Memories End (3 page)

The motion-capture vest, which both monitored a flyer's vital signs and enabled a navigator to keep tabs on his pilot, made Tech feel as if he were being crushed against the right side of his cockpit, and the wireless joystick shuddered in sympathy.

“Okay, kid,” Bios7 said soberly. “Let me know where you land,
if
you land.”

The saucer had just dropped back when the Venom began to spin through a dizzying succession of counterclockwise circles. Tech's hands slipped from the control stick, and he thought he was going to throw up. The castle became a smear in the visor. He tried valiantly to steady himself and his ship, but his best efforts weren't good enough.

The Venom rocketed over the brink of the Escarpment with nowhere to go but down.

“Be seeing you,” Bios7 said as Tech plunged into darkness. “In the end you're just another flamer. All show, no go.”

Tech fell in gloom. The joystick felt lifeless in his hand, and the power chords of Thunder Cracker sounded as if they were coming from underwater. He wondered whether he'd simply crash and burn or wake up in a hospital bed, laid low by a case of cyberstupor.

He could almost taste the bitter pill Bios7 had made him swallow.

Then, against all expectation, the Network began to flicker back to life in Tech's visor, and the music returned to normal volume.

Marz's voice cut in. “Are you all right?”

“I think so,” Tech said.

“Good. Then I feel okay about calling you a total jackout.”

Tech accepted the rebuke. “Stupid, stupid move… I had him.” He took a long, puzzled look at the featureless spheres and cubes that surrounded him. “Hello, where am I?”

“You're in the Metroplex Enforcement District,” Marz said angrily. “I managed to deploy a safety chute just as you were going over the edge.”

Tech shook his head in disbelief. “Man, I must have caught a data current. But at least I didn't drop out of the grid, right?”

“Bios7 set a new record for a Ribbon run,” Marz took clear pleasure in saying. “He told me to tell you, ‘Better luck next time.’ ”

“Next
time I'll go with the Mirage,” Tech fired back. “At least that one won't skid out from under me.”

Marz bristled and started to reply, but thought better of it.

“Hey, Marz…”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks, bro.”

“Hey, who else is going to keep you in line?”

Marz couldn't help but smile. He ran a hand over his curly brown hair and studied the on-screen map. “You can make a graceful exit back to the Ribbon at the next vertical intersection.”

Graceful exits were more for the sake of the flyer than the system. A cyberjockey could always get out of a tight spot by raising his or her headset visor, but such graceless exits were potentially dangerous for deep-immersion flyers like Tech to whom the Network was everything. There were dozens of documented cases of temporary blindness and/or psychosis resulting from “pulling the plug.”

“Once you hit the Ribbon, I'll give you a new course heading,” Marz continued. “I've got a
clearer echo of the electrician's telephone file. The file's hung up in one of AmTel's relay stations. Shouldn't be too difficult to grab. Fact, if we hurry, we can retrieve the thing before Felix gets to the office…”

He let his words trail off when he sensed that Tech wasn't listening, then said, “Tech, what are you doing? Why aren't you exiting?”

Tech said nothing.

“Tech,” Marz repeated.

“What's the green construct off to my left?” Tech asked.

“Environmental Protection Agency.”

“Great! What d'you say we test-drive Subterfuge?”

“In the EPA?” Marz said in disbelief. In a warming world, short on energy resources, the EPA had become an agency of wide-ranging authority. “Excessive Punishment Assured, Tech. Their agents don't need warrants, and they don't believe in courts. We'd be safer test-driving Subterfuge in the FBI—”

“Come on, you want to see the soft in action as much as I do, and the EPA's the perfect place to try it out. Agency bloodhounds couldn't nab a bug if it bit 'em on the nose.”

“And we're going to bite them how?”

“By deleting some of Felix's violations. He's gotta have a few backed up. Besides, that'll make up for the work we're not getting done.”

“Dude, wouldn't it be easier just to get the work done?”

“Easier, but not nearly as much fun.”

“Tech, I don't even know if I installed Subterfuge right.”

“Am I talking to the right Marz Vega?”

Marz turned to the dentist's chair to glare at his gangly, visored brother. “Haven't we had enough close calls for one session?”

