Psychotrope (6 page)
These details were supposed to frighten Dark Father into making a mistake, into letting the other decker get the upper hand. But Dark Father didn't scare that easily. When the gargoyle suddenly thrust forward with its horn, initiating an attack utility, Dark Father quickly countered with a program of his own, a shield utility that billowed from his open mouth like a cloud of fine white ash. It settled on his bones and clothes, turning them from ebon black to ghoulish gray and rendering him momentarily impervious to tactile contact.
The gargoyle stumbled as its arms and wings suddenly closed on empty air. Dark Father stepped quickly aside and regarded the other decker from his new position behind him before closing again to combat range. Before the other decker could react he hurled his own attack utility at the gargoyle. He slipped off his hangman's noose necktie and whipped it around the gargoyle's neck, then cinched it shut by yanking on the rope. The gargoyle persona flickered and jerked as the program sent a jolt of electricity back into the other decker's body, messing up the deck's neural interfaces. Dark Father smiled.
But the other decker was tougher than Dark Father had estimated. In a blink, the gargoyle restored his icon and slipped free of the noose. His scaly hands grabbed for Dark Father's bony chest. This time, despite the shield utility that still coated Dark Father like powdery snow, the claws sank home. Dark Father felt a sudden sharp stab of pain in his real world body. This was not merely mental shock that he was feeling. This was actual, physical pain.
Whatever utility the gargoyle was using, it seemed to be equivalent to lethal black IC. At last, Serpens in Machina had succeeded in frightening him.
"Attacking me was stupid," the gargoyle hissed. Its tongue lashed out, flickering briefly against Dark Father's cheek as the other decker tasted his victory. "You should have just paid the nine hundred thousand nuyen. I would have kept quiet about your dirty little secret. I would have kept my word. But now the second part of my offer is rescinded. I'm no longer interested in selling you the name of the person who led the bounty hunter to you. And now I'm going to have to do you some serious damage, to buy myself the time to deal with that track program you hit me with. You'd better pray that your ghoul body is able to take it."
"I. . ." It was getting difficult for Dark Father to speak, even though the words he wanted to utter were no more than neural signals in his brain, rather than actual movements of his flesh-and-blood lips. His thoughts were growing fuzzy.
At the same time, Dark Father's brain grasped at rational straws. It didn't make sense for Serpens in Machina to kill him. Not before the charities he'd picked had gotten their blackmail nuyen. But maybe the other decker had given up on collecting from Dark Father. He had no way of knowing that the nuyen really were on file at the Zurich-Orbital Gemeinschaft Bank, even though Dark Father had transferred the credit to the account only for show, never really intending to make the credit transfer.
Pain lanced through his body a second time. "Please," he whispered. "Don't kill me. Let's talk. I'll double the amount of nuyen . . ."
"No deal."
The bottom of the gargoyle's leathery wing brushed across the sundial at the center of the conversation pit.
Glowing white numbers displayed the local time: 9:46:59 PST. The hour of Dark Father's folly—the moment when he'd dared to go against a more talented decker and lost—was at hand.
Then the gargoyle, the spiral staircase, and the pillars that framed the conversation pit that was the SPU exploded into pixels of light that flew away like confetti and disappeared. . .
09:46:20 PST
(11:46:20 CST)
Jackpoint: Tenochtitlán, Aztlan
The jaguar stood between Bloodyguts and the slave node, crouching belly-low to the floor and ready to spring. The pattern of irregular dark spots shifted about on its golden hide, a hypnotic motion that drew the eye. Its tail lashed back and forth, and gleaming metal claws gripped the wide beam of blue light upon which both it and Bloodyguts stood.
The slave node that the jaguar was protecting was a small stepped pyramid. Each of its four sides was decorated with the stylized feline face that was Aztechnology's corporate logo. The heads protruded from the pyramid-like plaster masks; each was an access point to the real-world devices the slave node controlled.
