Farewell Horizontal

by K. W. Jeter

  “There you go -” He nodded to himself, not sure how pleased he should feel about this new discovery. If there were tunnels running through the building, then the end of that one was definitely open. Would’ve been handier if the spot was closer to the crossing of the two lines he’d drawn on the map. It’d take him days to get to the corresponding spot on this side, the other end of the line drawn straight to the building’s center.

  That was also assuming that the tunnel was open on this side. Also that the supposed tunnel did run through the center, instead of at some other angle through the building. And a few million other things.

  He had the advantage of being up against it, with no other choice. You were absolved of the fear of making the wrong decision. In some ways, Axxter figured, dead men had it easy.

  In the morning – morning on the other side, the disconcerting half-light on this – he’d start out for the spot where he’d calculated the tunnel opening should be. In the meantime, there was this night to get through.

  You’re a fool. Knowing already what he was going to do. With money in his account, and a phone line handy, he always did the same thing. He reached over and wriggled his finger inside the plug-in jack, made contact, and called up HoloDays.

  † † †

  He didn’t expect her to be waiting for him. She never was.

  He extended a forefinger of the image he was walking around in; the sensor at the side of the door picked up the presence of coherent light activity and rang the bell inside her apartment. The sensor, at least, interpreted him as being human.

  Maybe she wasn’t home – whenever he got this close, he started hoping that. Though he couldn’t imagine where else she’d be. Off work, she socked in tight into her cozy home space. The same as everyone else on the horizontal.

  The door swung open. Axxter held up the image of his hand. “Hi. Just thought I’d drop by. And say hello.”

  Ree glared at him. There was a discrepancy, a jitter on the line: the image she perceived of him was displaced a few inches behind his sensory feedback. The effect was as though her narrow gaze was boring right into the back of his skull.

  “What do you want?”

  He made the image shrug. “Hey – like I said. I just wanted to see you. That’s all. I mean, I don’t even have tactile sensation. See?” He poked at the doorjamb, the image of his finger disappearing two inches into the panel. “So it’s not like I’m here just to… fool around or anything.”

  A weary sigh from her. “Believe me; you wouldn’t have, anyway.” She leaned against the door, arms folded. “So now you’re here, you’ve seen me – is that it? You’re happy now?”

  “Well, there were some things I wanted to tell you -”

  “Tell me? I’ll tell you a few things. I’ll tell you that I don’t appreciate having some idiot that everybody’s seen is an idiot come round knocking on my door. I don’t need my neighbors checking it out, that I got the biggest fool in or outside the building thinking that he’s got something going with me -”

  “I don’t?” Axxter tilted the image’s head, puzzled. “I mean – you and me – we’re not -”

  Her eyes, small to begin with, disappeared in the tight lines of her scowl. “Not after this latest bullshit. You don’t care about yourself, you’re happy to be some bum out on the wall, some… some glorified tattoo artist – fine. That’s up to you. But you’re not going to embarrass me with it anymore.”

  “That’s what I came to talk to you about. What I came to tell you – I’m going to give it up.” His image had stepped back, away from the freezing chill of her words; he could feel that with or without any sensory input.

  “Really. I’m not kidding you about this. I’ve thought about it a lot. And that’s what I’ve decided. Soon as I get back, I mean back for real, I’m going to go back on the horizontal. Give up running around on the vertical. I’ll have plenty of money, I’ll be able to buy myself a commission, some nice junior executive job… the whole bit. And then… you and me… you know, we could work it out.”

  She shook her head. “Ny – I don’t believe you. You’ve always been a lying sack of shit.”

  He was about to say something, some vow of intention, when another voice shouted, loud enough to rattle the image’s optical feedback, setting the corridor and the open door shimmering in his sight.

  “Hey! Who the fuck are you!” A female voice, but not hers; he could see her mouth, closed and tight-lipped. “Get off this line, or I’ll deck you so hard you won’t know what’s happening!”

