Avalon

by Rusty Coats

  Cassady's eyebrows drew together. "You really haven't been back?"

  "Not since they sent me away. Avalon doesn't seem to want me anymore."

  "That's evasive. It's the voice of denial talking."

  "Spare me the psychobabble, Freud."

  He smiled; few people called him that anymore. "OK. But you know your story doesn't fly. Privacy hacks are in short supply these days, I hear. You could earn a thousand times more working now than you could have when it was legitimate."

  I pulled Cyn from my metal case and lit it. "Who says it's not legitimate now?"

  "Six-point-eight million addicts and one-point-two million corpses."

  "Sounds pretty legitimate to them," I said, replacing the Cyn case to my pocket. "And it's been very legitimate to you."

  "It wasn't always like this. The first year we opened, we had an eighty-four-percent relapse rate. It was a bad time. We almost lost our funding. The jackals in the United Nations were calling us a revolving door. They sent auditors to second-guess us, meaning to shut us down. I have no doubt they were on the Digerati’s payroll.

  "But two months after they audited us, we turned it around. Now we have a success rate of seventy percent. Seventy, Jack. Do you know how?"

  I shook my head. Cassady had changed less than most geological formations. During Construction, his Echo Wharf sermons sometimes stretched over days. He had the technical prowess of birdseed. But when it came to theory, he was unchallenged. Up all night, chattering all day, invoking everything from matriarchal society to the genetic code for interstellar pollination, he was the oral historian of the future, preaching to a choir of hard hats who were building downtown Tomorrow, USA.

  "We threw out the rules, Jack." His face was electric. "We'd been using the wrong archetypes. We'd been treating the addiction as if it were narcotic, a substance the body craves, builds a resistance to, and requires higher dosages of until the levels are lethal. It sounded correct, given the original studies. Remember Seito?"

  "He lived across the quad from my folks," I said, remembering him and the apartment my family shared with a suit maker named Charlie Monk. Seito worked in Continuity. "The day his foreman found him, we were celebrating. I forget what for."

  "Celebrating the fact that your father had been named curator of the Avalon Library," he said, waving his hand to dismiss the memory. "Seito's death made us believe SDS and CNI were directly related to narcotic addiction. Convulsions. Sweats. Diminished appetite, fragmented memory. Very textbook. His foreman found him plugged in, dead in his datasuit, his virtual ghost still standing at the brothel."

  When Avalon started biting back, you could find avatars turned to statues in the streets and buildings, their biological owners cooling from a cardiac arrest. First-timers thought the statues were for decoration. Experienced travelers would stop and stare, the way people used to gawk at highway accidents.

  "Two months after we nearly lost our funding, I threw out the narcotic paradigm. We weren't dealing with a physical craving, something the body as a survival-based organism needed to continue. No. These conditions were toxic and lethal, yes. Even addictive. But they were psychological addictions. In Avalon, we're not only seeing what people are capable of doing when they allow their libidos to run unfettered. We're seeing what the brain itself is capable of doing."

  He had excited himself so much that he needed another drink. He poured another shot of biloba and gulped it, never taking his fierce eyes off me.

  "I could show you autopsy reports of a dozen addicts and while they'd all show varying levels neurotransmitter imbalance, they'd show one similarity: High levels of dopamine and serotonin -- two brain chemicals known to inhibit appetite." He slapped his desk hard enough to make the honorary degrees shiver in their cheap frames. "That's when we knew. The brain was trying to separate from the body, the same way a parasite kills off its host. It was trying to free itself. But separation was always fatal.

  "When we realized that, our treatments shifted. The antidote in my transdermal patches was rough at first -- but God knows those people died with a purpose. When we finally got the antidote right, regulating serotonin and dopamine with the microchip in my bracelets, we had the plague on the run."

  It seemed he expected applause. I abstained. I'd heard the speech before from the Centers for Disease Control, the Congressional hearings and especially Nathan Zamora, head of the Neuromantics. With the propaganda campaign at full tilt, it was impossible to avoid. It was part of the white noise, even for people who believed SDS and CNI were more hype than science, and that anytime the government declares a substance illegal, you can bet there's more at stake than your state of mind.

