I wasn't sure where to go next. I don't have many connections with the city's shadowrunners—as an irregular asset for Lone Star, I work the other side of the street. But I put out the word to the few contacts I had to keep an eye out for anybody matching the description of the rigger who'd been working with the smugglers: the white guy with the tattoos.
Then I went home. Dawn was breaking, and I was exhausted. I romped with Haley for a while in the yard, working out my frustrations. At one point I bowled her over and snapped my teeth too close to her throat, making her whimper. I spent several minutes consoling her, using gentle licks to wash away her fears—and feeling guilty, once again, for having chosen Jane over her. Haley didn't appeal to me any more, except, of course, when she was in heat. Jane had engaged me on a deeper level. On a human level.
I changed back into human form, then curled up on my couch under the blanket that Jane had slept under during her all-too-brief visit to my garage. I pressed it to my nose and drank in Jane's scent, then drifted off into a dream in which I was chasing a woman along a foggy shoreline—a woman who turned to mist the moment I caught up to her.
Nearly a week after the Magical Task Force raided the freighter, I finally heard back from one of my contacts—the one I'd posted a message for, asking if he could dig up information on "spike babies" and New Dawn Medical Research. The return message was sent to Gem's telecom—the number I use as my home telecom address. Gem had printed it out for me and slipped it under the door of the garage. It was brief and to the point: meet me at the binary at 2100. d.f.
That was it. No return address—no routing codes of any kind, for that matter—and no mention of what my contact had found. But he was good, the best. He'd have some answers for me.
I jandered on down to the meeting place just before the appointed hour. The Binary is a bar, one of the quietest in Halifax. Instead of music it has soft white noise that reduces all other sounds to a whisper, and its patrons hardly ever speak to each other. Not in the real world, anyhow.
Located on University Avenue just down from the Technical University of Nova Scotia, the bar caters to decker wannabes—the university students who attend TUNS. They sit in the bar, day after night, fiberoptic cables plugged into their datajacks, surfing the Matrix on some of the hottest decks NovaTech ever produced.
The bouncer at the front door of the Binary gave me the once-over, pointedly noting my lack of data-jacks. He was a cybergeek—a scrawny-looking fellow with a stringy ponytail and mismatched clothes that smelled of old sweat—but with a body that was fitted with some of the most lethal-looking cyberware on the market. His arms were cybered from the elbow down, with retractable spurs in the elbows. A pistol was mounted on each of his oversized forearms on a gyromount, which would allow him to swivel and shoot them with a mere thought.
I nodded to him as I stepped inside, but privately scoffed at the bar's security overkill. The cybered-up bouncer was tough, but he'd be totally useless in dealing with the real threat to the patrons and staff of the Binary: black IC, whispering at the speed of light up through the fiber-optic cables the patrons used to jack into the Matrix.
The inside of the bar was filled with baglike chairs made of foam that molded to the contours of the body. The patrons—university students wearing the latest
nouveau
pauvre
fashions and glow-in-the-dark tribal body paint—drooped into these chairs, loose-boned, eyes staring, lost in the world of the Matrix.
That was how I'd be meeting my contact—in the Matrix. The Binary was a place for icon-to-icon meetings, not face to face.
I looked around for a free cyberdeck. I needed one with an electrode net interface, since my regenerative powers didn't allow me to have a datajack. The only deck available was built into a telecom set whose monitor screen was set to a news channel. I slotted my credstick into the box at the side of the telecom. The tridcast disappeared from the monitor, and was replaced by the face of a metallic-skinned android— a digital rendition of the program that served as the Binary's bartender. It asked if I wanted a drink in a voice that sounded like it was being reverbed through a tin can.
"Sure," I said. "Why not?"
The Binary makes money not only by charging for Matrix access, but also by selling "smart drinks"— herbal concoctions that supposedly boost the brain's processing power. Normally I wouldn't touch the stuff—on the two other occasions that I've been to the Binary, I came strictly for the Matrix access. But it had been a hot walk over to the bar and I was thirsty. I stabbed the icon under a greenish-looking cocktail glass with the name Neural Nectar. Then I was prompted to select a size: single or nought.