  He saw her staring at him now, eyes widening a bit, lips curling in disgust.

  “You heard me!” The voice, attached to nothing, went louder. “You little shit! Just you wait!”

  Then he wasn’t standing outside his girlfriend’s apartment, way over in the distant horizontal. The hookup with HoloDays had evaporated with a jarring suddenness. He was hanging in the dark again, over on the eveningside.

  “I’m gonna kick your butt so hard -”

  He pulled his finger from the plug-in jack, and the voice inside his head disappeared. Leaving silence.

  What the hell was that? Some kind of a parasite on the line. He’d encountered line-ghosts before – the main hazard of being too cheap to shell out for shielded calls – but never any with that brand of death-threat hostility. Usually they just made nuisances out of themselves with their constant wheedling to come and play, to join in their little line-ghost games.

  He stuck his finger back into the jack; an experiment. With immediate results.

  “There you are, dickhead. I wasn’t through with you.” The voice grated low. “You’re in deep shit with me now.”

  “Hey, hold on a minute.” The barrage was getting tiresome. “Who is this? What’s the problem?”

  “You’re gonna find out what the problem is, fella. And you know damn well who this is. And you know this line is part of my network, too. You’re one of those cracker defects guys, aren’t you? I can tell.”

  “Who? What are you talking about -”

  The words CRACKER D:FEX spelled out in his sight, one red letter after another, then faded away.

  “I’ve had just about enough shit from you D:Fex clowns. This is my network, and it’s off limits to you and your jerkoff buddies. And now that you’ve been hanging on the line long enough for me to get you pinpointed, I’m gonna be over there in person to kick you off. See you later, dipshit.”

  Silence again, then more red words. This time spelling out FELONY M:PULSE. They took a lot longer to fade away.

  Jesus H. Christ. The cold hard tone in the woman’s voice had been more unnerving than her initial wrath. He hadn’t understood half of what she’d been rattling on about.

  Violence had been promised, though of what sort – Screw it. At this point, what was there to worry about? His dead-man status still insulated him.

  Still with his finger in the jack; a legit call came through.

  “Ny – where the hell have you been?” Brevis’s voice was excited, but not in any way that indicated money. Panic, instead. “I’ve been trying to get hold of you for hours!”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “You gotta get moving, Ny; I mean, like right now. You don’t have time to go figuring out routes and stuff. You gotta get off that spot immediately, man.”

  “Hold on. Come on, slow down.” His agent’s words had come swarming over him, almost too fast to understand. “What’re you going on about?”

  The sound of a big gulp of breath came over the line. “Heavy action, Ny. I didn’t count on shit like this. It’s the Havoc Mass – they’ve sent major weight out after you. A megassasin has been spotted crossing over Linear Fair Left; it’s apparently making a beeline straight for you. I can’t believe how pissed those people are at you; I mean, this is the first reported instance of any military tribe personnel entering eveningside territory. It’s just unheard of. But the word’s out, Ny – they’re not going to stop until they’ve got you squas
hed like a bug.”

  He felt dazed. As if he weren’t in enough shit already. Don’t these guys ever give up? They’d already had their shot at him. Time to give the rest of the world a turn.

  “How long ago? I mean, how long ago did it go through the Fair?”

  “Don’t know, exactly – might’ve been four, five, maybe six hours ago. And it was making tracks, by all reports. Those big megs can really move.”

  Axxter wondered if it was the same one that he’d done the graffex designs on; Cripplemaker’s commission. It’d appeal to the warriors’ sense of irony for him to get squashed by the megassassin bearing his own work. The last thing he’d see would be the emblem he’d designed himself. It’d be like getting killed by your own signature.

  Brevis’s voice rattled on. “That’s what I mean, Ny. You gotta get moving. It’s got you pinpointed by the location of the jack you’ve been using. The longer you hang around there, or anywhere nearby, the sooner it’s going to be on your ass.”

