2xs

by Nigel Findley

  The conclusion? It's hard to track a shadow. Lone Star would have to fall back on techniques that cops used last century.

  Ah, but what about magic? Well, if I'd actually scragged Lolly, I might have to sweat a bit. A good mage or shaman could, theoretically, track me down from a fresh drop of blood, broken fingernail, maybe even a trace of exfoliated skin that I might have left behind at the crime scene. But since I didn't do it, any such trace should lead them to somebody else-namely, X.

  The Star might think they had me dead to rights, of course. Anyone who enters the Lone Star training program is forced to give blood and tissue samples that remain on file. The official story is that the samples are taken to prevent problems with rejection or incompatibility of body parts in case they have to put you back together after a line-of-duty injury. I have this nasty suspicion the samples are really so a Lone Star combat mage can track someone down astrally if he or she decides to skip the force. That's why my first shadowrun, which took place even before I "unofficially resigned," was to replace my blood and tissue samples with something that wouldn't get me into trouble. If that putative combat mage tried to track me from the samples, he'd catch up with a mangy Redmond alley cat, assuming some squatter hasn't eaten it in the interim.

  I let myself relax a little. As far as I could see, I was as safe as I was going to get. Lone Star hadn't tracked me down in the years since I'd bid them farewell, and I didn't think that was about to change now.

  But what about Jocasta? I thought with a start. Whoever planted the bomb in her apartment might have got hold of something that would let him track her magically. Ritual magic can be even nastier than C6 plastique. Then again, if Jocasta was dossing down in Beaux Arts Village, she'd probably be okay. Most enclaves like that are protected by hermetic circles, elementals, even dual para-biologicals like piasmae or hell hounds, which can watch in astral space as easily as the mundane world. That should be enough to save Jocasta's shapely ass.

  Okay, I had some breathing space. Which was good. My head hurt from the combination of too little deep sleep and too much deep thought. To take my mind off Lone Star and Lolly, I pulled up the results of the search routine I'd sent off to find references to Juli Long.

  To my surprise, there was one hit. Displaying the full text, I skimmed it quickly.

  Then I took the picture from my wallet and looked at it one last time. This wasn't a good week for young blondes. The fact that I'd predicted it didn't make me feel any better.

  Juli Long had been found floating off Pier 23. Dead, of course.

  Chapter 5.

  I remember once reading that it's better to waste your childhood than not to do anything at all with it. I might have misspent my childhood, but I certainly didn't waste it. And I've got the wide range of contacts, acquaintances, even friends, to prove it. In my business, that's the difference between squeaking by and starving. I've never liked starving.

  The contact du jour was a chummer named Bent Sigurdsen. Bent and I had been best buds while growing up in Renton. At ages fifteen and sixteen, we did a lot of illegal drinking together and made a lot of plans to become neoanarchists when we grew up.

  So much for childhood dreams. We both followed the paths our respective fathers had chosen for us, at least for a while. Against my better judgment, I'd gone into computer sciences at U-Dub, where I stuck it out for three long, slogging years until finally getting up the courage to drop out and tell my father to go frag himself.

  Bent also followed in his father's footsteps, but the difference was that he liked it. His dad was a drek-hot orthopedic surgeon, and Bent took to med school like one born to it. When it came time to specialize, he decided that orthopedics wasn't his interest, but that was okay with Sigurdsen Senior. Bent followed the pathology route instead, and when he graduated- magna cum laude, no fragging surprise-his old man pulled the strings to get him hired by City Health as part of the medical-examiner staff for the Seattle sprawl. (That's right, an ME, the guy who takes apart dead bodies to figure out what made them that way. I guess Bent prefers patients that don't bitch and who he's sure won't sue him for malpractice.)

  Anyway, Bent and I kept in touch over the years. When my parents were killed, he was there to get mind-fragging drunk with me and then make sure I didn't jump in front of a bullet-train. And when I escaped from Lone Star, he immediately got word to me via Naomi Takahashi that he was still a friend even if I was newly SINless. We kept in touch after that. Not regularly, not often. We'd get together maybe every couple of months to pummel our cerebral cortices with alcohol. Ours was one of those solid friendships where it isn't necessary to touch base often, where you know that even after a couple of years the other person's still going to be there for you.

