by Rusty Coats
"You don't look so well," Rita said.
The elevator had started slowing. "How often do you make this trip?"
"Every day. Sometimes I sleep down here, as I'm sure you'll see. It's a mess. I narrow the lens on the TP screen so that all he sees is from my eyebrows to my chin."
"Who is he?"
"Baxter Levy. A funny man. Quiet. I think he's a hermit, to tell the truth. I have no idea how he became one of the most powerful men in the Digerati."
"Neither does Levy."
The elevator lurched and the doors flung open. Rita was right about the old subway. Underground transit tunnels had been turned to rubble, collapsed more than twenty years ago by the big earthquake, leaving a legacy of myths about commuter ghosts still riding the trains.
"This way." Past plastic benches and escalators, we came to an opaline door. Rita tapped the pad and the door slid open, revealing a workstation the size of a closet.
"Oh, God," Rita said, hustling to scoop dirty laundry and food containers.
Merlin hummed against the wall, insulated from the world by several inches of black thermoset. Avalon's operating system lived in a string of Mensas, each one five meters across and three meters deep, a hidden army of smoked-Lucite supercomputer bricks. Unlike the slick desk in Van Meter’s office, Rita’s Mensas were streaked and scratched. Merlin worked for a living.
"Home at last." Behind her was the bunker's only decoration: Avalon's final blueprint by visionary architect Jann Turnquist, showing the city's sixty-four skyscrapers. Beneath it was the Project motto: City of Wonder, City of Light.
I lit a Cyn. "How much of the city can you access?"
"Depends on what you call the city. Most places, the city is rock-solid and write-protected. But in some of the brothels and gaming rooms, your seniority can mean the difference between a wall and a doorway."
"So high rollers can get into the exclusive clubs --"
"While your normal Joe just sees a blank sheet of wallpaper," she said. "If you don't have the access, you press against a door and it doesn't open. Virtual tailoring."
"But with Merlin, you've got global access, right?"
"It's not that simple. Everything in Avalon filters through Merlin as raw data, but when it comes to sightseeing, I’m just another customer." She brushed her hair over her ear. "So I can only use the toilet in a few places, but I can hear all the pipes groan."
"And what do the pipes tell you?"
Her smiled widened. "Everything."
I pulled out Van Meter's disc and said, "Prove it."
Rita waved her hand in front of the infrared beam and a small door in the Mensa opened. "I set you up with nominal access. Cassady said that's all you'd need."
"Tell me," I said. "Why are you doing this? If the Digerati found out you were helping Freud, they'd pull you out of this castle and turn you into a lightning rod."
Rita shrugged. "Let's just say I owe Doc a few favors."
"He must have something very good on you."
She laughed. "Not half as good as what you must have on Doc." She handed me a pair of wireless datagloves. "You still know how to use these, right?"
“Only one way to find out.” I slipped my hand into the black mesh and flexed my fingers against the glove's sensors. The output coils looked like silver veins stretching across my hand as they flashed assimilation patterns, synching with the Mensa. The insides were as crumby as a cracker tin. Rita worked for a living, too.
She slotted Van Meter's disc and slipped into a pair of wire-rimmed cheaters. I folded down my hat’s visor and waited for the Mensa to charge.
When the static cleared, Magdi greeted us, moaning in anal ecstasy.
"Wow, Jack," Rita said. "You sure get high-quality clients these days."
My stomach lurched, adjusting to the change in scenery. "Check the lower right corner. About six centimeters from Magdi's face."
"Magdi," Rita sneered. "How predictable. These guys --" But her voice trailed off. She sat up, her back rigid against the aluminum-tube seat. "Hey. Hey!"
Her gloved hand traced a line in the air and the Mensa zoomed in on the anomaly. The club warped as we traveled into the postcard and the audience faded into our peripheral vision. Rita tapped her index finger twice, doubling the image, showing a split-shot of Magdi's midair interloper, a pixeled block of reflective clouding.
"That's a ghost."
"You're quick."
"That shouldn't be there."
"Right again."
