay for his next dream fix. Steal from his family. Deal BTL himself. Hold up Stuffer Shacks even when BTL-induced synesthesia made it impossible to aim his pistol because he was seeing in smells or experiencing tactile sensations as colors. He'd even used the massive hands his troll heritage had given him to beat into a coma a cop who'd been coming down a little too hard on a local go-gang. And he'd sold out a friend.

  And then he'd flatlined—on the "snuffsense" recording of that very same friend's death.

  Knowing that he'd been responsible, knowing that he was the only one who could avenge Jocko's death, was what had kept Bloodyguts clinging to life after the BTL chip crashed his wetware and flatlined him. He didn't have even a street doc to help pull him through—he came back from the icy edge of death all on his own, his spirit forcing its way back into his body through sheer bloody-mindedness. The shaman he'd dated a short time later told him he must have had a strong will, in addition to his strong troll body. She'd loved him for both, for a time. And then she'd dumped him when he refused to stop slotting BTL. She told him he couldn't bury his anguish at his part in Jocko's death in a chip dream. She told him to grow up, that he wasn't fit to be a man, let alone a troll.

  That was when he'd begun the long, painful process of getting clean. Withdrawal from BTL was hell, but a hell that could be endured. The heightened sensitivity to stimuli and lowered threshold of pain, the agony that came from bright lights or the pressure of cloth against skin—neither of these were anywhere near what Jocko had endured as he experienced Jocko's death in simsense, disemboweled and bullet-ridden, his face slashed wide open by the razorboy that Bloodyguts had assured him would be a pushover, even though he'd known that Jocko didn't have a chance.

  The Azzies hadn't made the BTL recording of Jocko's death. Someone else had—someone who had disappeared into the shadows, rendering futile all of Bloodyguts' attempts at revenge. But the Azzies were a part of the whole thing, with the ultra-violent drek they exported into the UCAS under the guise of "sports" recordings. For people like Bloodyguts, legal Azzie simsense chips were the first step onto the slippery slope that led to snuffsense. And now Bloodyguts, who had made it his one-man mission while he was still in Seattle to slag every snuffsense dealer who still polluted the streets, was going to eliminate that step.

  Best of all, he was doing it from within the jaguar's den. Not only had he penetrated the system of a red host like Aztechnology's Seattle arcology, but he was doing it from a jackpoint within Tenochtitlán itself—the city that was the heart of the Azzie simsense industry.

  While on the run, slipping from the shadows of one city to the next, he'd wound up in Tenochtitlán. There, he'd hooked up with some rebels—a kick-hoop group led by Rafael Ramirez, an ork with a virulent loathing of the court ball game. Bloodyguts had earned their trust, and worked with them on a run. With Bloodyguts providing the decking they needed to trick the securicams into thinking that all was well, the group had planted a bomb in the telecom studios that were used to broadcast live from the court ball stadium, reducing the complex to a heap of rubble. The beauty of it was, it had all been done remotely; Bloodyguts had used a robotic drone to plant the C4 that leveled the studios.

  He'd done it from a distance, striking from afar like a powerful god.

  That was when he'd realized that he could also still strike out at Seattle, even though he was on the run and far, far away from that city. Grateful for his assistance, the rebels came through for Bloodyguts. They told him about a data transfer that had recently been made to the Seattle arcology, and of a shipment of simsense chips, made from that recorded simsense data, that was about to hit the Seattle streets. The shipment that Bloodyguts was looking at now.

  The chips he was about to destroy.

  Back in the meat world, Bloodyguts' lips twitched into a smile. Decking was the way to go, the best way to target the snuffsense industry. Like the image of Jocko on which he'd patterned his persona, Bloodyguts was a mere ghost in the machine, If his enemies threw a punch, it would pass right through him.

  Of course, if they threw IC at him the outcome might be different. . .

  Keeping a portion of his perception within the sec cam that was monitoring the truck loading bay, Bloodyguts accessed by feel one of the other faces on the small stepped pyramid that was the slave node. He first crashed the electronic locks on the loading bay doors, effectively freezing them in a closed and locked position and sealing the truck inside. Then he followed the maze of connections that led from the node to the automated weapons that protected the loading bay against intruders from the street. Inside a sensitive area like
the loading bay, which was typically filled with valuable shipments, rifles and explosives were not an opinion. Those weapons were reserved for the outer, streetside defenses. In the bay itself, lasers were the standard line of defense. A scorch mark or two on a packing case was vastly preferred to a series of deep holes chewed by high-velocity slugs and explosives.

