Avalon

by Rusty Coats

  "Love what you've done with the place, Jenny."

  "Some rewriting," he said. "I should show you the archives sometime. I copied this directly from a fifty-year-old porn movie. The table candles flicker and a cigarette girl comes out at intermission to drop handkerchiefs."

  "Charming."

  The view pulled back, and in the right corner I saw the audience -- a crowd of carbon-black mannequins with glowing eyes, squared haircuts and erections. Voyeurs. They couldn't afford to be the farm boy, so they paid to applaud his work.

  "What am I supposed to be looking at?"

  Van Meter keyed the Mensa and the image zoomed in on Magdi's face. She was a fine piece of work. No sharp angles, no flat or shiny colors, just supple and shady, even while a farm boy did his do-si-do. Whoever wrote Magdi's skin was worth more than Magdi.

  Van Meter was starting to say something when I saw it.

  Less than six inches from Magdi's face was a blob of clear pixel that reflected a snapshot from her nose to the dark tip of her right nipple. It looked like a smear, as if someone had streaked the air.

  "Stop the stream and zoom down."

  The pixels came into focus, square mirrors overlapping. Magdi was unaware. Ditto the farm boy and the crowd. The show continued while something not even Merlin could see stood tauntingly close, almost as if the ghost were leaning in to kiss her.

  If the disc wasn't doctored, it was the best encryption I'd ever seen.

  "We ran this ROM through a dozen Mensas and then shredded it with my best meat grinders," Van Meter said in a tone that sounded like respect. "Merlin called it an error in continuity. My Mensa did the same."

  "Maybe it is." But I knew it wasn't. I kept staring, my eyes burning an envious green behind the visor, because it was so good I wished I'd written it.

  "I would have said the same thing. Then I got this."

  Suddenly Delilah's was gone, wiped away by a wave of Van Meter's hand. Magdi's moaning died off, as if her ecstasy had been dragged down a long corridor. The Mensa spun the disc to a second track and landed us inside another postcard: Van Meter's office in Avalon.

  He'd remodeled his office several times, expanding with his empire, rounding his corners and squaring his curves. Right now, Van Meter's helm was a twelve thousand square-foot penthouse with a clear-glass floor, sixty stories above the streets of Avalon, where the foot traffic carried junkies to their dreams. His desk was a throne of birdseye maple -- the only thing that hadn't changed -- and his furniture consisted of low-slung sofas with blue-leather skins. For conversation, he'd added a bird cage with an African parakeet that was learning to cuss. A telepresence screen hung on the wall.

  "You OK?" he asked. I turned sideways so I could see his body in my peripheral vision; the difference in depth gave my stomach a slight heave. Same as always. Shading and dimension were near perfect online, but only if you stayed online. When you tried looking at both realities at once, your brain reached for the airsick bag.

  "Yeah," I said. "Shoot."

  The parakeet jumped against the cage and hollered, "Oh, damn. Oh, damn." Then the face of a Viking appeared on the TP screen. He had long blond hair and carried a heavy mallet. His facial features were dusky, not like the cheap cartoons most people wore, and when his lips opened to speak, I knew Van Meter was dealing with a serious player. Most visitors to Avalon couldn't afford lips.

  "You are a plague in a house of viruses, Van Meter. You sentence people to die from their own weakness while you profit."

  Van Meter chuckled. The Viking continued: "But your days are numbered, Van Meter. For months I have been stealing inside your brothels and bloodsport arenas, unseen and unheard. Your strongest hawks can't find me and your most powerful traps can't catch me. I've done this simply to prove a point: You are vulnerable."

  The parakeet said nothing.

  "Today I offer you a choice. Dismantle your online interests. Expel your staff of whores. Let your victims go free. Do this and you will never hear from me again.”

  The Viking leaned in, his smile as cold as a Norse wind. "If you do not comply --"

  The view abruptly changed from Thor to the interior of Van Meter's Arabian Knights brothel. Nude women undulated beside small boys with erections the size of riding crops, swaying to sitar music behind veils of silk. Beneath the women were the specters of men, online bodies in the throes of their most expensive orgy fantasies.

