Psychotrope

by Lisa Smedman

  It all looked familiar, somehow—familiar, but wrong. It took Dark Father a moment to puzzle out why. He realized suddenly that he was looking at the vast expanse of the Seattle RTG, subtly transformed. The geography was still the same, but the iconography had drastically changed. Everywhere he looked, the system icons were constructed from symbols of death and decay—except for the three-dimensional star of the Fuchi system, although it was too far away to see in detail.

  He was within the Matrix, that much was certain. And he'd escaped from his personal nightmare of being devoured by his ghoulish son. Assuming he was still alive and not just a bodiless spirit trapped within the Matrix, he could log off, now that he knew what RTG he was in. He executed the command that should have allowed him to perform a graceful log off. . .

  Nothing happened.

  He used a browse utility to locate the access node that would take him back to the Midwest RTG . . .

  Nothing. He remained exactly where he was.

  In desperation he tried to simply log off, even though he knew that the dump shock might kill him after the mauling that Serpens in Machina had given him . . .

  Nothing.

  The conveyor belts rattled past, carrying their gruesome cargo.

  A flash of silver caught Dark Father's eye. Something was lying between the hunks of meat, being carried along the belt with them. It had looked like a human figure—one of the UMS icons used by deckers who couldn't afford the software needed to customize their personas. If another decker were riding the conveyor belt datastream, perhaps Dark Father could, too.

  He reached out a skeletal hand and grabbed the frayed fabric of the conveyor belt. With a lurch that nearly jerked his bones apart, he as in motion. He sailed at breakneck speed in and out of the pyramid of skulls that was likely Aztechnology Seattle, and through the pagoda that was probably the Mitsuhama system. But instead of accessing those systems, he simply swept through them as if they were mere illusion. The conveyor belt carried him high above these icons toward a gleaming crystal skull that was probably a system access node—then plunged in one empty eye socket and out the next, looping over like a demented roller coaster without ever letting him access the node. Then the rattling, bone-jarring conveyor belt dragged Dark Father back down with it toward the landscape once more, hurtling toward the "ground" at breakneck speed. For a second, third, and fourth time his hopes soared as he was carried to one of the skulls—only to be dashed again as it proved impossible each time to let go of the conveyor belt during the millisecond or two he was actually inside the node.

  After his fifth attempt at using the conveyor belt to access another node, Dark Father released his grip and instantly came to a stop. At first he merely held his position in space, but then he discovered that he could approach one of the crystal-skull SANs on his own, without the aid of the conveyor belt. He heaved a sigh of relief at the knowledge that he had some control. He could move freely in this landscape, at least.

  He watched the datastream continue on its crazed, looping path in and out of the skull's eye sockets. The conveyor belt carried chunks of meat both in and out of the SAN—which meant that data was probably still flowing in and out of the Seattle RTG, even if the Dark Father himself was trapped here.

  Every now and then there was a flash of chrome as another UMS persona icon appeared on the conveyor belt.

  Always they appeared on the incoming belts. The deckers never exited the system, only entered it. And they lay on the conveyor belt as lifeless as the chunks of meat next to them.

  Hmm. It seemed that deckers—assuming that's what they were—could log onto the Seattle RTG but not log off it again. If indeed this was truly the Seattle regional telecommunications grid and not some distorted mirror image of it.

  Dark Father stared across the virtual landscape, letting his gaze wander. Then he noticed something. Each of the conveyor belts, at one point in its routing, traveled to a central location—an enormous silver urn that lay on its side.

  Descending toward it, Dark Father could see that the urn was as large as an apartment block. Its interior looked like a cave, with moss-draped sides and stalactites inside. Low groans and faint screams echoed in its depths. Hundreds of Conveyor belts flowed in and out of the mouth of this tunnel, the air from their passage stirring the swirling gray ash that lined its floor it into long, foglike tendrils. Dark Father's legs grew cold and clammy where this ash wafted against them.