  "That's how we turned it around," he said. "We changed our approach and watched people regain control of their lives."

  I crushed out my Cyn and said, "Anything you say, Doc."

  He shook his head. "Still the same, Jack. Jasper didn't change your sour disposition. I wonder if anything can."

  "Well," I said, fishing Van Meter's disc from my pocket, "this might."

  The zipper veins in his temples bulged. "How?"

  I tossed the disc and Cassady caught it awkwardly. While he fumbled it, I tapped a six-line stream of code on his archaic Tobi computer, a command-brick that was illegal in sixty-two countries and fourteen territories. Cassady huffed, but I ignored him. When I'd finished, I grabbed my fedora and lowered the visor.

  "I thought you said you didn't work Avalon."

  "I don't," I said, "but if my hunch is right, one of your regulars does."

  "I don't understand."

  I leaned over the desk, opened the drawer against Cassady's stomach and pulled out a pair of chrome cheaters -- nice ones, three generations better than government-issue immersion goggles -- and handed them to him.

  "Put these on," I said, "and you'll understand as much as I do."

  The ROM lasted twelve minutes, forty-six quick-cut scenes and background refs, plus location snapshots of Explicit Liaisons, Delilah's and Arabian Nights, just to give me a taste of the ghost's beat. I'd edited out the threats to Van Meter because, face it, Cassady would rather cheer a digital terrorist than catch him. So instead of seeing Arabian Knights burn away like old celluloid, the final image was a rehab doctor's nightmare: The skewed, midair reflection of the Indian prostitute on stage at Delilah's while the voyeur ghost applauded with one hand.

  "I still don't understand," Cassady said, tossing his cheaters into his drawer. "You say you're not working Avalon, yet you come in here with file footage from the very places that keep me in business. Raymond was right to take that disc from you.”

  "Don't get priggy, Freud." I flipped up my visor, then cussed the worn hinges when the thin screen fell down again. Old hats. "We both know you can buy the good stuff -- full-immersion, not this postcard sideshow -- half a block from your front door."

  Cassady diligently erased the source code I'd written on his Tobi. When he was done, he asked, "Who are you working for?"

  "You know better than to ask."

  "And you know better than to ask for my help if you're on the Digerati's payroll, Jack, even if I do owe you a favor." He pressed his lips together. "You and I are friends from the old days. I remember Echo Wharf and everything we dreamed like it was yesterday." He balled his hand into a tiny fist. "We almost had the world in our hands. We were so close. So close."

  He leaned closer. "And I remember when they came for you, Jack. We knew what it would do to your career. You went to Jasper for a noble cause, and that's why I made a pact to help you when you got out. So, if you need a job, I'll give you one. But don't ask me to help the Digerati."

  I rubbed my eyes and saw nothing but red. "Finished?"

  "Jack --"

  "Because if you are, I'd like to tell you what's going on. I'm not here for favors. I'm here because we have a problem."

  "The Digerati?"

  "No. The reflection hovering by the Indian prostitute."

  "Magdi," Cass
ady said absently. "Very popular with some of my more chronic patients. In fact, she's quite reminiscent of Helen of Troy. I believe --"

  "Skip it," I said, derailing another dissertation. "The reflection, Freud. On stage. It's a midair reflection that moves independently. What does that tell you?"

  He stared blankly, his face open and soft. "In a virtual environment, freed of reprisals, voyeurs often take the stage to view their obsession. And with gravity no longer a concern, many find that flight gives them --"

  "No, Freud," I said, slapping his desk. "We're not talking about voyeurs. We're talking about a junkie who can come and go without paying his tab because he's got the best gauze I've seen since I went to prison."

  It took another minute for the realization to dawn on the world's authority of SDS and CNI. His jaw opened wide enough to swallow a plunger and his copper eyes, for once, finally reflected the image of someone other than himself.

  "And we both know," I continued, "how junkies love to share. They're always swapping discs and 'gloves, using up the optics until the sensation tracks are dead. They're like kids passing around their first hit of Snap."

  Cassady began to sink lower in his seat, as if he was deflating.

