Again, that moment of blindness, then the electron skies of the Matrix burst into my consciousness. I thought I remembered its beauty, but saw at once how pale and inadequate was memory when it came to capturing an experience like this. I heard myself gasp aloud with the power of it all.
As the first time, we plummeted from the ebony sky toward the glowing network of the "ground" below, plunged into one of the glowing data "pipes" that crisscrossed the landscape. The sense of speed was overwhelming, and I wanted to cry out with exaltation.
Almost too soon, we burst from the pipe into a different corner of the Matrix from the one we'd visited before. A huge icon faced us. Not a gleaming gold star this time, but a cross, each of its four arms an identical cube, glowing a reassuring green. The regularity of the icon and its soothing color made me feel at peace.
"Crashcart Medical Services Corp," Buddy told me needlessly.
We approached slowly. As we drew nearer to the icon, its true size-if "true" has any meaning in the Matrix-became apparent. It loomed over us like a corporate skyraker. And it kept expanding, or perhaps we were shrinking. Finally we stood at its base, about equivalent in scale to two ants gazing up at an apartment block.
We were within touching distance of the green structure now, and for the first time I became aware of a faint hum in my ears. It took me a moment to place it, then I remembered the sound of a powerful electrical substation. Not the hum of motors or moving parts, but the sound of power itself. I almost thought I could smell the slight tang of ozone in the air.
With her slender hand, Buddy's icon reached out toward the green wall. As her fingers approached, the color of the wall shifted from a rich and comforting tone to a green that was harsh and virulent. The hum increased in volume and pitch. Buddy drew back her hand quickly, as though in pain. "Heavy duty," she grouched. "You sure this is important?"
I didn't bother answering. She-we-examined the featureless wall for a few moments. Then both of Buddy's hands moved into my field of view. One held a small box with a dial on it, something like a doctor's diagnostic instrument. The dial showed no markings and no obvious sensor through which the device could gather information about the world. But then I remembered that this "device" didn't exist, in any real sense.
It was merely a symbol, as the whole Matrix was a symbol, of some kind of program that Buddy was running on her cyberdeck.
She held the little device up in her left hand, while she ran her right palm over the wall in front of us.
She didn't touch the glowing green surface, but brought her hand so close that the color change I'd noticed before became even more pronounced. Using her hand as a sensor, Buddy's icon seemed to be scanning an area of wall about two meters high and twice that wide. Sometimes the needle on the meter would twitch, when it did, the color change on the wall remained permanent, not fading back to its normal hue.
Buddy seemed to be working totally at random, with no logical sequence or plan that I could discern.
She was also, out of necessity, standing very close to the wall, making it impossible for me to see if the areas of permanent color change followed any kind of pattern.
For several minutes she worked, and I was much too engrossed-and, let's face it, scared-to interrupt her. Finally, though, she grunted and stepped back from the wall, the small device was suddenly gone from her hand. She put her/our hands on her/our hips and examined her handiwork.
A shape stood out, bright, glaring green, against the darker hue of the wall. A door, it looked like. The lines weren't continuous, and in some places were wider and more intense than in others, but Buddy seemed satisfied. "Not as bad as I thought," she remarked.
"Don't be too hasty," I told her, "we're not in yet," but she just snorted.
The door swung open at our approach. As we stepped over the threshold, I felt an instant of biting cold, and the smell of ozone was suddenly more intense. But then we went on through.
Through, into an image from a paranoid's nightmare. We stood in a corridor, a hospital corridor, judging from the traffic of gown-clad doctors and starched-looking nurses hurrying past us in both directions. But the walls, floor, and ceiling of the corridor were mirrors. In every direction-left, right, above and below-reflections receded off into infinity. We seemed to be suspended in the midst of a lattice, a moving lattice of figures, that extended without end all around us. The mirror surfaces weren't perfect, I noticed after a moment, they had a slight silver sheen to them that made it possible to determine exactly where the walls were. Otherwise I think we'd have been totally disoriented, unaware of direction, dependent entirely on feel-"navigating by braille," a phrase I'd once heard-to find our way about.
