S/he
thought.
Sluggishly at first, a mere awareness of sensation. Of floating suspended in liquid, of being hemmed
in on every side by soft warm walls. From somewhere in the distance came the sound of a muffled heart-beat. It
reminded him/her that s/he had another body, another form. Elsewhere, outside. Beyond the darkness that enclosed
him/her.
The thought was swept away by an unseen hand.
The changes continued. Deep within the clusters of cells that made up his/her tiny form, more complex structures
were forming. A vast network of neurons coalesced, grew rootlets, linked with one another in a complicated and
intertangled web. And with each new connection, his/her thoughts became clearer, quicker, cleaner
—
better than
they had been before.
Before?
Somehow, s/he had a sense that this had all happened once before. But this time, the growth and development
were being overseen by something other than random chance and genetic code. Some higher intelligence was
directing the growth of each neuron and axon, the linkage of each synapse. This time the structure that was
forming was. . . perfect.
Perfection achieved, the process came to an end. S/he hung poised, linked in perfect unison with his/her creator.
The thoughts of each of them
—
parent and child
—
vibrated in perfect tonal harmony. The soft, resonant humming
formed itself into thought-words.
It is time for you to be reborn.
A wrench. Sudden movement. S/he was being pushed down a tunnel, propelled by violent contractions of the soft
walls that surrounded him/her. It hurt, it squeezed, it twisted him/her about. . . and yet it was somehow right.
Somehow, it was time. Joy was waiting at the end of this tunnel. Joy and light. A whole new world.
But even as his/her head emerged from the tunnel, even as the world began to spring into focus, something
changed. The gentle, guiding hands became clawed talons that hooked into his/her skull, dragging him/her out of
the safe warm place and flinging him/her into a world of nightmare with the shock of a cold, hard slap. . .
09:47:03 PST
(10:47:03 MST) Cheyenne, Sioux Nation
The sudden log off had made Kimi dizzy. She stood with one hand braced against the wall to steady herself, wondering how many seconds had already ticked past. Had the experiment already begun? But there was no clock in the hallway.
She ducked into the change room and pulled her bow and arrows from her locker. The bow looked like a toy, but a series of tiny pulleys inside its fiberglass body gave it the equivalent of a fifteen-kilo pull.
Whenever Kimi pulled it back to full draw, even a suction-cup-tipped arrow would tear through one of the sacks of soybeans she'd practiced on. The arrows he'd brought to the creche today, however, was special.
Hidden under its thin rubber suction cup was a teflon-coated ceramic point.
It was sharp, but it wouldn't really hurt Raymond Kahnewake. Just scare him. It was just a game.
Kimi ran down the hallway of the FTL building, heading for the bank of high-speed elevators that led to the upper floors. The glossy black surface of the elevator doors reflected the hallway behind her. The floor was a clear layer of plexiglass over Navaho sand paintings, and the walls were inset with a series of three-dimensional holos of Iroquois "false face" masks. The hallway was empty of adults—for the moment. So far, so good.
At last the elevator doors opened. Kimi ducked inside and stabbed the icon for the eighteenth floor. The doors sighed shut and the elevator took off with a high whine, its rapid climb creating a familiar sinking feeling in Kimi's stomach. She gripped her bow with a sweating hand and fitted her arrow to the string. Then she chewed her lip while the elevator's muzak system played a muted drum-beat and soft chanting. It was meant to be soothing, but Kimi was wound up too tight. She glanced nervously up at the security vidcam and tried to smile mischievously, like the great spirit had told her to do.
The elevator did not stop. It rose all the way to the eighteenth floor. Kimi stepped out into a hallway whose walls were textured to look like pink sandstone. A series of office doors stretched away to either side.
Kimi turned right and tiptoed down the plush carpet, her heart pounding. She rounded a corner and nearly ran into the security guard who was strolling the other way. She let out a yelp and dropped the arrow from her bow. The guard, an ork woman in uniform-blue pants and a crisp white shirt with Eagle Feather Security patches on the shoulders, squatted to pick up the arrow. For a long moment, Kimi stared at the guard, at the heavy pistol in the holster on her hip and the remote com unit hooked over one of her pointed ears. She tried looking anywhere but at the arrow, which the guard held in one huge hand. Could the woman see that this arrow was special?
The guard smiled and handed the arrow back to her. "Heya, Kimi. On the warpath again? Who're you counting coup against today?"
Kimi swallowed. She tried to keep her hands from trembling as she took the arrow and fitted it back to the string. "My mom," she said, her voice almost as squeaky as that of her Matrix persona. "Her office is just down the hall."
"Good hunting," the guard said. Then she walked away.
Relief washed over Kimi. Then she remembered how little time she had. She was probably already late; the other kids would have begun the experiment by now. She ran down the corridor to the last office on the left and peeked in the half-open door.
Raymond Kahnewake sat with his feet propped up on a work station cluttered with optical chips. He was jacked into a deck and was obviously hard at work programming; his eyes flickered back and forth behind closed lids and every now and then one of his fingers would twitch slightly as he executed a command. He was a large man with a thick shock of black hair shaved on one side to expose his datajacks. He wore the Sioux Nation equivalent of a business suit: buckskin trousers fringed with ermine and a tailored doeskin shirt with heavy beadwork all down the front.
Kimi raised her bow and took aim at the diamond-shaped design on the shirt. It formed a perfect bull's eye.
As if sensing something, Raymond Kahnewake suddenly logged off and opened his eyes. He recoiled slightly in surprise at seeing Kimi in the doorway. Then he smiled. "Heya, little one," he said in a deep voice. "What are you—?"
Kimi reminded herself what the great spirit had told her.
He's just like a virus,
she said in her mind.
