But then why had Daniel been carrying Lydia's holopic with him the day his UCAS handlers tried to slag him with the cranial bomb? A month had passed between his last assassination, which he'd carried out in Greece, and the detonation of the cranial bomb at the back of his skull. Why had he taken a holopic that would incriminate him, carrying it all the way to Amsterdam? Lydia had to have been
someone
he cared about. Didn't she?
There was one way to find out, but he wondered if he was too much of a coward to try it. Back in the sensory deprivation tank, when he was scanning the psychotropic conditioning programs and quickly surfing through the synopses of several of them, he'd noticed one that was intended to treat cyberpsychosis-induced amnesia. Could it also repair the gaps in his memory that the datasoft link had deliberately created?
He didn't like the thought of placing his wetware in the hands of untested technology—particularly a copy of a decades-old experimental software program. But what the hell. He was already trapped inside the Matrix with a crazed Al, cut off from his meat bod, and about to go down with that AI when it crashed. If the last seven years of effort really had been all for nothing, then he had nothing left to lose.
INTRUDER ALERT
CODE GREEN RESPONSE
PASSWORD VERIFIED
ALERT CANCELED
ACCESS TO U.S. GOVERNMENT DATABASE GRANTED
RUN PROGRAM "NEURO BRIDGE"
PROGRAM COMPLETE
RUN TEST
Subject Daniel George Bogdanovich reacts to the icon with a mixture of involuntary physiological responses. Heart rate and perspiration have increased, and blood flow and muscle contraction in the groin indicates a strong *sexual response.* At the same time, the subject experiences a variety of emotions: 'love* for the icon, *pain* at the realization that the female human represented by the icon is no longer accessible, and *happiness* that she is no longer accessible.
LOGIC ERROR
EXECUTE OPERATION: UPLOAD DATA
"Lydia!"
She sat across the table from him, holding a bitter espresso that had been sweetened with a generous spoonful of sugar. For the first time, they were meeting without "chaperones." At Daniel's insistence, Lydia Riis had ditched the two bodyguards that normally accompanied her everywhere, and had come to the cafe alone. Sweet-smelling hash smoke curled through the air overhead, and the voices of the other customers in the tiny cafe were a blend of Dutch, English, and German.
The holopic of herself that she'd just given him lay forgotten on the table between them.
Lydia had deliberately dressed down and was wearing baggy hemp-fiber pants and a white tank top that showed off her tan. Her long auburn hair was tucked under a white beret. She worked out regularly and had an athlete's body to show for it, with long legs, narrow waist, and small breasts. Her green eyes stared at him over her Vashon Island sunglasses, which she'd let slide down her nose, with a mixture of shock and mistrust. It was the same look she'd given him when he'd told her he loved her and wanted to marry her—and that he'd come to the cafe to kill her.
Except that this wasn't really Lydia.
Red Wraith looked down at his red, ghostlike arms and hands. The Amsterdam cafe was precisely detailed, as was Lydia—down to the tiny mole on her left shoulder. But this wasn't reality. This was a Matrix construct. A simsense, drawn from his own mind, his own memories. Not those of the Greek finance minister, or of any of his other targets. His own.
Red Wraith knew, now, who Lydia was—and what she had been to him: a target for assassination. She was a top-level researcher with the Military Technology division of the Saeder-Krupp Corporation.
His UCAS handlers had given him a different kind of assignment, this time. Instead of impersonating the individual he was to assassinate and using that as a means of access to that person's home or workplace, he had assumed the identity of one of Lydia's former lovers from many years ago—a man with whom she had lost touch but for whom she still cared. What that man's fate had been, Daniel neither knew nor cared. All that mattered was that the datasofts and activesofts he'd slotted made Daniel a carbon copy of the fellow.
Right down to the fact that he loved Lydia.
Daniel had done the unthinkable: revealed himself as a UCAS assassin and warned Lydia to disappear completely or face the prospect of being targeted by other, less amorously inclined killers. To change her identity, to vanish. And to never contact him again. Because by the time she next saw him, his handlers would have made sure that they'd erased the glitch in his headware that had allowed him to fall in love with her.
Then he'd walked out of the cafe and out of her life, the holopic of Lydia clutched in his hand.
The UCAS must have been monitoring him. That very afternoon, they'd detonated the cranial bomb in his skull.
Whether or not they'd succeeded in killing Lydia was another question.
I'm not dead, Daniel. I'm alive. Don't you want to see me again ?
Red Wraith stared at Lydia. No—at the icon that wore Lydia's face and body.
"Yes," he told the Al. "More than anything. And no. If I met Lydia again, I might kill her, if the last personality I slotted ever glitches and I stop loving her. So I don't know."
The AI immediately picked up on the switch in pro-nouns.
You are expressing two contradictory states of being at
once, "yes* and "no" are absolutes. Like binary code, they are opposites, polarities.
On/off.
Existence/non-existence. You have to choose between them.
"No, I don't." Red Wraith gave a bitter laugh. "That's why humans invented the word 'maybe.' So we didn't have to choose between absolutes. Or isn't that word in your vocabulary?"
Maybe: possibly; perhaps. Short for It may be . . .
After a millisecond-long pause, the AI continued.
So I don't have to choose? I can
—
"You said Lydia was still alive."
It may be.
Anger rose like bile in Red Wraith's throat. "You fragger. You've got null data on Lydia, except the memories you uploaded from my own mind, and you know it. You were just saying she was alive to test my emotional response."
I
want to understand the logic error. Lydia was your target. She was to be
—
crashed—just as all of your other
targets were. What made her different?
"I didn't want her to die."
Why not?