  Without warning, the brothel's image shuddered, moving in staccato blasts, frame by frame, until it froze. Then came a flamethrower, searing through the pornscape like a projection bulb burning through sepia film, until there was nothing but burnt edges.

  Thor returned. "In seven days, your empire will burn. You may fiddle, if you wish, but fiddle a funeral dirge. Unless we can make a deal."

  The visor went blank.

  I rubbed my eyes as the purple after-images faded. Van Meter poured two more drinks, tossed his VR cheaters into a drawer and said, "Melodramatic little bastard."

  I sipped the drink. "Sounds like a kid."

  "We cross-reffed the vocabulary and came up with a median of fourteen, but that doesn't narrow the field. Most people speak with a fourth-grade vocabulary." He sucked on his drink. "It's his visual acumen that impresses me."

  "What's he want?"

  "What they always want. Money. Power. Territory."

  "How much? How big?"

  "More than I'm willing to pay and more than I'm willing to lease." He took another slug. "I don't dicker with ghosts. Or anybody else."

  "This isn't the first time you've been spooked."

  "No. And I'll be honest, Jack -- the Digerati is in transition. A few Sysops are fighting and we don't know who is going to cut the cards." He shrugged. "So maybe it's the competition. Or those crazy Sons of David -- maybe they finally got their hands on something worth holding. Or someone in my own organization. Or maybe it's just a kid."

  "You tried traps?"

  "In every place I own? No. I was hoping for something a little more precise."

  I stared at my fedora, then out the window. The moon had snagged the last skyscraper on its ascent, an ivory C capping the stark Neuromantic needle like a crown.

  "I need him hung out to dry, Jack. I'm sure you understand my position. I can't report this to the police, since my occupation violates thirty-seven international laws and is blamed for a global epidemic. And I can't put my own people on it, in case it’s an inside job." He took another drink and met my eyes. "Most of all, I need someone who knows his way around a cipher without getting lost in his own code. I have three days left and I am out of resources. My attorneys suggest paying him. I suggest a last resort."

  "Me."

  "Precisely."

  I finished my Ephedria. "You're forgetting one thing. I don't work Avalon."

  "I'm not asking you to. Just decrypt his costume. He's surrounded by mystery. I want you to lift the veil." He blinked at me. "Look. I don't care why you don't work my town. I think it's Avalon's loss, but I'm entitled to my opinion, right?"

  I said nothing.

  "What I'm offering is a job. You can go two-D or three-D, postcard or immersion. Makes no difference to me." He straightened his Stygian jacket and folded his hands. "I'm offering whatever price you think is exorbitant enough, plus a separate payment to cover the debts in your ledger. I owe you that, for what you gave me ten years ago."

  "My guardian angel awakes."

  "Maybe. But I'm offering one more thing. Freedom."

  "I didn't know it was yours to give."

  "In this case, very much so. If you get this punk off my back, your guardian angel is going to square you with your parole officer. We'll wipe your record 'til it squeaks." He waved his hand to clear his own bravado. "Stan Dewey is a customer, Jack. His debt suggests that I have his attention."

  "He's in your pocket, then."

  "With the lint, I'm afraid," he said. "Of course, like many things in life, there is another side to my offer. For every positive, t
here is a negative. Perhaps you've already surmised that, but I'd be happy to rephrase it, if that would speed your decision."

  "Don't bother."

  "Good. Now. How about it, Jack? Want to find my ghost?"

  They say an honest man can't be bought, and maybe they're right. But honest men stopped hiring me a long time ago, and dishonest men rarely offered work that let me keep my feet planted in this reality. Van Meter was shining me on, sure. Something bigger than a ghost was hidden behind his doublespeak. And Van Meter could pretend he had a conscience and squawk about what he owed me, but behind all that was a real pitch. He needed someone competent, someone without attachments or loyalties, and that was me. I needed freedom, and Van Meter held the key.

  And if I turned him down, the lint in Jenny’s pocket would see that I had a return ticket to the Jasper Penal Colony, Cell 108.

  I replaced my hat and bent the brim. And then I told him I'd take the job.

