It was a dreamy feeling, like the one produced by the drugs the doctors had used to sedate her while she'd been confined to her family's private medical clinic after her "rescue" from Shinanai. Or like the gentle semi-slumbering lull she had fallen into while Shinanai supped upon her blood. And after, when she had died of blood loss and had looked down upon her lifeless body on the hotel bed…
She raised a hand and saw that it had become translucent, drained of all color. The dracoforms that had glowed so fiercely red on the sleeve of her kimono were a faint white on white, only their raised embroidery showing their form. Her hair, too, where it hung against her chest was white, as were the slippers on her feet.
White. The color of death.
What had she been doing? Oh, yes, logging off the Matrix. She should have found herself back in her room in the Shiawase Corporation's Osaka arcology, sitting at the table before her cyberdeck. But somehow she could no longer feel her body, let alone access it. She threw her mind out, seeking to log off. But there was none of the usual sense of movement, of rushing through space.
Lady Death heard a voice then-an achingly familiar voice. It called to her, wordlessly, from a direction somewhere above. Melodic and pure as a crystal flute, the haunting tones of Shinanai's singing cried out to Lady Death, drawing and focusing her attention, beckoning her to join the vampire in a place very, very far away, a place where lovers would be reunited once more…
Lady Death gasped, suddenly realizing what must have happened. After surviving so long with HMHVV coursing through her blood, she had at last succumbed to the virus. She had slipped into the coma that all of its victims experienced just before death. And now she was having a near-death experience, hearing the voices of departed loved ones…
Of her one true love.
But it was just a hallucination. Shinanai was alive, not dead and calling to her from some netherworld-the aidoru had only yesterday performed a concert in Kobe. Lady Death would not be tricked by her own mind, would not give in to oblivion, even if it was masked with love.
"No!" she screamed, blocking her ears against the singing. But her hands passed through her head, disappearing inside it without ever encountering the solidity of a living form. Startled, she jerked them away.
And then a series of images began to flash before her eyes…
Dark Father watched as scenes from his life flashed before him. It was as if he were watching a tridcast of the high and low points of his life, one melting into the other with dreamlike fluidity. Just as he had before, when his heart had stopped beating after the bounty hunter's attack, he watched the flashbacks with a mixture of amazement and dread.
He saw himself as a small boy-a human boy-on the Griffith estate, riding his pony across the grounds with his brothers and sisters. He relived the first manifestation of the disease at age fourteen, and the shame and horror of being found feeding on the corpse of the family dog. He watched himself being chauffeured to the secluded boarding school where he'd spent the remainder of his teenage years with the similarly afflicted sons of other wealthy families, and the futile efforts of the team of doctors who had tried to cure him. He saw himself as a young man in his twenties, during the restless years of traveling the world in a desperate search for a mage or shaman who could cure him of his taste for human flesh. Then in his thirties, when he settled into the bliss of married life and chairmanship of the board of directors of one of the Griffith pharmaceutical conglomerates.
He relived the night when Anne had given birth to their son-a misshapen monster of a child who showed all of the traits of goblinization at birth and who demonstrated them by tearing a bloody chunk from his mother's breast as she tried to nurse him. Then, in rapid succession, he re-experienced Anne's anger at his keeping the fact that he was a ghoul from her, their divorce, the lonely years that followed after their son Chester was sent to boarding school. With vivid clarity he watched the confrontation, two years ago, when the teenage Chester had stormed away from a visit with his father after yet another argument about the need to keep quiet about the fact that he was a ghoul, when the boy had vowed never to return to either the boarding school or the family home. And he saw, as if viewing it from a distance, the near-fatal attack of the bounty hunter, that night in the hospital.
The bounty hunter…
Dark Father glanced down at his chest, but didn't see the bullet-pocked flesh and bloodstained shirt he expected. His chest was skeletal black bone cloaked in a loose-fitting black suit, the hangman's noose still dangling from his neck. He still seemed to be firmly inside his Matrix persona. Which didn't make sense. If the other decker he'd been fighting in the conversation pit had crashed his deck, he should have awakened in his own real world body-if indeed he was still alive. But if he was dead or dying…
Dark Father shivered, remembering the stab of pain that had lanced through him just before the gargoyle and the conversation pit had disappeared. Had the bounty hunters found him a second time? Was he lying in the office of his family estate even now, his life blood slowly leaking from him? What happened to someone who died while their mind was connected with the Matrix? Did their soul migrate there?
He could no longer feel his body, or make any sort of connection with it. And his life had just flashed before his eyes. He could only conclude that he was injured or dying. And that brought a rising sense of anger. He didn't want to die like this. Not now. Not with the questions about who the bounty hunter was and where Chester had disappeared to unanswered. Nor did he want the world to learn his secret when his body was found. He had to claw his way back from death, just as he had after the bounty hunter had shot him.
Just as Dark Father braced himself to throw his mind out in a last-ditch effort to reconnect with his body, a light shone down on him from somewhere above. As bright as a spotlight, it engulfed Dark Father as if he were a tiny gnat, throwing his dark body into stark relief. He found himself rising up into the beam, drifting slowly toward the source of the light. At first this movement was gradual, but it steadily became more rapid. Soon he was hurtling upward toward an ever-expanding source of brilliant white light…
Bloodyguts tried to stop his head-first slide along the brilliant white datastream, but nothing worked. His utility programs were useless; he had tried to activate them and failed. His direct neural interface seemed to be fragged up as well, or maybe his RAS had glitched out. Whatever the cause, he was unable to feel his meat bod any more.
And that should have scared him drekless. But instead he was feeling emotions that weren't his. It was just like being on a BTL trip-this feeing of being out of control. The emotions being fed into his wetware gave him a sense of great peace, of intense happiness and joy. Of oneness with the multiverse. And they seemed to be intensifying and increasing, the further he moved along this weird dataline toward the brilliant spot of light toward which it led. He wondered if, when the experience peaked, it would literally blow his mind and send his brains oozing out of his ears.
Something flickered in the light ahead, and Bloodyguts wrenched his head around to look up at it. Frag! Was that Jocko? The human figure was backlit by intense light, no more than a faceless silhouette. But it had Jocko's wide shoulders and familiar slouched posture, and it stood with its head tilted to one side, occasionally tossing its head to flick its dreadlocks back over its horns the way Jocko did. And when it raised a hand to give a casual wave, light glinted off the chromed razors set into the back of the black leather gloves that Jocko always wore.