Hitomi's father shook his head in disbelief. "But why—"
"My—associates—are conducting their own research into HMHVV," the vampire answered. "Your so-called
'vaccine' will be useful to them."
"Never. There is no agreement."
"In that case," Shinanai said slowly, "I will reveal the terms of our agreement to the press. How much face do you think you will lose, when the public learns that you used your own daughter in this way? How much trust will they put in a corporation whose CEO shows so little regard for his own flesh and blood? And bear in mind my stature as a singer. The public will believe me and side with me. Especially when they see the trideo."
Hitomi's father considered for only an instant. "Very well," he said. "We have an agreement. I will arrange for a courier to bring the vaccine to you."
As the
aidoru
and her father began to work out the details, a wintry bleakness invaded Hitomi's soul. Her own father had tested an experimental drug on her, without her permission. He had used her, like any of the other multitude of assets at his disposal. And Shinanai—the person Hitomi had poured out her heart to and had thought her soul mate and one true love—had been a part of it.
Shinanai. Despite what Hitomi had just heard, she loved the
aidoru
still. . .
No! It was all part of the vampire's magic, a distant fragment that was her logical mind cried out in anguish. Not love.
Shinanai hadn't loved her after all! And neither had Hitomi's father.
Grief and anger settled upon Hitomi like heavy wet robes, each equally stifling. Without thinking, acting purely on emotion, she stabbed the key that would activate the commlink utility and allow her to cut into the telecom call.
"I hate you!" she cried. "I hate you both! You are not worthy of my love!"
Her father stared at her in shocked surprise.
Shinanai began to laugh.
The connection was suddenly broken. The monitor screen of her cyberterminal went blank.
Hitomi slumped over the keyboard, washing it with her tears. Shinanai didn't care. Her beloved
aidoru
didn't love her after all.
Hitomi was still in that position when the attendants came and removed the cyberterminal from her lap. So numb was she, so filled with grief, that she barely noticed when her father appeared with a mage in tow.
"Erase her memory," he told the magician curtly.
The mage looked startled. "All of it? But that would leave her a vegetable."
"No." Hitomi's father consulted his watch. "Just the past hour. That should be sufficient."
The mage went to work.
Hitomi hadn't even resisted as they used magic to wipe that last, painful memory of Shinanai from her mind. She felt it leave her, piece by piece, like cherry blossoms blown from a tree by an early winter wind.
When it was over, she looked up and saw her father smiling down at her.
"Father," she cried. "It is so good to see you. Look! I've walked to the lounge on my own."
Something was missing. Something that had sat in her lap, just a moment ago . . .
But Hitomi couldn't remember what that might have been. And so she returned her father's smile, knowing that one day she would have the strength to walk out of the arcology, to run away to Shinanai's loving embrace once more. . .
Lady Death lay on the ground, her grief and exhaustion too overwhelming even for tears. She was numb. Cold to her core. She wanted only to die.
But you rejected death before. When I placed you in the training loop, after your transformation, you pulled away
from my embrace, even though I had just given you a most wonderful gift. You were afraid of death, then. But now
you would welcome it. Why have you changed your mind about continuing to exist?
Lady Death looked up at the icon that wore Shinanai's face and body. The face was pale, cold, the blue paint on the cheeks giving the features a chilling indifference that she had never noticed before.
"You betrayed me," she told the false Shinanai. "You and Father both. I thought you loved me."
This emotion is a powerful one. What do you call it?
Lady Death uttered a bitter laugh. "Despair. Grief. Loss."
And it causes you to want to initiate a complete shutdown?
"Hai."
You are fortunate. This sequence is initiating now.
"Good."
Lady Death closed her eyes, let her head sag back down onto her arms, and waited for death to end her pain.
09:55:52 PST
The medics ran into the hospital tent, carrying a severed arm on a stretcher. The hand was still twitching; with each reflexive clench of the fingers, blood spurted from the stump that had once been attached to the shoulder. It soaked through the canvas of the stretcher and dripped onto the floor.
"Move it!" one of the surgeons in white shouted. "We're losing data! Let's get that packet on the table on the double."
The medics—both wearing uniforms with UCAS Armed Forces shoulder flashes, tipped the arm onto the operating table. Bright lights illuminated the scene as three surgeons restitched the arm to the torso. Using surgical thread that glowed like hair-thin, flexible neon tubing, they stitched one pixel to the next, working so quickly that their gloved hands were a blur. They moved in perfect unison—somehow each of the three was able to perform surgery simultaneously, without ever getting in the way of the other two.
Red Wraith watched nervously as the surgeons reconstructed the naked body of Daniel Bogdanovich. The icon, in the shape of his meat bod, represented the personnel file Red Wraith had downloaded from the UCAS SEACOM datastore. It contained all his personal data—including, he hoped, information that would give him a starting point in his search for Lydia, the wife he had not seen in seven long years.
The medics, the doctors, and the tent itself were all part of a Mobile Application Surgical Hypertext (MASH) repair program. Developed by UCAS, it was designed to restore datafiles and utilities that would otherwise be lost when optical code chips were damaged in cybercombat. The program used smart frames to retrieve individual packets of code from the damaged chip. They were routed here to the host system, where they went through a virus-scanning and error-checking sequence. The packets were then reassembled into their original form—or as close a copy as possible. Then the datafiles, applications, or utilities were uploaded back to the deck's active memory, where they could be accessed once more by the decker.
Because Red Wraith was trapped within the Matrix, the MASH program was his only hope of reading the personnel file he'd fought so hard to download. He'd temporarily abandoned his attempts at escaping this system or logging off altogether—his frustration around whether or not the personnel file was still intact wouldn't let him rest until he'd done everything he could to access it online, first. And the MASH program was the perfect tool for the job.