“Don't confuse the issue. This has nothing to do with thrills.”

“Nothing to do with thrills, huh?”

“Open the garage again,” Tech said, taking the Venom through a rapid turn. “We're going to need something a little less obvious than a racer.”

The headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency was a large, multiwindowed mushroom occupying an entire virtual block. Stacked at nearly every entry port were the myriad craft of telecommuting employees. Access to the construct, and indeed to most of the Network's vast cityscape of data domains, was typically restricted to staffers or privileged users with official clearance. But Tech and Marz's work for Felix McTurk had made them experts at cutting through security blankets.

Piloting an ancient biplane they'd nicknamed the Baron, Tech aimed himself for the least crowded entrance, the cyberflyer's virtual red scarf unfurling in the data breeze from the open cockpit.

True to its low-impact philosophy, there was nothing fancy about the EPA, either in decor or layout. Levels were color-coded according to the various departments to which they belonged, with narrow aisles wending between rows of file drawers. Once inside a drawer, you could move through
the contents, open files, scan, edit, or download contents. If you had the appropriate codes, you could even delete items, in part or entirely.

You accomplished all this by using your joystick to click on whatever menu selections, option keys, or free-floating icons a site displayed, or by entering executable commands into your virtual keyboard.

Tech opened another song cache and began to familiarize himself with the construct's layout while Marz ran a search for Felix McTurk's file. Navigating bureaucratic quagmires like the EPA was exactly what Tech was paid to do, since Felix, despite his chosen profession, had little fondness for flying and a case of adult-onset claustrophobia when it came to negotiating bureaucratic corridors.

“I found Felix,” Marz announced. “Level three, drawer 8504. That level's reserved for repeat offenders, so security's going to be thick.”

“I'm on my way,” Tech said, tweaking the joy-stick and depressing the accelerator pedal. The biplane banked to the right and sped off down a long green corridor.

Level three was even more heavily policed than he had expected it to be. But Tech managed to reach drawer 8504 without incident. Confident that Subterfuge would allow him to outsmart the EPA's watchdogs and trackers, he made a sharp turn into the drawer.

Even if the new software failed to do its job and a couple of security bloodhounds did pick up his scent, all would not be lost. To guard against just
such an eventuality—though not necessarily occurring at the EPA—Marz had patched Felix's cybersystem into the neural network computer that ran the multinational insurance company in the office next door to Data Discoveries. Any location trace would stop at the insurance company's system.

With luck.

“Jeez! You should see this thing,” Tech said when he reached Felix's file. “Big as a cinder block and pasted with overdue notices. Felix has been a very bad boy.”

“Play it safe,” Marz cautioned. “Don't try to delete too much.”

“I want to give the hounds good reason to come after me. Give the soft a real trial by fire.”

Tech had just begun highlighting and deleting some of Felix's more flagrant violations—the ones resulting from energy misuse and failing to recycle—when Marz's voice boomed through the headset earpieces.

“Heads up! The EPA has issued an intrusion alert. Security programs are searching all levels for undocumented arrivals.”

Tech stopped what he was doing. “It's cool. I already deleted the worst of the violations. I'm heading out the drawer.”

“Don't go out the way you came in. You've got pit bulls and bloodhounds zeroing in on your position.”

“Then it's time to bring out the big guns, bro. Unzip Subterfuge.”

Marz typed a flurry of commands on the key
board. “Subterfuge is open,” he said, crossing his fingers.

Tech glanced in the visor's rearview window in time to see a pack of shimmering, razor-toothed mastiffs come skittering around a turn in the corridor and race after him. His fingers danced over the joystick's control pad.

“Deploying ghosts.”

Instantly, multiple images of the Baron took shape to all sides of him and began to veer off in different directions. All but one of the slavering mastiffs chased after the ghosts, and that one angled into the drawer Tech had just exited.

He hooted with joy.

“Subterfuge is awesome! No way those trackers will be able to pick out the real me!”

“Get yourself off level three just in case,” Marz urged. “You're closest exit to the Ribbon is through the south gate on level one.”

