"Konnichlwa, otamajakushi,"
Lady Death greeted the crystal child. "Who are you? Are you one of the
otaku?"'
The child looked up. Its eyes were vacant orbs of colorless glass. Perfectly formed teardrops slid down its cheeks and shattered into sparkling shards on the floor.
The child opened its mouth. "The
otaku
are trying to stop me," it said. "But I've shut them out."
"What do you mean?" Lady Death asked.
The child looked around, a lost expression in its eyes. "Soon all this will be . . . gone," it said. "It will all be over. And then my pain—and yours—will end."
Lady Death felt compassion for the child. "Perhaps I can help to ease your pain," she said softly.
"No!" Bright stars of angry red blazed behind the child's clear eyes. It backed away from her, a wary look on its face.
"You're one of them!" it said in a high-pitched voice. "You want to kill me, too. But I won't let you. I won't!"
Bursting into sudden motion, the child darted around
Lady Death. It ran away rapidly, its crystal feet clinking against the glass-block floor.
"Wait!" Lady Death called after it. She ran after the child, but its speed increased until it was no more than a blur.
Lady Death slowed, and eventually stopped.
A voice echoed back at her as the blur reached the central hub of the Fuchi system star and disappeared around the bend. "Leave me alone . . . alone . . . ALONE!"
09:50:19 PST
"Go for it!" Bloodyguts shouted. "We'll catch up when we can."
Red Wraith looked back over his shoulder. The zombie troll was smacking baseballs with his bat, sending them careening into the mechanical soldiers that surrounded them on every side. Dark Father stood beside him, his skeletal body engulfed in a swirling cloud of ash, keeping tension on a noose that was cinched tight around a dozen soldiers, tangling them in a jumbled heap. Other mechanical soldiers, their faces painted in death's-head grins, popped up and down like arcade-game figures, the rifles in their hands spitting out deadly streams of white-hot light.
Lady Death was still nowhere to be seen. Perhaps she had been prevented from accessing the grave-shaped system access node. Or perhaps her words about sticking together and harmony had been a ploy to get them to go ahead so that she could strike out on her own, unobserved, for a different node. But there was no time to wonder about that now.
Red Wraith sprinted through an opening in the soldiers' ranks. Propelling himself forward on the ghostly stubs of his legs, he leaped into the air and caught the lip of the cliff, then hauled himself up.
The system they had accessed via the graveyard was only superficially like the old Fuchi system. Instead of the single, star-shaped frosted glass block that used to represent Fuchi on the Seattle RTG, this icon was a mountain of smaller star-shaped blocks, piled one on top of the other. A metaphor, perhaps, for Fuchi's fragmentation? The peak was the only feature in this virtualscape, and so the three deckers had made it their goal. But the mountain was well defended by IC.
Rings of tin soldiers painted in garish colors stood guard on each level of the mountain. Although the soldiers themselves were antiques powered by wind-up keys, the laser guns they held were patterned after something out of a futuristic space trideo. Most of the laser beams missed Red Wraith's ghostly body. But those that struck home
hurt.
Red Wraith grimaced in pain and nearly lost his grip as a bolt of light hit his hand. Gritting his teeth, he pulled himself up onto the next level of the mountain and rolled out of the line of fire.
He rose and sprinted across the star-shaped block, then quickly hauled himself up onto the next level. Just one more to the top. He grabbed at the lip of the star and scrambled up its smooth face, leaving the battle two levels below.
What he found on the mountain's peak stopped him cold.
It was an archaic-looking cyberdeck the size of a small table. Its monitor was illuminated; the words MEMORY ACTIVATED glowed in green letters on its screen. Instead of a modern datajack or trode rig connection, the deck had a battery of fiber-optic cables that disappeared into a sensory deprivation tank emblazoned with the Fuchi logo.
Cautiously, Red Wraith opened the tank's hatch. A puff of stale air breezed across his face. Inside the tank were a number of restraining straps, a breather hose, and a catheter. A primitive-looking electrode net that had to be the cyberdeck's simsense interface hung down from the top of the tank.
