The Harmony Paradox (Virtual Immortality Book 2)

by Matthew S. Cox

  Hayley seemed drawn to the skeleton and approached it. Kathy watched her, evidently having less tolerance for getting close to a dead body. The girl stopped about fifteen feet or so from the remains and peered at the ground. A few seconds later, she balanced on one leg and opened the clasps on her right boot, pulled her foot out, and held it near the ground.

  “What in the…” Kenny jumped down from the tire and hurried over. She compared the size of her foot to a print on the ground. Whoever made it had been a little smaller than her, and shoeless.

  “There was a kid here,” said Hayley.

  Eldon’s boot scuffed the dirt, startling Kenny. He held up the frayed rope. “Cut with a knife. I think our dead guy abducted some kid. There’s marks on the ground… poor kid was crawling around in blood.” He noticed Hayley and took a knee, grasping her foot and comparing it to the print. “Year or two younger than Hayley… probably a girl.”

  “You can tell that from the footprint?” Hayley slipped her boot back on and buckled it.

  Eldon nodded. “Print is thinner at the ball and heel. Least… My guess would be girl, about ten.”

  Kenny grumbled. “There’s cages in the truck. I think our kid was a Scrag.”

  “What makes you say that?” asked Kathy.

  “Because the truck is still here. There’s signs a kid fiddled around inside, but I don’t think they could figure out how to make it work. Didn’t see any blood on the terminal screen. Kid had blood on her hands and feet. If she had any clue how to get it moving, there’d have been fingerprints on the console.”

  “Kid probably had blood all over her… she’d have been slithering around in it like a snake. And the gun’s still there.” Eldon pointed. “Think you’re right about Scrag. Didn’t know what the gun was.”

  Nasir busied himself setting up the sentry turret close to the front door of the gas station office. On its tripod, the boxy housing reached the belt buckle height of a man, and from the look of it, mounted a Class 6―15 mm―rifle mechanism. Kenny patted Hayley on the shoulder and approached the bones while Eldon went to check on the truck.

  The weapon lay a short distance from the right hand, as if it had bounced out of his grip at the instant of death and been left where it fell. Neither the child nor whatever killed the man bothered taking it. He picked it up and blew a layer of sand away from a black UCF MCP21, a Class 4 that fired the same projectiles as Eldon’s rifle, only with about a third the propellant. The ammo counter read 13/25. That it still contained bullets further proved neither the killer nor the child had a clue what a gun was. Scraps of a duster coat and a distant hat on the ground made him think the remains belonged to a man. Two pairs of modern electronic handcuffs on the belt, plus a box of stimpaks next to them also proved he had come from West City.

  Hayley sank into a squat, and burst into tears.

  Alyssa and Kathy ran over to her. Kenny stood after collecting the stimpaks and jogged back to them. The girl shivered and had turned seven shades of pale. Both Alyssa and Kathy comforted her in between asking what was wrong, but Hayley didn’t react.

  “Hale…” Kenny grasped her head in both hands, brushing his thumbs over her cheeks. With firm, but gentle strength, he forced her to make eye contact. “Hayley… what’s wrong?”

  She grabbed at his shirt. “I’m scared.”

  Kenny let her cling, and patted her back. “Did you see something?”

  “I dunno. I just got scared.” She sniffled. “Like outta nowhere.”

  “Well there is a dead guy over there,” said Alyssa.

  She was close to the body before and didn’t react like this. Kenny stroked her hair for a moment until she stopped trembling. He relaxed his grip when she lifted her face from his chest and made eye contact.

  “I… sorry. This place just feels… bad. Like I’m gonna die if I stay here.” Hayley crossed her arms and shivered. “I felt so helpless.”

  Ahh… Kenny nodded with understanding. “I get it.”

  “Get what?” asked Kathy.

  Sniveling, Hayley gazed around at the old gas station. “I feel like I’m stuck here. Like I can’t move and I’m afraid of dying.”

  Kathy hugged and rocked her, muttering reassurances.

  The sentry gun chirped a ready tone.

  Eldon jogged over. “Couple of bloody tracks on the road. Think that kid left on foot.”

  “Figured out what happened.” Kenny smiled. “I’m pretty sure that kid was a mystic.”

