by Lisa Smedman
Locking the fingers of one hand tightly into the socket of a skull, he reached for one of the fiber-optic cables and pulled it free. A pulse of maggots—one of the longest and fastest he'd seen yet—was just entering the jack on the end of the cable. Quickly he popped the jack into his mouth. He tried not to gag as the maggots flowed onto his tongue but instead concentrated on swallowing as many of the foul-tasting insects as he could. They filled his mouth and spilled out over his lips, but he managed to choke most of them down. Eyes closed, he sampled the data that flowed into his mind and, ultimately—somewhere in the meat world—into his cyberdeck.
The data was still nonsense, either so heavily encrypted or so glitched that it was meaningless. But Bloodyguts had at last found what he was looking for. Although the fiber-optic cable looked like any other, the analysis provided by Bloodyguts' commlink utility confirmed it: this dataline had an input/output bandwidth of more than one hundred megapulses per second. This was a main communications trunk.
Data continued to pulse through the cable, one string of maggots at a time. Choosing skulls at random, Bloodyguts pushed the data plug into one empty eye socket, then another. Somewhere in the meat world, telecom calls would be scrambled, machines served by slave modules would be receiving meaningless commands, and private or corporate data would be rerouted to someone else's data-stores. Assuming that the data flowing through the cable was intact—that it had not already been hopelessly corrupted by passing through this system—someone was bound to sit up and take notice.
Someone did. Several someones.
An angel materialized in the air next to the wall. The woman had the classic Christian religious iconography—white gown, glowing halo, and feathered wings—except that her features were ork. She strummed gently on a harp and sat cushioned on a pillowy white cloud.
Next came an Azzie eagle priest, decked out in a brilliant turquoise feathered cape, white loin cloth, and gilded sandals. Large gold earrings distended his earlobes and a jade pectoral carved with glyphs hung against his chest. In his hands he held a small dog—in Azzie mythology, the guardian-guide to the land of the dead.
Beside him floated a Buddhist monk in saffron robes, whirling a prayer wheel. Next to him was an elf woman with East Indian features, brilliant blue skin, and an elaborately sequined sari. And last came a dark-skinned human who looked like a skinnier version of Bloodyguts' own persona, his dreadlocks held back by a colorful knitted toque. He held a water pipe in one hand; the water inside it bubbled as he took a long, slow drag on the mouthpiece. The sweet smell of ganja smoke filled the air.
For a moment, Bloodyguts thought the trunkline must have accessed some sort of religious network. But then he realized that the sculpted system he was in would only accommodate deckers whose personas conformed to its iconography in some way. These deckers all had icons that represented their idealized, "angelic" forms—religious depictions of dead spirits or souls. Despite the fact that they seemed quite capable of movement, they were not very animated. They stared at him with flat, expressionless eyes.
After a moment Bloodyguts realized that the icons themselves were flat, two-dimensional. And that they were somewhat distorted, as if reflected by an imperfect mirror.
"I need your help," he said quickly. "I'm trapped here—I can't log off. Tell the sysop of whatever system this is to check on something that's gone wrong. Really fraggin' wrong . . ."
All at once, the angel hanging in the air next to Bloodyguts changed. Like a card being flipped over it turned end over end, revealing an image on the reverse. The persona it had transformed into was just as cliched as the angel had been—a devil with horns, goatee, and pitchfork. His expression was demonic in the extreme. Reversing the pitch-fork, he aimed its three barbed ends at his own chest, then plunged the weapon home. The mirror—for that's what the two-sided persona icon had indeed been—fragmented into thousands of pieces. Bloodyguts heard a woman's voice screaming as the shards tumbled to the plane of the virtual-scape far below, splashing into it and then blending into the floor as if they were made of liquid mercury.
