Asimov's Science Fiction: February 2014 (9 page)

The man vanished in an even larger puff of smoke. Oxford tried to wave the air clear. "Is the smoke really necessary?"

Cassandra frowned. "Luke likes his theatrical touches."

"And he'll show up any time I ask for the—the thing?"

"Someone will," she said. "As Luke mentioned, it's not a prison."

"And then they pull the plug and dump my jellied brain down the toilet?"

She smiled. "I suspect the disposal is a little more decorous than that, but that's the gist of it, yes."

"Maybe that's for the best, then," Oxford said.

"Oxford, please. Give it time."

"Why? Emily is—lost, and you say there's no way to find her. So what's the point? It's not like I can sue or get a court order, now is there?"

"I said
I
can't find her." Cassandra stood up again, this time pacing back and forth, three quick steps in either direction. "Look," she said, stopping after a dozen round trips, "I've spent some time in Red."

"You?" Oxford looked at her tidy suit. "You don't seem the free-for-all type."

The air shimmered and, for a moment, her features became cat-like. Her ears grew pointed tips and her clothes transformed into flesh-hugging black fur that covered everything except her six breasts. Oxford blinked and she was the blue-suited Cassandra again. He looked away before their eyes could meet. He kept trying to unsee what he'd seen and silently chastising that part of his mind that didn't want to.

"I've embarrassed you, haven't I?" she said.

"A little."

"Well, that's conservative compared to what you'll see in the zone." She went back to her desk and started typing. "I used to do this Medusa thing, but it was too much work keeping the snakes animated."

"That's easy," Oxford said, glad for something
normal
to think about for once. "You just spin off separate threads with predefined behaviors that loop continuously. That way, you don't use the parent thread's CPU cycles."

Cassandra looked up, clearly surprised. "You're a programmer? I thought you were in insurance."

Oxford shrugged. "Our IT department was annoyingly slow," he said. "I got tired of waiting so I learned to do things myself."

"There's hope for you yet, Mr. Brown." She gave her keyboard one final, triumphant tap. "There. I've set your PAL to use your twenty-year-old avatar. That way you'll look young, even if you don't feel young."

"I see," Oxford said, even though he didn't, really. He looked at his hands. The spots were gone and the skin was smooth and supple. He flexed them. Gone, too, were the irritating creaks and groans. "I suppose I'll get acne again now, too."

"I've also added a safety line," she said. "Just say the word 'sanctuary' and the system will surround you in a three-foot circle of orange zone privileges."

"But you said the system can't track people in the Red Zone."

"It can't." Her expression grew serious. "I'm using the tagging system we use for customer service reps. Attached out here, it can follow you anywhere, but you can't tell anyone. My boss will kill me if he finds out."

Oxford tried to sort language from idiom from taxonomy. "Literally?" he said. "Like the—Luke thing?"

Cassandra shrugged. "I honestly don't know. No one's ever been caught abusing their privileges before."

He stayed quiet. Part of him wanted to back out, thank the woman for her time, and leave, but that left nothing but a long, lonely time while he worked up the courage to call on Luke's services. Still, self-pity was more palatable than the other kind. He was about to speak when a red door appeared next to his chair.

"What's wrong?" Cassandra asked.

Again, he found he couldn't meet her gaze. "I'm trying to believe that you're not doing all of this because you feel sorry for me."

"Of course not," she said. "I'm just a hopeless romantic."

He stood up slowly and, as hard as it was to do, made himself look at her face. He felt shaky and flush with shame. "Tell me," he said, "that it's for Emily."

She smiled at him. It seemed a little sad, but genuine. "For Emily, then."

Oxford nodded. “Wherever I may find her.”

On the other side of Cassandra's red door was a seedy-looking road house. Unfinished wood, rough and splintered, planked the walls. The pitted tables and mismatched chairs showed years of wear and even the stains had stains. It smelled of rotting beer and wet animal.

The patrons were a bizarre assortment of creatures, none fully human. There were cat-people, dog-people, horse-people, and people mixed with things that could only come from someone's nightmare. There were impossibly proportioned women and just as impossibly muscled men. There were hairy things with pointy ears and pointy things with hairy ears. Something dressed in pink swirls flapped its butterfly wings at him.

