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Authors: Marianne de Pierres

BOOK: Crash Deluxe
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He shrugged. ‘I don’t know w-why. M-maybe they are looking for s-something that will give them an edge against the m-media.’
‘Why do they need an edge?’
‘W-when we had governments and p-political parties they had a lot of p-power. N-now they don’t have anything, except their royalty.’
I thought about what he said. Information was everything in any war. Maybe Merv was right and something was brewing here in Viva.
‘What about Code Noir, then?’
He rubbed his eyes. ‘Snout’s searches t-tripped a bunch of s-seekers. She had to bail out. The only thing I c-can tell you is that the s-seeker definitely came from one of the Jinberra p-portals.’
I nodded. No surprises there. Only more reason for doing what I knew I had to do. ‘I have to get in there, Merv.’
He shivered. ‘You c-can’t. Not by y-yourself, anyway.’
I slipped the mystic star over my head and placed it in his damp hand. ‘I’m all out of time, Merv. I have to do it now. I need your help. Please.’
He trembled and kissed the charm as if it were his lover’s flesh. Reverently, he laid it in its place and sighed. ‘You c-can ride with me.’
His eyes got watery in a way that reminded me of Stolowski. Only it wasn’t with trust. Merv was scared.
‘I like Jales better than Parrish,’ he added.
I stiffened for a moment and then relaxed.
The only way that Lavish could have discovered my true identity would have been through Merv. Who had probably known who I really was from day one at the Luxoria.
‘Sometimes, Merv,’ I replied softly, ‘so do I.’
Chapter Twelve
 
 
 
 
M
erv locked off access to his room and unfolded a jockey seat from the side of his chair/bed. The springs groaned with lack of use but he didn’t seem to notice. His eyes and mind were flicking ahead to vrealspace like a dog scenting virgin territory down the road.
He handed me an opaline bracelet.
‘What’s this?’
‘Put it on,’ he instructed automatically.
I turned it over in my hand, examining the sharp bumps on the inside of the band. ‘What do you mean? Is this the transceiver?’
He didn’t answer.
‘MERV.’
‘Yes.’ His attention flicked back to me again. He looked slightly embarrassed. ‘It will link you to me.’
I stared at the mound of cables and the wetware webs littering the room. ‘You mean this is all show?’
‘Not exactly. Everything works. My back-up, if you like. But it’s best if Delly doesn’t understand how I really do things.’
I pointed to the wetware stains on his collar. ‘What about that?’
Merv’s embarrassment turned downright sheepish. He pulled a little tube of dye from his pocket.
I laughed. Merv had seemed so incapable of deceit with me.
‘Tighten the bracelet around your wrist. The connectors prick a little bit but then it’s over. Your senses interpret the vreal first. You don’t even have to close your eyes. You’ll have to c-cadaver. It’d take too much time to configure a s-subtle enough avatar,’ he said apologetically.
Cadavers had no iconic representation or signature in vrealspace. They were worse than the ezyrent ghosts.
That meant they had no rights. Voyeurs in vreal land.
‘You’ve r-ridden before?’
I nodded.
‘This vreal is called Chaos. It’s five-gen s-sensory. Changeable and h-hard to read if you don’t understand the p-patterns. The f-fringe areas are often olfactory, ’ he warned. ‘Just don’t lose me.’
Hadn’t Teece said the same thing?
I jacked down my augs as a precaution and tightened the bracelet.
The pinpricks were mild and the drop was smooth and seamless. One second I was tucking my legs under the jockey seat of Merv’s bed-chair, the next I was floating down from the V-Net launch pad in neat spirals. None of the crazy head-rush that I’d had with Teece.
Merv was slick. Only he wasn’t Merv any more - he was a tiny, faint light pixel, a firefly surfing an endlessly changing rainbow.
I was bodiless, weightless and his equal in shadow, all my hopes depending on staying with his almost indistinguishable flicker of light.
We sailed through the coils of data, changing streamers hundreds of times, darting in and out until everything blurred.
By the nature of his movement I figured that Merv’s firefly was masquerading as part of the Vreal Net’s internal spy system - a self-regulating program that monitored light organisation and behaviour. Snout probably did something similar.
Inside my invisible shadow body, my invisible shadow heart beat faster. If the system found an anomaly in Merv’s disguise it would destroy us in a pica-second.
For the first time in a long time, I remembered a prayer.
Merv traversed the red spectrum navigating on colour subtleties and taste - amber to orange, sweet to fruity. Orange to sienna, fruity to scorched.
5
G
- an almost unbearable sensory experience to the uninitiated. In real time my mouth filled with saliva and my eyes streamed.
As we danced I began to discern energy clusters and finally shapes: light avatars forming exotic fractal creatures.
Decahedrons are the gateways
. Merv thought-whispered. Data-streams poured around them, creating whirlpools and lightfalls.
We swirled down them, attracting only a flicker of security.
The butterfly fractals are data miners
, he thought-said.
We jumped aboard one that was trawling the violet spectrum. As we got closer to the edge of the range we leaped from it into a dark worm-trail.
What’s this?
A virus.
Somewhere, some part of me held its breath, watching as Chaos sent out its virus protection, shining helixes writhing like snakes.
Merv’s firefly folded over me and we slid down the twirling killers.
His confidence and daring staggered me - a paradoxical contrast with the real person.
Momentum flung us into the wake of a fast-moving stream of indigo data heading right into the heart of a magenta cluster. I could taste strawberry syrup.
It was soon cancelled out by the familiar smell of putrid meat that told me we’d passed right under the nose of the sifter and the odour firewall that had bounced me into mouth-to-mouth with Gigi.
Prison central.
When the indigo transfer was complete we dived into light quicksand.
Temp repository
, thought-said Merv.
I wanted to reply but I’d forgotten how to do it, so I contented myself by watching light flickers.
A lifetime or many passed as we hid out in the shifting data-pile.
When the swish of a new incoming transfer stirred the grains of our repository, Merv finally floated us upwards.
An error alarm started as Chaos tried to work out what tiny thing was out of place.
Merv contorted his firefly avatar into a helix shape and the system passed over us. In a pica he’d branched back into the main data-stream and we surfed the crest of a light wave right into the Jinberra nexus.
It was an elegant move. Humble. Brilliant. With much less statement than most bio-hacks employed.
We sank straight into another quicksand data repository.
It was impossible to know how much time passed. Somewhere in my hindbrain I had a vague perception of discomfort - a twinge that all was not well.
I absorbed Merv’s thought-speak.
Your real-time body is having circulatory problems. I’m going to move your limbs. This may cause you some disorientation.
I thought-sent my agreement back to him.
Then vertigo took over.
The impression of the swirling grains of the repository disintegrated and I began to shoot upward into a curling viral blackness. Just like the nightmares I used to have of elevators exploding from the top of lift wells.
You’re getting sick
. Merv’s thought-voice again, a tinge of annoyance in it.
I don’t have suction so I’m going to derm you with an anti-spasmodic before you choke on it.
His mind-voice disappeared and a malaise crept up on me, another bodily sensation that I shouldn’t have been able to feel.
Panic.
What’s happening, Merv?
A delay before he replied.
The node is defragging. We have to move ahead of it or we’ll be
sloughed.
Your mind-body connection is messed up. You’re going to feel things . . . they aren’t real, but your body won’t believe that. I’ve given you a second derm to counter it. It should work within a couple of real minutes, you just have to withstand the sensations of defrag until it does . . . good luck.
His last two words were the quietest I’d ever heard.
He pulled us free from the repository and the torture began.
The system-defrag tore me apart. I felt my muscle fibres being tweezed and shredded while they were still attached to me. My hair ripped out in tufts. The soft skin inside my mouth carved with a knife and peeled back to flop about on my tongue. My tongue sliced into sections that were then pulled apart and down into my throat.
Pain with no endorphin rush to combat it.
A total rending so painful that I should have died from the shock. And yet I didn’t.
I just lost everything.
My mind imploded. Only the pain stayed.
And stayed.
Some primal instinct took over.
I fled it, into a glacial darkness, dragging my memories with me.
I am Parrish. I am in vreal with a bio-hack. The pain is imagined. I am Jales. I am Roo. I am . . . no one . . .
In the cold distance I saw a shape, a void at the end of it all. I laboured towards it, the most wretched pilgrim, reaching it on determination alone.
This was the place I’d come to die.
Peace.
Finally. I deserved it. Mine.
But solitude, even there, was denied me. Something had taken my space, stolen my death’s refuge.
‘Who are you?’
The figure turned its shadowed Angel face to my impassioned insistence. Gone were the bloodied wings and statuesque body. Gone was the power of blood and lust.
It huddled in my last mindspace, as distressed and disarmed as I was.
‘Why are you in my death?’ I shouted.
‘Don’t you know yet?’ it said. Wearily, it opened its eon-long memory to me.
With the wonder of a child I began to see . . .
A comet seeding - riding the tides of a galaxy. Parasites bred as agents of evolution. Spreading themselves. Catalysts of change.
Earth discovered and infected. What satisfaction and relief. The host is most suitable, the WE agree. Strong enough to withstand and not be destroyed. Strong enough to be pushed the next step.
But
Homo Erectus
had its own survival mechanism.
The WE became trapped.
‘You say we wouldn’t have evolved without you,’ I say.
Yes. That is our single purpose. We have generated the higher evolution of many - those that can tolerate our needs. Some, of course, cannot. It is our hunger, our lust, the nature of WE that has brought you to where you are. See . . .
Thought images ran past me then.
Mass suicide of species that could not withstand them. Creatures so alien that they create only an impression. There is no reference to build their appearance.
‘But the balance has been disturbed. You are in excess now. You are taking us over.’
The WE cannot resist that which has happened.
‘What if we try to destroy you? We will both die, won’t we? We will all die . . .’
 