The doctors and nurses seemed totally oblivious of our presence. Buddy had to step back hastily to get out of the way of one onrushing doctor, but in avoiding her we almost got clipped by a nurse so intent on his own destination that I think he'd have gladly walked over us. Buddy cursed viciously under her breath. In the nearest mirror-wall, I saw an infinity of Buddy-icons wave a hand over her body, as if to erase an image. As the hand passed, I saw that Buddy's image had changed. No longer the gorgeous young woman in her evening dress, she now looked like a middle-aged and very imperious doctor, wearing the same white gowns as all the other doctors around us. The change was astounding. It was as if we'd suddenly been rendered visible. A large nurse who would have stomped us into the floor suddenly dodged aside, bobbing his head in greeting and perhaps respect. In infinite reflection, I saw Buddy's altered head nod in satisfaction. "What now?" I whispered.
"Don't fragging whisper," Buddy snapped, at normal volume. "They can't hear us, we're not talking here."
I let the philosophical ramifications of that one slide on by. "What now?" I repeated.
Buddy was silent for a moment, then decisively strode off down the hallway. The traffic flowed around us, rather than trying to walk through us. Apparently the system had accepted that we belonged here.
The hallway was long, with many turns and many branches. Unmarked doors, their color slightly grayer than the silver of the walls, lined the corridor. I figured we'd walked maybe half a klick when the corridor opened out into a kind of central lobby, with other corridors leading off in all directions. A mirror-finish desk that I guessed to be a nurse's station stood in the center, staffed by several officious-looking, white-suited staff.
Buddy strode right up to the desk. "Records?" she demanded, in a voice that wasn't hers.
A staffer looked up at her. For the first time, I noticed the figure's eyes glowed with an unpleasant silver sheen. "What department?" he asked. "Intensive care," I whispered."
"ICU," Buddy answered.
The staffer pointed down a hallway to our right. For an instant the floor of that hallway glowed a faint red. Buddy nodded and turned away.
"Wait," the staffer snapped. We turned back. The staffer's silver eyes had narrowed suspiciously.
"Let's see your authorization."
With unnatural speed, Buddy's right hand lashed out, clutching a scalpel with a blade that glowed the red of a C02 laser. Even though the blade was no more than two centimeters long, it severed the staffer's head as smoothly as a katana. The staffer's body slumped back in his chair, while his head bounced off the surface of the desk. Then both body and head dissolved. As calmly as if she'd just swatted a bug, Buddy strode down the hallway the dead staffer had indicated.
That was when I really wanted to have some control over the icon's body. Specifically, I wanted to look around to see if anyone had taken undue notice of the cavalier way Buddy had dispatched the staffer.
But Buddy was in control, and she either didn't care or else knew how much or how little attention would be paid. Apparently, judging by the figures that did enter our field of vision, no one was paying any attention whatsoever.
This corridor was different from the one we'd initially entered. Less crowded, for one thing, with more doors in both walls. These doors had a faint green tinge to the
m.
"Time for biz," Buddy muttered, more to herself, I think, than to me. She waved a hand over her body again and her reflected image returned to its normal form. Immediately, she had to step out of the way of an oncoming doctor who apparently couldn't see us. "Wiz," she murmured.
Quickly we moved along the hallway, dodging traffic, with Buddy laying a palm against each door as we passed it. The surface of the door would flare to brightness at her touch, but none had the power I'd sensed in the outside wall. After maybe a dozen doors, Buddy grunted with satisfaction. "Corbeau, right?" she asked. "You got it."
She pushed on the door in front of us, and it swung open. From the ambience of the hallway, this would probably have been the entrance to a semi-private or private ward, had we been in a real hospital.
We were in the Matrix, though, and nothing is ever what you expect. The room was much larger than it should have been, judging by the spacing of the hallway's doors, old-style filing cabinets took up virtually every square meter of available space. A white-clad figure was searching through a file drawer, but looked up as we entered. Apparently this one could see us. The figure's silver eyes flashed brilliant red as it took a step toward us.
With the speed of thought, Buddy threw something, a small sphere of silver light, at the figure. The sphere burst, expanding into a gleaming net that wrapped itself around the figure's limbs. Before the trapped figure could respond, Buddy hurled herself across the intervening space, and drove a glowing hypodermic into the struggling figure's arm. It fell limp at once, but didn't dissolve.