  I put both hands on the desk and leaned close enough to smell his cologne. "So let's think about what's going to happen to your seventy-percent success rate when this ghost starts copying his masquerade program and lets every junkie in the hemisphere stroll into Avalon, get his fix and stroll out without paying."

  Cassady's eyes were flat. "Tell me what you need."

  AVALON III: The Mission

  It was just past three when the clouds came in, black and husky and full of drizzle. I turned up the collar of my trenchcoat and started up Dreyfuss, toward the Mission substation. A few dealers hollered, hoping to drum up some afternoon traffic, but the pitches were lame. If you're in the Mission and you're not already wired by three, chances are you're broke or saving souls. Either way, you're not a customer.

  On Dreyfuss, my shoes clapped puddles in the broken concrete, splashing the Tremayne suit they'd given me as a graduation gift from Jasper. I climbed the hill, took a left on Benton and scouted for a pedicab. No luck. Pedicab drivers avoided the Mission, and not because they were scared. They stayed out because no one in the Mission was going anywhere worth the fare.

  Twenty blocks later I came to the rounded walls of the old Compression building and I ducked under the cantilever to smoke. The southernmost building on the WPA Campus, Compression was the drivetrain that pushed our work into Avalon. Everything we did went in the front door and came out small, smashed down to the basics, and then we launched it across the binary divide. Six stories of translucent obsidian brick, it looked like an old atomic submarine breaking the surface of an asphalt sea, torpedo bays aimed at the rest of the city. Aimed at the past. It was the only Campus building you could see from the federal buildings downtown, and when Prohibition passed, Monk sent me a postcard in Jasper, one I'd stare at when insomnia came on strong. It was a shot of the Library staff, standing on Compression's terrace, pants down and mooning Prohibition’s authors. My parents were third and fourth from the left.

  Now you couldn't see the federal buildings anymore. The view had been obstructed by the skyscrapers built in Avalon's fallout. The Scopes and Genedyne buildings -- futuristic pantheons of fluted steel and Lucite that rose like magic wands over the city -- housed the Digerati's minions, from gameboys to the brotherhood of Sysops. Higher still was the Neuromantic building, home of Nathan Zamora and the Tomorrow Crusade. In less than ten years the Neuromantics had grown from a loosely knit band of secret societies to a movement more powerful than Populism. Its first step -- and the one that launched the Crusade as a global force -- was supporting Cassady’s anecdotal claims of Avalon’s fatal side effects and swaying the International Congress to bury the Project before the Project buried more people.

  Since then, more than two million had joined the Neuromantics -- biotechnicians, physicists, nuclear engineers and even some of Avalon's cast-offs -- to form a group that was part technocracy and part religion. Their members worked like cobbler's elves to nurse the world back from a Depression and two nuclear exchanges. Their wind-farms and solar fields provided a third of the world's electrical power; their farms and DNA labs boasted that the Neuromantics fed sixty percent of the world – and you. Zamora's billboards chatted up the cause, repeating the Neuromantic question: "What have you done for the species lately?" Headquarters was the world's tallest skyscraper, a mile-high needle built to hold the world's largest concentration of absolute nutjobs.

  While finishing my smoke, I felt something in my pocket that felt like a mouse and spun around in time to see a grubby street urchin run off with the three discs I'd compiled at New Hope. Pickpockets were few in the Mission because junkies didn't have the chutzpah, but kids were another story. Orphans from the WPA Campus, the cast-off kids were ferocious and wild. Alone, they were annoying. But if they came at you as a school, you dropped everything and ran. They were piranha without manners.

  "Hey, you little roach!" I yelled, sprinting after him. "Hey!"

  He was maybe ten years old with matted dreadlocks flopping on his head, a bone-thin kid who'd be more useful keeping a kite in the air. He cut back down Furnald Street, gliding over the holes in the old pavement. With a pivot he ducked into the alley beside the charred entrance to Echo Wharf. He was traveling alone. I decided to risk it.