It was just the kind of fantasy clap-trap that Oxford had never understood.

He made his way to the bar, ignoring the stares he drew. The bartender was a seven-foot demon, complete with long, twisted horns, pointed teeth, and bat wings. Still, he was a bartender, and bartenders knew things. Or so the detective stories said.

The demon nodded as Oxford planted an elbow on the bar in what he hoped was a no-nonsense manner.

"You're a little under-dressed for the zone, aren't you?" the demon said. His voice bore both the hiss of steam and the scrape of stone on stone.

Oxford glanced down at himself. "What's wrong with khakis?"

"It's your death," the bartender said. "What'll you have?"

"Information."

"It's a bar, not an oracle booth."

Oxford shook his head. "I'm looking for a woman."

The demon grabbed a towel from behind the bar and started wiping the spots off of a beer glass with it. He glanced over Oxford's shoulder. "Plenty of women here," he said.

"A particular woman."

The demon set the glass under the beer tap. "Some of them are
very
particular." "You don't understand."

"Sure I do," the demon said. He glanced over Oxford's shoulder again and nodded.

"I just don't care."

Something clamped down on Oxford's shoulder, crushing it. Pain shot through him as he felt himself spin around. A minotaur in surfer trunks and a Hawaiian shirt grabbed Oxford's throat. "Run back to the blue, narc," the minotaur growled. "We own the red."

Oxford couldn't breathe. Half-blinded by the tears in his eyes, he kicked at the thing. He connected, but the creature just laughed and tossed him aside. He landed in a splintering pile of bar stools. The monster came at him again. In panic, he grabbed a broken leg from one of the stools and jabbed it into the thing's stomach. It stopped, shuddering. Then the shuddering became chuckling and then all-out laughter.

"You're new at this, aren't you?" the minotaur said.

Oxford pulled his makeshift spear back. There was no wound, no blood. This was the Red Zone, where the residents had complete control. The bull-man had found a way to block the damage. Oxford scrambled to his feet, waiting for the next attack.

When it came, Oxford ducked past the minotaur's sweeping fist and scooted around behind him. With the stick clutched in his right fist, he jumped onto the creature's back and wrapped his left arm around its throat. "Sanctuary!" he yelled, and drove the stick deep into the thing's shoulder.

What started as a beastly howl quickly became a simple human scream as Oxford's adversary fell out of character. "What the hell!" the man cried. "How'd you get past my firewall?"

Holding tight against the bull-man's thrashing, Oxford pulled the stick out. The wound started healing immediately. "Does it matter how?" he said. He shifted the point of the stick near the thing's right eye. "What matters is that I can do it any time I want. And I'm betting I can hurt you just as fast as you can heal."

"I believe you!"

"Then we're done now?" Oxford said.

"Ow, dammit. Yes! We're done!"

"Fine, then." Oxford jumped down. He tried to twirl the stick in his fingers, but it slipped and clattered at his feet. He pushed it away with a flick of his toe. Who was he kidding? He was no warrior. He was just plain old Oxford Brown, a simple, quiet man who was so far out of his comfort zone he might never get back. His hands started to tremble and he hurried over to the bar before his knees could join them.
For Emily,
he thought.

Everyone in the bar, like puppets tied to a single string, reached for their PALs. They all looked from their devices to him, but when he looked back, they each found something else to occupy their attention. The minotaur just vanished.

Oxford looked at the demon behind the bar and smiled. "Her name is Emily Brown."

"Doesn't ring a bell," the demon said, taking a small step back, "but I know a guy who wrote this locater hack. Says he can find anyone in the system."

"Go on," Oxford said.

"His name's Bones. He hangs out here sometimes."

"Call him."

The demon grabbed his PAL, but stopped. "What if he's busy?"

Oxford sighed. "Then do, please, convince him that it's an urgent matter."

Nodding, the bartender hustled off to the far end of the bar to make the call. Oxford couldn't hear what he said, but he was certainly animated enough to convey a sense of urgency. A minute later, Bones appeared at the bar.

Bones was a living skeleton with a pair of bright, blue eyeballs in his head and bushy eyebrows that seemed to float above his eye sockets.

"So," Bones said without introduction. "You're the narc that's got the ALFs so wigged. Kicked Bully Boy's ass, huh? No easy feat, that. He floats some tough mojo code."

