Psychotrope

by Lisa Smedman

  His only adornment was a thin gold wedding band.

  Park, a young man whose sky-blue cybernetic eyes were incongruous and jarring in his Korean face, shrugged.

  "Beats the drek outta me." He leaned back in his chair. Under his unbuttoned lab coat he wore a T-shirt emblazoned with a nineteenth-century print advertisement for Fowler and Wells, Phrenologists. The ad showed a human head, divided into sections labeled with personality traits. "Phrenology reveals our natural tendencies, our capacity for right and wrong, our appropriate avocations," the advertisement read. "Mssrs. Fowler and Wells shall read your skull and direct you how to attain happiness and success in life."

  McAllister, the researcher seated beside him, was an elf woman whose single braid of blonde hair was almost as white as her lab coat. She spoke without looking up from her data display.

  "We're seeing some rather dramatic shifts in the subjects' neurotransmitter balances," she said in a dispassionate, clinical voice. "There's an increased presence of dopamine; the substantia nigra seems to be producing this neurotransmitter at a greatly accelerated rate. There are indications of oversaturation of the limbic system as a whole, and there are abnormal spike discharges in the nucleus accumbens that are suggestive of severe emotional disturbance."

  "And the cause?" Halberstam asked.

  "We can't be sure," she answered. "It may not be as simple as a mere overproduction of dopamine. There may also be hypersensitivity of the brain's dopamine receptors."

  "It has to be some sort of IC-induced biofeedback," Park said.

  "Impossible," McAllister countered briskly. "Our intrusion counter-countermeasures are state of the art. There's no way IC could get through."

  Park scratched his crew cut and swiveled his chair so that he was facing a bank of a dozen trideo monitors that were linked into the facility's computer system. Most of their holographic projections showed ever-shifting views of the Matrix—colorful but commonplace images of datalines, geometrical system constructs, and beautiful but surreal sculpted landscapes.

  Three of the trid monitors, however, were frozen on a single image—or series of images. Park stared at one of them.

  The three-dimensional image the monitor was projecting jerked and bounced as if it were a closed-circuit feed from a vidcam held by someone who was running. Filling the display was the image of a woman who the viewer seemed to be chasing. She strode purposefully away from the viewer, shoulders squared and head turned away, her face hidden by long, dark hair.

  For just a moment, the scene shifted. The woman was suddenly facing the viewer as the vidcam operator jogged around in front of her, taking up the too-low perspective of a person on their knees, or of a child looking up at an adult. The woman's face, revealed, was horrifying. It was twisted in a terrifying snarl—that of a ravenous vampire with blood-flecked fangs. She licked her lips with a bloody tongue, then leered down at the viewer, mouth gaping wide. . .

  Then the perspective suddenly shifted back to the original image—that of someone following a woman who was walking steadily away. The jogging motion resumed as the chase began anew.

  The trideo monitor was labeled: SUBJECT 3. Park thumbed a button on the side of the unit and activated the aural component of the display. A child's voice echoed from the speakers. "Mom?" it said hesitantly. "Is that you? Please don't leave me. I want to go with you. Mom?"

  "The same general sequence keeps repeating," Park said. "Kid chases woman, kid catches up, woman scares kid.

  Although the woman's face is different each time. The combinations are always human and animal, but they're freaky.

  Nightmarish. They have a surrealistic flow.

  "It's like the kid's on a drug trip or something," he added. Then he laughed and cocked an eyebrow. "Maybe someone slipped some coke into the tanks when we weren't looking."

  McAllister gave Park a withering look. She shook her head disdainfully at the joke that she seemed to take as a serious attempt by Park to explain what was going on. "If any drug was introduced, it's more likely to have been L-dopa. But with our security, I doubt it. Unless we have a practical joker in our midst."

  Park's pale blue eyes stared into space as he continued following his original train of thought. "Or maybe the kid's just having a nightmare . . ."

  "Thank you, Doctor Tong, for your in-depth analysis." McAllister snorted.