  Stepping back from the urn, Dark Father saw that the sides of it were covered in ornate characters. Despite the urn's size, the words engraved on its tarnished silver surface were in so small a script as to be unreadable.

  Suspecting that scramble IC was involved, Dark Father activated a decrypt utility. An old-fashioned magnifying glass appeared in his hand. Instead of glass, its black metal frame held an eyeball that moved back and forth as the eye scanned the text engraved on the urn. At the same time, glowing green letters scrolled across the back of the eyeball, flowed down the handle of the magnifying glass, up Dark Father's arm, and into his mind.

  The flow paused for a second as Dark Father puzzled over what he had found. Despite the decrypt utility, most of the file on the urn icon was gibberish. But one segment of data, reminiscent of a tombstone inscription, was still coherent:

  Deep Resonance Experiment

  Born: 09:47:00 PST

  Aborted: 09:48:00 PST

  Resonance in peace

  Dark Father released the magnifying glass, which broke apart into pixels and disappeared. He looked around at the landscape with its eerie death imagery. Just prior to the time listed on the urn, Dark Father had been in the Virtual Meetings conversation pit, battling for his life against Serpens in Machina. One second later, at precisely 9:47 a.m. Pacific Standard Time, some sort of experimental program had chosen him as its guinea pig, yanking him out of that cybercombat, forcing him to reexperience his death and birth and then thrusting him into a system whose iconography was based on his own worst nightmares of ghoulish feeding frenzies. And then—either as a result of Dark Father's own frantic attempts to escape the ghouls or simply by virtue of the fact that the experiment had "died" one minute later, he'd emerged into this weirdly corrupted version of the Seattle RTG.

  He didn't know whether to be thankful for having escaped Serpens in Machina's potentially fatal attack or resentful at having been drafted into an experiment without having given his permission. And there was no way of telling whose experiment it was. The conveyor belt data-streams that entered and exited the urn seemed to connect to every node on this RTG. It wasn't as if they all congregated at the skull pyramid that was probably Aztechnology, for example, or at the bone-barred dungeon that hunkered where Lone Star's system had once stood. They went everywhere, connected everything.

  Connected everything to this urn.

  The answer had to lie inside it.

  Dark Father activated his sleaze utility. The urn was probably just a sub-processing unit, but he wasn't about to enter it naked and unprotected. His black top hat shimmered and then melted downward, transforming into an executioner's hood that hid all but his yellowed eyeballs.

  Peering from within it, he reached out a hand, braced himself for the jolt, and grabbed onto one of the conveyor belts leading into the urn.

  The datastream wrenched him off his feet.

  Dark Father found himself immersed in warm liquid, thicker and more cloying than water. His hand was empty; the conveyor belt had disappeared. All was darkness; it was impossible to tell which way was up. Within seconds his chest felt heavy, his legs and arms weak, and blood pounded in his ears. His sodden clothes dragged him down and the hood obscured his vision. He was drowning.

  Crashing his sleaze utility, Dark Father at last was able to see a light that he assumed was the direction of the surface. He swam frantically for it, but his skeletal hands and feet gave him no push against the liquid. He had only a meter or so to go now, but was getting nowhere. But then he saw something splash into the wat
er from above. Long and slender, it looked like the bottom of an oar. Grabbing it, Dark Father pulled himself hand over hand, up toward the bulging black form that was the hull of a boat. He grabbed the side of the boat, which tipped violently toward him.

  Thrashing madly, he lunged up and over the gunwale, sputtering and gasping and reaching desperately for whatever would give him purchase . . .

  Someone was screaming. Dark Father looked up and saw a woman in a white kimono scurrying away from him across the tilting deck of the long, narrow boat. Behind her, a hooded figure mechanically worked an oar back and forth. Another figure—a headless red ghost—stood with its head in its hands, as if about to pass it to Dark Father like a basketball.

  Sensing that he was about to be attacked by another decker, Dark Father arrested his forward motion and instead fumbled for the noose at his neck. Then the head in the ghost's hands spoke.

  "Make one more hostile move and I'll crash you," it said.