"Which one's smaller?" I asked.
Tinny laughter echoed from the monitor, as if my question was the dumbest thing the bartending program had heard in weeks.
"Never mind," I growled. I touched my finger to the "single" icon.
Within a minute, the drink was at my table: a soupy green liquid in a frosted shot glass. It smelled like grass and algae, and had a bitter aftertaste. And it had the punch of a half-dozen cups of coffee. Within a few seconds of downing the drink, it felt as if the tufts of hair on the tips of my ears were vibrating.
I set the empty glass down and fitted the trode net over my head. I waited the minute and thirty-eight seconds it took for the clock to hit precisely 21:00 hours—nine p.m. in the real world—then entered one of the private chat rooms that were the Binary's stepping-stone to the Matrix. I didn't need to bother actually surfing the Matrix; I knew my contact would find me.
My body tensed and I involuntarily bared my teeth as I found myself in the chat room I liked the least: the Roller Coaster. Logically, I knew I wasn't really moving, but my stomach lurched and my pulse sped up as the virtual roller coaster I was riding plunged down an impossibly steep track into what appeared to be a bottomless pit, then rocketed through a series of turns, corkscrews, and hills, turning the landscape around me into a blur. Everything seemed real, from the rumble and squeal of the metal wheels on the track to the smell of cotton candy that filled the air. The worst part was, you couldn't close your eyes. The sensations were being fed directly into the brain, via the electrode net that was snugged over my temples.
Finally, with one heart-freezing jolt, the roller coaster left the tracks altogether and sailed into a star-speckled black void. That was when my contact appeared in the seat beside me.
His Matrix persona was an ink-black skeleton wearing a loose black suit and a tall top hat. The skeleton's eyeballs were yellow and bloodshot, and a noose made from frayed white rope hung around his neck like a tie. He blended with the backdrop of the chat room, a shadow against the darkened sky.
"Good to see you again, Romulus," he said in a voice like velvet dust.
"Good to see you, too. How's Chester doing?"
"Just fine." He turned and grinned at me, baring teeth as shiny and black as piano keys. "Thanks to you."
My contact went by the name of Dark Father— when he was in the Matrix. In the real world he was a wealthy Toronto businessman and philanthropist, a prominent campaigner for metahuman rights in the UCAS. He'd come to Halifax in person a few months ago, searching for his estranged son. Lone Star hadn't made any headway in tracking the boy down—the fact that Dark Father's son was a ghoul hadn't exactly motivated them—and I'd been assigned to the case. I'd found the son—Chester—in record time, despite the fact that the piece of clothing from which I'd sampled the boy's scent hadn't been worn by him in years.
Sometimes you just get lucky—and wind up with one of the world's hottest deckers owing you one, as a result. I'd figured that if anyone could track down the data on spike babies, it was Dark Father. And I was right.
"What did you find?" I asked. "What's a 'spike baby'?"
Dark Father answered my question with one of his own: "Are you familiar with the theory that there are cycles of magic?"
"Sure," I said. "But just what I've seen on the tabloid trid shows—about how the level of magic in the world rises and falls over the millennia, and that the peak that resulted in the Awakening of 2011 was just one of a series of high points. And something about the last time magic reached threshold levels was maybe 5000 B.C., with a seven-thousand-year trough when magic didn't work."
"They're talking about the ambient mana count," Dark Father said. "But some people think there may have been highly localized mana spikes during those trough years. Not necessarily high enough to allow for spellcasting—although some of our 'legends' seem to indicate that magically active individuals may have been able to cast spells, in certain specific locations. But certainly high enough for the genes linked to the elven metatype to express themselves."
"So you're saying elves were being born before the Awakening?" I asked. It made me wonder if there had been shifters in earlier centuries, as well—if the legends of werewolves might be true. "What about other metatypes? And paras?"