  Eldon tilted his head forward and cocked the Eyebrow of Disbelief.

  Kenny cracked up for a few seconds, and spent a few more trying to keep a straight face. “I knew you’d give me that look. Mystic is what Scrags call psionics. I bet this dead guy here was one of those yahoos who run around out here lookin’ for primitives to ‘save,’ and bring back to the city. ’Cept the one he found didn’t want to be saved, but he took her anyway. He probably decided to spend the night here, just like I did… and that kid, being psionic, charged the area with terror. Either that or she watched someone kill the guy and burned her emotion into the ground.”

  Eldon made a series of faces, but stopped short of yelling ‘bullshit.’ Psionics had been established fact for years. Badlands hoodoo, not so much. “If that’s true, then why’d only Hayley get whammied?”

  “Hell if I know.” Kenny shrugged. “Maybe ’cause she’s young. You know the stories. Kids see ghosts all the time when they’re tiny, and grow out of it. Maybe she’s got a little bit left.” He looked at her. “Have you ever had emotions come out of nowhere before?”

  “You think she’s psionic?” whispered Kathy. “Like a clairvoyant?”

  “No. I’ve never felt anything like this before, an’ I never saw ghosts either. At least, not outside of a video game.” Hayley stared at the building. “Are you serious? Are we really going to sleep in a place where someone got gibbed?”

  “Gibbed?” asked Kathy.

  Eldon chuckled.

  Kenny had no idea, but didn’t show it.

  “Gibbed is like when you shoot a person with a missile and they explode into chunks.” Hayley pointed at the skeleton, and swept her arm to the right. “There’s blood everywhere.”

  Noticing the size of the blood ‘slick,’ Kenny’s eyes widened. “That kinda looks like a canid mutant’s work… but…”

  “You’re wondering why it didn’t eat a helpless kid,” said Eldon.

  “Yeah.”

  Eldon tossed the scrap of rope at him, bouncing it off his chest. “You said psionic. Ain’t need much else to explain shit what don’t make sense. She let it kill the dude who tied her, and”―he waved both hands over his head―”did some mind mojo on it to keep herself alive.”

  “You said that people always bring these… ‘Scrags’ back to civilization.” Katherine tucked her arm around Alyssa. “You think that man tried to drag her back to the city against her will?”

  “Maybe. It’s somewhere between official law and an unwritten code,” said Kenny. “Anyone with any sense of decency’ll usually try and explain that the world didn’t end. Most of the real tribals think the entire world is like the Badlands. They don’t know any different.”

  Kathy eyed the bloody rope. “If we find a solitary child, and they don’t want us to take them back to civilization… would you let them run off alone?”

  “Ain’t an easy answer to that, hon.” Kenny squinted into the darkening eastern sky, along the road. “If I thought they were alone and not trying to protect the rest of their family or tribe, no, I’d probably not let them run off on their own. These people aren’t stupid. They’re not animals, just uneducated. Whatever happened here, I can only guess at.”

  “We’re clear,” yelled Nasir. “Got sensors set up around the place. Nothing can get in without me knowing about it.”

  Two orb bots, each about the size of a man’s head, circled the building in a slow glide, moving in opposite directions.

  Kenny took the girls’ hands, and walked wit
h them over to the former office/convenience store. A trail of the same bloody child’s footprints went inside. “Is that sentry going to shoot anything that moves? There could be Scrags in the area, and they usually have small kids doing the scouting.”

  “No.” Nasir shook his head. “Sentinel Corporation units all have minimum size lock on the targeting electronics… unless the target is armed and moving in a hostile manner.”

  Kenny glanced at his daughters’ pistols. “Is it gonna drill someone with a holstered weapon? Would it react to a sword or bow?”

  “No.” Nasir blinked. “A bow? Seriously?”

  Kenny laughed. “Out here? Nothing surprises me.”

  he Old Cowboy opened his eyes and directed a contemptuous gaze around the virtual recreation of Joey’s apartment. He checked himself over, tugged on the sleeves of his black duster coat, patted his leather gun belt, and caressed the handles of his silver revolvers. It had been a while since he’d logged in to cyberspace not using a Division 9 deck.