Like dominos, each of the other personas also reversed itself. The Azzie priest became a snake-headed monster dressed in a bone skirt that sank its fangs into its own arm; the saffron-robed priest turned into a leering Tibetan demon who stank of offal and who tore deep furrows in his own flesh with long fingernails; the blue-skinned elf woman into a hooded snake that wrapped strangling coils around her neck; and the Rastafarian into a figure in the costume of an Egyptian pharaoh who flogged his back with a barbed whip. Each shattered into mirrored fragments in turn and fell screaming to the plain below, which absorbed the shards into its rippled surface and then became smooth again.
As the last persona icon fragmented, Bloodyguts tried to catch one of its shards. The mirrored glass sliced open his hand. The wound burned like fire for a moment, but in the instant before his hand healed itself, Bloodyguts received a brief burst of unencrypted paydata from the data log of the Rastafarian's cyberdeck. The decker had been accessing a slave node that controlled a robotic assembler in an aircraft manufacturing plant in Puyallup. He had been trying to find out why it had suddenly run amok while the rest of the plant continued operating normally. The decker had activated an analyze utility just before his persona crashed, and it had come up with the source of the glitch: a cluster of LTG addresses within the Seattle regional telecommunications grid.
The data that represented those addresses was degrading. Already the addresses had shrunk from more than one hundred in number to less than a dozen. Bloodyguts had to do something—and fraggin' fast.
He jammed the data plug of the fiber-optic cable he held into one of the bullet holes in his chest. He felt a brief burst of pain, then threw his mind out through the connection in an effort to log onto the last of those addresses. He felt his consciousness squirm through the cable together with the other maggot-bits of data, toward a hexagonal coffin. Inside it was a child, curled in a fetal position, thumb jammed in mouth. The child looked up, saw Bloodyguts streaming down at the speed of thought. . .
And slammed the coffin lid closed.
Bloodyguts smashed into its polished glass surface like a bird striking a window. He reeled back, barely retaining consciousness. For an endless second he hung in an empty void. Then sparkles of light danced around him—fragments of a mirror. As they spun, they reflected his darker side—an image of his meat bod. Of Yograj Lutter, the brainburner. Bloodyguts could see that shards of mirror were embedded in his head. The chipped-out addict in the reflections gave Bloodyguts a sloppy grin, then jammed another fragment of mirror into his scalp. Cold pain slid into Bloodyguts' own mind like an icicle into warm flesh. Screaming, he balled a huge fist and smacked it into the nearest reflection of himself.
His fist punched home with the snick of a data plug finding its jackpoint.
He connected with . . .
H . . . O . . . I . . . !
Bloodyguts hung from one hand on the wall of skulls. His other hand—his fist—had punched through one of the skulls and was buried inside it. Blood seeped from cuts on his wrist, flowing down his arm, then up his neck and into his right eye. He tried to blink but could not clear the blood away—and wiping his eye would have meant removing one of his hands from the wall. Since his full weight was suspended from them, his feet hanging free, he didn't dare try.
The gutter slang word for hello with its exclamation mark—HOI!—had appeared slowly, one letter at a time. It remained projected on his right eyelid whenever he blinked. He closed both eyes and the simple, printed text hung in place, refusing to be dislodged no matter how much he rolled his eyes around behind closed lids. His right eyelid was like an antique monitor whose screen had projected the same image long enough to have burned a ghostly pattern on the screen.
Questions raced through his mind. Was the greeting from another decker? And where were they? Who were they?
P. . . I. . . P.
The word was burned into h
is inner eyelid, just as the greeting it replaced had been. Pip? Who or what the frag was a pip? Was that some sort of Japanese word, like otaku ?
NOT OTAKU. YET.
Not yet otaku! This was obviously someone who knew about the experiment. Perhaps even the sysop or programmer behind it.
"Where are you?" Bloodyguts asked out loud. "Can you access this node?"
ONLY BY TORTIS. AND IT WUZ HARD. KEP GETTING DUMPED.
The words appeared at a painfully slow pace, one letter at a time. Judging by the rate of transmission, a keyboard was being used. If this was the sysop, he or she wasn't a very good speller—or else was typing madly in the meat-world, unwilling to correct a mistake when seconds within the Matrix counted for so much.