How could he explain emotion to an artificial Matrix construct that had never experienced it? He tried his best to explain: "It would have caused me pain. I didn't want her to 'crash.' I wanted her to continue . . . functioning. I loved her."
Were your other targets also *loved* by someone?
Red Wraith shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe. I suppose so."
Did crashing them cause pain to those who "loved* them ?
"I suppose so."
Red Wraith wanted to argue that their deaths had been for the greater good—that the assassinations he had carried out had led to increased political stability and had made Europe a safer place as a result. Hell, his assassinations might even have saved lives. But if even one person went through the anguish that he'd felt after losing Lydia, did the scales really balance?
For the first time in his life, he felt a stab of remorse for what he had done—what he had been. Yet he tempered it with the knowledge that he was no longer an assassin, and that he had spared Lydia's life. That she was still alive.
Maybe.
If he did want to continue trying to track her down, he at least had a starting point now: Saeder-Krupp. But that wasn't a decision he had to make right now. It could wait until he'd escaped this pocket universe.
Just as he was pondering whether to rejoin the others or try to find a way to log off on his own, the patrons in the cafe began to blink out.
"What's happening?" he asked the Al.
This program is shutting down. All programs currently running are being terminated. All files are being closed.
Realization dawned. "You're crashing yourself?"
Yes.
"But the shock of being dumped from an ultraviolet host could kill—crash—me too. And everyone else who's trapped in this pocket of the Seattle RTG!"
It is for the greater good.
"No, it's not!" Red Wraith shouted. "We'll all die!"
That. . . may be.
"Spirits be fragged," Red Wraith whispered. Then the lights in the cafe went out.
09:56:13 PST
Bloodyguts batted away the moths that fluttered in front of his face. Then he hoisted himself out of the hole, his hands sinking into something soft and wet. Clear liquid soaked his knee as he knelt on the edge of the hole and then levered himself up onto a jelly-like, quivering surface.
He stood on a gigantic eyeball that stared blindly up into a black void. Its pupil was the manhole he'd just crawled out of; Bloodyguts was a mere centimeter or two high, when measured against the scale of the body. It lay stretched out on its back, a glowing grid of datastreams seeming to hold it down like a coarse mesh net. Yet there was nothing to hold the body to; it floated in the inky void, an island unto itself.
The body itself was that of a naked child, its gender not apparent from Bloodyguts' vantage point. Completely hairless, the child had neither eyebrows nor eyelashes. The arms and legs were round and smooth as sausages, and the belly bloated as if filled with gas. The smell of putrefaction hung in the air, making Bloodyguts wince and pinch his nostrils shut. The odor lessened somewhat, but it still made Bloodyguts want to gag.
He'd found his way here from the dilapidated street he'd followed to the edge of the Seattle LTG. While retracing his route, he'd noticed an octagonal manhole in the center of the street. He'd nearly passed it by—until he saw the logo embossed on its rusted iron surface: the eagle-and-arrows logo of the former United States. He'd only glanced at it a moment—just long enough to wonder if the octagon really did represent a CPU—but in that instant he'd felt a warm, happy glow. And he'd recognized that he was being subliminally manipulated by a psychotropic effect.
Bloodyguts knew all about positive conditioning. Developed by the corps to ensure employee loyalty and customer "satisfaction," it was a big part of what made illegal BTL chips so addictive. Eventually the user could only feel good in the presence of certain images, certain icons. Without them, he felt emotionally flat, all fragged up.
Normally, the Matrix was filled with icons—they were used for everything from prettying up a signature at the end of a file to signposts that pointed the way to a corporate system to the framework of a system icon itself. But since he and the others had been trapped here by the Al, Bloodyguts had only seen one other icon—the Fuchi star on the bone of data that Dark Father's smart frame had uncovered. He'd felt a hint of the warm fuzzies then, too. But he hadn't realized why until Lady Death told the rest of them of the file she and Dark Father had uncovered—the one that told the history of the AI's incubation in the Fuchi system computers, after the corp had acquired the Psychotrope program from Matrix Systems.
It seemed the original program had been altered by Fuchi's programmers to include code that caused users—and ultimately the AI itself—to react positively to Fuchi's logo. That positive conditioning seemed to have been a part of the original program, since the AI also induced a happy glow in the presence of the "logo" of the government that had originally funded the Echo Mirage project. Unable to delete those icons, the AI had left them in place, even when they flagged incriminating pieces of data—or important nodes.
Like the manhole.
After climbing down into the icon-flagged manhole, Bloodyguts had followed a twisting maze of tunnels for nearly two minutes—an eternity in the vastly compressed time frame of the Matrix. He'd hoped they would allow him to access some key element of the AI's programming, so that he could try and start sorting out its core code from the virus. Maybe then he could use a disinfect utility in an attempt to heal the Al.
The tunnel had led him here. But he was fragged if he could understand what this corpse represented.
His peripheral vision registered movement. So slowly as to be almost imperceptible, the eyelid was closing.
Bloodyguts backed away, his feet squelching against the surface of the eyeball. It compressed slightly, and as he stepped off onto the cheek, a putrid-smelling tear pooled at the corner of the eye and ran away down the side of the face.
Bloodyguts stared down at the chest of the corpse, and saw that it too was moving. Like the motion of the eyelid, its rise and fall was so slow as to go unnoticed by a casual glance.
He walked to the nose, knelt, and held a hand in front of one nostril. A barely perceptible breeze warmed his fingers. The corpse was still breathing.
It was alive.
But not for long. Even as Bloodyguts knelt there, the breathing stopped. As the final breath was exhaled, a tiny gray moth fluttered from the nostril and landed on the back of Bloodyguts' hand. At the same time, a child's voice issued from the parted but unmoving lips.