  And so I had no second thoughts about keying in the LTG code for Bent's lab (with another one of Buddy's wiz utilities running cover for me).

  Almost immediately, Bent's cherubic face appeared on the screen. "Yeah?" He frowned into what I knew was a blank screen. Bent's image was slightly blurred by the protective layer of transparent plastic that, for reasons as obvious as they are nauseating, covers the lab's telecom. Seeing him, I cut in my video pickup.

  His frown instantly vanished, to be replaced with a smile that lit up his face and made his blue eyes twinkle. When Bent Sigurdsen smiles, he looks like the Cheshire cat. Any moment you expect he's going to fade from view, leaving nothing but that grin. "Hey, chummer," he beamed, "it's been a long time. How's biz?"

  I was tempted to tell him, but that would only make him feel bad. And I didn't like making Bent feel bad if I could help it. So I shrugged. "Pretty good," I told him. "Lots of stuff on the go." (Classic understatement.) "You?"

  I didn't think it possible for his grin to get broader, but it did. "Wizard," he offered. "Things couldn't be better."

  I could tell he was about to launch into shoptalk-no doubt a blow-by-blow rendition of how his latest customer had ended up on the slab-so I derailed that train of thought before it could get up to speed. "I've got some biz, Bent. Got a few ticks?"

  "Of course," he said at once. "Anything for a chummer." (Any wonder I like Bent so much?) He gestured over his shoulder, probably at the worktable that was, mercifully, out of frame. "Jane Doe here isn't in a hurry. What can I do for you?"

  "Mi Long," I said, then filled out what little I'd learned about the fluffy blonde's departure from this mortal coil. "Any chance you can pull up her file and give me a capsule review?"

  Bent's smile had faded as I spoke. Now he looked sadly into the video pickup, and I could tell he was grieving for young Juli. (For the hundredth time I wondered how the frag someone as sensitive to the human tragedy as Bent could do his job.) "Null perspiration," he said. "The report should be on line. Long, Juli, right?" I nodded, and he was off, attacking the telecom's keyboard with the gusto of a teenage decker.

  For a moment I thought I'd be treated to nothing but a view of his face as he worked, but then he remembered my existence long enough to slave my display to his. The video picture shrunk down to a quarter-size window in the upper corner of the screen, while the rest of the display revealed what was showing on his monitor. I watched as he entered the search syntax, pleasantly surprised at the speed with which two side-by-side digitized images of Juli Long flashed up on the screen. One was the same picture I had in my wallet: Juli flashed a devilish grin into the camera. The other was the identical face, but perfectly at rest. If not for the blue tinge of cyanosis about her lips, I might have been persuaded she was just asleep.

  The rest of the screen filled with text, but Bent quickly blanked that off my display. "Confidential," he explained, a little apologetically. "I'll tell you if there's anything interesting." I suppressed a smirk. Bent's ability to mentally compartmentalize continued to amaze me, but of course now wasn't the time to share the joke with him.

  I watched his cornflower blue eyes flick back and forth as he read the text. It took him maybe a minute, and I was hard-pressed to keep my mouth shu
t and not try to hurry him along, particularly when I saw him raise his eyebrows and purse his lips in surprise. Finally he was finished. "Well?" I prompted.

  "Interesting case," he pronounced slowly. "I wish she'd come across my table." Then he looked up at me guiltily, I didn't think my telecom's microphone was sensitive enough to pick up the grinding of my teeth, but I might have been wrong. "Heart failure," he stated. "Apparently brought on by the chip she was using."

  It was my turn to raise my eyebrows and purse my lips. "Simsense good enough to kill?" He shook his head. "There's more to it than that." I waited, then realized he wasn't going to continue without prodding.

  "Oh?" I said.

  Bent looked uncomfortable, and I knew I was pushing the limits of what he felt easy about doing.

  Friendship's a big thing to Bent, but he's got his own somewhat convoluted sense of ethics. I watched as friendship fought with principles, and was relieved when friendship won. "There's another file reference here," he told me. "File-spec L-S-S."

