"I need your help," he said quickly. "I'm trapped here—I can't log off. Tell the sysop of whatever system this is to check on something that's gone wrong.
Really
fraggin' wrong . . ."
All at once, the angel hanging in the air next to Bloodyguts changed. Like a card being flipped over it turned end over end, revealing an image on the reverse. The persona it had transformed into was just as cliched as the angel had been—a devil with horns, goatee, and pitchfork. His expression was demonic in the extreme. Reversing the pitch-fork, he aimed its three barbed ends at his own chest, then plunged the weapon home. The mirror—for that's what the two-sided persona icon had indeed been—fragmented into thousands of pieces. Bloodyguts heard a woman's voice screaming as the shards tumbled to the plane of the virtual-scape far below, splashing into it and then blending into the floor as if they were made of liquid mercury.
Like dominos, each of the other personas also reversed itself. The Azzie priest became a snake-headed monster dressed in a bone skirt that sank its fangs into its own arm; the saffron-robed priest turned into a leering Tibetan demon who stank of offal and who tore deep furrows in his own flesh with long fingernails; the blue-skinned elf woman into a hooded snake that wrapped strangling coils around her neck; and the Rastafarian into a figure in the costume of an Egyptian pharaoh who flogged his back with a barbed whip. Each shattered into mirrored fragments in turn and fell screaming to the plain below, which absorbed the shards into its rippled surface and then became smooth again.
As the last persona icon fragmented, Bloodyguts tried to catch one of its shards. The mirrored glass sliced open his hand. The wound burned like fire for a moment, but in the instant before his hand healed itself, Bloodyguts received a brief burst of unencrypted paydata from the data log of the Rastafarian's cyberdeck. The decker had been accessing a slave node that controlled a robotic assembler in an aircraft manufacturing plant in Puyallup. He had been trying to find out why it had suddenly run amok while the rest of the plant continued operating normally. The decker had activated an analyze utility just before his persona crashed, and it had come up with the source of the glitch: a cluster of LTG addresses within the Seattle regional telecommunications grid.
The data that represented those addresses was degrading. Already the addresses had shrunk from more than one hundred in number to less than a dozen. Bloodyguts had to do something—and fraggin' fast.
He jammed the data plug of the fiber-optic cable he held into one of the bullet holes in his chest. He felt a brief burst of pain, then threw his mind out through the connection in an effort to log onto the last of those addresses. He felt his consciousness squirm through the cable together with the other maggot-bits of data, toward a hexagonal coffin. Inside it was a child, curled in a fetal position, thumb jammed in mouth. The child looked up, saw Bloodyguts streaming down at the speed of thought. . .
And slammed the coffin lid closed.
Bloodyguts smashed into its polished glass surface like a bird striking a window. He reeled back, barely retaining consciousness. For an endless second he hung in an empty void. Then sparkles of light danced around him—fragments of a mirror. As they spun, they reflected his darker side—an image of his meat bod. Of Yograj Lutter, the brainburner. Bloodyguts could see that shards of mirror were embedded in his head. The chipped-out addict in the reflections gave Bloodyguts a sloppy grin, then jammed another fragment of mirror into his scalp. Cold pain slid into Bloodyguts' own mind like an icicle into warm flesh. Screaming, he balled a huge fist and smacked it into the nearest reflection of himself.
His fist punched home with the snick of a data plug finding its jackpoint.
He connected with . . .
H . . . O . . . I . . . !
Bloodyguts hung from one hand on the wall of skulls. His other hand—his fist—had punched through one of the skulls and was buried inside it. Blood seeped from cuts on his wrist, flowing down his arm, then
up
his neck and into his right eye. He tried to blink but could not clear the blood away—and wiping his eye would have meant removing one of his hands from the wall. Since his full weight was suspended from them, his feet hanging free, he didn't dare try.
The gutter slang word for hello with its exclamation mark—HOI!—had appeared slowly, one letter at a time. It remained projected on his right eyelid whenever he blinked. He closed both eyes and the simple, printed text hung in place, refusing to be dislodged no matter how much he rolled his eyes around behind closed lids. His right eyelid was like an antique monitor whose screen had projected the same image long enough to have burned a ghostly pattern on the screen.
Questions raced through his mind. Was the greeting from another decker? And where were they? Who were they?
P. . . I. . . P.
The word was burned into his inner eyelid, just as the greeting it replaced had been. Pip? Who or what the frag was a
pip?
Was that some sort of Japanese word, like
otaku ?
NOT
OTAKU.
YET.
Not yet
otaku!
This was obviously someone who knew about the experiment. Perhaps even the sysop or programmer behind it.
"Where are you?" Bloodyguts asked out loud. "Can you access this node?"
ONLY BY TORTIS. AND IT WUZ HARD. KEP GETTING DUMPED.
The words appeared at a painfully slow pace, one letter at a time. Judging by the rate of transmission, a keyboard was being used. If this was the sysop, he or she wasn't a very good speller—or else was typing madly in the meat-world, unwilling to correct a mistake when seconds within the Matrix counted for so much.
"Can you help me log off?" Bloodyguts asked.
NO.
"Can anyone else help me?"
The answer was even slower in coming this time, as if the other decker were considering the question.
MAYBE GRATE SPIRIT.
What the frag? Spirits were part of the natural world.
They couldn't enter the Matrix—and wouldn't survive inside it if they could.
Perhaps there was another way out. "What is deep resonance?" Bloodyguts asked. "Can it help me to perform a graceful log off?"
For a moment, Bloodyguts thought the connection had been broken. But he could still feel the slide of blood flowing up his arm and the tickle of it creeping under his right eyelid, drop by drop like reverse tears.
EVERYWUN WUZ DEEPRESONUNS. SOMETHING WENT RONG.
