Raymond Kahnewake sat with his feet propped up on a work station cluttered with optical chips. He was jacked into a deck and was obviously hard at work programming; his eyes flickered back and forth behind closed lids and every now and then one of his fingers would twitch slightly as he executed a command. He was a large man with a thick shock of black hair shaved on one side to expose his datajacks. He wore the Sioux Nation equivalent of a business suit: buckskin trousers fringed with ermine and a tailored doeskin shirt with heavy beadwork all down the front.
Kimi raised her bow and took aim at the diamond-shaped design on the shirt. It formed a perfect bull's eye.
As if sensing something, Raymond Kahnewake suddenly logged off and opened his eyes. He recoiled slightly in surprise at seeing Kimi in the doorway. Then he smiled. "Heya, little one," he said in a deep voice. "What are you-?"
Kimi reminded herself what the great spirit had told her. He's just like a virus, she said in her mind. I'm launching a complex form at a computer virus, just like in the Matrix. It's just pretend. To scare him.
Knowing it was all just a game made her feel better. She let the arrow fly. It plunged through the beadwork that covered Raymond Kahnewake's chest, shedding its thin coating of rubber as the hidden ceramic tip bit deep. The programmer looked down in shock at the "toy" arrow that had buried itself up to its fletches in his chest. He tried to lean forward, but the arrow tip was lodged fast in the plastiform chair behind his back. The arrow was drawn deeper into his chest by the motion, and he grunted in pain.
"Who are…? Why…?" Then he coughed and a faint spray of blood flecked his lips.
Kimi stood for one frozen moment, transfixed by the sight. Then she realized that this wasn't just a game, after all. The man looked like he was hurt.
She dropped her bow and ran away down the hall.
The ork security guard looked bemused as Kimi rushed past her and leaped into the empty elevator that was still waiting on this floor. The guard gave another friendly wave as Kimi scrambled for the elevator's control panel. As Kimi pushed the icon that would send the elevator down, she heard the guard call out.
"Hey, Kimi!" the guard said. "You dropped your-"
The elevator doors closed.
As the elevator rushed down, making Kimi's stomach feel as if it were lurching up into her chest, she frantically plugged her fiber-optic cable into the telecom unit that was installed in one wall of the elevator. Snicking the other end of the cable into the datajack in her skull, she retreated into the Matrix. This was the "real" world. This was where she felt safe. In a constructed world of icons and programs, where personas merely faded away in static when they died. Where they didn't look at you with accusing eyes and blood on their lips. Where the quickest and cleverest always lived to run another day… even if they died.
Firmly, she told herself that the man she'd just shot with an arrow wasn't really dying. The arrow had been no more than an illusion. Just a construct. An icon. It hadn't really hurt him. But his wide eyes and bloody lips kept returning to haunt Kimi, like a loop in her programming…
She accessed her time-keeping utility and saw that the local time was 10:49:45. She'd done what the great spirit wanted, but had she been in time? She really didn't think so. And had this really been what the great spirit intended? Had she really been meant to hurt Raymond Kahnewake?
Fretting, uncertain, she followed the Matrix's familiar gridlike maze to the place where she and her friends left messages for one another. But she was stopped short by a wall of rippling sheet lightning. It hung like a crackling curtain in front of the portal she was trying to access, blur ring the edges of the irising airlock icon and sending Kimi bouncing back into the datastream she had been following.
And that was weird. The lightning curtain was definitely a barrier of some kind. But data was flowing through it. This was a high-traffic area, one that led to public data. Anyone could enter this part of the Matrix-not just technoshamans like herself. A barrier here just didn't make sense.
Kimi swam back along the dataline and tried approaching from another direction. The portal this path led to looked like a round metal hatch. But when Kimi reached out to spin the wheel that would release the hatch, a wall of sheet lightning, just like the first, sprang up to block her path. Cautiously, she touched the lightning wall with her teddy bear paws, trying to find a way around or through it. This wasn't any program she was familiar with; it didn't match any of the samples stored in her memory. Touching it didn't hurt her meat bod any, but the barrier solidly refused to allow her to go any further. Yet data was passing freely through the portal from a spray of datalines that connected to it. And so was…
Another decker-a cartoonish character with a blue cape and red, skin-tight suit-zoomed through the curtain of lightning as if it didn't exist. The wheel on the hatch spun and the portal opened, admitting him. But the barrier still held Kimi back. It had shifted, somehow, to block her way. She peered through it and saw swirling, red-tinged darkness inside the opening, just before the hatch closed. And then she heard the decker scream.
Kimi shuddered. This was creepy. She was scared.
A second figure undulated down the dataline toward Kimi. She recognized the hunched green form of Inch-worm. The worm wore its usual sloppy grin, but its multiple arms were waving in agitation. It stopped before the barrier and caught at Kimi's thick, fuzzy arm.
"Something's gone wrong, Suzy Q," it said in a happy voice that contrasted sharply with its obvious distress. "The experiment didn't work. After one minute, everything went… bad."
A chill shot through Kimi's meat bod. "Bad?" she asked. She glanced back at the shimmering sheet lightning barrier, at the closed portal. Was this all her fault? She'd been too late with her attack on Raymond Kahnewake and now the great spirit wouldn't love her any more.
"None of us can access the Seattle RTG," Inchworm continued. "Something's keeping us out."
Kimi frowned at the barrier. "But other deckers are getting through. That cartoon guy-"
"Yeah, I know. But they're not getting out again." He gave a worried sigh. "I just wish I knew what was happening in there. My new friend Pip is trying to find out what's going on. But she's gotta use a tortoise. And even though she's wiz with a keyboard, that's gonna be slow."
In the world of the flesh, Kimi felt the elevator sigh to a stop and heard the doors opening. She opened her eyes and for a painfully long second was confused by the double images her brain received: Inchworm's icon silhouetted against the glowing grid of the Matrix-and the hallway that led to the creche. She realized that she had instinctively pushed the second-floor icon instead of the icon for the lobby
"I gotta go," she told Inchworm. Without waiting for him to answer, she logged off, then reached for the fiberoptic cable that connected her with the telecom unit and yanked it free. But just as she did, an alarm began to shrill. The elevator's control panel blinked out, and the doors froze in an open position.
Kimi's heart started to pound. Had they found out what she'd done? Were the security guards looking for her now? She glanced up at the elevator's monitor camera but couldn't tell if it was activated or not. Uncertain what to do next, Kimi stepped quickly out into the hallway.
Then the door to the games room burst open and children spilled out, some still carrying their foam lacrosse sticks. Kimi joined her creche mates as they jostled their way down the hall toward a fire exit. The kids were excited, talking all at once in loud voices as they tried to guess what the alarm meant.