  “Christ…”

  “Look, just get away from there. Any direction’s fine; but just go. I’ll do what I can from this end – maybe I can find out what direction the meg’ll be coming in – but everything else you’re going to have to figure out on the run. Okay? And give me a call when you find some place just as far from where you’re at as you can make it.”

  When the first gray half-light oozed around him, the plug-in jack with its yellow marking rings was already beyond sighting, hidden by the curve of the building. His progress had been slow in the dark, clambering blind, his chest close to the wall, only the pithons sure about striking out for new holds.

  He paused to catch his breath; his heart had been hammering in his throat the whole distance. Brevis’s panic had infected him, locking into his spinal column. Take it easy – he could make it if he just kept a steady pace, kept traveling. Maybe he could. If he could reach the entry site to the interior, the tunnel opening he’d calculated… then he might have a chance.

  His pulse had slowed with the light; trying to move in the dark had spooked him. Too much like running in nightmares, where there was no sign of motion at all. He filled his lungs, nostrils stinging with the chill air, and reached out for another handhold.

  He heard the whistle of the cable reeling out before it hit him. Across the shoulderblades, knocking him flat up against the wall – then he was jerked back by an arm around his throat.

  “Don’t move, sucker.” The voice snarled at his ear. A woman’s voice; he’d heard it before. Something pointed dug through his jacket toward his ribs. The sensation ended, simultaneous with the appearance of a shining knifeblade close to his face. “Get the picture? Be smart.”

  The woman shifted her weight off his back. He turned his head to look at her.

  She sat in a loop knotted in the cable, dangling alongside him. A kid, younger than he, with dark hair cropped short. She looked him over, her level gaze traveling from his boots upward.

  “You’re not a circuit rider.” She used the point of the knife to scratch the side of her face. “I can tell. You should be over on the other side. What’re you doing here?”

  The voice that had broken in on his hollow-time call; now confronting him in the flesh. “You know, you don’t need to wave that thing around.” The blade annoyed him. “You want to know something, you can just ask.”

  She smiled and tucked the knife into her belt. “I thought you were one of that D:Fex bunch. I’ve got it in for ’em.” She leaned back against the wall. “So what’s the deal – you trying to get back over to the morningside? Is that it?”

  “You’ve heard about me?”

  The woman shook her head. “What you people do is no concern of mine. I’ve got other business to take care of. I wouldn’t’ve come around here at all if you hadn’t been using part of my network.”

  “Your network?” He remembered some of the things she’d said before, when she’d just been a voice on the line. “Was that that M something or other?”

  “M:Pulse. Yeah, that’s it.”

  “So you’re, uh, Felonious.”

  “Felony. Sometimes; most of the time, actually. When I’m not something else.”

  Axxter glanced up the wall, along the length of the cable. He could see where it emerged from a peeled-back section of the wall, just large enough for someone to wriggle through. Work on this one – anybody who had working knowledge of things like that was worth cultivating.

  “You’re a line-ghost?”

  “‘Line-ghost’ – give me a break.” She looked at him disgustedly. “Line-ghosts are just phenomena, like static or something. They’re just echoes on the wire. You should be able to tell the difference between a ghost and a circuit rider.”

  “Oh.” He nodded. “So, uh, what’s a circuit rider?”

  A pitying smile. “Circuit riders are people like me, people who can do things. Do things with the wires, man. We’re into the systems. People like you, you make a call, you go over the wire, through the grid, little dot-dot-dots moving along. But you’re like a rat that’s got its way through the maze memorized; all you see are the little walls in front of your rat nose. The trick is to get above the maze, get your hands on it, make it do what you want.”

  “I get you.” He couldn’t hide his disappointment. “You mean phone phreaking. Hacking and stuff.”

