Psychotrope (21 page)

Which suggested only one thing: psychotropic conditioning.

Every decker knew that Fuchi Industrial Electronics had been right out on the bleeding edge of programming when it came to psychotropic black IC. The corp had held that position a long time. Back in the early days of the first commercial cyberterminals, it had been Fuchi that developed the very concept of intrusion countermeasures. They were rumored to have modeled their prototype IC after the virus that caused the crash of 2029—a virus that could induce lethal biofeedback in the deckers who encountered it.

The cybercommandos of Echo Mirage had been the first to face the virus. And the data that Red Wraith had just sampled—and the fact that it was in a copy of an old Fuchi database—seemed to suggest that Fuchi had acquired this raw recording of their experiences. Yet Echo Mirage had been an entirely government-funded and military-controlled project. How had a private-sector company acquired what was bound to have been highly classified government data?

Red Wraith hung suspended in the sensory deprivation tank, lost in thought. Fuchi. . . The U.S. government. . . The "logos" of both the corporation and the government had been among the icons he'd just used to access these files.

But there had also been a set of letters between the two emblems: the initials MS.

Red Wraith suddenly realized where he'd seen those letters before. The logo they formed was one from the history trids—a company whose meteoric success had been abruptly cut short by the deaths of its two founders. Back in the early 2030s, Matrix Systems of Boston had been the first off the block with a cyberterminal sufficiently compact, user-friendly, and safe enough to be marketed to the general public. The company—and the tech it had developed—had seemingly materialized out of nowhere. Matrix Systems was an overnight success story without any precedent, and the backgrounds of its founders were equally enigmatic.

Both of these founders had died in accidents six weeks after Matrix Systems launched its first cyberterminal. Forced into receivership due to this loss, the company was scooped up by a young up-and-comer, a brash young corporate raider by the name of Richard Villiers.

The same Richard Villiers who, a few months later, used Matrix Systems' technology to buy his way into the Fuchi fold. And who ultimately rose through the corporate ranks to become the CEO of Fuchi Americas—a division of Fuchi that Villiers himself created.

Red Wraith's guess was that the founders of Matrix Systems had been two of the surviving members of the original Echo Mirage team. Based on what he'd just seen, they'd been working on a program that would diagnose and treat what was then known as "cyberpsychosis."

After Echo Mirage had defeated the virus and been wound down, they'd used their expertise to found Matrix Systems. Presumably they'd also taken some of the Echo Mirage tech with them, and later been flatlined in retaliation for this breach of national security. But their deaths seemed to have been a wasted effort on the part of the government. The tech had not only remained in the private sector, but had also fallen into Fuchi's hands, giving what had previously been a strictly Asian corporation the know-how it needed to produce the cutting-edge IC that would later dominate the North American market.

Red Wraith shuddered. The program whose datafiles he had just accessed had been the inspiration for lethal IC.

And maybe for much more . . .

Red Wraith returned to the main menu and scanned the other icons it contained. One accessed numerous copies of psychotropic conditioning programs, their version numbers indicating various degrees of development. The other icons simply represented datafiles.

He ran an evaluate utility and programmed it to key in on either "deep resonance" or
"otaku,"
but it came up empty. The datafiles contained only unrelated information. He scrolled through a handful of them quickly. Most dealt, in encyclopedic fashion, with medical information on highly specialized topics: the evolution and function of the brain; theories of the cause of various human behaviors; diagnosis of psychoses; and chemical breakdowns of drugs capable of causing psychotic episodes. But there were other files that were more philosophical in nature. Treatises on the basic human needs—food, shelter, freedom, and love. Analyses of early human attempts to achieve Utopia, and why these succeeded or failed. Moral arguments both supporting and opposed to the unrestrained pursuit and fulfillment of desire. Discussions of whether the use of force was justified to defend oneself, and in what circumstances.

As he scrolled through the files, Red Wraith noticed a pattern. Those dealing with medical data were stored in memory sectors that had been written in the early 2030s. The philosophical datafiles were all uploaded in the late 2040s and had been heavily encrypted before being written to memory—although the encryption had since been deciphered back into standard text that any decker could read. None of the files were current—this particular datastore contained no files at all from the 2050s.

So where had the bone retrieved by Dark Father's smart frame come from? Since the sensory deprivation tank and its cyberdeck seemed to be the only datastore on this system, if the memo came from here it should have been copied from this menu. And yet the memo was only a few months old, while all of this data was ancient history. Had they been routed to a different database than the one the memo had come from? Did multiple copies of old Fuchi datastores—some older, some newer—exist in this pocket universe? It would seem so.

Red Wraith let his body return to its mistlike form. His wrists and calves slid free of the restraints and the breather fell away. He ghosted through the wall of the sensory deprivation tank, then crept to the edge of the star-shaped block that formed the apex of the mountain and looked cautiously down. Dark Father and Bloodyguts had finally dispatched the last of the toy soldier icons and were climbing toward him.

When they reached the peak, Red Wraith quickly told them what he had found.

"Thanks for the history lesson," Dark Father said dryly. "But I don't see where it's led us."

"Don't you get it?" Bloodyguts asked, tucking back inside himself entrails that had spilled out during the climb. "It all fits. Those insects I saw . . . the brains . . . the poor fraggers whose nightmares Red Wraith and Lady Death accessed . . . Someone or something is messing with the wetware of hundreds, maybe thousands of people. Millions even, if the whole of the Matrix is affected. We've gotta crash their program!"

"Someone else already tried," Dark Father observed quietly.

"Huh?" Bloodyguts was pacing, lost in his visions of vengeance.

"The inscription on the urn," Dark Father lectured him smugly. "This all started with an experiment—probably by one of the computer giants. Maybe a rival corporation succeeded in capturing one of these
otaku,
and was trying to imitate the so-called deep resonance effect in online deckers. And then—and this is pure speculation, based on the memo we just downloaded—Fuchi Americas, or rather, NovaTech, shut them down."

