Flare

by Roger Zelazny

  "… the Speculator!" was the last thing he heard as the darkness of bodies gathered over him turned into the sensory blank of an artificial unconsciousness.

  After what might have been five seconds or five minutes, some feeling returned. One side of Jerry's face seemed to be brushed by feathery touches. The other side felt numb.

  When Jerry Kozinski was allowed to open his eyes, he was lying in an empty street, half-buried in black powder. That was the numb part of him. More powder, mixed with small stones and grit, was sprinkling down on top of him. That was the feathery part.

  He pushed up with his arms, feeling the pinpoint tingle indicating his many aches and bruises. His left knee was in bad shape. A physical restraint, like an invisible elastic bandage, kept him from bending the joint more than a few degrees. A sharp, needle-like pain stabbed through it as a reminder that he had ripped a tendon or something. Jerry could no longer run; he could barely even walk.

  The cinders and bits of rock were falling faster now. If he didn't get off the street, they would smother him. He limped out into the deserted plaza, wading through drifts of slippery ashes. They slushed around his feet and squeezed between his bare toes like warm, wet mud. If he didn't get down to the waterfront, he'd be killed here when the lava came, unless the gas got him first. But with every step the rain of dark matter came more thickly, with a sound like ice crystals hitting glass, until a kind ofblack lace veiled his sight and blotted out the surrounding buildings. His shoulders and arms and head were mantled by sticky goop. The sun had long since faded from the morning sky.

  This was no good. He would freeze like a statue right here. Jerry understood that he had to get under cover quickly. No sooner had he made this decision than the quality of the rain changed. Large chunks of hard stone started coming down, making loud smacks! and splashing craters in the muck on the ground. If one of them hit him, it could kill him.

  Jerry hobbled over to the nearest building and beat on the door.

  No response.

  He pushed against it and found no give. It must have been barred from the inside.

  Keeping under the overhang of the second floor, he hurried on to the next one. It was closed and barred, too.

  As he was cutting across the alley between two houses, he heard a whimper. It was such an unexpected sound that he stopped and peered into the shadows. There, hunched over and shivering, was a small dog—a puppy, judging by the size of its feet—of the lean and almost hairless variety that ran in the streets of any Mediterranean town. The little thing was so sad and scared, with such big, staring eyes, that Jerry felt a physical ache in his chest.

  He was about to dismiss the dog and keep on his search for shelter, when his gamer's sense took over. There was something suspicious about that puppy, trapped here with him when everyone else had gone. He remembered back to his morning on the terrace, before the game had properly started, when the only activity he could see in the town was dogs and children. Coincidences like that just didn't happen by chance in a Virtuality™ simulation. He guessed that helpless children and dogs might have point-value in the final scoring, if you managed to rescue one.

  The little tug on his heart was another clue. The sensation might have been his own pure emotion, but it might also have been induced for a reason. It occurred to Jerry that, after the hatred that the mob had shown for the corn factor Sulla, he might need to do something selfless and compassionate for a change if he wanted to get out of the game alive.

  Finally, it was an old fantasy gamers' rule: when in doubt, take it along.

  Jerry limped up to the puppy, offering it the flat of his hand. The little animal sniffed his fingers and waggled its butt happily, smiling at him in that loose-lipped way all dogs have. He scooped it up in his arms and headed out into the plaza again.

  It was the right instinct after all, because the next door he knocked on swung open. Inside was a low room, some kind of servants' quarters or kitchen attached to the front of a great house. The windows were shuttered, so it was dark. But when he pushed his head in, the air in the house smelled cleaner than outside.

  Kozinski went through the door, leaving it open a crack for light. On a solid oak table in the middle of the room, he found an oil lamp, flint and steel, and a quantity of dry wood shavings for tinder. His unpracticed hands struck a spark on the first try, and the lamp wick was soon shedding about sixty watts of illumination. Jerry turned and pushed the door fully closed.