  AVALON II: New Hope

  Dr. Pete Cassady ran a rehab center called New Hope in the Mission, a ten-minute Tube ride from Van Meter and a six-block hike from my apartment, if that gives you a better idea of the food chain. Funded by an embarrassed government and the consciences of people who could still afford pity, Cassady opened shop in the city's biggest concentration of speakeasies and porno shops, where junkies panhandled for a set of Mylar goggles and a disposable love glove. The streets smelled like yeast and sweat and desperation, like bad puberty.

  "Help a brother, man, got what, bring it. Man."

  The junkies mumbled staccato fragments from doorways. Most were still smart enough to get out of the rain, and somehow that made it worse. They never looked you in the eye or saw your face. They begged at the motion, like dogs barking at ghosts.

  "See, I got it, and it's, man. It's there. All I need is, you know. See?"

  I clenched Van Meter's disc as I passed the derelicts and alley pushers. They'd removed the Mission's payphones years ago, long before Avalon, because old-school hacks used the touchtones as way stations, hiding access codes inside the glass-tube ganglia. It sounds caveman now, but it was a good hack while it lasted.

  The lack of dialup didn't stop the pushers. At Sebastian Street, a Chinese kid called Moon hollered from a doorway, saying he had a clean uplink to Jaxom. He waved a cluster of genital electrodes that looked like spider's legs -- a cheap, messy way to go, if you cared about that. Most junkies didn’t, which was why any kid with a palmtop, a set of electrodes and an uplink could pimp here. They chiseled a place in the market -- sometimes alone, but usually as feeders for the Digerati.

  Moon said he'd give me an around-the-world for two hundred, "real-time love, no canned heat!" then flipped me off when I ignored him.

  "One 'dese days, Denees!" he yelled, Pidgin English slapping the stained ceramic tiles. "One 'dese days you need love!"

  I passed the vacant storefronts and faded marquees, tombstones for the soldiers killed by the 28th International Amendment. Before Prohibition, the Mission was the psychological shoreline, the last stretch of dry land before you plunged into the electronic waters. The players may have lived uptown, steering into the future from atop the Scopes, Clarke and Genedyne buildings, but the Mission was where we rowed the boat ashore. Code writers, designers, sociologists and digital hitchhikers gathered here, extended families living in dormitories of the WPA Campus. The days and nights crackled with the noise of frenzied construction, a shipyard at wartime.

  Between shifts, we'd meet in the Campus cafes and taverns, sipping Ephedria and passing hits of Snap under the table, critiquing each other's work -- until each virtual brick of Avalon became a communal effort. When an oarman died -- of an overdose, stroke or exhaustion -- he was replaced by someone just as eager, just as idealistic. And when the hammer fell, Prohibition killed more than a few thousand jobs. It was as if the Vatican had vetoed Heaven.

  Residents got two weeks severance and watched their apartments searched for immersion equipment, tools of a trade now declared illegal. They were shell-shocked, empty, broken. Some became junkies, unable to unplug, or went underground, turning trade for the Digerati. The rest disappeared into the wireless Sons of David communes or joined the Neuromantics in the fanatical Tomorrow Crusade. Some, as I was told in Jasper, flooded their systems with Snap, jacked into Avalon one last time and walked into eternity.

  Now, even with the dealers and the shivered begging of junkies, the Mission seemed as silent as a stage after curtain call. The WPA dorms became subsidized flophouses for the addicts. The few stores that survived were fronts, selling discs of what Moon called "canned heat" -- full-body immersion into one of Avalon's seedier brothels. The only day the place came alive was government check day, when the junkies blew their month's food money on a three-day online orgy, then spent the other twenty-seven days staring at your shoes and begging for a fix. The cafes and taverns were torched. The gutters reflected torn Mylar; septic rivers carried love gloves and sex shafts through the storm grates. We were all scenery here -- junkies, dealers, even the leftovers too soft to admit it was over.

  Cassady's guard frisked me at the door of the clinic while the addicts watched. The guard was a jaundiced Pole with hands like hams. When he felt the disc in my pocket, he pulled it out and grinned as the light shot prisms off the ROM.

  "Peddling here gets you five in Jasper, dad."