"So where did the memo come from?" Bloodyguts asked.

"Somewhere other than here, obviously," Dark Father said contemptuously.

Bloodyguts snorted. "I know how we get some answers," he said sarcastically. "We just browse our way through the datastores of every rival corporation on the Seattle RTG. There can't be more than a few dozen—with a few million datastores and plenty of lethal black IC. Piece of cake."

"Don't be an idiot," Dark Father snapped.

"It's too bad there isn't some central node we could start with," Red Wraith said, thinking out loud. "But it looks as though Lady Death was right about this being a pocket universe. We're in the Seattle RTG, but not in it. This mountain peak, for example, isn't an exact copy of the old Fuchi system—it's just a slice of data taken from that system and modified heavily to fit the central metaphor of the sculpted system that we're accessing. In a pocket universe, there's no CPU. Just a series of dataspaces on hosts scattered throughout the RTG."

He sighed. "We could be searching for the way out for a very long time."

"There is another way," Dark Father said.

Red Wraith and Bloodyguts looked at him dubiously.

"Think of the pocket universe as a corporation," he continued. "It doesn't have a central office—just a series of work stations and employees, scattered throughout the city in different buildings. There's no geographical core, no CPU. But there is a logistical core—the chief executive officer. We've been dealing with the programs and IC, so far—with the workers. Now it's time to find the CEO."

"Good thinking," Red Wraith smiled. "We talk to the sysop—also known as the officer in charge. But how do we get his attention?"

Bloodyguts grinned. "Leave it to me."

09:50:55 PST

Bloodyguts clung precariously to the wall of skulls, his fingers hooked in a pair of eye sockets. The wall formed an impassable barrier that blocked all forward movement. It seemed to have a top; Bloodyguts could see empty black space "above" the uppermost layer of skulls. But the higher he climbed, the farther away the top of the wall seemed to be.

Dark Father and Red Wraith were far below, standing on a mirrored surface that reflected their images like shadows.

They had each walked in a different direction along the base of the wall, seeking the ends that—like the top—remained tantalizingly just out of reach. Occasionally one or the other of them would stop and inspect one of the skulls, searching for any anomalies.

While most of the skulls were empty, several had data plugs in their eye sockets. A mass of fiber-optic cables draped the wall like transparent vines, connecting one skull to another. Fat white maggots crawled slowly through the cables. They traveled in glowing pulses—a string of maggots wriggled past, and then the fiber-optic cable was empty of light for a time. Then another string of maggots, longer or shorter than the first, and another. Each time they flowed in through an eye socket, the jaw of the skull would vibrate, causing the teeth to chatter. The vibration was too rapid to follow, but somehow regular. Bloody guts was certain that it was some sort of algorithmic code.

Locking the fingers of one hand tightly into the socket of a skull, he reached for one of the fiber-optic cables and pulled it free. A pulse of maggots—one of the longest and fastest he'd seen yet—was just entering the jack on the end of the cable. Quickly he popped the jack into his mouth. He tried not to gag as the maggots flowed onto his tongue but instead concentrated on swallowing as many of the foul-tasting insects as he could. They filled his mouth and spilled out over his lips, but he managed to choke most of them down. Eyes closed, he sampled the data that flowed into his mind and, ultimately—somewhere in the meat world—into his cyberdeck.

The data was still nonsense, either so heavily encrypted or so glitched that it was meaningless. But Bloodyguts had at last found what he was looking for. Although the fiber-optic cable looked like any other, the analysis provided by Bloodyguts' commlink utility confirmed it: this dataline had an input/output bandwidth of more than one hundred megapulses per second. This was a main communications trunk.

Data continued to pulse through the cable, one string of maggots at a time. Choosing skulls at random, Bloodyguts pushed the data plug into one empty eye socket, then another. Somewhere in the meat world, telecom calls would be scrambled, machines served by slave modules would be receiving meaningless commands, and private or corporate data would be rerouted to someone else's data-stores. Assuming that the data flowing through the cable was intact—that it had not already been hopelessly corrupted by passing through this system—someone was bound to sit up and take notice.

Someone did. Several someones.

An angel materialized in the air next to the wall. The woman had the classic Christian religious iconography—white gown, glowing halo, and feathered wings—except that her features were ork. She strummed gently on a harp and sat cushioned on a pillowy white cloud.

Next came an Azzie eagle priest, decked out in a brilliant turquoise feathered cape, white loin cloth, and gilded sandals. Large gold earrings distended his earlobes and a jade pectoral carved with glyphs hung against his chest. In his hands he held a small dog—in Azzie mythology, the guardian-guide to the land of the dead.

Beside him floated a Buddhist monk in saffron robes, whirling a prayer wheel. Next to him was an elf woman with East Indian features, brilliant blue skin, and an elaborately sequined sari. And last came a dark-skinned human who looked like a skinnier version of Bloodyguts' own persona, his dreadlocks held back by a colorful knitted toque. He held a water pipe in one hand; the water inside it bubbled as he took a long, slow drag on the mouthpiece. The sweet smell of
ganja
smoke filled the air.

For a moment, Bloodyguts thought the trunkline must have accessed some sort of religious network. But then he realized that the sculpted system he was in would only accommodate deckers whose personas conformed to its iconography in some way. These deckers all had icons that represented their idealized, "angelic" forms—religious depictions of dead spirits or souls. Despite the fact that they seemed quite capable of movement, they were not very animated. They stared at him with flat, expressionless eyes.

After a moment Bloodyguts realized that the icons themselves were flat, two-dimensional. And that they were somewhat distorted, as if reflected by an imperfect mirror.