  "Which means?" I asked, though I could guess. "Lone Star Secure," Bent confirmed. "Lone Star's put a security hold on the appended file for some reason."

  "Can you get past it?"

  He looked almost affronted for a moment, then his smile returned. "Of course I can. . .

  "The question is will you?" I finished for him. "It could be interesting, chummer. Something even you haven't seen before. Simsense to die for. . ."

  As I'd expected, he took the bait. "Yeah," he mused, "yeah, could be interesting."

  Then he looked up and his gaze met mine. Deep in those intense blue eyes was a gleam that told me he knew perfectly well what I was doing, but he didn't care. "Your LTG number's the same?"

  I nodded. "Then I'll get back to you. Hang easy, chummer." And with that he broke the connection.

  I sat back, fingers laced behind my head. If Bent Sigurdsen said he'd get back to me, he would. Good thing, too. The Star doesn't lock the file on a stiff unless it's something really out of the ordinary. I considered getting on the line to my eastern Mr. Johnson with a status report, then thought better of it. He could wait until I had the answers to a few more questions. Mi Long sure wasn't going anywhere.

  The next day dawned cold and gray. No rain, but the clouds were like dirty lead, and the air had a chilling damp that made my head hurt. (Or maybe it was the half-bottle of ersatz scotch I'd drunk "to kill the dreams.")

  Lolita Yzerman had been very much with me as I'd tried to get to sleep last night. Little Lolly's memorial service was scheduled for today, Thursday, November 21. But how could I go? Null perspiration.

  I had a bucketful of fragging good reasons why not. It wasn't until I climbed into bed on Wednesday night and then couldn't turn off my brain that I realized how much Lolly's death was slotting me up.

  I tried for more than an hour, but my brain wouldn't cooperate. Sleep? Null program, cobber. I would just start to get that warm, floating feeling when some image of Lolly would flash into my brain-a smile, a turn of phrase, or something more intimate-and I'd be awake again, lying there tingling. The worst moments were when I saw the shadowy stranger with my face raising the gun and pressing it against little Lolly's forehead . . . I gave it about ninety minutes before I conceded and reached for the bottle of synthahol. Only that eventually managed to push Lolly, and everything else, out of my brain, so that finally I slept.

  This morning, of course, I was paying the price. A dull headache had taken up residence behind my left eyebrow, and seemed disinclined to leave. I accepted the pain as partial penance for missing Lolly's memorial. As further penance, I decided now was the time to do something that I'd been putting off as rather unpleasant. I had to go to see Buddy. Don't get me wrong, Buddy the decker is a good friend. I respect her, trust her, even like her. But not face to face, and definitely not when I'm feeling under the weather.

  Everyone has a history, but Buddy's is more interesting than most. In my experience, most drek-hot deckers start off as the stereotypical computer nerd. Often they get into decking simply because they get along better with machines than with people. But Buddy came at decking from the other side. She was originally into neurological research at U-Dub, where she made some major breakthroughs in monitoring.

  Like any researcher, she had to learn about computers, over time becoming especially intrigued by techniques of interfacing electronics and the brain. The logical next step for her was research in that area.

  That was a while back, sometime about 2027, before decking became what it is today. Buddy was right out on the cutting edge, with a background that set her apart from other computer researchers. Not only did she understand the hardware and software, she also knew a lot about the "wetware."

  When the axe fell during the Crash of '29, her qualifications weren't lost on the government. One of the first people to be recruited for the "enhanced" Echo Mirage program, Buddy later became a member of the cadre that led the major assault against the computer virus that lobotomized the world's datanets.

  Everybody in Echo Mirage was a volunteer, and Buddy wouldn't have missed it for the world. But she paid a steep price for that experience.

  The cyberdecks the Echo Mirage team used were barbaric compared to the toys you can pick up at any Radio Shack today. The software was even worse. From the little I understand of it, the persona programs were really kludges, just as likely to hang as to work right. And without the persona program to run interference, it's the decker's naked psyche that confronts the alien world of the computer Matrix. Most people know that four of the Echo Mirage team died, while others came out mind-shattered and vegetative.