  Halberstam watched the exchange without comment. When he spoke, it was with the voice of authority. "Whatever is causing this is coming from outside the clinic," he said. "From the Matrix. It's localized in the Seattle grid. It's not interfering with any of the functions of the Matrix, or with any of the hardware that supports the Seattle RTG. If it was, we'd have been hearing panicked news reports coming out of Seattle by now. Whatever this glitch is, it seems to be affecting only the users of the system themselves. As a precautionary measure, we've warned the other subjects to stay away from that RTG until this is cleared up."

  He glanced once, briefly, over his shoulder at the trideo monitor. "Number Three appears to be experiencing a loop in its programming, one that was induced by something it encountered in the Seattle grid. But the imagery does not conform to any of the universal matrix specifications codings. That suggests that, if it is IC, it's highly sculpted."

  "The IC may be corrupting the reality filter of the subject's MPCP," McAllister suggested.

  Park's eyes rolled at McAllister's sudden acceptance of the fact that IC could, after all, have penetrated their defenses. Just because Halberstam said it was so didn't make it so. "Kiss-hoop slitch . . ." he mouthed behind her back.

  "The key point seems to be that dopamine's involved," Halberstam continued. "One of our candidates at the Redmond clinic is experiencing what sounds like a psychotic episode. She's suffering from extreme agitation combined with hallucinations."

  "What?" Park asked, coming out of his reverie. "Is she schizophrenic?"

  Halberstam stared for a moment at Park. Then he smiled. The biotechnician might be sloppy, he might be a daydreamer, but sometimes he could come up with answers. He'd just earned his nuyen.

  "Right," Halberstam said, his voice terse with excitement as he made his decision. "We'll try to correct the problem by introducing an anti-schizophrenic drug to the nutrient. We'll start with chlorpromazine on Number Three, and observe the results."

  McAllister favored Halberstam with a kiss-hoop smile. "Brilliant!" she said with a brisk nod, ignoring Park's contribution. "Block the dopamine receptors with a binding agent. That should stabilize the subjects."

  Park stared at the flatscreen projection of the brain. "At least we won't have to worry about the kid suffering any side effects," he added with a laugh. "Body rigidity, tremors . . . Kid doesn't know how lucky he is to be nothing more than a ghost in the machine." He frowned. "Or how lucky she is."

  Halberstam left the room at a run, heading for the part of the facility that contained the holding tanks.

  09:52:32 PST

  Dark Father heard Bloody guts cry out and turned to see what the fool had gotten himself into this time. A second ago, the troll decker had been a distant speck, almost to the top of the wall of skulls. Now he was plummeting down toward Red Wraith . . .

  No, not Red Wraith. Toward another decker, one he'd never seen before. A dark-skinned woman in a tight, gauzy wrap and elaborate headdress and—Dark Father strained to see details—what looked like frayed evening gloves on her hands.

  Dark Father grimaced as he realized that the troll was about to crash into the other decker. He held his breath and half turned away, not really wanting to watch but held in horrified fascination just the same.

  Then the world shifted beneath his feet. Suddenly sideways was down. Dark Father fell onto the wall of skulls, which a second ago had been a vertical surface. He struggled to free himself from the tangle of fiber-optic cables and then rose to his feet on the bumpy floor. The rounded skulls were slippery under his feet, like wet cobblestones.

  He looked up and saw Blood
yguts tumbling along the floor in a tight somersault. The troll rolled end over end twice more and finally came to a stop within touching distance of the new arrival.

  His curiosity piqued, Dark Father made his way back to where a rather shaken Bloodyguts was climbing to his feet.

  It was slow going—Dark Father had to brace a hand against the mirror that now formed a wall beside him and pick his way carefully through the tangle of fiber-optic cables that littered the floor. He saw that Red Wraith was heading back from the opposite direction. Because he walked above the floor—rather than on it—he reached the others long before Dark Father did.

  By the time Dark Father arrived, the three were already deep in conversation.

  ". . . so this is the Seattle Visitor Center database?" Bloodyguts was asking.