  On the other hand, lasers were the perfect weapon to wield against optical chips that were protected only by a thin layer of shrink wrap and cardboard . . .

  Bloodyguts activated the four MP laser guns and sent them coasting along the rails on which they were mounted.

  Maneuvering them into position directly behind the rear of the trailer, he quickly set up a loop of programming that would send the beams crisscrossing back and forth over the bundles of optical chips. The program would also gradually step up the gain on the lasers, allowing them to burn deeper and deeper into the cargo inside the truck.

  Within a minute or two at most—long before any security guards could react to the threat by unloading the truck—the optical chips would be slag.

  With a satisfied smile, Bloodyguts activated the laser guns and watched as four ruby red beams of light began cutting destructive swaths through the optical chips. The shrink wrap bubbled and warped, and the cardboard packaging below it began to smolder. A few wisps of smoke began to drift upward, but Bloodyguts had already compensated for any interference that the molecules of soot would cause.

  He watched for only a moment, then exited the slave node and activated a spoof utility. A loop of dripping entrails appeared in his hand. Whipping them over his head like a lariat, he wrapped them around the slave node, enclosing the face icons on its four sides in heaps of tangled entrails. The hoses of flesh constricted around the stepped pyramid as the utility began its work, editing the slave node so that any commands sent to the node would be rendered into unrecognizable strings of gibberish by the node's own subsystems as the commands were forced to pass through the long loops of entrails. Regardless of any overrides sent by the arcology's system operators, the laser guns would continue their deadly work.

  Good. A job well done. Bloodyguts glanced at his log monitor. It was just a second or two before 9:47 a.m., Seattle time. He'd completed the run with plenty of time to spare. Now it was time to scram from the arcology's system and do a graceful log off before any of the Azzie deckers came to investigate the overwhelmingly improbable "glitch" in the loading bay's weaponry. Bloodyguts turned and made his way past the jaguar-shaped IC that had blocked his way earlier. He started along the beam of blue light, intending to follow the datastream out of the arcology . . .

  And suddenly faltered to a halt as his legs collapsed under him. Looking down at the lower half of his persona from where he lay sprawled on the beam of blue light, he saw that his feet and lower legs had been infested with tiny black moths with wings of gleaming obsidian stone. They rose into the air and descended again, dipping and fluttering down to take sharp bites of his flesh. Their tiny mouths devoured his persona icon pixel by pixel; already his feet were fragmenting, turning translucent and revealing the glowing blue data stream on which he lay.

  Drek! The slave node must have been booby-trapped with crippler IC. Even as he'd been rendering the Azzie chips to slag, it had been doing the same thing to his deck, silently attacking its MPCP chips. And now his persona was disintegrating.

  Bloodyguts flicked his hand, causing a gigantic hypodermic needle to appear in it. Aiming the needle at his legs, he squeezed the plunger down. A thin stream of liquid, rainbowed like a streak of oil, coated his lower legs. Gradually, the restore utility filled in the holes the moths had created, washing them away in the process. The optical chips in his MPCP would still need to be replaced, but at least his persona had been prevented from crashing. He rose to his elbows and prepared to stand . . .

  He heard a snarl and glanced behind him. The jaguar that had guarded the slave node was advancing on him, eyes narrowed and tail lashing in fury. Now that the crippier IC had attacked Bloodyguts, the jaguar must have recognized him as an intruder. Bloodyguts expected it to spring forward in an attack, but instead it vomited forth the heart Bloodyguts had offered it earlier. The pulsing red organ sailed from its mouth and landed square on Bloody-guts' chest, where it stuck fast, beating with a feeble arrhythmia.

  Back in the meat world, Bloodyguts' own heart gave a lurch. Dimly, he felt a painful twinge grip the left side of his chest. The fingers of his left hand began to tingle and go numb. And that was bad. Very bad. He was under attack by black IC.

  There was no time for a graceful log off. Not if he wanted to live. He'd have to jack out and take whatever dump shock came, even though it might send his weakened heart into fatal fibrillation. His timekeeping utility showed a local time of 9:46:59 PST—nearly noon in Tenochtitlán. With any luck, one of the rebels he'd agreed to meet with at noon would find him in time to pull him through. . .