  Dark Father hung, limp, across the gunwale of the boat, his legs still dangling in the warm liquid. "I won't," he gasped, at last finding his breath. He looked between the three figures already in the boat. The one handling the oar seemed to be executing a looped sequence; its stiff, repetitive movements were those of a program icon. But the other two were definitely deckers.

  "Are you the ones running the experiment?" Dark Father asked.

  "We—" the ghost began to answer.

  "What experiment?" the woman said at the same time.

  The ghost shot her a look, then replaced his head on his shoulders. "He's another decker," he told her. Then he leaned over and extended a hand toward Dark Father to help him into the boat.

  "Welcome aboard our nightmare."

  09:48:59 PST

  The instant Bloodyguts opened his eyes, a gigantic scythe whooshed in a murderous arc for his throat. He threw himself to one side, avoiding its deadly swing by mere centimeters. The point of the scythe caught the fabric of his tattered shirt, slicing it open from collar to shoulder. Then he landed on the ground—hard—and rolled frantically to one side to avoid the scythe's next swing.

  All around him, closing him in like a forest, were wooden stakes as tall as he was. Each had been driven into the ground and crudely hacked into a point, and on each was impaled a severed head. Scrambling behind one, Bloodyguts got the stake between himself and the scythe. The harvesting tool with its brilliant chrome blade sliced into the wood with a thunk, quivered a moment, then reversed and poised itself to swing again.

  The deadly tool was operating independently, floating above the ground and zigzagging back and forth in order to get a better angle of attack. It had to be IC—but there was no time to wonder what type. Bloodyguts had to crash that fragger. Now.

  A utility icon appeared in his hand: a baseball bat made of dull white bone. A baseball with an outer layer of stitched human flesh appeared about a meter in front of Bloodyguts at chest height. Slamming the bat against the ball, he sent the ball flying at the scythe. It struck the long wooden handle just at its midpoint and exploded in a flash of light, splintering it in two. The two halves of the scythe stuttered, blinked. . .

  Bloodyguts grinned and lowered the bat. Then he swore as the lower half of the scythe arced around a wooden stake and slashed at his stomach. He threw himself to the side but too late—the blade snagged a piece of entrail and snipped it neatly in two. Blood-flecked data spiraled out of the severed ends and the bat in Bloodyguts' hands shimmered, losing its cohesiveness.

  Drek! This IC was tough!

  Bloodyguts grabbed the severed ends of his entrail in one hand, squeezing them shut, and at the same time dodged behind another stake. But now that the scythe had a shorter handle it was more maneuverable. It zinged between the stakes, following Bloodyguts' every move.

  Cursing, Bloodyguts pumped everything he had into his crash utility. This time, the ball that appeared in front of him was softball-sized and tattooed with skulls and crossbones. Wielding his bat with one hand, Bloodyguts swung it in a wild arc as the scythe zoomed in for the kill. The bone-bat connected with the ball and sent it hurtling on a collision course with the scythe blade—which shattered into a million glowing fragments as the ball connected and exploded. A rain of steel-colored fragments of light showered Bloodyguts, pocketing his skin with tiny perforations.

  He howled in triumph as the scythe disappeared. "Home run!"

  The bat in his hand disappeared. Quickly, before any more data was lost, Bloodyguts tied together the severed ends of entrail and watched as they fused back into a smooth loop. He'd crashed the IC, but he had no way of knowing whether his meat bod had suffered any damage as a result of the attack. He was utterly cut off from any true physical sensation, as if his RAS override had been pumped to the max. But since he was still conscious, he had to assume his heart was still beating—that he was still alive.

  Might as well try to figure out where the frag he was.

  He took a closer look at the severed heads closest to him. Their skin gleamed with a metallic sheen, as if they had been dipped in metal. They were identifiable by metatype: one had the narrow face and pointed ears of an elf; another the knobby forehead and jutting horn of a troll. He could even tell which were male and which were female. But all of the heads looked pretty much alike. They were caricatures, not individuals. Icons.