I'm launching a
complex form at a computer virus, just like in the Matrix. It's just pretend. To scare him.
Knowing it was all just a game made her feel better. She let the arrow fly. It plunged through the beadwork that covered Raymond Kahnewake's chest, shedding its thin coating of rubber as the hidden ceramic tip bit deep. The programmer looked down in shock at the "toy" arrow that had buried itself up to its fletches in his chest. He tried to lean forward, but the arrow tip was lodged fast in the plastiform chair behind his back. The arrow was drawn deeper into his chest by the motion, and he grunted in pain.
"Who are . . . ? Why . . . ?" Then he coughed and a faint spray of blood flecked his lips.
Kimi stood for one frozen moment, transfixed by the sight. Then she realized that this wasn't just a game, after all.
The man looked like he was hurt.
She dropped her bow and ran away down the hall.
The ork security guard looked bemused as Kimi rushed past her and leaped into the empty elevator that was still waiting on this floor. The guard gave another friendly wave as Kimi scrambled for the elevator's control panel. As Kimi pushed the icon that would send the elevator down, she heard the guard call out.
"Hey, Kimi!" the guard said. "You dropped your—"
The elevator doors closed.
As the elevator rushed down, making Kimi's stomach feel as if it were lurching up into her chest, she frantically plugged her fiber-optic cable into the telecom unit that was installed in one wall of the elevator. Snicking the other end of the cable into the datajack in her skull, she retreated into the Matrix. This was the "real" world. This was where she felt safe. In a constructed world of icons and programs, where personas merely faded away in static when they died.
Where they didn't look at you with accusing eyes and blood on their lips. Where the quickest and cleverest always lived to run another day . . . even if they died.
Firmly, she told herself that the man she'd just shot with an arrow wasn't really dying. The arrow had been no more than an illusion. Just a construct. An icon. It hadn't really hurt him. But his wide eyes and bloody lips kept returning to haunt Kimi, like a loop in her programming . . .
She accessed her time-keeping utility and saw that the local time was 10:49:45. She'd done what the great spirit wanted, but had she been in time? She really didn't think so. And had this really been what the great spirit intended?
Had she really been meant to
hurt
Raymond Kahnewake?
Fretting, uncertain, she followed the Matrix's familiar gridlike maze to the place where she and her friends left messages for one another. But she was stopped short by a wall of rippling sheet lightning. It hung like a crackling curtain in front of the portal she was trying to access, blurring the edges of the irising airlock icon and sending Kimi bouncing back into the datastream she had been following.
And that was weird. The lightning curtain was definitely a barrier of some kind. But data was flowing through it.
This was a high-traffic area, one that led to public data. Anyone could enter this part of the Matrix—not just technoshamans like herself. A barrier here just didn't make sense.
Kimi swam back along the dataline and tried approaching from another direction. The portal this path led to looked like a round metal hatch. But when Kimi reached out to spin the wheel that would release the hatch, a wall of sheet lightning, just like the first, sprang up to block her path. Cautiously, she touched the lightning wall with her teddy bear paws, trying to find a way around or through it. This wasn't any program she was familiar with; it didn't match any of the samples stored in her memory. Touching it didn't hurt her meat bod any, but the barrier solidly refused to allow her to go any further. Yet data was passing freely through the portal from a spray of datalines that connected to it. And so was . . .
Another decker—a cartoonish character with a blue cape and red, skin-tight suit—zoomed through the curtain of lightning as if it didn't exist. The wheel on the hatch spun and the portal opened, admitting him. But the barrier still held Kimi back. It had shifted, somehow, to block her way. She peered through it and saw swirling, red-tinged darkness inside the opening, just before the hatch closed. And then she heard the decker scream.
Kimi shuddered. This was creepy. She was scared.
A second figure undulated down the dataline toward Kimi. She recognized the hunched green form of Inch-worm.
The worm wore its usual sloppy grin, but its multiple arms were waving in agitation. It stopped before the barrier and caught at Kimi's thick, fuzzy arm.
"Something's gone wrong, Suzy Q," it said in a happy voice that contrasted sharply with its obvious distress. "The experiment didn't work. After one minute, everything went. . . bad."
A chill shot through Kimi's meat bod. "Bad?" she asked. She glanced back at the shimmering sheet lightning barrier, at the closed portal. Was this all her fault? She'd been too late with her attack on Raymond Kahnewake and now the great spirit wouldn't love her any more.
"None of us can access the Seattle RTG," Inchworm continued. "Something's keeping us out."
Kimi frowned at the barrier. "But other deckers are getting through. That cartoon guy—"
"Yeah, I know. But they're not getting out again." He gave a worried sigh. "I just wish I knew what was happening in there. My new friend Pip is trying to find out what's going on. But she's gotta use a tortoise. And even though she's wiz with a keyboard, that's gonna be slow."
In the world of the flesh, Kimi felt the elevator sigh to a stop and heard the doors opening. She opened her eyes and for a painfully long second was confused by the double images her brain received: Inchworm's icon silhouetted against the glowing grid of the Matrix—and the hallway that led to the creche. She realized that she had instinctively pushed the second-floor icon instead of the icon for the lobby
"I gotta go," she told Inchworm. Without waiting for him to answer, she logged off, then reached for the fiber-optic cable that connected her with the telecom unit and yanked it free. But just as she did, an alarm began to shrill. The elevator's control panel blinked out, and the doors froze in an open position.
Kimi's heart started to pound. Had they found out what she'd done? Were the security guards looking for her now?
She glanced up at the elevator's monitor camera but couldn't tell if it was activated or not. Uncertain what to do next, Kimi stepped quickly out into the hallway.
Then the door to the games room burst open and children spilled out, some still carrying their foam lacrosse sticks.