  Buddy survived and even remained functional, but she didn't make it totally unscathed. Perhaps she'd always had the tendency, or maybe it was purely a result of her experiences. Whichever, she came out of Echo Mirage with what the shrinks call a "bipolar disorder." In English, that means she's manic-depressive, but with a twist. At the highest point of her cycle, she's about as down as I am on a bad day. At the bottom, she's out-and-out paranoid. Apparently this hasn't stopped her from pulling in some major contracts over the years. I guess the corporations don't really care how fragged up a decker is as long as he or she can perform. (In any case, paranoid isn't a bad way to be in the sprawl.)

  The personal significance of all this was that I had no way of knowing in what stage of the cycle Buddy might be at the moment. Calling wouldn't help: she never answered her phone. You just leave a message and hope.

  So that's what I did. I punched in her code and waited for her outgoing message-a very informative five seconds of dead air, followed by a beep-and told her I was coming over. That being all the preparation possible, I jumped in the car and headed south on 405. I tuned my radio to the traffic station, just in case something was going down that I ought to know about.

  And hit the jackpot the first time. It seemed that something big and tentacled had slobbered its way out of Lake Washington and onto the deck of the Route 520 bridge, the floating one connecting Bellevue and Downtown. After eating a couple of cars, the thing had slobbered its way back into the water. The traffic advisory was recommending that drivers select an alternate route. No drek. Ah, the wonders of the Awakened world.

  I took the advisory to heart, of course, my alternate route taking me down 405 until it cut west, then up Ambaum Boulevard into White Center. Buddy had a place on Roxbury Street. It was a good-sized flat near the top of the tallest building in the area. With the apartment's western exposure, she also had a great view out over Puget Sound toward Vashon Island.

  The view meant nothing to Buddy, however, other than I a reminder of how vast and threatening was the outside world. Within days of moving in, she'd covered up the big, beautiful windows with sheets of reinforced construction plastic. She'd also reinforced the door, the walls, the ceiling, even the floor, and rigged every possible entrance with security devices. (While making all these modifications, Buddy had asked me to recommend an air-conditioner mechanic
who also knew high-voltage electricity. Jumping to the obvious conclusion, I assumed she wanted him to rig unpleasant surprises for anyone who tries to break in through an air vent.) At the same time, she was beefing up the apartment's sound insulation. Which was just as well, considering Buddy's other obsession.

  That other obsession is percussion. From the way I put it together, she'd always loved percussion-heavy music, stuff with lots of polyrhythms. Her tastes became even more arcane and twisted after her Echo Mirage days, until no commercially available music would suit her. That was when she built herself a computerized drum machine, programming it to write and play its own intersecting polyrhythms, using insanely complex weighting algorithms to make it stay with the stuff she finds pleasing. And that's the crux of the matter. To anyone else, Buddy's "music" sounds like street repairs or like driving around with rocks in your hubcaps. To make it worse, she plays it so loud I'm surprised Sea-Tac Airport hasn't threatened to move.

  (As a trivial footnote, a while back I thought I'd figured out that Buddy took her street name from Buddy Rich, a drek-hot jazz drummer from the previous century. Buddy didn't confirm or deny my speculation, but only pointed out scornfully that even if Rich's music weren't woefully simplistic, it was slotted up anyway by all those horns and drek playing over it.)

  So that was why I looked on a visit to Buddy as penance of a sort. A paranoid, depressed drum addict certainly wasn't my company of choice on a Thursday morning.

  I parked on Twenty-eighth Avenue Southwest, just around the corner from Buddy's place, then tried vainly to run between the heavy-and probably acidic-raindrops that had begun to fall. I gave my name to the doorman/guard in his booth of bulletproof glass, and was reassured when he buzzed me in. At least Buddy was enough with the program to put me on the guard's "okay" list. I rode the elevator to the fortieth floor, where I got off and turned left down the hall. Buddy must have scoped me out with her security systems, decided I was really me, and that I posed no immediate threat. Mechanical locks, bolts, and chains rattled, maglocks snapped open. The door opened a crack. I put on my best reassuring smile. "Hoi, Buddy," I called. "Can I come in?"