  The stakes on which they were impaled stretched across a plain that disappeared into an indefinite horizon. There were hundreds of them—thousands. The faces were frozen in a single expression—abject terror—but the stakes themselves seemed to be . . . flowing. Peering at one, Bloodyguts could see that the grain of the wood was constantly shifting, kind of like the current of a river.

  Data! It had to be a flow of data. But how to access it? The wood was coarse and solid under Bloodyguts' fingers and refused to be dented by his thumbnail; it was not permeable at all.

  Something moved on the head. Bloodyguts jerked his hand back, instinctively reacting to an insect-sized creature that was scuttling across the frozen ridges of metallic hair. The thing looked like a combination of robot and dragonfly—a tiny silver-metal creature with articulated legs and wings, and arms that ended in miniature tools. Its face was featureless except for a single vidcam lens.

  Bloodyguts watched, fascinated, as the thing drilled a hole into the head. A probe extruded from the insectoid's arm and vanished into the hole. Then it was pulled back, and the miniature robot used the circular saw in its other limb to cut a larger hole. Flipping it back like a trap door, the insectoid exposed what looked like an old-fashioned circuit board, one with resistors and capacitors as large as fingernails, plastic-clad copper wires thick enough to be seen with the naked eye, and metal-on-plastic circuitry. A dull red light glowed on one of the insectoid's limbs as the circular saw turned into a soldering iron, arid then the creature went to work, soldering in a new wire to bypass a section of the board.

  Taking a quick glance at some of the other impaled heads, Bloodyguts saw similar creatures at work. Some heads contained archaic cog and wheel mechanisms, powered by wound springs; others held what looked like the glowing fuel rods of a nuclear power plant. In every case these mechanisms were being tinkered with.

  If this Matrix system was an actual representation of what was going on in the meat world, and if these were actually deckers, someone or something was messing with their wetware. And judging by the expressions on their faces, they were finding it about as pleasant as a bad BTL chip dream.

  Bloodyguts growled. What was he dealing with here? He decided to activate an analyze utility to find out.

  He pointed at one of the robot insects and a palm-sized plastic card appeared in the air just above it. The three-dimensional holo programmed into the card showed the image of the bug icon in various poses, while stats scrolled across the flat surface of the card itself.

  Bloodyguts watched the stats scroll past. The insectoid icon was one weird piece of programming. It seemed to be uploading and downloadi
ng data at the same time that it was performing a number of editing and disinfecting functions. It hadn't been written using any of the common programming languages—at least not any of the languages Bloodyguts recognized. Its code seemed to contain elements of HoloLISP, Oblong, and InterMod, but the blend kept changing, as if the utility were reprogramming itself in response to new data.

  It reminded Bloodyguts of black IC—intrusion countermeasures programs that sampled the command transactions between decker and cyberdeck and then injected dangerous biofeedback responses into the deck's ASIST interface.

  The program was obviously proactive, but it wasn't responding to Bloodyguts' presence. The insectoids were ignoring him—they weren't drilling into his wetware, thank the fraggin' spirits. At least, not as far as he could tell. He still seemed to be thinking normally—or thought he was.

  He shifted the analyze utility, pointing at the head itself. The card shimmered, and the face of an elf female replaced the insectoid holograph. After a millisecond's hesitation, a new set of code began scrolling across the card.

  Bloodyguts whistled in surprise. It was a decker, after all—the head was an abbreviated version of the standard USM persona icon. The stats suggested that the elf was using a hot deck—one that would leave her wide open to the potentially lethal effects of black IC. The deck's condition monitor was fluctuating wildly, one moment showing massive amounts of neural overload and the next reporting that all mental functions were within normal limits. She wasn't taking any physical damage, however.

  So the robot bug wasn't lethal black IC, or the poor fragger would have been dead already. And if the insect was causing mental damage, it was repairing it as quickly as it occurred. When the decker logged off or jacked out, she might never realize that her wetware had been tampered with. And that suggested only one thing.