Tech rammed the joystick forward. The biplane veered and shot for the end of the corridor. But Tech wasn't halfway there when, out of nowhere, a program gremlin popped into existence and perched itself like a gargoyle on the Baron's upper-right wing tip. The product of free-floating data fragments, program gremlins were a fairly common sight in the Network. But this one was bright blue, from pointed ears to splayed feet and had a short tail, big black saucer-shaped eyes, and a yellow button nose.

“What the heck,” Tech said. “This thing must have escaped from some gaming site.”

Marz was already running diagnostic programs. “I'm not sure where it came from. It's made of some code I've never seen before. If I didn't know better, I'd swear it launched from Subterfuge.”

Tech aimed the biplane's cockpit gun at the gremlin and sprayed it with a burst of minimizing code to no apparent effect. “Well, wherever it came from, I can't shake it loose! And it's getting
bigger
.”

Marz stared at the monitor screen in mounting astonishment. “It's uploading data from the EPA's central-processing unit!” He hit the keyboard's record button, intent on downloading a backup file in case the office cybersystem crashed.

Tech slammed the joystick from side to side in an effort to dislodge the gremlin, which was continuing to swell as it gobbled data. The Baron's upper-right wing was already sagging under the weight of the cybercreature, and the biplane was in danger of stalling.

“Tech, get out of there!” Marz said. “The dogs are back on your scent. They're going to get a fix on us.”

“The gremlin's slowing me down!” Tech yelled back. “I'm too heavy with code.”

Marz nibbled at his left thumbnail while his right hand flew across the keyboard. “I found a closer exit. Go left at the next intersection and head straight down the corridor. The exit will be marked in red. Punch it!”

Tech's right foot depressed the accelerator pedal as far as it would go. Despite the presence of the now bloated gremlin, the retro plane managed to
pick up a bit of speed as it negotiated the turn. Seconds later the exit came into view, growing larger and larger in the visor. Tech made a beeline for the irising portal. The Baron had almost reached it when an amorphous jet-black presence dropped from the arched ceiling, obscuring Tech's vantage on the exit and blotting out nearly all ambient light.

Tech worked the joystick and the foot pedals in a desperate attempt to find a path around the black curtain, but no matter where he moved, the thing kept positioning itself directly in front of him.

He was trapped.

Even with the accelerator floored, the Baron seemed to be hovering like a helicopter. It lurched once, but only to stall. Springing forward suddenly, the black mass draped itself over the plane like a collapsing parachute.

Fear began to gnaw at Tech's confidence.

What had he gotten himself into? He knew that he shouldn't be afraid, and yet he couldn't suppress a rising tide of panic. He wanted to lift the visor, but he couldn't bring himself to move. His heart thudded in his ears and against his ribs. He felt frozen inside.

Abruptly, a high-pitched, sharp voice that wasn't Marz's filled the headphones.

“That thing wants me, not you.”

For a moment, Tech wasn't sure where the voice was coming from. Then he grasped that it was the voice of the saucer-eyed gremlin that had hitched itself to his craft.

“Huh? What?”

“Better let me handle this.”

“Who are you?” Tech said.
“What
are you?”

“You just freed me.”

“I
freed you?”

“What'd you say?” Marz asked, swinging toward the dentist's chair in confusion.

“Follow my instructions,” the gremlin told Tech. “If you hope to avoid falling into Scaum's clutches.”

“Scaum?” Tech asked.

“The dark presence that is about to engulf you.”

Tech swallowed hard and shoved the joystick to one side as wavering tentacles sprouting from the shadowy thing began to entwine his ship.

“You can't outrun it,” the gremlin cautioned. “Surrendering control of your data craft to me is our only chance.”

Marz heard Tech mumbling to himself. Again he swung away from the cybersystem console, this time to see Tech loosening his grip on the joystick and lifting his feet from the pedals.

“Tech, you're powering down! The EPA hounds are almost on top of you!”

Lowering the interface goggles he wore high on his forehead, Marz swiveled back to the console. One eye opened to the real world, the other gazing into cyberspace, he watched the Baron disappear into a utility shaft that wasn't indicated anywhere on the map of the EPA construct. Downloading all the information he could, Marz swiveled back to the dentist's chair, expecting to find Tech's hands back on the joystick. Instead they were raised to his shoulders.