Tears brimmed in her eyes and streaked dark furrows down her cheeks. Her pale complexion, Red Wraith saw now, was no more than makeup. After a moment, the streaks erased themselves. Lady Death looked at the skeletal figure in the back of the boat and then back at Red Wraith with a stricken expression.

"We're not dead-are we?"

Red Wraith fought down his own uncertainties. "We're still in the Matrix," he told her firmly.

"Hai," she said. "I know it's a crazy thought. But it all seemed so… Just like before when I was…"

Understanding dawned. The experience the girl had been trying to describe bore an uncanny resemblance to his own.

"Accessing this system reminded you of a near-death experience you once had?" he asked.

She nodded.

"Me too,"

They sat in silence as the gondola glided along. Red Wraith wasn't about to share the story of his brush with death with a complete stranger, and the girl seemed to feel the same way.

"I wonder if the others are experiencing the same thing," she said at last.

"The others?"

"The damned. The screaming people." She jerked her head. "Back there. I touched one, and saw her nightmare. It was…" She shuddered. "Horrible."

Red Wraith heard a soft thump and looked over the edge of the boat. A moment ago, the boat had been crossing an open stretch of water. Now a body that had appeared from out of nowhere was gently bumping against the side of the gondola. Although it seemed to be made of gleaming chrome, the metal was pocked with rust-rimmed holes and a strong smell of rotting meat arose from it. If it was, as

Red Wraith suspected, another decker who had just logged onto this system, would it be possible to communicate? Red Wraith reached a hand through the side of the boat and brushed his misty fingertips across the body…

He was walking through a forest on a hot summer day. Somewhere behind on the trail, he could hear a faint buzzing noise. Something sweet-smelling and sticky was on his skin, and he had to find water to wash it off before it attracted…

Flies. One buzzed toward him, circling him in lazy loops. Then another. The first one landed on his arm and bit. Red blood welled in the tiny wound. Then another fly landed, and another. Their buzzing grew louder, filling his ears.

Flies the size of grapes landed on his skin and bit into it with sharp, stinging bites. They laid eggs, injecting them into his skin like tiny bullets. They sought out his eyes, invaded his nose and ears, flew into his mouth each time he opened it to breathe or scream. He scratched, he slapped at the insects, but there were too many of them. He ran blindly as they covered his flesh, attracted by the sticky sweet syrup that covered it.

Now the eggs were hatching. Maggots wriggled just under his skin, their bodies humping up the flesh in obscene lumps. He fell to the ground, to the rich damp soil. Worms wriggled up out of the leaf mold and sought out the holes the flies had left in his skin. They feasted on the rot the maggots had left behind, consuming him piece by piece until there was nothing left. There was no escape…

The scene blinked like a bad simsense edit.

He was walking through a forest on a hot summer day. Somewhere behind on the trail, he could hear a faint buzzing noise…

Red Wraith drew his hand away. Shuddering, he glanced down at his body, absently slapping at his misty skin to drive away the burrowing insects. It took him a moment or two to shake off the phobia that was not his own. All the while Lady Death stared at him. "What did you see?"

"A nightmare," Red Wraith answered. "Hies. Maggots. It repeated, as if there was a loop in the programming. As if the decker was trapped…"

He watched the chrome body float away as the gondola left it behind. "If the bodies are deckers, they seem to be unable to move around freely in this system. We seem to be the only ones capable of doing that."

Lady Death looked out over the lake. "They are all standard icons," she mused. "You would think that a highly sculpted system like this one would include less primitive iconography. Something that matched the rest of the system."

Red Wraith looked up at the other decker in surprise. Sculpted system? He had known it instinctively, but only now were the ramifications clear. "That's why we're the only ones capable of moving around or interacting with the system," he said. "Our personas fit its central metaphor: death."

He gestured at the bodies in the water. "Theirs don't, and so they appear as universal matrix symbolism icons. The reality filters on their decks' MPCPs won't allow them to interact with this system's sculpture. For some reason, its data is being translated into nightmarish images that they loop through over and over again. They're trapped here."

"So are we," Lady Death said quietly.

"I don't think so," Red Wraith answered. "We're capable of movement and interaction with the system. There's still hope."

"Hai," she stared out past the bow. "I suppose so." The gondola had nearly reached the opposite shore. "As long as we don't run into any black IC."

Blood fountained up from the lake in a sudden spray. The boat rocked violently to one side and Lady Death screamed. Red Wraith turned to face the threat and saw a black, bony hand gripping the side of the boat. A hideous black skeleton, its clothing soaked with blood and its yellowed eyes bulging, hauled itself into the boat and lunged straight at them in a frenzied attack…

09:48:45 PST

Dark Father crawled out of the hole and into what looked like a gigantic abattoir. Conveyor belts crisscrossed the inside of an infinitely large building, carrying chunks of flesh and broken bone along at blurring speed with a rattling, clanking clamor. Some of the belts were horizontal, others vertical or angled or even upside down, but the bloody meat they were carrying stayed firmly in place, in defiance of gravity.

The conveyor belts seemed to be linking the various system icons that dotted the landscape, carrying the meat from one to the next. Within Dark Father's immediate view was a massive pyramid of skulls, a pagoda shingled with tombstones, a ball-shaped knot of gigantic wriggling worms, and a multi-faceted office tower made of gleaming black coffins.

It all looked familiar, somehow-familiar, but wrong. It took Dark Father a moment to puzzle out why. He realized suddenly that he was looking at the vast expanse of the Seattle RTG, subtly transformed. The geography was still the same, but the iconography had drastically changed. Everywhere he looked, the system icons were constructed from symbols of death and decay-except for the three-dimensional star of the Fuchi system, although it was too far away to see in detail.

He was within the Matrix, that much was certain. And he'd escaped from his personal nightmare of being devoured by his ghoulish son. Assuming he was still alive and not just a bodiless spirit trapped within the Matrix, he could log off, now that he knew what RTG he was in. He executed the command that should have allowed him to perform a graceful log off…

Nothing happened.

He used a browse utility to locate the access node that would take him back to the Midwest RTG…

Nothing. He remained exactly where he was.

In desperation he tried to simply log off, even though he knew that the dump shock might kill him after the mauling that Serpens in Machina had given him…

Nothing.

The conveyor belts rattled past, carrying their gruesome cargo.

A flash of silver caught Dark Father's eye. Something was lying between the hunks of meat, being carried along the belt with them. It had looked like a human figure-one of the UMS icons used by deckers who couldn't afford the software needed to customize their personas. If another decker were riding the conveyor belt datastream, perhaps Dark Father could, too.