"We've got to work fast," Buddy muttered. She pulled open the nearest file drawer. Instead of the hard-copy records that would have matched the imagery of this place, the drawer was filled with a swirling cloud of alphanumeric characters. Without hesitation, Buddy shoved her arms up to the elbows into the cloud.
As before, glowing text suddenly resolved before my eyes, scrolling past so rapidly that it became merely a blur. This time I didn't interfere, though, just let Buddy handle it as she knew best.
It didn't take long. After only a few seconds, the madly scrolling text stopped. Centered atop my visual field was the name CORBEAU, MARIANE T. "Can we download this?" I asked. "No," Buddy snapped.
So I concentrated on reading as fast as I could. It seemed that in late June, Ms. Corbeau had done something ill-advised on I-5 at night and wrapped her new toy, a twin-turbo Porsche 999, around a lighting stanchion. As I'd suspected, Ms. Corbeau had recently switched her personal medical coverage from DocWagon Super-Platinum to Crashcart Executive Diamond. Corbeau had been whisked away by a trauma response team to Crashcart's central clinic. After she was stabilized, unrecoverable tissue-in this case, a leg-was excised. When the ICU technicians were confident that she wouldn't croak, Corbeau was transferred to another department for reconstructive work, authorized by J. Carter and K. Mobasa, supervising physicians D. Horbein, X. Marthass, P. Dempsey, and A. Kobayashi.
And that's where the record ended. She was out of ICU by the first week of July, file transferred and closed. Frag it.
"That what you wanted?" Buddy asked. "For starters," I told her. "Her file was transferred. I want to know where to, and then I want to scan that file."
She snorted again, apparently really angry this time. "This ain't enough?" she demanded harshly.
I hesitated. Somebody loses a leg, they get it replaced-at least if they can afford it, which Mariane Corbeau definitely could. I'd confirmed most of my nasty suspicions: Corbeau had been worked on by Crashcart, and she did get a cyber replacement. But I still didn't know for sure that the cyberware they'd plugged into her body was anything out of the ordinary. That final connection was still missing. Whether or not I would have proof by looking further into the records of her stay in the clinic all depended on how detailed were the files. There might be nothing of any use or interest, other than a graphic medical description of someone who survived having a leg torn off in a car crash. But, there just might be something. I couldn't turn aside from that chance. "We've got to go further," I told her.
I thought Buddy was going to protest, but she didn't. Instead she just pulled her hands out of the swirling bits of data and slammed the file drawer. Without a glance at the figure still lying motionless in the corner, we walked out of the room and back into the hallway.
I expected Buddy to return to the "nurses' station" for more information. Instead, she strode along the hall in the other direction. She seemed to know where we were going, so I didn't interrupt. We turned left, left again, then left a third time. If this had been what we normally think of as reality, the corridor we were in now would have intersected the hall we'd been in previously. But geometry was apparently as arbitrary as everything else in the Matrix.
The hallway had changed, too. It was wider, the doors fewer and further between. There was almost no traffic here, just an occasional white-clad nurse scurrying by. Archived records, I assumed. Buddy again went through the procedure of touching each door as we passed it. This time it was a longer process. We'd walked for more than a kilometer, I figured, and checked eighty or so doors before she found what she was looking for. Without a word-she was still angry with me, I guessed-she pushed open the door and stepped through.
They were on us instantly: three hulking figures the size of trolls. Their garb was the familiar nondescript white, but their bodies immediately identified these figures as different from anything we'd see so far. Instead of normal flesh, these were creations of angular shining metal, as though their entire bodies were cyber. Their faces were hideous, intersecting planes of mirror-polished chrome, out of which red eyes burned like hot coals. They fell on us as soon as we stepped through the door or, more precisely, they fell on Buddy, the only one of us who had a body. Fingers like knives slashed into the flesh of Buddy's icon, but the plain blossomed in my mind. It was as though I were being torn apart.