I tapped the air and the Mensa's control panel appeared in my visor. I ordered Optics, toggled Edit and outlined the spook with neon-blue chalk.
"How long is this visible?"
"Not long. Sixteen clicks."
"And before that?"
"Nothing. No ghosts, no bends." I backed it up a few frames to show her. Magdi lost her ecstasy, the crowd clapped backwards and the specter shrank, pixel by pixel, like an oil spot slipping into the waves. I brought it forward and the ghost re-emerged.
"My guess is we caught him just as he unplugged," I said. "It's good encryption, but it takes a lot of juice. When he unplugs, the command drains power from his cloak. Not enough to make him visible, but enough to show Magdi and her john had company."
I pulled up Optics again and deleted the room. Magdi, her mate and audience disappeared, sent to the infinity of an edit buffer. If only life were so easy.
"You’ve been working Merlin a long time,” I said. “Have you seen this before?"
Rita shook her head. "I’ve seen a lot of shape-shifters, but that’s just business. Old-fashioned espionage. We run so many ciphers it's a wonder we can see through the fog -- but for good reason. I'm sure your buddy Van Meter told you that."
"He's not my buddy. But he did say the city’s got bugs."
"He's not kidding." She crossed her arms and the motion made the scene shift, tugged by her dataglove. "Everyone's bugging our feeder lines. The first two years were mild; we had more stink from the Sons of David than the datacops. Now everyone's on the warpath. The U.N.'s whining about a global epidemic of SDS and CNI. Zamora and his Neuromantics are thumping their chests. Meanwhile, the Sysops are making money hand over fist. Last month the datacops hit a chain of nursing homes that were fronts for an online swinger’s club called SwapShop. Before that the feds busted a Boy Scout troop in Kansas that was renting Tenderfoots to corporate accounts.”
“It goes on and on.”
"The cops aren't a threat," Rita said. "Anyone can fool their scanners. We use modified crypto chips for uplinks, nothing fancy. If they tap the line, all they get is static."
“What about spies?"
"Everyone's a spy these days," she said. "Judging from the way Jacarta's boys lit you up, I don't suppose I have to tell you that the Sysops are at war."
"Why now?"
"Ask Jacarta. Ask anyone who's been burned. Someone's trying to shake things up. Last week we had six interrupted stations. Everything froze -- from the executive commands on down. An interruption at The Palms locked four-hundred dancers on the floor, mid-Charleston. The image started to shudder, then it burned through. Pfft! Paper in fire. Merlin thought it was a virus and kicked the customers out, but diagnostics found nothing." She chuckled. "At least they were only dancing. It happened at Lusty Luthor's in the middle of an orgy. Imagine all those people, stuck in their suits, naked and --"
I waved my hand. "The Sysops have been fighting since Prohibition. Big deal."
"This is different. These burns, they're not supposed to happen. I rewrote a few of Merlin's security channels and still couldn't find anything capable of a burn like that."
I thought of Van Meter's extortion note, of Arabian Knights disintegrating in digital fire. But the Viking didn't say he'd already torched other clubs. Neither did Van Meter.
"You seen any ghosts like this been around the burns?"
"No." She tapped the image with a neon blue hand and it fluttered like a jellyfish. "Like I said, I've been in the hole s
ix years and I've never seen anything like this."
"Mmm," I hummed, not knowing whether to believe her or not. When it comes to encryption, junkies, the Digerati, a banned sensory-city and an invisible goon at a live sex show, it’s smart to keep trust folded in your hip pocket.
She picked up on my distrust and glared over the rim of her cheaters. "I've never seen anything like this and neither have you, convict. This ghost is packing the real thing, maybe prototypical. Compared to this, Icarus was a simple shuffle toy."
She smirked. I let her enjoy it because she was right. It was all very simple and the ghost on the screen was not. In Avalon, public cryptography was supposed to provide a sense of privacy, giving people – virtual or not – the ability to live without an audience. Simple. Only reality wasn't so simple. The encryption had a trap door and the government had the key. When we realized Avalon's global community could easily become a police state, we lobbied to amend the Project bylaws to allow personal encryption. The U.N. said nix, so I wrote Icarus and gave it away. And that was illegal. That was treason. That was simple.