  Bloodyguts thrust his hands out, grabbed the oversized referee's whistle that appeared in them, and blew it as loud as he could.

  09:46:23 PST

  Seattle, United Canadian and American States

  Ansen arched his neck to relieve the ache in his shoulders and closed the door of his cube. The tiny apartment didn't hold much—just a futon with some rumpled blankets, a nuker to warm up food, and a chrome clothes rack, scrounged from a dumpster behind the clothing store on the corner, that held his jeans and jackets. Plastiboard packing crates he'd salvaged from work served as tables. The only ornamentation was also functional: a bubble lamp that stood in one corner. It burbled out a steady stream of bioluminescent spheres that drifted around the room, filling it with gentle washes of light until the bubbles collapsed with soft popping noises.

  Ansen flipped his sneaks off his feet and into a corner, undid the leather thong that held his pony tail, and shook out his long, dark hair. Then he settled onto the edge of his futon with a sigh. He rubbed a shoulder with one hand and stared for a moment at the flatscreen display that served as the cube's "window." It showed a penthouse view of the city, shot from a vidcam on top of the building. On the streets below, traffic crawled along through the last of the morning rush-hour haze. Cars and trucks disappeared into static that had fuzzed out the center of the window, then reappeared out the other side. Ansen knew enough tech to have easily fixed the glitch in the display, but never seemed to get around to it. All of Seattle could be eaten by the static hole, for all he cared. That wasn't the world that interested him.

  His hand wandered to the kitten-shaped Playpet that lay on the futon next to him. As he stroked its soft synthetic fur it began to emit a rumbling purr. Servos inside the toy responded to the faint electromagnetic field given out by Ansen's hand, causing the toy to roll over and offer its belly for scratching. He tickled its purple tummy with his fingertips, giving the memory plastic the daily stimulation it required to "grow" from kitten into life-sized cat over the next six months. The kitten responded by widening its already oversized eyes and staring adoringly in Ansen's general direction.

  Most of Auburn's blue collar workers were just starting their working day. Ansen had just ended his—an eight-hour shift at the Diamond Deckers plant. The ache in his shoulders came from hunching over an assembly table all night long, slotting chips into computers that were cheap knock-offs of more expensive cyberdecks. The decks had the look and feel of the high-end Fuchi models, with their clear plastic cases and sleek gold-on-black keyboards. But they were made from bargain-basement chips and inferior materials.

  The work was tedious and brain-numbing. And the pay was drek: just minimum wage. But it was the best a seventeen-year-old high school dropout could do for a job in this city. And it had its fringe benefits . . .

  Ansen turned to the cyberdeck he'd liberated from a back room of the Diamond Deckers warehouse. Big and boxy, the CDT-3000 Vista clone was an antique, older even than Ansen himself. It was one of a dozen that had sat without ever being used, just gathering dust, until Ansen discove
red them. He had upgraded this deck as far as it would go, but it still had only ten megapulses of active memory and a two-meg MPCP. And its interfaces were primitive in the extreme. Instead of a DNI jack or even a trade rig, the computer relied on old-fashioned VR goggles and data gloves.

  While other computers allowed their operators to run them at the speed of thought, this "tortoise" of a deck relied on gross eye and hand movements to execute its commands.

  Still, it was better than nothing at all. And it was the window onto the world Ansen loved—if only a narrow one.

  Ansen pulled nylon data gloves onto his hands and flexed so that the hair-thin webbing of sensors woven into the blue fabric shaped to his hands. He made sure the fiber-optic cables that led from the deck to the goggles were snug in their ports, plugged the deck into the comm jack in the wall, then pulled the goggles over his eyes.

  Holding his hands over the deck's illuminated sensor board, he flicked his fingers to activate it. The wrap-around peripheral-image screen inside the VR goggles flickered to life and the speakers next to his ears began to hum.

  He entered the Matrix.

  A door-shaped rectangle of glowing yellow appeared directly in front of him—a system access node in the local telecommunications grid that served this area of Auburn. Ansen touched the SAN and watched as a blue stain spread outward from the point his hand had touched, a halo of green encircling it. After a moment, the blue faded, leaving a green-tinged hole in the middle of the door. Ansen pointed his finger, moved it forward—and was sucked into the hole. The SAN disappeared behind him.