  The puppy ran around the room, making squeaky barks and shaking itself. Ashes flew from its coat and rattled against the tiles of the hearth. Jerry brushed at his hair and shook out the folds of his clothing, surrounding himself with a ring of black soot and stones.

  He found a stool and sat down, stretching his bad leg out stiffly. The puppy came over and jumped onto his unevenly balanced thighs, scratched once at the folds in his toga, and settled itself down with its head propped on one of Jerry's battered knees. He scratched behind the dog's ears and rubbed its neck.

  Jerry needed to rest and think about his next move. Certainly, he couldn't stay here. Being a player, he knew exactly what was going to happen to the town of Pompeii itself. He didn't think he would get many points for letting an archeologist make a plaster cast of the hole in the ashy sediment that his corpse was going to make two thousand years from now.

  But the major outfall of detritus was still some hours away. In the meantime, this house did offer possibilities. Here he might find a chair leg or a bedpost or something that could be made into a crutch for his leg. He might find an axe or spade or other tools that would serve him later in digging his way out of the rubble. He could certainly take food and water that might mean the difference between strength and debilitating weakness later in the game.

  When his leg no longer felt so stiff, Jerry Kozinski stood up, ready to go exploring. The puppy jumped down, and as it hit the floor the whole room rocked like a cabin on a ship at sea.

  Another earthquake!

  The lamp flew off the table, crashed against the wall, and shattered in a pool of blue flame.

  The little dog squawked and ran in circles until it finally found the table and cowered under there.

  Jerry fell down then. He rolled under the table, too, clutching the puppy's silky side to his face.

  Pieces of plaster or stone or more volcanic stuffclattered down on the tabletop in the darkness. A mighty crash! told Jerry that part of the house had come down, although nothing fell directly on him. The light was now a little brighter, though.

  Peering out between his hands, Jerry saw that most of the front wall had collapsed outward into the plaza. The black snow was pounding down on the broken clots of bricks. A wave of soot was rolling slowly toward his sheltering place, like a sand dune filmed in time-lapse photography. The crest was building up around the table's legs, passing the stretcher bars that joined them fifteen centimeters above the floor.

  If Jerry didn't get up and move right now, he was going to be boxed in. Then he would never get out.

  He gathered the puppy in his arms again and surged up on his knees. His head hit the underside of the table, and the simulation gave him another flash of red pain. Before he could quite get his senses back, the ash walls had risen to seal themselves around the edges of the tabletop. His vision went black. The puppy howled.

  His vision went a pure and dazzling white.

  The dog's howling became a whine of feedback.

  Jerry Kozinski wondered if this was how the game simulated death by suffocation, and he felt a gush of anger. He wasn't dead yet! He still had his fingernails! He could dig!

  These desperate thoughts chased themselves around his brain in tinier and tinier circles until he fell unconscious.

  For real this time.

  Chapter 11

  Market Mayhem

  Clink!

  Clink!

  Spill!

  Clatter!

  Hong Kong Two, British Columbia, March 21, 9:53 a.m. PST

 
Sonic and optical effects under the Virtuality™ neural-nexus system were indeed awe-inspiring. As Winston Qiang-Phillips dropped each pointer on the green felt surface of his trading booth in front of Mr. Harald Sampson, the silver disks clinked and clanged together like real cash. They even collected glints and highlights from the fluorostrips that were simulated above the men's heads. And when the pile went top-heavy, it fell with a resounding clatter.

  For a moment, and sometimes for hours each day, Winston could forget that he and his customers did not actually sit face to face and deal. Sampson, for example, was plugged into his ether-board in Omaha. Others worked the network from as far away as New York City or the Ryukyu Islands—where they were really pushing the envelope of the trading day.

  Qiang-Phillips was making an offer on a block of natural gas pipeline stocks, one of many that he had tried to amass over the past eleven days. The silver coins he was dropping on the table were, in reality, electronic pointers for funds which he had officially registered with the HK2 Exchange—in dollar denominations, of course.