"Can you help me log off?" Bloodyguts asked.
NO.
"Can anyone else help me?"
The answer was even slower in coming this time, as if the other decker were considering the question.
MAYBE GRATE SPIRIT.
What the frag? Spirits were part of the natural world.
They couldn't enter the Matrix—and wouldn't survive inside it if they could.
Perhaps there was another way out. "What is deep resonance?" Bloodyguts asked. "Can it help me to perform a graceful log off?"
For a moment, Bloodyguts thought the connection had been broken. But he could still feel the slide of blood flowing up his arm and the tickle of it creeping under his right eyelid, drop by drop like reverse tears.
EVERYWUN WUZ DEEPRESONUNS. SOMETHING WENT RONG.
"Can the otaku still experience deep resonance? Were they the ones behind the experiment?"
NO. YES.
"Without our permission? Why?"
WUZ GOOD FOR YOU.
Anger burned in his gut. He'd make his own decisions about modifications to his wetware, thank you very fragging much.
"Can the otaku repair whatever the frag went wrong?"
DUNNO. TELL US MO—
Bloodyguts howled in pain as the jaw of the skull began to move. Its teeth ground against his balled fist, turning it to hamburger. He could feel the bones splinter and his fingers popped like squashed sausages. The pain was unbearable, excruciating. . .
Swearing, he yanked his hand free. The pain stopped, and he saw that he had been tricked. The hand of his persona was still whole. But whether his meat-bod hand still functioned—or was a squashed mess, or even gangrenous—was impossible to tell.
The skull he had punched had repaired itself. Realizing that he had lost his only contact with the outside world, Bloodyguts slammed his fist back into it. But his hand hit what felt like concrete. The skull did not give. And in all of his thrashing, as he hung from the wall one-handed, the fiber-optic cable that he had plugged into his chest had fallen free. It hung below him, spewing out blurps of maggots.
Then the skull in which his fingers were wedged blinked, ejecting them.
Bloodyguts fell through space. As he raced down toward the mirrored floor of the virtualscape, his reflected image flew "up" to meet him from its depths. He wondered if he would shatter into pieces when he hit. . .
09:51:13 PST
Seattle, United Canadian and American States
Ansen had tried everything he could think of. He'd plugged in his spare VR goggles and sensor board, changed the fiber-optic cables, checked all the ports, and run a diagnostics test on the deck's utilities. Now he had the case off the deck and was arm-deep in the Vista's hardware. He checked each of the computer's MPCP optical chips but didn't see any signs of damage. There was none of the burned-plastic smell associated with a chip burned by gray IC, and under a magnifying scope the complex tracery of molecular circuitry didn't show any signs of fusing.
Even so, he popped out the four chips that were the heart of the MPCP and replaced them. Then he began the task of rebooting the persona programs, one by one. He drummed his fingers on the frayed denim of his jeans as the seconds ticked away, then executed the deck's self-diagnostics check. And smiled, as the sensor board came back to life, its panel fully illuminated. The problem must have been with the MPCP, after all.
"Well, kitty," he said to the purple kitten that sat beside him on the futon, its head butting against his thigh as its sensors homed in on the warmth of his body. "Wish me luck."
He yanked the data gloves back on, snugged the VR goggles over his eyes, and made a dialing motion with his right index finger. This time, he'd try visiting a different LTG and would stay away from the one that gave access to the U-dub system. The IC that had crashed his deck was probably confined to a single SAN—hopefully not the one he used to access the Matrix itself. But he wouldn't know for sure until he tried to log on . . .
Ansen resisted the urge to cross his fingers. It would only screw up the data glove's signal.
