Timea jammed her hands over her eyes, shutting out the sight of her brother's dead body. Tears poured down her cheeks. She knew that this was only a virtual creation of some twisted decker's mind-one who was somehow using her own memories against her. That this was only sim-sense. But that didn't stop it from hurting. And what she was feeling right now was worse than the physical pain of the fire. Drekloads worse.
"Stop it," she begged in a hoarse whisper. "Please."
Something cast a shadow over her face. Instinctively, Timea jerked her hands away from her eyes and looked up, one arm raised to fend it off. A three-dimensional hexagon hung suspended just over her head. Like the cube that had preceded it, the hexagon was red and veined with gold.
This is a sub-processing unit, the voice said. It had returned to its soothing tones.
Timea glanced down. Nate's burned body had disappeared.
It is trapped with blaster IC. You can destroy the IC by creating a complex form that will crash it. Concentrate on what you want the form to look like. To begin the complex form, think about something big and destructive. The bigger you imagine it, the more powerful it will be…
Drek! The same lesson was repeating itself. Timea didn't want to go through this a second time. Angry and scared, she wished she had the gangers from the clinic backing her up. She imagined the ganger from the clinic blowing this whole system to pieces with his Warhawk. He'd show this null-brained program who was boss…
Booming shots rang out, filling the room with noise.
Timea instinctively ducked, but the pistol that had appeared in the air beside her was not aimed at her. Instead it peppered the icons all around her with lead, blowing fragments off them and filling the air with the smell of gunpowder. Most of the fire was concentrated on the hexagonal CPU icon in front of her. It shattered and splintered-then fragmented into a million pieces as it was blown away. The pistol clicked a couple of times, ejected an empty magazine, then disappeared.
That was very good, the voice told Timea. You have mastered your first complex form. You 're a good girl.
Timea stared at the space where the hexagon had been. She'd just done the impossible-accessed and used a utility she didn't have. Her deck held plenty of offensive utilities, but none that would crash IC or an entire CPU.
"If I'm a good girl, then reward me," Timea said bitterly. "Get me the frag out of here."
But we've only just begun, the voice said. Don't you want to learn another form?
"Not now," Timea said. "I've got to find someone. How do I exit this system?"
A rectangular green block appeared in front of Timea's face. This one was solid, without the golden veins.
This is a system access node, the voice began. It allows you to travel from host to host or system to system on the Matrix.
Timea groaned.
Where would you like to go next?
"This node can access any LTG?" Timea asked.
Any on the Seattle grid.
That sounded more promising. But any address? That didn't slot right. SANs were programmed to allow access only to specific hosts and systems. Some systems had "trap doors"-secret entry points that only deckers with the correct password could access. But trap doors were rare. And a SAN that could access any node on a regional telecommunications grid was unheard of. Impossible.
But so was the crash utility she'd just materialized from thin air…
Timea looked dubiously at the green rectangle. Her skin was still tingling from the burns she had experienced ear Her. They'd been strictly virtual-the blisters on her skin had already disappeared. But she didn't trust this program any more. Whoever had meddled with what had once been a simple MatrixPal teaching program had been one sick fragger. She didn't want to get burned a second time.
She decided to try an experiment. She chose the address of a public database, a code-blue host with no real security to speak of. It lay at the center of the Seattle RTG and offered connections to hundreds of other systems-lots of potential escape routes. "I'd like to access NA/UCAS-SEA2066."
The letters and numerals appeared in raised, blocky script on the cube in front of her.
The voice resumed its instructional tone. To use a system access node, simply swipe your palm from left to right along the address you have chosen. The node will allow you to access Bracing for the worst, Timea followed the instructions. The UMS icons around her shimmered and disappeared and the voice abruptly stopped…
She stood on a floor whose surface was a polished mirror, staring down at a reflection of herself. Over the shoulder of her reflected image she could see a wall made of round, white objects. And she could see a figure, hurtling up at her.
Hurtling down at her. Wrenching her head back, she saw a figure falling rapidly toward her-a massive troll with dreadlocks and bullet-pocked skin. A streamer of red fluttered behind the figure like a banner and his arms and legs were flailing. In less than a second he would crash down onto her…
And it was too late to run.
09:52:20 PST
Santa Barbara, California Free State
Dr. Halberstam cursed and shoved the cell phone into his pocket as he strode into the monitoring lab. Timea hadn't given him any answers, but maybe the biotechs could. They'd been dealing with this now for-he consulted his watch-nearly five minutes. He crossed the windowless room to consult with his two researchers.
Park and McAllister were both peering intently at a series of computerized displays. One showed a scan of a human brain, its various lobes illuminated in bright blues, greens, and yellows. As the image rotated, the colors shifted position, washing across the brain and breaking apart like brightly flowing phosphorescent waves.
Another display showed what looked like a tangle of multicolored spiders, their bloated bodies connected one to another by multiple tendrils. The "spiders" that made up this neural map pulsed with a rapidity that caused the entire display to twinkle like a field of stars.
The remaining displays showed scrolling numbers, menus of data, and long sequences of text that were filled with chemical formulas. Superimposed over them were pie graphs and charts whose brightly colored bars fluctuated up and down.
"Well?" Halberstam asked. He stood with his arms crossed over his chest, the image of a stern grandfather. His eyes were piercing under thick gray brows and his white lab coat was immaculately starched. A flesh-colored datajack was set discreetly into one temple, and the suit and tie he wore under his lab coat were both a somber charcoal gray. His only adornment was a thin gold wedding band.
Park, a young man whose sky-blue cybernetic eyes were incongruous and jarring in his Korean face, shrugged. "Beats the drek outta me." He leaned back in his chair. Under his unbuttoned lab coat he wore a T-shirt emblazoned with a nineteenth-century print advertisement for Fowler and Wells, Phrenologists. The ad showed a human head, divided into sections labeled with personality traits. "Phrenology reveals our natural tendencies, our capacity for right and wrong, our appropriate avocations," the advertisement read. "Mssrs. Fowler and Wells shall read your skull and direct you how to attain happiness and success in life."
McAllister, the researcher seated beside him, was an elf woman whose single braid of blonde hair was almost as white as her lab coat. She spoke without looking up from her data display.
"We're seeing some rather dramatic shifts in the subjects' neurotransmitter balances," she said in a dispassionate, clinical voice. "There's an increased presence of dopamine; the substantia nigra seems to be producing this neurotransmitter at a greatly accelerated rate. There are indications of oversaturation of the limbic system as a whole, and there are abnormal spike discharges in the nucleus accumbens that are suggestive of severe emotional disturbance."