Behind the node, stretching off into infinity, was the vast expanse of the host system that served the Aztechnology arcology in Seattle. From the outside, the host looked like a gigantic stepped pyramid, reminiscent of the arcology itself. From the inside, the system was a vast city-scape, programmed to resemble a blend of ancient and modern Tenochtitlán. Canals of data filled with blue light flowed in one direction, crossed at right angles by datalines that resembled gilded streets and bridges. The square spaces between the datalines were filled with pyramids made of gleaming chrome and backlit red glass, or with monumental pillars topped with statues that offered visual clues to the sub-processing units or datastores they represented.
Moving through this landscape were the icons of the legitimate users of the system. Many were customized personas, sculpted to look like brilliantly colored feathered serpents, goggle-eyed Azzie gods, or ancient nobles in jaguar pelts and gold finery.
From their perspective—and that of the IC that faced Bloodyguts with tail lashing, waiting for him to enter a validation passcode—Bloodyguts looked much like any other legitimate user. His sleaze utility and masking programs were projecting the standardized persona of the typical Azzie silicon wage-slave: a nongender-specific Amerind human in a plain white suit, face covered with an elaborate breather mask. But Bloodyguts' reality filter allowed him to continue to see his persona as it really was: a shuffling zombie of a troll whose massive body was pocked with the gaping holes of violent wounds. Entrails dragged along the ground behind him, part of his cheek was ripped away to expose white bone and shattered teeth, and bloody red bullet holes dotted his exposed chest like acne.
The persona was designed to both terrify and mislead. Its horrific elements often gave Bloodyguts the extra second or two he needed to close to combat range when taking on another decker. And the slow, zombielike gait was deceptive; Bloodyguts had pumped the response increase on his cyberdeck to the max, and ran it hot on pure DNI. He didn't need to frag about with keyboards or any of the other null-gain interfaces of lesser decks. He
was
his deck.
Reaching up to his chest, Bloodyguts used both hands to yank apart the skin, exposing his heart. Its beat was a particular algorithmic code, one for which he'd paid a fortune in
peso libres.
Reaching inside the gaping cavity, he pulled the heart from his chest. He offered it, still beating and dripping blood with each pulse of data, to the IC that guarded the node.
The jaguar paused a moment—Bloodyguts imagined it sniffing the proffered heart—and then its rough tongue licked a drop of blood from Bloodyguts' fingers. It suddenly clamped gleaming gold teeth upon the heart, which it devoured in one gulp.
"Niiice kitty," Bloodyguts said, easing his way along the beam of blue light past the IC. "You liked that validation code, didn't you?"
The jaguar sat back on its haunches. Bloodyguts tensed as he heard a rumbling noise, then realized the icon was purring. Laughing, he slapped a hand onto one of the mask-like faces on the side of the slave node.
His perception exploded into thousands of fragments as he looked out through a multitude of different closed-circuit vidcams at once. He saw corridors, board rooms, labs, foyers, shops, elevator interiors, exercise rooms, hallways, hermetic laboratories, fast-food outlets, mini-factories, religious temples, loading bays, classrooms. He saw shoppers, security guards, wage slaves in business suits, priests, para-normal entities on patrol, children playing, executives gathered around telecom displays, maintenance workers, officious priests leading religious ceremonies, crowds of people drinking soykaf at tiny tables in public squares, magicians casting spells, factory workers, teachers.
He saw exterior views of the Aztechnology arcology itself: open-air terraces, expanses of gray stone, rooftop missile batteries, streetscapes, helipads, the gigantic quartz-crystal friezes on the side of the main building.
After a dizzying moment or two, Bloodyguts zoomed in on the view he wanted: a street-level loading bay in which a large truck was parked. Its swamper was just pulling his empty forklift away from the open rear door of the truck's trailer while another man entered information into a data-pad on the wall. In another moment both exited through a door that led to an adjoining corridor.
Bloodyguts skipped rapidly between vidcams, trying for a better angle of view. This was his third attempt to penetrate the Azzie host system. Twice before he'd been dumped; only his intrusion counter-countermeasures biofeedback filter had saved him from serious dump shock. It looked as though he was barely in time; the truck was just about full. Bloodyguts consulted his time-keeping utility. It was just over thirteen minutes before ten a.m., local Seattle time. If the Azzies kept as fanatically to their schedules as usual, the truck wouldn't roll until ten on the nose. He still had plenty of time. Assuming that this was the right truck. . .
