"Frag off! They don't love me any more. That's why I won't let them in. Now shut up. I don't want to hear about them anymore!" The boy rocked more violently. Back and forth. Back and forth.
"Then you must know what deep resonance is," Dark Father continued, heedless of the fact that the boy had jammed his hands over his ears. "You're the one behind the experiment. You can tell me what's going on-"
"You!" The boy spun around on the bunk to stare at Dark Father. "You're the one! You're the one who tried to kill me. I hate you! I HATE YOU!"
Twin beams of rippling force shot out of the boy's palms. They struck Dark Father's chest, propelling him violently backward. He slammed into the cell's cement wall with such force that he heard his bones cracking. Then the wall behind him gave way in a shower of concrete and dust and he flew through the air. Another shift…
He landed on his back, stunned, and saw Lady Death looking down at him, a surprised expression on her makeup-white face.
"Konnichiwa" she said, extending a slim hand to help him up. "Where did you come from?"
09:52:49 PST
Lady Death held the spotlight in her hands and swept its beam around the room that represented the datastore that she and Dark Father had accessed. Dust hung in the air, scattering and softening the light.
The room was small and cramped, filled with gigantic, old-fashioned metal filing cabinets. Back in the days be fore virtual offices became the norm, cabinets like these had been used to hold hardcopy documents. Each was twice as high as Lady Death was tall, had four oversized drawers, and was a dark, dull green in color. A thick layer of dust covered them.
The winged microphones of Lady Death's browse utility bumped gently against the drawers of several of the cabinets, their wings buzzing. As she swung the spotlight toward them, what had appeared to be unlocked drawers suddenly changed. As the light hit, enormous bombs sprang into view. Made of sticks of red dynamite taped together with a digital readout that read ACTIVATED, the bombs were stuck fast to the drawer fronts. As the beam of light swept away, the bombs disappeared, becoming invisible once more.
"Data bombs." Lady Death spoke in a whisper, as if her voice would trigger them. She turned to Dark Father. "Do you have a defuse utility?"
The skeleton beside her nodded. Dark Father's black bones and clothes made him almost invisible against the darkness, but his white teeth gleamed in a perpetual death's-head grin. His finger bones clicked together as he mimed a scissor-like cutting motion, and a pair of oversized wire cutters appeared in his hand. "Which one holds the most data?"
Lady Death listened to the buzzing of the microphones. "That one," she said, pointing her searchlight at the icon that was buzzing the most insistently. The winged microphone nudged against the lowermost drawer next to the sticks of dynamite.
Dark Father knelt before the filing cabinet. He gently guided the wire cutters forward, then released them and let the icon do its work. The wire cutters drifted first to one side of the data bomb, then the other, rotating gently as the defuse utility decided which string of programming to interrupt. Then the tool positioned its blades over a striped black-and-red wire and snipped.
The readout changed from ACTIVATED to DEACTIVATED.
"Good," Dark Father said in a satisfied voice. "That was easy enough."
Tape unraveled with a hissing noise as the data bomb broke apart into six individual sticks of dynamite. At first, Lady Death thought that this was what was supposed to happen. But then each of the red cylinders elongated and expanded into a red snake several meters long and twice as thick as Lady Death's arm. Bands of gold light strobed down their bodies and green targeting lasers projected from their eyes. Two pairs of finger-thin beams of light locked on Lady Death, and two of the snakes surged toward her, streaking through the air like sinuous arrows.
"Ki o tsukete!" she cried. "Attack IC!"
Dropping the searchlight, she activated the jets in her sandals. The evade utility allowed her to spring up onto one of the filing cabinets in an enormous leap, but the snakes were quicker. One of them opened its wide mouth and engulfed one of Lady Death's legs, swallowing it to the knee. It yanked, and she crashed to the floor. The second snake surged for her head, mouth open. Lady Death threw her right arm up to fend it off-and her hand and forearm disappeared into the snake's gaping maw.
The snakes began to undulate as their throats constricted and swallowed, constricted and swallowed. Lady Death's arm and leg disappeared into the gullet of the snakes, centimeter by centimeter. Then the snake on her arm reached her shoulder, and Lady Death felt searing pain as its teeth sawed home. The teeth crunched through bone, snapping her arm off at the shoulder. Then the snake disappeared, leaving her an amputee.
Through a haze of pain, she saw that Dark Father was faring no better. Three snakes were on him, locked on both legs and one hand. He was thrashing madly, rolling back and forth in an effort to avoid the fourth snake. He'd managed to get his noose around it, which had damaged the IC somewhat, but the snake was still trying to engulf his head. Instinctively, Lady Death knew that if the IC struck that part of his persona, Dark Father would be a dead man.
This IC was deadly stuff-a construct of two separate programs: a data bomb that was easily defused, and some sort of proactive ripper IC that attacked a decker's persona. The attack should have been painless, the damage confined to the MPCP of the deck itself-to the optical chips responsible for creating and maintaining the persona icon. But Lady Death could feel the agony of the snake's sawlike teeth as the serpent reached her upper thigh and began worrying at the flesh of her leg.
The second snake reappeared. It zoomed in for an attack on her other leg. Reacting instinctively, Lady Death used the jet in her remaining sandal to boost her out of the way. The snake missed by a centimeter, its jaws closing on dust and air.
She had nothing with which to attack the snake. She was a Matrix surfer, not a real shadowrunner. Her deck carried no combat utilities. She was dead.
She twisted violently as the snake rippled forward in another attack. Her shoulder banged against a filing cabinet. It shifted slightly, and Lady Death saw that the drawer had slid open wide. It was empty, save for a single manila file folder.
The snake attacked again, and Lady Death ducked so that the filing cabinet drawer was between her and the IC. Instead of completing its attack, the snake veered off to one side. And then Lady Death realized that there was a way out. The IC was programmed to prevent deckers from accessing the datafiles. Whoever had programmed it had left one tiny loophole-the IC was unable to recognize the spaces inside the filing cabinet itself.
Lady Death screamed as the snake on her leg completed its attack by neatly snipping off that member. In the same moment she activated her evasion utility, optimizing it fully. The jet in her sandal washed the room with a brilliant light as Lady Death was propelled head-first into the filing cabinet. She looked back through the opening at her feet and saw the snakes writhing in the air, searching for their target-who now lay inside the open drawer. Then they disappeared from sight.
She was safe.
She heard the rattle of bones banging against the floor, somewhere outside.
"Dark Father!" she cried. Her voice was loud in the coffin-sized space of the drawer. "They can't access the datastores! Try to get inside!"
A loud clank reverberated through the filing cabinet in which she lay. A skeletal hand powdered in gray dust gripped the edge of the drawer. Lady Death twisted around, grabbing it with her free hand. Then she activated her evasion utility once more. With a rattle of bone against metal, Dark Father was yanked into the drawer with her. The snakes that had reached his knees and elbow, despite his shield utility, vanished, taking his lower legs and arm with them.