Psychotrope (14 page)

"Noooo!" Bloodyguts clawed at the chip in his jack but was unable to wrench it loose. Instead it broke in two, leaving its circuitry buried in his skull. It throbbed there like a living thing, sending pulses of pain through his body.

He/Jocko lay on his back in the dust, watching his body as it was cut into bloody chunks . . .

His body. No, Jocko's body. No not even that. The Matrix persona that was modeled after Jocko's body.

This isn't real,
Bloodyguts told himself.
This is a BTL trip. A chip dream. I'm still in the Matrix, and my icon is
that of a chummer who is already dead. You can't kill a dead man. And that's what I am. Dead.

Concentrating his will against the powerful sensory stimuli, Bloodyguts shut down his senses one by one. Sight, hearing, smell, taste—until only the pain remained. Then that too was blocked. He hung for a moment in the void of nothingness, balancing on the brink of blissful oblivion, then concentrated on ejecting the chip from his jack. He felt it slide free—with aching slowness at first, then suddenly popping free, all in a rush. He waited a second more, then allowed his tactile sense to return. He felt no pain. Encouraged, he allowed his other senses to return one by one.

Then he opened his eyes and looked around him.

The ork riders, their horses, and the chip-flat landscape had all disappeared, popping out of existence while Bloodyguts hung suspended in a world without sensation or time. He had crashed that chip dream—logged off from it and found another, less painful reality for his soul to occupy.

But it didn't exactly welcome him with open arms . . .

09:48:27 PST

Lady Death stood in a vast cavern whose high ceiling reflected the red light of fires that erupted in flickering jets through cracks in the stone floor. Streams of blood wound their way between these fires, entering and exiting the cavern through gloomy tunnels, and sulfurous yellow smoke obscured the air. The walls echoed with the screams and cries of the damned.

They were everywhere: perched on stone stalagmites, curled in fetal positions on the hard rocky floor, or beating fists or foreheads against walls in an effort to dull their agony. Some were submerged in the stone floor, with only grasping hands or quivering feet showing above its surface, trapped like living flies in amber.

They were humanoid figures having neither distinguishing characteristics nor gender, smooth and gleaming as if they had been dipped in molten chrome. Their heads were hairless and their faces identical; they had eyes, noses, ears, and mouths, but all looked the same. Only their voices differentiated adult from child, or male from female. Agony echoed from every tongue: groans, shrill screams, or low moans.

Lady Death shuddered. She would have gone back to face the vampires again, but the door had disappeared the moment she locked it shut. Although their screams caused her to wince, the damned seemed to offer no real threat.

They were oblivious to her, each wrapped in his or her own private hell. They stood, sat, or lay in place, faces distorted and mouths open and screaming.

Was this the Matrix? It had to be. If she had died, the
gaijin
hell was the last place she would have expected to wind up. Her parents had schooled Hitomi in the Shinto religion; she'd rejected it and considered herself an atheist. The only way she'd have wound up in a scene out of Dante's
Inferno
was if someone else had programmed it and put it in her path. The vampires and hotel/hospital room had been drawn from her own fears, but this place was someone else's nightmare.

"So Ka,"
she whispered to herself. "I am in the Matrix. But where? And what does this represent?"

Although the damned themselves looked like standard USM icons, the landscape they inhabited did not conform to universal Matrix symbolism. It looked custom-designed, like a sculpted system. The rivers of blood had to be data-streams, just like the sand ripples in the Shiawase system. The stalagmites were probably datastores or subprocessing units, and the tunnels system access nodes or input/output ports. But it all felt so
real.
The heat from the fires was causing rivulets of sweat to run down her temples and back, she could smell the heavy stink of sulfur, and her mouth and nose were dry from breathing the hot air. The screams . . .

Were those other deckers? Lady Death moved cautiously toward one. She chose a small figure; by the size it was a child about half her age. The kid was lying on the cavern floor and kicking her legs, beating at her body with her hands.

Lady Death knelt down and touched the child's shoulder. . .

She was lying on her foam mattress in the squat and it was dark. Outside she could hear angry shouts and the
sound of automatic weapons. Light slanted through the boarded-up window beside her. Something was on her bed

—
something nearly as big as her. Its eyes gleamed red in the dim light and its pointed ears twitched. Its mouth
opened wide, grinning, and its hairless tail lashed back and forth. It sniffed at her, whiskers twitching, as she lay
tangled in her torn woolen blanket, terrified and unable to free herself or kick the gigantic rat away no matter how
hard she thrashed her legs. Then it bit. Warm blood flowed down her calf as its sharp teeth worried their way into
her flesh. She cried out for Ma, but Ma wouldn't come. She was in the next room with a "customer" and that meant
she was busy. And now more devil rats were pouring in through the cracks in the wall, dropping from the ceiling
onto her mattress, crawling up through the ventilation shafts, pushing the board away from the window to get
inside, chittering with evil laughter, coming to tear and rend and gnaw at her, smothering and suffocating her until
she . . .

"Get them off me!" Lady Death screamed. "Get them off!
Takukete!
Help meee—!"

She tore her hand away. She stood, shaking, for several long seconds. Shudders ran the length of her spine and tears streamed from her eyes. She looked down at where the girl lay thrashing and could still feel her terror, even though she was no longer experiencing it first-hand. Horrible.

She looked around. If she touched another of the deckers, what other nightmares would she experience? She didn't want to know.

Lady Death knelt and dipped a finger into one of the streams of blood. She braced herself for more horrific images, but instead her mind was filled with a stream of meaningless data. Word fragments echoed in her ears, kaleidoscopic images flashed before her eyes, meaningless clumps of English letters and pseudo-Japanese
kanji
characters scrolled rapidly past, and fragments of tactile sensation assaulted her. The blood was a data stream—but one that seemed hopelessly scrambled. She flicked the blood from her fingers and the sensory jumble cleared from her mind.