Rita batted the ghost with her virtual hand and it floated away like a cloud.
"What is this thing, Jack?"
I stared at the ghost and felt it staring back. "It's a piece of art."
Rita fetched a stack of sandwiches. "Where did you live before Construction?"
Merlin took the codes Rita uploaded, checked them for forgery and opened his doors. While Avalon had been built for glamour, with towering skyscrapers and elegant facades, Merlin had been built for speed. No panoramic terrains. Just raw code.
"We moved around a lot."
"Us too." She took a bite, crunching the stale bread. "I think the last place we lived for more than six months was Louisville. Dad taught literature at the University, before everything went online. I was six."
"Mmm." I dove into Merlin's archives, dialed Delilah from the dashboard and immediately screwed up. Merlin booted me out with the congeniality of a gorilla.
"Jeez," Rita chirped. "Do you want training wheels?" She hot-wired the archive and Merlin delivered the records for the date matching the one on Van Meter's disc.
"First lesson's on the house," she jeered. "The second will cost you."
"Great. I'm in the hole with a pusher."
"We're all pushers."
I worked in silence for two minutes. Then Rita was talking again. "Dad had poetry readings with students, in person, and they'd sit in the living room and drink dark beer and smoke and they were so loud. That's what I remember most. They were loud. People today aren't loud. It's like we're afraid of each other off-line. Don't you think?"
I told her I didn't spend much time thinking about it. Merlin found the date of the ghost's visit and pulled up the archive. Rita's cheaters flashed and she drummed her fingers on the air. Suddenly my visor splashed inside Delilah's.
"We lived near campus, so our house became this bohemian village," she shook her head. "Mom worked nights doing database admin at a hospital credit union, so they didn't see each other much. I guess that was best. Mom was linear; Dad was just out there. 'Nor marble, nor the gilded monuments of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,' he used to say before every reading. That was --"
"Shakespeare," I said absently, staring at a blue grid, the room's substructure. They gave us books in Jasper. Books couldn't be hacked.
"Not bad, convict," she said. "Dad quoted so many of them. Keats and Yeats and Roethke and Blake and Shelley. Sometimes I dream of Gaelic poetry and wake up with the taste of gasoline on my tongue."
It took a few seconds for the scenery to slot into place -- walls and then the stage, balcony and curtain, then the cocktail tables with their flickering lights. After that came customers, blipping onto the screen as Merlin resurrected their virtual bodies. It took longer to construct an immersion room than a snapshot, because, to Merlin, everything had history. That's the way it is when you live in a stream of code. Everything comes from somewhere. Everything's going somewhere. Nothing is static.
"The readings were what he liked best. And talking politics. Like the secession of South China, before the nukes fell. Or the Arab-Israeli War, wondering how long the oil would be too hot to drill. But mostly they talked about the Worker's Paradise." Rita hugged her knees and smiled. "Their theory was that the Depression was only short-term growing pains. Automation would free people to pursue artistic ends. Of course, that was only three years into the Depression. I don't think anyone talks like that now."
I pulled up the guest list. Delilah's had sixteen people when the spook appeared. The ledger told me when they came and when they left and how much they owed for sitting in a bar where the smoke was a sub-program. More importantly, it revealed that Merlin hadn't seen the ghost coming or going. The number of guests remained constant.
"I would sit up and listen. Sometimes I sat in a student's lap. Zoe was my favorite. She would braid my hair and always smelled like gasoline. Dad said -- Wait. You're doing that wrong." Her hand appeared in my screen and pulled a second-tier scan program out of the menu. I hadn't known there was a second tier.
"When Zoe burned down an optic-cable warehouse, Mom and Dad had a huge fight. Mom wanted to cancel the readings. She said it was exposing me to the wrong element. Dad said he was exposing me to the only right element left in the world."
I took a bite of my sandwich and went to work on tearing the sex palace apart.