Oxford tried not to stare at the twitching eyebrows. "No offense," he said,

"but I have no idea what you just said."

"A noob, eh? No time to grok the glossary?"

"Do you speak English?"

Bones sighed. "Narc. AftrLyf employee." He tilted his skull toward Oxford. "That would be you. ALF. AftrLyf Freak. That's those of us who weren't satisfied with being who we were before shuffling off the mortal coil and tweaking it to the great CPU in the sky. Got it?"

"Of course," Oxford said, pausing to clear his throat. "Then I'm not a narc."

"You got a tag on you," Bones said. "You're not seeserv—that's customer service, for those in the slow lane—but you're totally narc.
And
you got high-end mojo, which means you either hack like a machete or you got a guaranteed pipeline to the mothership. I'm betting the latter. What? Is corporate sending in enforcers now? Expired retired security slugs come to clean up the zone? 'Cause I gotta tell you, I never did anything to anybody that they didn't deserve. At least, they would've deserved it, given half a chance."

Oxford only understood some of what Bones had said, but he'd seen a few cop movies. He keyed up Emily's unhelpful Scroll page on his PAL and held it out toward the man. "Let's just say I need to find this woman," he said, smiling, "and that you're going to help me, and that, in exchange, I'll make sure no narc enforcer slingshots your bony ass into a blue zone hell hole filled with pain, and suffering, and really bad music."

Bones drummed his fingers on the bar. It sounded like someone shaking a box of pencils. "You make a compelling case," he said after a while.

"I'm a trained professional."

"Fine." Bones pointed his own PAL at Oxford's for a second, then began making clattering gestures over it. He did that for two solid minutes, muttering to himself, before stopping and looking at Oxford.

"Well?" Oxford said.

"She's nowhere."

"What?" "Wait, wait, wait." Bones waved his free hand at Oxford. "That just means she's in a black hole—a dark place hidden from the pidlist—never mind. The point is, there's really only one of those worth going to, and that's the Last Resort."

"Okay," Oxford said. "How do I get there?"

"It's tricky." Bones waved a red door into existence. "You have to be invited, which, for some reason, I never have been, so I can get you
to
it, but you have to get in on your own. Anyway, the place relocates itself randomly in core. You have to scan for the leftovers, then calculate the probabilities of its next jump, and factor in the time it spent at its last location. It can take a long, long—now!"

The door turned black.

"Go," Bones said. "Now!"

Without thinking, Oxford ran through the door.

Oxford stopped himself just inches from the rim of the crater. It was miles across and inf initely deep. Below him lay a black, starry sky. Above, the other sky was wrapped in the twisted rags of hurricane clouds. The eye stood above the center of the crater. A shaft of dazzling sunlight stabbed down though it, falling on what had to be the Last Resort. Floating in midair in the center of the crater was a glittering gem of land. Buildings sprouted from both the top and the bottom—daylight above, nighttime below. As he watched, fireworks shot out from the bottom, falling back up in glittering cascades.

"Okay," Oxford said aloud. "You can do this. You've come this far, haven't you? It's the Red Zone, where the residents control the environment, right? You just fly right on over there just like everyone else."

He took ten steps back. Then ten more. If they could do it, so could he. He took a deep breath and started running. He ran, ran, jumped—and flew!

"For Emily!" he cried.

Arms spread wide, he angled upward, aiming for the day side.
Fly for Emily. Fly for Emily. Fly fo—
Halfway there, he slammed into an invisible wall. He was falling down into the stars! He tried to fly again, but nothing worked. He couldn't think. All he knew was that he was falling. He curled into a ball and cried "Sanctuary!," trying to think of soft, fluffy, resilient things. Pillows. Mattresses. No. A trampoline!

He bounced back up, high into the daylight sky. High enough, he hoped, to clear whatever barrier he'd hit before. Up, up, he went. Over. Then down.

Faster and faster he fell, heading for a pool near the edge of the day side. What now? He couldn't use the trampoline trick again, that would just bounce him back out into space. He needed to slow down, to fly again. Still, nothing happened, and the pool was getting closer every second. Terrified, he squeezed his eyes closed.
Stop, stop, stopstopstopstop.
He risked a look. He was just ten feet above the pool! "Stop!" he screamed.