  His four-deck work rig could run rings around the Nishihama Necromancer, not to mention their ability to pass undetected within most systems. Still, the deck Proscion had bequeathed him before he―for all functional purposes―died, was still one hell of a deck for civilian use. Few cyberspace jockeys not working for major corporations or governments could afford a Grade 7 unit, and truth be told, the differences in two grades amounted to a smattering of memory capacity and slightly more processing power.

  Of course, to Joey, using a weaker deck (even if it could still kick the snot out of most things he’d run into) only exhilarated him more. The skin of the old gunslinger fit him like a well-worn pair of comfortable shoes, as welcome as coming home after an overlong vacation.

  He bowed his head, and a slow, bassy laugh welled up from deep in his throat. Nothing had particularly amused him, but he adored sounding like the bad guy from a horror holo. He’d almost forgotten about the special ‘mood tweak’ he’d programmed into this avatar. Other living users that came within a certain distance of him in the net would experience a sensation of paranormal fear, caused by his software forcing their deck to stimulate the amygdala. Almost no one manipulated moods like that, so the effect hit people many times harder due to surprise.

  During his days of infiltrating for profit, he’d stumbled on an old technical manual locked away in a data node belonging to Endless Entertainment, a now-defunct media house that churned out schlock horror films. He still had about sixty of their titles on a neural stick somewhere, though he hadn’t watched any since he’d been in high school. The documentation had been put together as a business plan to bring in ‘TruMood’ to EE holos, but the legal department had been too worried about what effect it could have on people, so it never caught on.

  He concentrated on the starport data relay and his surroundings shifted. From the office, ‘teleporting’ on the net (much to the chagrin of the Sages) was legal, so those systems didn’t have to overcome the tracking routines that kept things running. The effect there had been too fast to perceive, but using the Necromancer, and his old trusty software, the new location faded in over the course of three seconds.

  Joey appeared in a small alley that resembled West City in most ways. The major difference showed in the lack of trash piled in the shadows. The virtual metropolis rendered in clean and tidy, a city spared the presence of real habitation. This part of town, in the shadow of the Edmonson Memorial Starport, had a bad reputation in meatspace. Few people who had the means to live wherever they chose wanted to dwell anywhere near a starport. Thus, two or three sectors in all directions had poor people, gangs, drugs, violence, and even a grey zone at the southwest.

  No alarms went off, so he knew the daemons that monitored netspace hadn’t detected his too-rapid movement. He never understood why the Sages had such a problem with people teleporting around. The only logical explanation he’d ever come up with involved a conspiracy with various software developers who sold ‘vehicles’ intended to make travel in the GlobeNet faster than walking. If people could teleport at will, those softs wouldn’t be anywhere near as expensive.

  “Money… always money.” The old gunslinger frowned.

  In his head, Joey grinned. He could say just about anything with this avatar’s slow, gravelly voice, and it would sound menacing as all hell. Again he thought about Hayley/Cleopatra, who had singled him out for abuse because he ‘took himself too seriously.’

  Soon, little one, vengeance will be mine!

  The look she’d given him when they first met for real, so terrified, small, and vulnerable, haunted him. Joey grumbled. Maybe he’d wait until she’d grown up, and then hit her with something annoying or embarrassing that wouldn’t send her into therapy.

  “Bah.”

  He stepped out from the alley and turned right, joining the flow of pedestrian traffic. Two men nearby looked around, clearly on edge. Joey smiled. When one made eye contact with him, he returned a dour look that sent the man scurrying away.

  Inside, Joey grinned like a small boy who’d just scared his older sister.

  Software-simulated advert bots glided along at the edges of the crowd, offering an array of virtual items as well as real food or snacks. The GlobeNet rendition of the starport appeared much the same as it did in reality, except for the handful of people shooting at each other with cartoony laser weapons. He’d seen actual laser weapons used, which generated a point-to-point beam that appeared in an instant. The gamers’ laser weapons fired discrete projectiles consisting of streaks of colored light about a meter long that traveled slow enough see but not so slow the person (or creature) you fired at could dive out of the way. Those ‘lasers’ weren’t the same as his six-guns, which represented attempts by background software to destroy other programs or users by corrupting them. If one of the gamers shot someone not playing the game, the laser blast wouldn’t do anything more than create a momentary ‘charred’ appearance.