But the Angel withheld and began to dissolve into the walls of my core.
 
What?
Merv’s mind-voice was back.
Jales, I mean . . . Parrish. Are you . . . can you still . . . think . . . ?
No more than usual
, I managed after a time. Humour not felt.
His relief enfolded me. And surprise. ‘You survived.’
I suppose.
It didn’t feel like survival. More like a residue of what I had been.
I’ve found the place where the data is stored. But there’s one last hurdle
, he thought-said.
Wasn’t there always one last hurdle?
My thoughts drifted, muddled still by the thing I had just seen, and by what the pain had cost. Slowly the vreal began to reconstruct around me and my bodily sensations distanced again.
Merv had set us down onto a crag above a crumpling data sea. Across it, the small, stolid light of an infrared transceiver pulsed.
You want to know about
Code Noir, Merv thought-said.
You have to get yourself over there.
Chapter Thirteen
 
 
 
 
D
o I go on?
the residue of me wondered.
It seems that is all there is
, I answered myself.
And so . . .
How do I do that, Merv?
I’ve been watching. The
impartial
is periodically synchronised but I can’t travel the light wave. My avatar can’t be decoded in the infrared spectrum and the
impartial
’s got some old and ugly defences. You might be able to fly it, though. Nothing like you should have gotten this far into the
Jinberra
nexus. Your encoding is so simple, the most basic blip of information. It might not have a parameter to detect it as an intruder.
And if it does?
I imagined his shrug.
Your call.
Momentum. That’s all there is
, the residue of me thought.
What do I attach to?
A photon. I’ll help boost you on to it. You’ll have to flake off at the other end.

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