It fit the death imagery of this sculpted system, and so should run here without a glitch.
He'd accessed the program via the UCAS SEACOM system he had decked his way into earlier. He hadn't been surprised to find the system—or rather, a modified copy of it—on this pocket universe. Whatever had constructed this backwater of virtual reality—Red Wraith had at last reluctantly accepted the fact that it really
was
an artificial intelligence—had incorporated artifact copies of every system on the Seattle RTG. The copied hosts and systems were incomplete, with large chunks of iconography missing and gaping holes where data had been left out of the upload. But many of the links to the firmware chips on the CPUs of those hosts were still in place, providing access to the programs those chips contained. Like the MASH repair utility, for example.
Red Wraith glanced at his time-keeping log. The time for his rendezvous with Dark Father, Lady Death, Bloodyguts, and Anubis had already come and gone. But what were a couple of seconds, more or less? Especially when so much was at stake.
He still couldn't figure out why he had been unable to access his own deck's storage memory. Logically, he must still be jacked into his cyberdeck, since he was still able to run the Matrix and use his deck's utilities. He supposed that something had gone wrong when he'd downloaded the personnel file from UCAS SEACOM. He thought he'd defused the data bomb that had been attached to the file, but perhaps there had been more to the intrusion countermeasure than he'd thought. He suspected that some hidden, viruslike component of the data bomb had glitched the operating system of his deck, making it impossible to read or upload from its storage memory.
The MASH program, however, seemed to be getting around this. It was bypassing the IC, just as it should. Red Wraith smiled. There was nothing so satisfying as turning the "enemy's" own forces against one another.
The deckers who served with the UCAS Armed Forces, defending its military datastores, used cyberdecks that bore an MPCP signature that identified them as "friendlies" whenever they logged onto a UCAS host or system. The programs and utilities they slotted were also marked with the virtual equivalent of a military shoulder flash. By using MASH, rather than one of his own customized utilities, Red Wraith was bypassing the UCAS IC that was blocking the interface with his storage memory.
Already the program had retrieved most of the file; the torso, arms, and one leg had been sewn together, and the other leg was complete down to the ankle. Only one foot and the head remained unaccounted for . . .
The medics pushed in through the tent flap, carrying the missing foot on the stretcher. Just as they had before, the surgeons shouted and beckoned the smart frames over to the operating table. They readied their clamps and needles, bent over the body . . .
The operating room lights went out.
"Drek!" Uncertain what had happened, Red Wraith fumbled around in the sudden darkness. He found the operating table by feel and pushed past the surgeons, who were frozen in place. Even as he shouldered a way through them he felt them dissolve. At the same time the sides of the tent began to fold up into the tent ceiling like Venetian blinds, revealing the glowing streaks of tracer bullets cutting through the thick, dark night and letting in the sound of gunfire. The MASH program was shutting down! And his personnel file was still incomplete. But even though key parts of it were missing, the copy of it that lay partially assembled on the operating table might very well be the only copy that would ever be available to him . . .
Red Wraith did the only thing he could think of. He activated his evaluate utility, which he had previously programmed to search for any text that contained Lydia's name. Then he dove onto the table, letting his own wraith-like body merge with the naked corpse in an effort to read the file. It was a creepy feeling; the body was already starting to dissolve into individual pixels. Red Wraith could literally feel himself crumbling to pieces . . .
Data streamed through his mind.
>NAME: DANIEL GEORGE BOGDANOVICH
>D.O.B.: 03/10/2019
>RANK: CAPTAIN, UCAS ARMED FORCES
>TRADE: ADMIN CLERK
Red Wraith laughed out loud at that one. An administration clerk was a paper-pusher. The only thing Daniel Bogdanovich had ever "administered" was a lethal injection.
>ENLISTED: 12/23/2038
>DISCHARGED: 05/13/2052
Red Wraith laughed grimly a second time. Discharged? "Killed in action by friendly fire" would have been more accurate. At least he wasn't listed as being given a dishonorable discharge. Lydia would still be entitled to his military service pension.
>CURRENT ADDRESS: UNKNOWN
>MARITAI STATUS AT TIME OF DISCHARGE: SINGLE
>NEXT OF KIN: NONE
>SERVICE RECOR—
The data suddenly stopped scrolling through Red Wraith's consciousness as the operating table below him also vanished. He drifted now above a shell-pocked battlefield that was crisscrossed with the glowing trails of tracer bullets—the UCAS SEACOM system and its datastreams, edited by the AI to match the central metaphor of this pocket universe. The personnel file had lost cohesion, had broken apart entirely as the MASH utility completed its shutdown. It was gone.
A pathologist in a bloodstained white lab coat appeared in the air beside Red Wraith. The evaluate utility handed him an autopsy report. Red Wraith scanned it quickly, his anxiety growing as he read its text. The utility hadn't found the keyword "Lydia" in his personnel file a single time. Not once. She wasn't listed anywhere as Red Wraith's common-law spouse or next of kin.
Red Wraith released the autopsy and watched both it and the pathologist disappear—along with his hope. Would the UCAS military have deliberately deleted any mention of Lydia from his file, in order to protect her? Or—and the thought sent a shiver of dread through him—had she died long ago, been erased from his personnel file? Had the memory of her death been wiped from his mind, just as the memory of his previous missions had?
Then an even more chilling thought occurred to him. Perhaps he had been wrong about everything.
Had he ever had a wife or girlfriend named Lydia? Or had the memory of her not been Daniel's at all, but that of one of his targets? The last chip he'd slotted into the data-soft link in his skull had contained the personal data of his final target: the Greek minister of finance whose throat Daniel had slashed. Had Lydia been
his
wife?