  His pistols animated like guns, but in the background, his deck hammered the target user or program with malware, and since his Necromancer deck had the requisite hardware, a successful enough attack could overload the M3 port of another user and deliver a fatal shock to the person in the real world. Of course, such decks weren’t legal, and often saw use only by the Syndicate, the NSK, and shadier corporations. In his time with Division 9, he’d already been involved in seventeen cybercrime investigations where they tracked down individuals using Black ICE. He had been sure two of them had the full blessing and knowledge of their employers, but no evidentiary trace could prove it.

  Joey disregarded the crowd exchanging red and blue laser blasts, heading deep into the starport to a portal that existed only in netspace. Beyond lay the enormous purple crystal that represented the CPU cluster responsible for linking the GlobeNet to the MarsNet.

  The old cowboy strolled into the cavernous chamber and gazed up at the thick beam of amethyst energy shooting into space. As soon as he desired to join it, he flew into the air, rocketing upward, skimming inches away from the glasslike surface of the crystal.

  Despite knowing that his deck logged into the uplink, requested a MarsNet address, and patched over a quantum data relay, Joey lost himself in the abstraction of flying. He shot out past the hole in the roof, flanked by a few other live users: a man and a woman in boring business attire, a catgirl with a feline head and black/gold banded fur, and a couple in old-fashioned spacesuits.

  A speck of light above grew as the Earth below him shrank to the size of a Gee-ball orb, becoming an impossible floating-in-outer-space rendition of a PubTran maglev terminal. He hadn’t yet tried to teleport direct to Mars, unsure if the task of leaping networks would even work. MarsNet started decades after the GlobeNet, and generally had newer hardware that required a router translating between them. Attempting a direct connection to a Mars-based peer system could result in him riding the Technicolor Death Coaster out into the real world, dumping the connection no different from someone yanking his wire
out unexpectedly.

  The tram ride took twenty-two seconds, stopping at another ‘orbital maglev station.’ Whereas the invisible military channel he’d taken last time ended direct on the surface, the public one had another layer of hardware to go through. It didn’t matter to Joey; he amused himself by scaring the norms that got close enough to experience his paranormal aura.

  As soon as he sensed the link to MarsNet come online, he reached into the air and opened a virtual terminal window. Querying the network for ‘The Bandau Group’ brought up a simple map of Arcadia City’s virtual shadow. Joey pushed deeper, breaching the normal user-level access with a few old passkeys he hadn’t touched in at least a year. Lazy bastards. He chuckled. Still using the same logins. The floating map expanded, creating the effect of the point of view falling out of the sky to the street, before proceeding to plunge into the ground. The pretty graphics faded to a plain text list of address reservations.

  He sifted down the list until he found the registration for the secure IPv12 address of the Bandau Group’s human resources server. Joey fed that address to a teleportation soft he’d written at fourteen.

  The ancient gunslinger reached into his coat and pulled out a large, black silk handkerchief. He snapped it forward, and it hardened into a black disc. After placing the disk on the ground, he jumped into the hole.

  Pulsing cyan light raced along the walls of an inky dark tunnel. The vertical drop became horizontal flight, and gradually pivoted until he sailed straight upward. He glided to a halt with his boots an inch above the floor in the middle of a cube-shaped room with silicon grey walls and a three-foot tall CPU crystal. A quick step to the side prevented him from falling back down the opening. He stooped and grasped the edge, lifting the ‘hole’ off the floor as a patch of silk once more. At his mental command, his deck ran two active anti-detection programs designed to prevent the network from sensing his presence and triggering a breach alarm.

  I could probably sell this routine for quite a bit… but as soon as I do, whoever bought it would sell it too, or hack it, and then it would be everywhere, and they’d plug that bug in the user-detection routine. His teleport program attacked the ‘heartbeat’ process that checked every discrete node within the MarsNet to see if any active users or software constructs were present. Whenever it came back with zero, it put the node into a suspend state to save resources. Joey’s teleport soft hacked the pulse to insert a user’s hardware tag into the node’s current ‘object inventory,’ while removing it from their current node. Most deck jockeys attempted to teleport by sending a command to the GlobeNet roughly equivalent to ‘move me to X.’ He edited the node inventory rather than adjusted the user’s location pointer.