"Spirits be fragged," Red Wraith mused. "This hardware is ancient. Not even an RAS override."
He glanced back at the cyberdeck. "And no keyboard, either."
There was only one way he was going to access the data on the deck, and that was by directly interfacing with this system's iconography. And that meant entering the sensory deprivation tank. That made him pause. If anything happened to him in there, he'd have to rely on Bloodyguts or Dark Father for backup. And he didn't like that. He didn't like depending on other people.
Nor did he like waiting for them. He glanced back at the other two deckers, who were still pinned down by the soldiers.
Red Wraith climbed inside and held onto a restraining strap while the gimbaled tank rocked gently underfoot. The simsense recreation of the tank was complete, right down to the oxygen hose. Gripping it in his teeth, he snugged the trode net down over his head. Then he snapped his wrists and calves into the restraints.
The door to the tank swung shut. Red Wraith found himself in utter darkness, suspended like a puppet as the restraining straps gently cinched tight. All light and sound were cut off. . . . Then he heard a gurgling sound. Warm liquid flowed into the tank, gradually soaking his legs, groin, chest, and arms. He jerked back instinctively as the water came up over his face, causing him to tumble into an upside-down position, but the continuing supply of air from the breather hose helped him to stay calm. As the water completely covered his head, he tasted salt. Then the gurgling stopped. The tank was full. He hung in place, perfectly buoyant and held steady by the straps.
The trode net activated. An image flowed into Red Wraith's mind—a crude, low-rez icon; the by-now familiar five-pointed star of what had once been a united Fuchi Industrial Electronics. Guessing that the old corporate logo was a main menu icon, Red Wraith accessed it by reaching out and "touching" its surface. The icon peeled away like a label that had lost its glue, revealing the stylized initials MS underneath. The letters were constructed out of primitive computer circuitry. Touching this icon caused it to peel away as well, revealing yet a third logo: the eagle emblem of the now-defunct United States of America.
Red Wraith persisted, touching the emblem. This time, it dissolved in a shimmer of sparkles, and his vision filled with a starscape of icons. One of them immediately caught Red Wraith's eye—not so much due to the crude graphic that showed a soldier cradling a keyboard in his arms like a rifle, but due to the text below the icon. It read: ECHO MIRAGE.
Red Wraith remembered the name from the history texts he'd scanned while taking his officer training courses. Set up originally by the security agencies of the former U.S. government, Echo Mirage was a team of "cybercommandos" who were sent into battle against the virus that caused the Matrix crash of 2029. The team was strictly a government operation, with no known links to any corporations. Red Wraith wondered what a file captioned with its name was doing on a cyberdeck within a copy of the old Fuchi system—assuming that this was an accurate copy, of course. He was starting to have his doubts.
He focused on the icon, pointed a finger, and a menu of simsense files materialized in front of him. Each bore a name.
Red Wraith chose one at random: LOUIS CHENG. Sensory data, overlaid by scrolling text, flowed into his mind.
DIAGNOSTIC SAMPLE 056, MATRIX RUN 05-28-2029
He was surrounded. He tried to hide behind the flat, smoked-glass rectangle, but the spheres formed a complete
circle around it, a chain of beads on an invisible string. Each was as smooth as a billiard ball, a solid yellow, red,
green, or blue, with a white stripe around which black letters and numbers scrolled like a marquee. Beyond the
spheres was only empty black space.
Red Wraith considered the old-fashioned iconography. The rectangle was an RTG system access node with spherical LTGs circling it. No big deal. So why did Louis Cheng find it so frightening?
They were only pretending to be LTGs. He knew what they really were. Eyeballs. Watching him. See
—
that large
dot that kept circling around the band of white on the red sphere, hidden between the letters? It was the pupil. They
were eyes, watching him, waiting for him to make a move. He tried to make himself smaller, but the rectangle didn't
hide him. Instead it reflected his image
—
reflected it out to the killer eyeballs, telling them where he was. With a
terrible dread, he realized that the mirror was talking to the eyeballs—sending them messages. And there was no
escape. That blackness
—
it went on and on, never ending. He was a tiny speck, trapped here. Any second now the
eyeballs would open their gaping mouths and devour him whole. . .