  “Hey, fuck you, man.” Felony seemed genuinely offended. “Don’t give me that. That’s ancient stuff – people were doing that shit before the War. Those punks, that D:Fex bunch and the other network families, they can waste their time that way if they want to; gaming each other and breaking into restricted access files and kid shit like that. I’ve got more important business to take care of. I’ve got territory.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Keep her talking.

  “I’ll tell you what it means. It means I don’t have to band together with a bunch of other circuit riders, just to have somebody to watch my ass while I’m out working the wires. M:Pulse is a lone-wolf network, fella; it’s nobody but me.” A broad smile accompanied the swagger in her voice. “I got circuits that nobody can get on except me. That was why I got so pissed when I found you on that line, making your call. I don’t handle encroachment well, it just burns me up, man. Those wires are mine.”

  He figured she was referring to some part of the phone grid running through the building. Out here, in the middle of nowhere. “So what makes them yours? Just because nobody else uses them?”

  Felony shook her head, still smiling. “No, man, it’s more than that; a lot more. I’ve cracked the interface; I was born able to do it, I just had to learn how much I could do. And I can do anything on the wires. I mean, anybody can get into the wires – that’s what having a terminal inside your head is all about. The trick is to get back out and come up inside somebody else’s head. When you can do that, there ain’t shit that can stop you.”

  She really was just a kid, he realized. Easy enough to bait her into bragging about stuff like that. That was what living on ‘the wires,’ as she put it, spending your whole existence messing about inside a maze of electronic circuits, did to you. Nothing but games, a sealed Peter Pan existence. Everybody, on the vertical or the horizontal, knew of that little world just on the other side of the phone. You could dabble your toe in it easily enough – there was always a standing invitation to ‘come in and play,’ more kid mentality – with the accompanying risk of getting your whole head sucked in. And spending the rest of your life there, your body a vestigial organ in reality, the real you stripped down to the infantile wiggle on the circuits, looking for fun among the electrons.

  “That’s the trick, huh?” It sounded like some nutball thing; she might be crazy. “How do you do something like that?” He had to find out what he could from her – like her access under the building’s surface, and other handy stuff – and get moving again.

  She looked smug, pleased with herself. “I just do it. The trick is to get somebody up close enough t
o a jack I’ve got exclusive control of, so I can catch ’em. Like this body.” She pressed her thumb against her breastbone. “This ain’t mine. Well, it is now, but it’s not the one I started out with. I got several of ’em, about a dozen, all stashed in various places around the building. It keeps me hopping, making the rounds and taking care of them all; they gotta be fed and stuff. This one’s the only eveningsider I got. It took a long time to catch her; I used some old pre-War music I got out of an archive I broke open. I looped it and kept it playing from a jack I found over here that had an audio output; must’ve been part of some old public-address system. I just hung around for days, lurking in the wire, waiting for one of ’em to come along, hear the music, and lean up close to the jack. I’d just about given up, when this one wandered by. Soon as she had her head up close, I made the jump, and zap, she was mine.”

  Weird shit, whether it was true or not. Talking about the leap from being a cold signal on a wire into warm, living flesh. If she could do that… Good thing it was impossible. He didn’t want to let on that that was what he thought. “What happened to her? The person who used to be inside the body?”

  Felony shrugged. “Died, I guess. You take over somebody else’s body, you gotta spend a little time getting control, rooting ’em out. Then they just aren’t there anymore.”

  “Yeah, but a dozen of them? What do you need so many for?”

  “I told you – I’m a loner. I don’t need a bunch of other circuit riders tagging along, cramping my action. This way, I got physical control of the jacks I use, plus some great big sections of the wire itself, whole subnets. I can cut ’em in and out of the grid whenever I want, so none of those little jerks can get into ’em when I’m not looking. If I tried to do that with just one body, I’d be hiking my ass all over this damn building. Twelve bodies, in twelve locations, I can just zip from one to the other, pop in as long as I need to do my housekeeping, and split to the next one. Cuts the travel time down to nothing, so I got more time to do what I want.” Her smile went wicked.