"Can the
otaku
still experience deep resonance? Were they the ones behind the experiment?"
NO. YES.
"Without our permission? Why?"
WUZ GOOD FOR YOU.
Anger burned in his gut. He'd make his own decisions about modifications to his wetware, thank you very fragging much.
"Can the
otaku
repair whatever the frag went wrong?"
DUNNO. TELL US MO—
Bloodyguts howled in pain as the jaw of the skull began to move. Its teeth ground against his balled fist, turning it to hamburger. He could feel the bones splinter and his fingers popped like squashed sausages. The pain was unbearable, excruciating. . .
Swearing, he yanked his hand free. The pain stopped, and he saw that he had been tricked. The hand of his persona was still whole. But whether his meat-bod hand still functioned—or was a squashed mess, or even gangrenous—was impossible to tell.
The skull he had punched had repaired itself. Realizing that he had lost his only contact with the outside world, Bloodyguts slammed his fist back into it. But his hand hit what felt like concrete. The skull did not give. And in all of his thrashing, as he hung from the wall one-handed, the fiber-optic cable that he had plugged into his chest had fallen free. It hung below him, spewing out blurps of maggots.
Then the skull in which his fingers were wedged blinked, ejecting them.
Bloodyguts fell through space. As he raced down toward the mirrored floor of the virtualscape, his reflected image flew "up" to meet him from its depths. He wondered if he would shatter into pieces when he hit. . .
09:51:13 PST
Seattle
, United Canadian and
Ansen had tried everything he could think of. He'd plugged in his spare VR goggles and sensor board, changed the fiber-optic cables, checked all the ports, and run a diagnostics test on the deck's utilities. Now he had the case off the deck and was arm-deep in the Vista's hardware. He checked each of the computer's MPCP optical chips but didn't see any signs of damage. There was none of the burned-plastic smell associated with a chip burned by gray IC, and under a magnifying scope the complex tracery of molecular circuitry didn't show any signs of fusing.
Even so, he popped out the four chips that were the heart of the MPCP and replaced them. Then he began the task of rebooting the persona programs, one by one. He drummed his fingers on the frayed denim of his jeans as the seconds ticked away, then executed the deck's self-diagnostics check. And smiled, as the sensor board came back to life, its panel fully illuminated. The problem must have been with the MPCP, after all.
"Well, kitty," he said to the purple kitten that sat beside him on the futon, its head butting against his thigh as its sensors homed in on the warmth of his body. "Wish me luck."
He yanked the data gloves back on, snugged the VR goggles over his eyes, and made a dialing motion with his right index finger. This time, he'd try visiting a different LTG and would stay away from the one that gave access to the U-dub system. The IC that had crashed his deck was probably confined to a single SAN—hopefully not the one he used to access the Matrix itself. But he wouldn't know for sure until he tried to log on . . .
Ansen resisted the urge to cross his fingers. It would only screw up the data glove's signal.
"I'm in!" he crowed with delight as the wrapscreen of the goggles flared to life. But the image they projected was not the familiar checkerboard of the Seattle RTG. Instead he floated in a field of black that was splattered with blood-red stars. Drops of red liquid fell on the outstretched arms of his persona, and before him hung a disembodied face that was twisted in a mask of terror. One eye was an empty socket that wept black tears; the other had
a
pupil shaped like a fly. Worms writhed where there should be hair, and the lips were stitched crudely together with coarse black thread. Ansen didn't even want to think about what this icon would smell like to someone whose deck included ASIST circuitry.
Then the lips came apart with a shuddering tear as the face began to scream . . .
The agonizing wail was still echoing in Ansen's mind as he tore the goggles away from his face. Just as it had before, when he had confronted the mist-filled tunnel icon, the system had dumped him. The goggles were dead, their speakers silent.
Had Ansen turned to look behind him at the flatscreen monitor that served as his apartment's "window" on the world outside, he would have seen an image similar to the one he'd just seen on-line. Down on the street below his building, a woman in a tailored skirt and jacket staggered down the sidewalk, her face twisted in agony and her hands clenched in her hair. Oblivious to the traffic that surged past her, she turned suddenly on her heel and ran out into the street
The window did not show what happened next, for the woman had disappeared into the gray static that obscured the center of the display. But the traffic came to an abrupt halt, and in another moment drivers closest to the blank space were spilling out of their vehicles with grim looks on their faces.
Ansen, bent over his deck, was oblivious to the drama that was unfolding on the wall screen behind him.
He frowned down at the Vista, trying to puzzle out what had gone wrong. The sensor board still glowed with life. And the flatscreen display was active. But all background color had been leached from the screen, leaving it a blinding white.
Across this blank field scrolled blocky red letters. The same message repeated itself, refusing to clear no matter what commands Ansen executed with his data gloves.
ACCESS DENIED. LEAVE ME ALONE. GO AWAY.
Ansen frowned. The first part of the message made sense. Some glitch in his deck was routing him somewhere strange, then dumping him before he could log on to any system. He thanked the spirits that he didn't have a direct neural interface; suffering dump shock twice in one day would have given him a serious skull ache, for sure. But the second part of the message made no sense. Who was "me"?
It was starting to sound like his deck had picked up a virus. And the only way to be rid of a virus was to replace every meg of memory in the Vista. To re-slot every single chip.
Ansen sighed. He wished he knew another decker well enough to call on the telecom unit at the end of the hall.
Brother Data would be able to tell him what to do. Or Digital Dawg or Sysop Sarah. But he was used to interfacing with them only over the chat stations of the Matrix. He didn't even know their real names, let alone their telecom numbers.
Grabbing his tools, he began to replace the optical chips that made up his deck's active and storage memory banks.
09:52:05 PST