With the speed of a chipped fencer, Buddy danced back. Her scalpel was in her hand, its tiny blade looking ludicrous in comparison to the razor-sharp fingers of the opposition. She feinted at one, then slipped a lightning-fast stab under the guard of another as it moved in. The scalpel bit deep, and with a teeth-aching screech the chrome figure dissolved. Buddy tried to recover from her thrust in time to block a raking attack from the third figure, but she was a millisecond too slow. Fingers like five gleaming daggers tore into her left shoulder. We screamed simultaneously, Buddy and I, a terrible harmony of pain. Through a red haze of agony, I saw Buddy's left arm fall to the ground, then pixilate and dissolve. She staggered back to give herself time. But not if the two gleaming attackers had anything to say about it. Closing with her, their fingers made feinting motions toward Buddy's face and belly.
We weren't going to win this one. "Jack us out!" I screamed.
A large red button sprung into existence before our eyes. Buddy reached up to stab it with her other hand.
The silver monsters were too quick. Before she could touch the button, both had lunged in, burying their hands in her/our gut. Agony again exploded within me.
"Dirk!" I heard Buddy screech, despairingly. Then nothingness surrounded me.
An instant of transition, then I was back in my own body, lying on Buddy's floor, the inductance rig digging into my scalp. My heart was beating wildly, irregularly, but I could feel it beginning to slow and its rhythm becoming steady once more. The memory of agony washing through my body was strong, but the actual pain was gone. I pulled the inductance rig from my head and rolled over.
Buddy.
She was crumpled, face-down, over the deck. I crawled over to her, moaning deep in my throat. I unfolded her body gently, lay her back on the floor, set her precious deck aside. I felt for a pulse at throat and wrist, jammed my ear against her chest. Nothing.
Though I knew it was futile, I used what CPR I could remember, until I was drained and panting, soaked with sweat.
Nothing.
Carefully, I picked her up. Her body was childlike in my arms as
I carried her out of the apartment, down the elevator. In the lobby, the security guard stepped forward with An offer of help. I turned cold eyes on him, and he stepped back. I put her in my car, accelerated recklessly out into traffic. Even as I searched my memory for the nearest trauma clinic, I knew it was useless. Buddy was gone. The intrusion countermeasures of the Crashcart system had killed her.
I had killed her.
Chapter 23.
Buddy's death was on my hands, on my conscience. I tried to explain that to Jocasta.
As I'd expected, the trauma clinic could do nothing for her. The black ice guarding the Crashcart system had set up a lethal biofeedback in Buddy's central nervous system, basically shutting down her breathing and stopping her heart. No one could have done anything.
As for me, I'd looked on the medusa and lived. The ice had tried to do the same job on me and had damn near succeeded-hence the palpitation and arrhythmia when I'd come back to myself. If not for the inductance rig, I'd have been hosed, too. I could never have withstood the intensity of the attack except that the rig made the interface with the Matrix indirect. That killer computer code had tried to stop my heart just the way it did Buddy's, but the most it succeeded in doing was to slot up its rhythm. Buddy was, of course, running through her datajack, giving the ice direct access to her brain. When she failed to jack out in time, she didn't have a chance.
And it was my fault.
Oh, sure, Jocasta made all the appropriate noises. "She was a professional, she knew the risks," and all that drek. Yeah, she'd known the risks. And she'd wanted to call it quits after we found our first file. I was the one who pushed her into going the next step-against her better judgment. To make it even worse, her death had been for nothing. I hadn't gotten what I wanted, hadn't caught even a glimpse of Mariane Corbeau's file. I knew no more than if we'd jacked out after that first file.
* * *
No, wait, that wasn't quite true. There'd been no killer ice on the first file. Only the second file, the one presumably dealing with the nature of Corbeau's cyber replacement, was loaded with serious ice. That told me something right there, I suppose it was possible that it was pure coincidence that Crashcart would so heavily protect that kind of file or maybe it was just standard procedure. But neither possibility seemed really feasible. Some decker-maybe it was even Buddy-had once told me that no system designer loads ice except where it's really needed because it slows down system-response time too much. That could only mean that Crashcart was pretty touchy about unauthorized eyes seeing Corbeau's restoration record.
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