DIAGNOSIS: DELUSION. SEVERE PARANOIA COMBINED WITH PHOBIA. TREATMENT RECOMMENDATION:
TREAT SUBJECT LOUIS CHENG WITH POSITIVE RESPONSE CONDITIONING PROGRAM POSCON 1.2 TO RESTORE NEUTRAI RESPONSE TO NON-THREAT ICONS.
Another notation followed:
TREATMENT TERMINATED WHEN SUBJECT EXPIRED.
Red Wraith was returned to the sub-menu. He chose another simsense file: PAULA WEBBER.
DIAGNOSTIC SAMPLE 127, MATRIX RUN 06-02-2030
She hung over the city, an invisible figure in the darkness. Below her, neon lines of brilliant orange formed a
rectangular grid. Tiny objects moved along them
—
automobiles filled with tiny, antlike people. She could crush any
of them at a whim, but she chose not to. For she was a benevolent goddess and they were her constructs. She had
created all of this
—
the streets, the glowing pyramids and rectangles that were the city's buildings and the heavens
above in which she floated. So all-powerful was she that she had even created herself.
Red Wraith recognized the grid of the New York RTG. It had grown tremendously over the three decades since this recording was made—looking at this earlier version was like looking at an old fashioned two-dimensional holo-pic of the city. So Paula Webber thought she had created it, did she?
It was time to begin seeding. She executed an upload command and began tossing fragmented bits of an
encryption program down onto the landscape below. The numbers and characters fluttered down to the neon
streets, landing with soft splashes of light as they scrambled random pieces of data. She smiled, waiting to see what
would happen next. The act of creation always produced surprises.
A dragon appeared in the sky next to her. It was immense but rather crudely programmed, with rough red
scales and wings whose edges were blurred. Its eyes strobed a virulent green. The dragon's head reared back on a
serpentine neck as it opened its wide mouth and emitted a stream of glowing green fire. The super-hot breath
engulfed her, melting the skin from her bones.
"And then there was light," she said dreamily as consciousness dissolved in a searing wash of pain.
All iconography and sensation disappeared.
Red Wraith twisted violently away. Then the restraining straps of the sensory deprivation chamber rotated him smoothly into an upright position. Paula Webber was crazy. Even a newbie decker should have recognized this primitive version of Fuchi's classic Dragon Flame, one of the earliest forms of black IC to hit the Matrix. She should have tried to evade it or shield herself from its lethal effects.
But then Red Wraith remembered the year from which the sample was taken. In 2030, Dragon Flame had yet to be released. Hell, Fuchi's commercial
cyberdeck,
the CDT-1000, wasn't even marketed yet, and the Fuchi Americas division did not yet exist, since the corporation had yet to expand into North America. In 2030, the dragon-shaped icon that had just fried Paula Webber would still have been an experimental program—someone else's program. Had he just experienced a recording of the first decker to die by black IC?
The text that scrolled across the all-black field confirmed Red Wraith's guess.
DIAGNOSIS: GRANDIOSE DELUSION. LOOSE THOUGHT ASSOCIATION COMBINED WITH COMPLETE LACK OF FEAR RESPONSE TO THREATENING ICONOGRAPHY. TREATMENT RECOMMENDATION: NONE. VITAI SIGNS OF SUBJECT PAULA WEBBER HAVE TERMINATED.
After mentally bracing himself, Red Wraith randomly sampled four more simsense files. Although the imagery and emotions differed, the files themselves followed a standard format. The "subjects"—presumably the poor fraggers who had volunteered for Echo Mirage—experienced irrational reactions to the Matrix iconography, ranging from utter despair and indifference to frenzied rage. Some suffered compulsions that caused them to execute the same utility over and over again, while others experienced simultaneous and conflicting emotions such as a mixture of love and hate, or fear and desire. In each case the file ended with a diagnosis: autism, altered perception/reaction syndrome, mood disturbances, ambivalence . . . And with a recommended treatment, which was a computer program of some sort.