  The female decker nodded and said something about accessing an LTG address. Now that he was closer, Dark Father could make out the details of her persona. She'd chosen to appear as a black woman—although her skin had a grayish tinge, just as his own skin did in the real world. It looked as though patches of mold were growing on it. Her arms were wrapped in mummy bandages and her jackal-headed headdress was gilded and inset with sparkling gems. Like the rest of them, her persona icon was that of a dead creature. Dark Father wondered if she too had once died and then been reborn . . .

  "What happened then, Anubis?" Red Wraith asked her.

  Dark Father decided not to comment on the fact that they had failed to introduce him.

  "I saw him—uh, Bloodyguts—falling toward me. I knew there wasn't time to get out of the way. I remember thinking that maybe this system was patterned after an old-fashioned funhouse like the one we used to have in the Squatter's Mall. It had a big, mirrored tunnel that rotated. It wasn't virtual at all—you actually had to climb through it. I remember wishing that I was inside that tunnel instead of here, that the walls and floor would rotate . . ."

  She shrugged. "I guess I must have created a program that edited this system."

  "Just like you created that crash utility out of thin air," Bloodyguts said.

  "Try to do it again," Red Wraith suggested. "Edit the system's axis and rotate the floor back where it was."

  Anubis closed her eyes a moment, as if in deep concentration. A frown creased her forehead. Then she opened her eyes and shook her head.

  "I can't," she said. "I don't know how I did it."

  Bloodyguts gave her an encouraging look. "But you were able to create a utility by the sheer force of your will alone," he said. "You said that the teaching program called it a 'complex form'—the same words that Fuchi exec used in his memo. Looks like the otaku can not only deck without a deck, but create and run utilities without software."

  "Maybe it's instinctive," Red Wraith offered. "Something that only happens in situations of extreme duress. During the late twentieth century, there were reports of soldiers in combat spontaneously developing 'psychic' abilities—what we'd call magic today. Military memoirs are full of stories of soldiers being able to 'feel' a land mine before they put their foot down, or walking through dark jungle on a moonless night and stopping just centimeters short of the trip wire for a booby trap. Or seeing tombstones in the eyes of a buddy who was going to die that day . . . They couldn't control it, either.

  "Some researchers speculate that stress had triggered early manifestations of magic, long before the Awakening.

  Maybe we're seeing something similar here—the awakening of a new ability, triggered by a combination of whatever 'experiment' we were subjected to, combined with the high stress of cybercombat."

  Dark Father listened patiently, trying to follow the conversation despite the fact that he had missed the preamble.

  "What you're proposing is an impossibility," he said after a moment's thought. "Writing a program from scratch takes hours or days. It must be the same for the otaku and their complex forms."

  "Ritual magic takes days to prepare, too," Red Wraith observed. "But adepts are able to spontaneously cast spells.

  Maybe stress plays a part there, too."

  Dark Father snorted. "I thought you were the doubter of the group," he said. "You don't believe that Als exist when there's plenty of evidence to suggest that they do, but you believe it's possible to create a utility program at will or to perform a complicated series of editing commands instantaneously . . ."

  Red Wraith shrugged. "I have to believe the evidence of my own eyes. And of my own gut. Something just feels different about the way I've been interfacing with this virtualscape. It feels like, like . . ." His voice trailed off as he sought words for something he obviously found difficult to describe.

  "I feel it too," Bloodyguts said. "And I do believe Anubis when she says she created that program on the fly. You saw the results: I would have been a mirror-smear if she hadn't."

  "If only it were true that stress could trigger this ability, we could all escape from here." Dark Father stared meaningfully at the troll. "Certainly the aggravation of dealing with such knob-headed—" Then he froze as he spotted his reflection in the mirrored wall beside him. Instead of showing the familiar top-hatted black skeleton that was his Matrix persona, it reflected Winston Griffith III as he looked in the real world: a dapper black man wearing a three-piece suit. His head was bald and his face was devoid of eyebrows or lashes, and his skin held a grayish tinge—one that was slowly increasing, even as he watched. And his nails were growing into long, curling claws. . .

  Dark Father's finger bones clicked against the bones of his palm as he instinctively balled his fist. The reflection on the wall beside him mirrored his action, and for a moment the claws were hidden. Then they emerged from inside the balled fist, erupting through the backs of his hands like sprouting vines.

