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 on-line 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."