"It's possible some paranimals might have been born in the areas where mana spikes occurred," Dark Father said. "But my sources say elves would have been the only metatype that appeared pre-Awakening. Remember that when the Awakening started producing 'unexplained genetic expression,' elves were the first metatype to appear."
"And dwarfs," I prompted.
"Yes, although I haven't heard anything to suggest that there were dwarven 'spike babies.' And the magic certainly wasn't high enough for other metatypes to appear. Even after the Awakening, the mana level was still rising. It took another ten years before 'goblinization' began—before orks and trolls began to appear."
"And ghouls?" I asked. "Were they after that?"
"Ghouls aren't a metatype," he corrected me. "We're a result of a virus: the Krieger strain of the HMHW virus, to be specific."
He sighed. "Maybe if we'd also had a genetic reason for our appearance, rather than being linked with a disease, people might have treated us like people, instead of like monsters ..."
He stared off into the star-filled sky for a moment, a pained expression on his skeletal face. I could feel for him. Dark Father was a ghoul—one who could pass for human, just as I could pass. But ghouls were even more reviled than shifters were. Shifters ate raw meat, but at least we didn't feed on our own. Ghouls were cannibals, and ate the flesh of the dead.
"So how come only some of us are born metas and paras?" I asked. "Why are there still humans?"
Dark Father turned his yellowed eyes back to meet my own. "It's in the DNA," he said. "And it's recessive. Just as some people are redheads or are left-handed, only some are metas—those that have the DNA coding for it. There is a magically triggered 'loci' on one of their chromosomes that doesn't express until the mana level has reached a certain threshold. When the level of magic does become high enough, these genes activate and begin producing enzymes that cause specific changes in the body. Two human parents living in a high-mana area suddenly produce a child with pointed ears and strangely colored eyes and hair: an elf. Or two wolves produce a cub capable of shifting into human form.
"Depending upon the superstitions of the era, the offspring is either worshipped or reviled. It may be honored as a child of the gods, or feared as the spawn of the devil."
"Which would explain why Jane bobbed her ears," I muttered to myself.
I shook my head, glad that wolves had no such prejudices. My mother had enough intelligence to be puzzled by my strange shape, but I'd still had the same scent, and still was her cub, even if I suddenly turned soft and hairless and pink, with hands instead of paws. She'd suckled me just the same, along with her other cubs.
I wondered how Jane's parents had reacted to their "changeling" child. What century
had
she been born in? Given her magical abilities, she was lucky not to have been burned at the stake as a witch.
"Is it possible for an elf born in another century— a spike baby—to still be alive today?" I asked.
"Possibly," Dark Father said. "There was a brief burst of chatter in the shadow community around that very question several years ago, back in 2054.I managed to find some data uploaded by the person who'd been in the thick of the discussion: a genetic researcher who went by the tag of Doc. She was the one who coined one of the terms you asked me to dig up information on: the 'stopwatch complex.'
"In her years spent researching the elven genome, Doc discovered a gene complex on a specific chromosome that arrests the natural decay of biological systems. She named it the 'stopwatch complex' because it seems to literally stop the clock—to halt the aging process. According to Doc, the complex was present in all metatypes but was only fully developed in elves. And it required high levels of mana to activate."
He paused to let me think that one over. "So it's possible for an elf to be ... immortal," I said slowly.
"It would appear so. But remember that this is all just conjecture. You can't believe everything you hear on the Matrix, especially in the shadow files." His eyes bored into mine. "Or can you?"
It was clear that he wanted to hear all about Jane—about the spike baby I'd uncovered. But my mind was on other things. As Mareth'riel Salvail, an employee of New Dawn Medical Research, Jane had been doing research into longevity. I'd learned that much from Crazy John. Could she have been the "Doc" who'd posted the information on the stopwatch complex to the Matrix shadow files seven years ago? If she'd compromised New Dawn's research, she must have really slotted the corporation off. She'd have needed good reason to take that risk—maybe she'd done it in retaliation for being tricked into testing a drug that accelerated aging. Which made her one of the good guys, after all.