  About twenty junkies looked up, Personal History forms forgotten. Two-thirds were men, the youngest a kid no older than fourteen, and the only things they had in common were thin bracelets delivering Doc Cassady's patented virtual-reality methadone. That and pale skin. Addiction turned you gray and meek. They looked like the suicide corpses pulled from the Bay after Prohibition, translucent and blue-veined. But their milky eyes came alive at the sight of Van Meter's disc.

  I grabbed the ROM before he could break it and the Pole shoved the metal coils of a stun against my jugular, a trigger away from grand-mal seizure. I clenched my teeth and stared into his milky eyes.

  Junkie eyes. Cassady hired his own.

  "I already did my time at Jasper," I said, feeling the pincers dig into my neck. "And if you don't move that heater, I'll show you what I learned there."

  "Tough guy." His voice was thick and oily. "Tough enough to dance?"

  He had thirty pounds on me, but that didn't matter. Junkies were broken people. The disease shaved the insulation off their nerves and left them cowering. Cassady's bracelets stopped them from wanting a fix by mimicking the neurochemical effects of deep virtual immersion, but couldn't stop the damage from eventually killing them, one nerve at a time. If you stared them down, they peed on the floor like a dog.

  "Yeah." I stared into his hazy pupils. "But you don’t want to dance with me. You want what you think is on this disc, don’t you?"

  The coils pushed into a tendon.

  "Sure," I said. "You've cleaned up nice, but you're still hungry. Very hungry."

  The guard breathed slowly, but a line of sweat had broken out on his upper lip.

  "I bet boys are your gig, eh, pal? All pink and dimpled --"

  "Raymond!"

  The guard jerked around to see Doc Cassady standing in the lobby's stainless-steel doorway. Cassady wore a white lab coat over his black Bigelow suit, silver hair pulled back in a ponytail, and his square shoulders said more about who was in charge than the tranquilizer baton in his hand.

  "Thank you, Raymond, but Mr. Denys is an old friend." His patients stared at their laps. "You may put that away."

  Raymond's breath bobbed in his throat. He glanced at me, swallowed hard and holstered the heater. The veins in Cassady's forehead pulsed as he watched Raymond shuffle away.

  "Come in," he snapped, "before you do any more damage."

  Cassady's office had the thrown-together look of most government offices, with a secondhand laminate desk and two six-story file cabinets that had survived four agencies and two plagues. His degrees were his trophies -- honorary doctorates for his work in septal
-region rehab, schools that once had told Cassady to take a hike. Now they gave scholarships in his name and sent grad students to New Hope, trying to learn the secret of his success. Most never did.

  Cassady's secret was that he belonged here, and the junkies could smell that like dogs smell trust on your palm. The Mission was his home. He'd been here since Construction, when it belonged to the WPA hard hats and code writers. Down at Echo Wharf, where we'd swap code, Cassady rapped about how we were on the verge of programming our own eternity. Before their falling out, he worked with my mother on a project to archive consciousness, trying to upload the human soul.

  We called him Freud. He called us lab mice. And when the cheese turned to poison, Cassady dropped his Socratic cloth and opened New Hope in his garage, treating the victims of SDS and CNI. He'd been here so long it sometimes seemed like he'd invented the programmer's disease.

  "Ray's been clean for a year, Jack. He doesn't need that kind of treatment."

  I shrugged. "He was about to break my disc."

  Cassady poured himself a drink. "That's his job. We have a real problem here with dealers. Raymond's M.O. is to break first, apologize later. You can understand."

  "Sure."

  Cassady sampled his biloba juice, winced and sat behind his desk. "So what brings you down here, Jack? Business, I hope."

  "Business. Unless you've found the addiction has an eight-year incubation."

  "That depends on which study you believe."

  "Which do you believe?"

  He smiled. "The ones I write."

  Like Van Meter, Cassady had found Prohibition's silver lining, though they fought on opposite sides. Van Meter's brothels were status symbols for the outlaw rich; Cassady's work as a warzone medic made him one of the most respected men in a field so new the ink hadn't dried on its definition. Other doctors studied Septal Decay Syndrome and Chronic Neurotransmitter Imbalance from the safety of Midwestern and European universities; Cassady was in the trenches.