  I was a little less graceful and a lot slower, but I knew the territory. Instead of chasing him up the alley, I cut down Mercury until it dead-ended in the lobby of the Digitrack building. I hurdled the mangled foyer and dodged the junkies, their heads bobbing as they stared through disposable Mylars, twitching.

  "Man, spare some, got it? See. Hum it on."

  The doors had been burned for firewood. I ran past the wrecked Mensas and shouldered through the airlock with a crunch, bursting back into the afternoon rain. I hunched behind a dumpster and caught my breath. After a few wheezes, I saw the kid, glancing over his shoulder, running right for me.

  Sometimes it pays to know the neighborhood.

  When he got close, I jumped out from behind the dumpster and caught the hood of his sweat jacket in my hand. It was covered with mildew and felt like old cheese.

  "Hiya, kid," I said. He had dark, almond eyes and a face smudged with years of urban poverty. He looked like any one of the hundreds of kids who lived in the Mission like rats nesting in farmhouse walls.

  The kid squirmed and kicked my shin. I showed him I didn't like it by tugging his ear, which made him squeal. Father material I'm not.

  "I think you took something of mine and I think I'd like to get it back."

  His dreadlocks slapped my wrists as he tried to shimmy out of his jacket. I tightened the grip and shoved him against the dumpster.

  "Look, roach, give me the discs." I held out my free hand. "Maybe I got a protein bar for you. We could trade."

  He pulled his face into a tight snarl. I called him a kid, but the truth was that there were no kids here. Kids grew up to be adults. That wouldn't happen to this kid. If he was lucky, one of the agrarian communes in the foothills would swoop in on a soul-saving junket and kidnap him and raise him far from the Mission, and maybe they'd dilute the acid in his veins. But chances were he'd run with the piranha until puberty, and if his pack didn't kill him first, he'd be a junkie by thirteen and dead before his voice changed. Another side effect of Prohibition. Another statistic.

  A siren wailed a few blocks away, probably for another delivery at New Hope, and the noise changed the odds. Without a sound, three sets of children's hands shot out from beneath the dumpster, grabbing my ankles and calves. Their tiny fingernails were like dirty hypodermics, digging into my skin.

  There was a sound of wet panting, the noise kids make when they're breathing through an open mouth of saliva and new teeth. It was the sound street kids used to call for reinforcement. For attack.

 
"Cheee! Cheeee!"

  And suddenly the broken windows and cracked granite boiled with feral children. I stared at them, hearing the rain spatter on my fedora, and lost count after twenty. Some flashed artillery -- ROMs filed down for makeshift throwing stars, fiber-optic whips and circuitboard blades, anything that could be salvaged and sharpened. It was about to be showtime.

  In one fluid motion the kid kneed me in the groin hard enough to win a prize and ripped free of the jacket. I doubled over but looked up to see the urchins fade back into the shadows as the kid pranced down the street, ROM discs glittering on his fingers like wedding rings.

  "Name not roach!" he yelled, hands raised to the rain. "It's Ferret!"

  The kid turned the corner and disappeared, giggling. Cunning eyes tracked my footsteps from unseen keeps, their whispers picking at my coat as the drizzle soaked my fedora. There were no kids here.

  Twelve more blocks of broken pavement and the rain began to clear and I'd almost kicked the habit of looking over my shoulder. The kids had made off with three discs of junkie bios, some hem thread and a little blood. Some people call that lucky.

  The Mission officially ended six blocks south, on Coulter, where it turned into what was left of Chinatown. In between was a scavenger market called Haggletown. Street peddlers stared up from smudged brows and opened their coats to expose chains of punk-metal jewelry and cheap, unreliable stun-guns. Women gazed vacantly from behind makeshift market stands made of rusted automobile hoods, hawking hand-stitched shawls.

  Nice hat, mister. Still works, don't it? Top trade, I'm your boy, set you up with anything you need. Kitchenware? Real Teflon, no cheap stuff. I'm sure the owners woulda wanted you to have it, God rest 'em.

  I shouldered through the peddlers, dodged a jam of pedicabs and bounced up the red-tiled steps of St. Luke's Cathedral. Stained-glass martyrs stared through cast-iron security bars as I doffed my fedora and stepped through the tall oak doors.