Back in the meat world, Bloodyguts' own heart gave a lurch. Dimly, he felt a painful twinge grip the left side of his chest. The fingers of his left hand began to tingle and go numb. And that was bad. Very bad. He was under attack by black IC.
There was no time for a graceful log off. Not if he wanted to live. He'd have to jack out and take whatever dump shock came, even though it might send his weakened heart into fatal fibrillation. His timekeeping utility showed a local time of 9:46:59 PST-nearly noon in Tenochtitlan. With any luck, one of the rebels he'd agreed to meet with at noon would find him in time to pull him through…
Bloodyguts thrust his hands out, grabbed the oversized referee's whistle that appeared in them, and blew it as loud as he could.
09:46:23 PST
Seattle, United Canadian and American States
Ansen arched his neck to relieve the ache in his shoulders and closed the door of his cube. The tiny apartment didn't hold much-just a futon with some rumpled blankets, a nuker to warm up food, and a chrome clothes rack, scrounged from a dumpster behind the clothing store on the corner, that held his jeans and jackets. Plastiboard packing crates he'd salvaged from work served as tables. The only ornamentation was also functional: a bubble lamp that stood in one corner. It burbled out a steady stream of bioluminescent spheres that drifted around the room, filling it with gentle washes of light until the bubbles collapsed with soft popping noises.
Ansen flipped his sneaks off his feet and into a corner, undid the leather thong that held his pony tail, and shook out his long, dark hair. Then he settled onto the edge of his futon with a sigh. He rubbed a shoulder with one hand and stared for a moment at the flatscreen display that served as the cube's "window." It showed a penthouse view of the city, shot from a vidcam on top of the building. On the streets below, traffic crawled along through the last of the morning rush-hour haze. Cars and trucks disappeared into static that had fuzzed out the center of the window, then reappeared out the other side. Ansen knew enough tech to have easily fixed the glitch in the display, but never seemed to get around to it. All of Seattle could be eaten by the static hole, for all he cared. That wasn't the world that interested him.
His hand wandered to the kitten-shaped Playpet that lay on the futon next to him. As he stroked its soft synthetic fur it began to emit a rumbling purr. Servos inside the toy responded to the faint electromagnetic field given out by Ansen's hand, causing the toy to roll over and offer its belly for scratching. He tickled its purple tummy with his fingertips, giving the memory plastic the daily stimulation it required to "grow" from kitten into life-sized cat over the next six months. The kitten responded by widening its already oversized eyes and staring adoringly in Ansen's general direction.
Most of Auburn's blue collar workers were just starting their working day. Ansen had just ended his-an eight-hour shift at the Diamond Deckers plant. The ache in his shoulders came from hunching over an assembly table all night long, slotting chips into computers that were cheap knock-offs of more expensive cyberdecks. The decks had the look and feel of the high-end Fuchi models, with their clear plastic cases and sleek gold-on-black keyboards. But they were made from bargain-basement chips and inferior materials.
The work was tedious and brain-numbing. And the pay was drek: just minimum wage. But it was the best a seventeen-year-old high school dropout could do for a job in this city. And it had its fringe benefits…
Ansen turned to the cyberdeck he'd liberated from a back room of the Diamond Deckers warehouse. Big and boxy, the CDT-3000 Vista clone was an antique, older even than Ansen himself. It was one of a dozen that had sat without ever being used, just gathering dust, until Ansen discovered them. He had upgraded this deck as far as it would go, but it still had only ten megapulses of active memory and a two-meg MPCP. And its interfaces were primitive in the extreme. Instead of a DNI jack or even a trade rig, the computer relied on old-fashioned VR goggles and data gloves. While other computers allowed their operators to run them at the speed of thought, this "tortoise" of a deck relied on gross eye and hand movements to execute its commands.
Still, it was better than nothing at all. And it was the window onto the world Ansen loved-if only a narrow one.
Ansen pulled nylon data gloves onto his hands and flexed so that the hair-thin webbing of sensors woven into the blue fabric shaped to his hands. He made sure the fiber-optic cables that led from the deck to the goggles were snug in their ports, plugged the deck into the comm jack in the wall, then pulled the goggles over his eyes. Holding his hands over the deck's illuminated sensor board, he flicked his fingers to activate it. The wraparound peripheral-image screen inside the VR goggles flickered to life and the speakers next to his ears began to hum.
He entered the Matrix.
A door-shaped rectangle of glowing yellow appeared directly in front of him-a system access node in the local telecommunications grid that served this area of Auburn. Ansen touched the SAN and watched as a blue stain spread outward from the point his hand had touched, a halo of green encircling it. After a moment, the blue faded, leaving a green-tinged hole in the middle of the door. Ansen pointed his finger, moved it forward-and was sucked into the hole. The SAN disappeared behind him.
He hung suspended over the multicolored checkerboard of light that was Seattle's regional telecommunications grid. He knew all of its familiar landmarks by heart: the golden stepped pyramid of Aztechnology; the nucleus with swirling red electrons that was the Gaeatronics power company; the forbidding black slab of Renraku; and the multifaceted, crystalline silver star of Fuchi Industrial Electronics. A host of other system constructs also dotted the cyberscape-cubes, spheres, and more complex shapes, each representing a different corporation or public agency.
He looked "down" at his Matrix body-a gender-neutral silver humanoid with glowing blue hands. This had been the standard non-customized persona since the 2030s, back when the Vista was SOTA-state of the art. Ansen could have re-cooked the chips in his MPCP to customize his persona, but that would burn memory that he couldn't spare. Besides, the persona's archaic look was part of his image.
Although the goggles gave Ansen the illusion of floating in space, he could feel the futon underneath him, could smell his unwashed T-shirts in the corner, could hear the sounds of feet in the apartment above him. He hadn't quite escaped the real world.
But someday he'd be able to afford to go under the knife and have a datajack implanted in his temple. And the SOTA deck he'd been building from parts scrounged off the assembly line would be complete. Then Retro would show the other deckers who was wiz.
In the meantime, Retro left his mark on the Matrix, tagging datastores at random with his graffiti. His trademark was changing the iconography of the nodes he visited, leaving behind icons that were "retro" in the extreme. Old-fashioned paper file folders, galvanized metal garbage cans, non-digital wind-up alarm clocks, and brightly colored suitcases-all icons that were standardized in the previous century by a long-since defunct corp by the name of Macintosh. Ansen's other favorite tag was an image of that corp's logo: a rainbow-colored apple with a sign inviting deckers to "take a byte." Woe betide the decker who took the bait and found the worm virus inside!
Ansen knew the prank was childish, but, hey, he didn't claim to be anything else. He seemed to just have a knack with computers, and he'd been slotting people off with his decking ever since he was a kid. Back when he was eleven, the first time he'd run away from home, he'd hacked his way into the computer system that operated his uncle's hotel and checked himself into one of the "coffin" cubicles. Using the thumbprint scan of another guest, he'd ordered a drekload of fast food, keeping him in growlies for a whole week. And he'd done it with his sister's MatrixPal, a null-value chunk of chip if ever there was one.