  "Fifteen," Winston said, formally recording his per-share offer.

  Clink!

  Sampson just stared gravely down at the coin.

  "Sixteen."

  Clink!

  Harald Sampson held a straight face, what the Americans called a "poker face," which the neural network could read directly from electrodes planted in the skin behind the man's ear, reading his nervous reactions. The experience, Qiang-Phillips marveled, really was just like sitting across from a person, with every twitch and flinch visible to the trading party.

  "Seventeen," he said, dropping another coin.

  Sampson grunted. And now little beads of sweat were coming out on his brow, detected there by other sensors.

  Qiang-Phillips thought he might have to go as high as twenty-one. Or withdraw the offer.

  "Eighteen."

  Clink!

  That was a full five dollars over the price Winston had paid yesterday for comparably valued stocks. And it was almost a forty-percent markup over the pipeline's Accura™ evaluation. For his 52,000 shares, Sampson would earn a profit of $260,000. Not a fortune, by any means—but neither was it wasting the man's time, especially for only six minutes of soft connection on a busy morning.

  But Qiang-Phillips had lots of other gas-related stocks to buy yet today. If Sampson did not bleed him dry on this sale, others would certainly be trying to dehydrate Winston later on. So, perhaps it was time to think about pulling out. Still…

  "Nineteen."

  Clink!

  A large drop of sweat pooled in a furrow above Sampson's left eye, ready to run. Would it pass down beside his nose? Qiang-Phillips wondered idly. Or outside, alongside Sampson's bulging temple?… But he could hardly afford to indulge himself with such speculations.

  "Twen—"

  Ka-ZAPP!

  Harald Sampson's face split vertically. Behind it, a white hand, dazzling in a silver-mesh glove, reached out and gripped Qiang-Phillips' forehead. The fingers twisted his skull once, sharply, to the left. Then they dropped him on the table-that-wasn't-a-table. The pile of silver coins broke his fall with a mushy splatter, and then they disappeared as in a bad dream. From there he slumped down to the floor-that-wasn't-a-floor and into a smothering darkness.

  But his head still hurt terribly.

  Frizzle

  Frizzle

  Ravel

  Ravel

  Central Processing Section, HK2 Exchange, 9:54a.m.PST

  Watching on the bank of video screens, with a voice-only bud pressed against his right ear—as the Exchange's strict insider-dealing regulations required—Shift Supervisor Ethan Fong saw just the surface manifestations as the neural-nexus system came apart.

  One screen of the monitoring equipment told Fong that 2,339 of the traders registered with the Exchange were currently plugged in and dealing. Another showed the system's four telecomm switches—each handling twenty incoming lines stacking upwards of fifteen calls per line at various frequencies—with a sliding usage of ninety-two percent, for a total of 1,104 potential outside connections. So the rest of the traders on the Exchange were either talking to each other or in the middle of deadtime and reconnects. That had been the start position, and Fong now typed it into the notepad on his lap.

  When the blitz hit, all four of the switchbanks had maxed out on some kind of electrical charge, or something. They weren't supposed to do that because, after all, the line equipment had buffers and filters and signal delays up the wazoo. Whatever had blown his system—and every indication was that the interference first came through from the outside—it had burst across those static defenses like barbarian horsemen scrambling over the Great Wall. Nothing in the international telecomm network was supposed to generate that much of a charge. And if it did, alarms were supposed to sound, circuit breakers to pop, the fault to be isolated, the system to be secured.

  The only thing Ethan Fong could think of, as he watched the numbers fall apart on his tracery screens, was that something had entered his telecommunications channels, almost all of them, from above the atmosphere. The common practice of bouncing thousands of multilayered signals off the ion trails of meteor strikes in the upper atmosphere had made telecommunications far cheaper than in the days when those signals had to be sorted through a handful of geosynchronous satellites or, worse yet, a trunkline skein of glass fibers. So the stratosphere was now awash in the pulses of human commerce and conversation. Perhaps a large meteor strike somewhere above western Canada's horizon had interrupted these signals, inserting enough kinetic or magnetic energy into the process that the filters on the Earthside receiving stations had failed.