She stood and touched one of the stalagmites instead. It seemed solid, its lumpy limestone formation like an upside-down ice cream cone. If it was indeed a datastore, it wasn't giving up any of its secrets. Unless . . .

Lady Death pushed against the tip of the stalagmite. She felt it give a little, and pushed harder. A crack appeared just below her hand. The tip shuddered and felt as though it were about to break off. . .

A jet of reddish-orange flame erupted at Lady Death's feet. She jumped back, but it licked at her kimono and set a corner of the fabric on fire. Lady Death smacked at it with her hands until it went out, then contemplated the black singe mark that was left behind. Had she just been attacked by IC? Had she just activated some sort of defensive utility? She could no longer tell what was going on. She could not feel her body in the real world, nor did she have a sense of which utilities she had loaded and ready to run.

As an experiment, she tried to activate one of her programs—an analyze utility. She had been expecting it to fail, so she was startled when a theater-style spotlight appeared in her hands. She shone its bright beam on the jet of flame and waited for the returning flow of information. It appeared in her mind as a page from a script:
The pan of the blaster
IC is being played by hellfire. Its role is to attack any who would cause the leading player harm. It is a minor
character of low rank.

Lady Death shut the spotlight off and stood, lost in thought. Gray IC then—black would have been assigned a more prominent part. But the "leading player"? Was that the sysop for this system?

Something moved in her peripheral vision. Lady Death spun around, her kimono whirling. Then she backed up slowly, concealing herself behind a stalagmite and trying not to draw the attention of the figure that flowed out of one of the walls like a ghost. Like the damned that surrounded her, it was a humanoid figure, but unlike them it was neither smooth and featureless nor metallic. Instead it seemed to be composed of swirling red mist. Jets of flame showed through its translucent body as it moved past them. It paused a moment, then moved further into the cavern with a sure stride, despite the fact that its legs ended in stubs several centimeters above the floor. Drops of red fell from the ends of these stubs onto the stone, where they hissed and bubbled as the heat evaporated them.

As the figure drew closer to where Lady Death was hiding, she could see that it was a man. His hair swept back from a high forehead and his chin and cheeks were dark with beard stubble. He wore a loose-fitting robe that looked more like a shroud, a tattered reddish-brown fabric the color of dried blood. He balanced on his three-quarter-legs with the poise of a martial artist and his arms were raised in a defensive posture. He glanced warily around the cavern he had just entered, eyes flicking from one to another of the damned.

Then they locked on Lady Death. She tried to duck back behind the stalagmite but wasn't quick enough. The ghost man had seen her. Frantically, she tried to ready a defensive utility. Would the ghost attack? What would her best defense be? Should she hurl an attack program at it before it could—

"Wait!" the ghost man called out. "Don't go! Who are you? Where are we? What system is this?"

Lady Death paused, confused. He didn't sound hostile. He seemed as confused as she was. But maybe it was a trick.

She activated one of her utilities. Miniature jets appeared in the bottom of her wood-block sandals, lifting her a fraction of a centimeter from the floor. The extra speed and maneuverability they provided would add precious milliseconds, should she have to avoid this other decker—or whatever he was—in combat.

She crouched down low, ready to jet into the air at the first sign of a hostile move, then peeked out from behind the stalagmite.

09:48:39 PST

Red Wraith tensed as the other decker peered out from behind the stalagmite. The woman—assuming the decker's gender was the same as the persona's—had abnormally white skin, red lips, and black hair piled high in an elaborate bun. She wore a flowing kimono patterned with glowing red dragons that were probably icons for her utilities. He watched her hands warily, ready to react if she made a move to activate any of them.

She said something, but Red Wraith found it difficult to hear her over the screams of the human figures that filled the cavern.

"What?" he called out. He edged closer but stopped when her body posture told him that she was about to flee.

"Are you the leading player?" she repeated.

Red Wraith frowned. The other decker's question seemed to imply that this was a game of some kind. Had he blundered into some sort of ultra-high-rez, Matrix-based arcade? The other decker seemed to regard him as a potential threat—or perhaps she simply saw him as competition. Was the "leading player" this woman was referring to the game site's sysop?

Red Wraith calculated the benefit of answering her question in the affirmative. But after weighing it against his ability to spin out the lie without having slotted any background data, he rejected this course of action. If she thought he was in control of the game, she might expect
him
to provide
her
with data. But if she thought he was a fellow player who wanted to team up with her, information might be more forthcoming. And she seemed to know more about this system than he did.

Red Wraith decided to play along.

"No, I'm not!" he shouted back. "I'm just an ordinary player. I go by the handle of Red Wraith. Who are you?"

"I'm Lady Death." She rose from her crouch but stood so that the stalagmite continued to partially shield her.

"Want to team up?" he asked.

She took a moment to consider his question. "Hai. I guess."

Red Wraith slotted that piece of data away. She'd answered with the Japanese affirmative. She was of Japanese descent then, just as her persona icon implied. Or else she wanted him to think that was the case.

Red Wraith edged closer. The woman tensed—and he resisted the instinctive reaction. Instead of triggering a utility as a defense, he kept his hands in plain sight and stood in an non-threatening pose. A jet of flame flickered out of a crack in the stone nearby; he felt its heat on his legs and side but deliberately did not flinch.

"Watch out for the fire," the white-faced woman told him. "It's blaster IC."

"Thanks. I will." He looked around. "Is there a way out of here?"

The Japanese woman shrugged and looked around. "We could try accessing one of the tunnels. I think they're datastreams."