  Dark Father glanced nervously at the other deckers, but they were engaged in a debate over whether or not they could spontaneously create a utility that would help them log off this system. Looking back at the mirrored wall, Dark Father saw that their reflections were also different from those of the persona icons who stood in front of him. Anubis was a young black woman with close-cropped hair that was shaved high around the datajack behind her left ear and slots in her wrist that probably housed some sort of cyberware. She wore jeans and a fibermesh vest and looked street-smart—lower class but too clean to be gutter scum.

  Red Wraith's reflection was that of a lithe-looking white man of about forty with chrome-pupilled eyes and wavy brown hair that had receded to leave a widow's peak. The back of his neck was horribly scarred, as if from some ancient injury. The tip of one of his fingers—the right index—had bent back at an odd angle, like an opened hatch. Projecting from the stump was a needle-thin bit of steel.

  Bloodyguts . . . Well, what had Dark Father expected? The troll's reflection was that of a living man, rather than a rotting zombie, but Dark Father was willing to bet that he still stank. He was perhaps in his mid-twenties, wearing a sloppy track suit with sweat stains under the arms. The hair between his horns was uncombed, and his jutting yellow teeth looked as if they could stand a good brushing . . .

  As if sensing that Dark Father was looking at him in the mirror, Bloodyguts turned. Dark Father felt his cheekbones go hot, as though he had flesh there that was capable of holding a blush. He turned, flustered, trying to step between Bloodyguts and the reflection of his ghoulish self.

  "Hey, look!" Bloodyguts shouted. "The mirror's reflecting our meat bods!"

  Dark Father felt a prickle of dread run through him as the others stared at his reflection in the mirror. The ghoulish gray pallor was pronounced now, and his claws were several centimeters long. He saw that his reflection was grinning in fear, revealing sharp, feral teeth. He quickly pursed his lips shut and tucked his hands behind his back, but it was too late. The others had seen. They knew.

  "Spirits be fragged," Red Wraith said in a hushed voice. "You're a ghoul. I didn't think it was possible for ghouls to run the Matrix."

  Anubis took a step back from Dark Father
, as if he were a leper. Steel blades shot out of the arm of her reflected image. She raised her arm defensively, as if about to fend off an attack.

  "Yup," Bloodyguts said. "He's a ghoul, all right. Nice suit, too."

  "No!" Dark Father shouted. "I'm not a ghoul! The mirror is a lie. I'm human! Human!"

  "Do you think we can trust him?" Red Wraith asked. "I wouldn't turn my back on him in the real world, but here in the Matrix . . ."

  "Doesn't matter to me if he's a ghoul," Bloodyguts said with a shrug. "One of my best chummers is a ghoul. Poor fragger has to keep it under wraps, though, so the bounty hunters don't get him. I know how it feels, always having to watch your back. And how it feels to have people judge you by the way you look, rather than the programming power of your wetware. I can understand why . . ."

  "I don't want your pity!" Dark Father screamed.

  He turned, cringing from the looks he saw in their eyes. He couldn't breathe. Couldn't think. They'd found him out.

  They knew. If only there were a way out, some place to hide . . .

  Four cracks appeared in the mirror, forming a doorshaped frame around the reflection of Winston Griffith III. Inside the rectangle of cracks, a round dark circle appeared just to the right of his hand—a door handle. Dark Father lunged toward his own reflection, grabbing for the handle. He wrenched the door open and leaped into the mirror, into the reflection of himself. . .

  The virtualscape shifted.

  He was in a jail cell with concrete walls. There was no door. Only a tiny window high in the rear wall, its grimy glass set well back behind a thick iron grill. The floor was bare gray concrete, as was the ceiling. A foul-smelling toilet sat in one corner, next to a chipped ceramic sink. The opposite wall held two metal bunks.

  A child sat on the upper bunk—a boy about twelve years old. His head was shaved bald except for two tiny tufts of electric blue hair that had been gelled into hornlike points. He was human, but his features were a mix of racial groups.