"Mom was worried that she was losing me, so she gave me a Mensa Mini and a pile of programming tutorials. Man, those things were heavy."
"Praise the code and pass the aspirin," I said.
She smiled over her cheaters. "I didn't care, though. Not about the aches from the helmets or the way my eyes burned. It was worth it. After that first flight, chasing daemons through the maze, I was hooked."
"Most kids were." The goal was to catch beasts that time-traveled to famous historical spots to destroy the time-continuum, but the result was a legion of half-pints who became prodigy programmers -- people like Rita.
"It was the best. I programmed friends and built houses and walked around in them. Dad never really understood that. I wasn't playing in there. It was never a game. I was composing. And to me, it was as poetic as anything his students wrote."
First on the menu were clients, so I started decoding their sensory commands. Tedious work. Each time a john moved, Merlin logged it. For Bobby G. to enjoy himself to fruition, Merlin supplied four hundred thousand lines of code. What once took nothing but a randy idea and a free hand now required more programming than it took to send Voyager out of the solar system. And the ghost could have hidden himself in any of it.
"When the University started replacing professors with ROM libraries, things fell apart," Rita said. "It put professors in every living room. And it put Dad out of a job."
Merlin helped me sort through the mush, but the field was immense. It was like rendering a crowd of people down to every shard of DNA, down to the fleck of skin on the light-switch, and then tracing those flecks back to their owners.
"After that, the poetry readings stopped. Mom wanted to find a job on the coast before the Depression got any worse. Dad said no. I think he felt obsolete, and that was something that had never occurred to him. Not him or any of the students so enamored with what would happen when information culture replaced industrial culture.
She stared at the black ceiling. "See, to him, it wasn't that he'd become obsolete. All of us had. He believed that people had started seeing everything -- even each other -- as nothing but bits and bytes. He thought we'd lost something important, something you couldn't put on a disc. He still believed our souls were hidden somewhere between the lines."
Rita took off her cheaters and fetched more sandwiches. She stood back there a few minutes, alone in the room's silence while I waved my dataglove, staring into Merlin's strata of ones and zeroes, pretending I couldn’t hear her cry.
Two hours later Merlin and I found enough crumbs
to build a slice of bread.
When Bobby G.'s hand touched the pulsing rod in his lap, Merlin saw it twice. When Raymond C. trebled the tingle in his spine, Merlin thought Raymond C. had made a habit of it. When the ghost moved across the room, his encryption program searched the buffer for a similar action and copied it, as if the bitstream stuttered.
I compared personal flight logs to Merlin's taxi meter and started coming up with stutters. One or two, I overlooked. Merlin sometimes stutters and I don’t hold it against him; the A.I. has a lot on his mind. But after twenty stutters and then after two hundred, I realized where the ghost was hiding his DNA. Like a parasite, he was hiding his code by echoing the johns' sensory commands. He was a ghost who was never in one place, with his coding spread across the grid like butter. Merlin wasn't built to find that kind of spook. No one was. Because the spook was everywhere, hidden in the wink of your eye and the wave of your hand.
I'd been right. It was art. But art is rarely perfect.
I began laying the trap.
AVALON V: Tomorrow Crusade
It was 3 a.m. when I finally left the substation, but the vendors outside St. Luke's still hustled full-tilt, bartering the glitzy leftovers of another generation, almost by habit, the way a crashed Mensa will sputter and reboot even after you've wiped its memory.
Six women with spines like question marks tugged at my overcoat, hawking silverware they'd lifted from abandoned homes. I lit a smoke and the cinnamon jolt gave me enough energy to push past them, past beggars sitting in broken windowsills and chewing Snap crystals, past missionaries promising Eden in a Sons of David commune where "digital" meant counting on your fingers.
Outside Haggletown, I leaned against a steel garage door and called Van Meter. The filament kept slipping off my jaw and the visor fogged in the rain. Old hats. Van Meter's answering service picked up and my visor lit up with a Hollywood antique named Harlow, who lounged on a white boulder in the middle of a purple sea.