  That was all easy enough to understand. What Fong had trouble with was how the fiberoptic lines that connected the Exchange's receiver horn with the switchbank had managed to pass the jolt on through to the trading floor. There just weren't that many lumens the laser signal relays could put out.

  But then, what might a flash overload do to the comm signal, when that impulse was being taken directly—through filters, again, of course—into the cerebral cortexes of 2,339 asset traders? How sturdy was the electro-protein interface? This was one of the unanswered questions, one of the hazards of twenty-first century technology where laboratory testing lagged so far behind commercial implementation.

  Fong simply couldn't guess how the energy transmission was proceeding, but the equipment showed that it was. He watched his screens as the excess voltage or whatever disrupted the delicately balanced sensory maze in more than two thousand individual minds. A screen on his left scrolled the list of flared and broken connections, while the one to his right, the red-letter medical monitor, flashed statistics on trader after trader. And each one of them showed electrolyte balance and neural activity readings that were shooting off the scale. People were literally dying out there on the floor, and Ethan Fong could do nothing to stop it.

  His equipment took the numbers on everything local but none of them could show, and so Fong couldn't know, exactly why all this was happening.

  It just was.

  Burr-burr

  Burr-burr

  Burr-burr

  Burr-burr

  Federal Reserve System, Washington, D.C., March 21, 12:59 p.m. EST

  "Yes, what is it?" Micah Jordan, the chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve System, barked when he could finally pick up the phone. To get it, he'd had to lunge back across his desk with one arm pinioned by the folds of his winter coat, which he had been putting on and heading for the door when the damn thing rang. The phone, that is, not the coat. Or the door.

  "Mr. Walthers calling from New York, sir," his executive secretary said decorously.

  "Well, look, can I call him back? I'm late as it is for the Board of Governors luncheon, and I really—"

  "He said it's most urgent, sir."

  "Damn. All right, put him on. But tell him first that he's got just two minutes."

  "Yes, sir."

&n
bsp; Click-click.

  'Jordan!" The voice of Peter Walthers, chairman of the Exchange Bank of New York, one of the Fed's commercial clients, came through the line with extraordinary clarity.

  Like he was calling from the next room and not two-hundred-plus miles away by bounce-beam. "What's this 'two minute' crap?" Walthers barked. "We've got an emergency here, and it's got your name on it."

  "Ah, what emergency's that, Peter? I really have to rush off to an important—"

  "The system just fell apart. We've lost about three trillion in transactions due to some kind of electronic glitch. That's my bank alone. Three trillion. From my end. And that's just in the last five minutes. The losses are going up all the time."

  Jordan was stuck, his mind frozen in neutral. "T-trillion, did you say?"

  "Yeah. Do I have your attention now?"

  "Absolutely. What was it, some kind of computer failure? You know there are backup systems, or should be, to keep—"

  "No, it wasn't the computers, although they're affected, too. Some kind of electromagnetic pulse, like a big H-bomb, wiped out all the phone beams emanating from or coming into New York. That's what my technical people say, anyway. So that affects my bank and about five hundred others. Everything that was in transit at the time of the pulse got fried. And everything that the automated clearing systems had in hand went poof, too. And this interference is still hitting us, to the tune of… here it is—four hundred billion dollars a minute."

  "What? Didn't your people shut the system down right away?"

  "Well, Micah, with an average of two million accounts in flux at any one second, that's easier said than done. Just killing the momentum of our credit-clearing operations and funds transfers, just trying to reach stasis at the end of the banking day, takes the machines about half an hour. That's with all the totalization, cleanup, and verification. But when you burst the flow apart like this—one second flowing, the next gone—then the machines're going to drop you a bundle."