"I'm in!" he crowed with delight as the wrapscreen of the goggles flared to life. But the image they projected was not the familiar checkerboard of the Seattle RTG. Instead he floated in a field of black that was splattered with blood-red stars. Drops of red liquid fell on the outstretched arms of his persona, and before him hung a disembodied face that was twisted in a mask of terror. One eye was an empty socket that wept black tears; the other had a pupil shaped like a fly. Worms writhed where there should be hair, and the lips were stitched crudely together with coarse black thread. Ansen didn't even want to think about what this icon would smell like to someone whose deck included ASIST circuitry.
Then the lips came apart with a shuddering tear as the face began to scream . . .
The agonizing wail was still echoing in Ansen's mind as he tore the goggles away from his face. Just as it had before, when he had confronted the mist-filled tunnel icon, the system had dumped him. The goggles were dead, their speakers silent.
Had Ansen turned to look behind him at the flatscreen monitor that served as his apartment's "window" on the world outside, he would have seen an image similar to the one he'd just seen on-line. Down on the street below his building, a woman in a tailored skirt and jacket staggered down the sidewalk, her face twisted in agony and her hands clenched in her hair. Oblivious to the traffic that surged past her, she turned suddenly on her heel and ran out into the street
The window did not show what happened next, for the woman had disappeared into the gray static that obscured the center of the display. But the traffic came to an abrupt halt, and in another moment drivers closest to the blank space were spilling out of their vehicles with grim looks on their faces.
Ansen, bent over his deck, was oblivious to the drama that was unfolding on the wall screen behind him.
He frowned down at the Vista, trying to puzzle out what had gone wrong. The sensor board still glowed with life. And the flatscreen display was active. But all background color had been leached from the screen, leaving it a blinding white.
Across this blank field scrolled blocky red letters. The same message repeated itself, refusing to clear no matter what commands Ansen executed with his data gloves.
ACCESS DENIED. LEAVE ME ALONE. GO AWAY.
Ansen frowned. The first part of the message made sense. Some glitch in his deck was routing him somewhere strange, then dumping him before he could log on to any system. He thanked the spirits that he didn't have a direct neural interface; suffering dump shock twice in one day would have given him a serious skull ache, for sure. But the second part of the message made no sense. Who was "me"?
It was starting to sound like his deck had picked up a virus. And the only way to be rid of a virus was to replace every meg of memory in the Vista. To re-slot every single chip.
Ansen sighed. He wished he knew another decker well enough to call on the telecom unit at the end of the hall.
Brother Data would be able to tell him what to do. Or Digital Dawg or Sysop Sarah. But he was used to interfacing with them only over the chat stations of the Matrix. He didn't even know their real names, let alone their telecom numbers.
Grabbing his tools, he began to replace the optical ch
ips that made up his deck's active and storage memory banks.
09:52:05 PST
Timea had no idea where she was. She'd logged onto the Seattle RTG through the clinic's Redmond address, but instead of the familiar grid she found herself in a tunnel whose walls blurred past as she rushed toward an impossibly bright light. The dizzying sense of uncheckable momentum brought back a painful memory. She'd experienced exactly the same hallucination after she'd taken the straight razor and . . .
The scene had shifted then.
What followed had proven equally horrific. She'd regressed to the size of an embryo, and had gone through the whole miraculous process of development. She'd felt her tiny body changing, growing—then experienced the Painful wonder of being born. Until an abortion cut that experience short. She was the aborted fetus, the embryonic being whose life was being terminated. Except that she had been full grown, an adult with full awareness of what was happening to her . . .
The trash. They'd thrown her dying body in a trash can. And then the lid had started to close. Frantically, Timea had scrambled upward with bleeding and broken hands, had managed to pull herself partially out of the dumpster. With one last Herculean effort, she tumbled over the lip of the dumpster and landed on—linoleum tiles?
After a moment of disorientation, her surroundings came into focus. She found herself lying in a corridor that stretched to infinity in front of her and behind her, with impenetrable darkness at one end and brilliant white light at the other. The linoleum floor beneath her was stained and heavily pitted with scratches, as if some wounded creature had dragged itself along the floor with its claws. Somewhere in the shadows at one end of the corridor the beast waited for her, ready to take its revenge . . .