The securicams swung into position, giving Bloodyguts a view inside the trailer. Pay data! The rear of the truck was filled from floor to ceiling with hundreds of packages of optical chip cases, bound into neat blocks by shrink-wrap plastic. All of the chips inside the brightly labeled cases were legal simsense—the Azzies didn't sully their hands selling illegal BTL, despite the corp's origins as a drug cartel back in the twentieth century. All of the recordings on these chips had been filtered through an
It wasn't the signal strength of the chips that Bloodyguts objected to. It was the recordings that had been laid down on them. These ranged from the relatively tame—sports events with plenty of mayhem and bloodshed (court ball, for example) to "extreme splatter" recordings that were outright kill fests. Gladiatorial combats in which both animal and gladiator were wired for simsense, allowing the user to experience the wonders of polyPOV sampling. Or "hunter and prey" games in Aztlan's northern desert, in which the user got to be inside the heads of each of the hunted in turn, and could guess which would be the last one alive. The recordings were little more than snuffsense, capturing in gory detail every agonizing moment until the poor drekker who'd been coerced into one of the target roles flatlined.
Not so many years ago, Bloodyguts had been a fan of that sort of thing. He'd frothed over the Azzie tridcasts that were pirated into Seattle via the Deathstar-9 satellite, and had eventually graduated to a more "real" experience—the wonders of simsense slotted directly into his datajack.
From there he'd moved on to BTL—better than life dreamchips that provided both the baseline sensory track and the raw emotive tracks of the simsense "performers." And raw they were: the elation of victory, the agony of defeat.
Fear, bloodlust, power, and domination—and the sheer and absolute terror of knowing that your life is leaking out through the hole they just tore in your gut and that there is nothing—
nothing
—you can do to avoid your imminent death.
Bloody guts had become a brain-burner, a chiphead, a jackhead. He'd done anything for that next chip, for the nuyen to pay for his next dream fix. Steal from his family. Deal BTL himself. Hold up Stuffer Shacks even when BTL-induced synesthesia made it impossible to aim his pistol because he was seeing in smells or experiencing tactile sensations as colors. He'd even used the massive hands his troll heritage had given him to beat into a coma a cop who'd been coming down a little too hard on a local go-gang. And he'd sold out a friend.
And then he'd flatlined—on the "snuffsense" recording of that very same friend's death.
Knowing that he'd been responsible, knowing that he was the only one who could avenge Jocko's death, was what had kept Bloodyguts clinging to life after the BTL chip crashed his wetware and flatlined him. He didn't have even a street doc to help pull him through—he came back from the icy edge of death all on his own, his spirit forcing its way back into his body through sheer bloody-mindedness. The shaman he'd dated a short time later told him he must have had a strong will, in addition to his strong troll body. She'd loved him for both, for a time. And then she'd dumped him when he refused to stop slotting BTL. She told him he couldn't bury his anguish at his part in Jocko's death in a chip dream. She told him to grow up, that he wasn't fit to be a man, let alone a troll.
That was when he'd begun the long, painful process of getting clean. Withdrawal from BTL was hell, but a hell that could be endured. The heightened sensitivity to stimuli and lowered threshold of pain, the agony that came from bright lights or the pressure of cloth against skin—neither of these were anywhere near what Jocko had endured as he experienced Jocko's death in simsense, disemboweled and bullet-ridden, his face slashed wide open by the razorboy that Bloodyguts had assured him would be a pushover, even though he'd known that Jocko didn't have a chance.
The Azzies hadn't made the BTL recording of Jocko's death. Someone else had—someone who had disappeared into the shadows, rendering futile all of Bloodyguts' attempts at revenge. But the Azzies were a part of the whole thing, with the ultra-violent drek they exported into the UCAS under the guise of "sports" recordings. For people like Bloodyguts, legal Azzie simsense chips were the first step onto the slippery slope that led to snuffsense. And now Bloodyguts, who had made it his one-man mission while he was still in Seattle to slag every snuffsense dealer who still polluted the streets, was going to eliminate that step.
