Bloodyguts fed the track utility the new LTG address, then sent the dog through the barrier once more. He closed his eyes, and the dog tag that he'd inserted like a chip in his temple gave him familiar simsense-like feedback: the utility reached a dead end, butted up against it a few times, then gave it up and sought out the nearest slave node. It took Bloodyguts only a moment or two to find the right security camera. Then he was looking down at Lady Death's meat bod from an overhead angle.
Red Wraith was right. She was just a kid.
The girl didn't look anything like her Matrix persona, aside from the fact that both were Asian in appearance. She was small and slender, a waif with short dark hair that framed her chin, and cheeks that were rosy red with the glow of youth. She wore an expensive-looking pair of sea-green silk pajamas and lay on what looked like a hospital bed. A cluster of attendants in crisp white stood nearby, fussing over monitors that were linked to the teenage girl's body with fiber-optic cables and trode patches.
Two tense-looking men in suits-obviously security staff-stood guard at the end of the bed. Just behind them was an Asian man in his late forties. He looked as though he had just gotten out of bed-he too was wearing silk pajamas and slippers. His hair was uncombed, but he gave the impression of dignity and practiced poise, just the same. He stared at the bed, a grim expression on his face. Bloodyguts couldn't shake the feeling that he had seen this man somewhere before…
With a start, he realized where. This was Tadashi Shiawase, president of the whole fraggin' corporate shebang- CEO of the Shiawase Corporation. What was his interest in a teenage decker? Why had his staff gotten him out of bed at-Bloodyguts did a quick mental calculation-nearly three in the morning, Osaka time?
Bloodyguts angled the sec cam to get a look at the equipment that was connected to the girl in the hospital bed. They seemed to be monitoring her vitals-pulsing lights on the screens indicated that Lady Death's meat bod was also still very much alive.
Her cyberdeck was nowhere in sight. But-and here was the curious thing-a fiber-optic cable connected her datajack to a plug on the wall. She was plugged into the Matrix without any deck to serve as her interface. Which could only mean one thing. She too was an otaku.
Bloody guts could only guess at what had happened. Someone had found Lady Death hooked up to what appeared to be a non-functional deck, and decided to unjack her. Since she had been accessing the Matrix at the time, even without a deck, she suffered some form of dump shock. In the ensuing panic, someone slotted the wrong cable into her datajack-and discovered, to their amazement, that she went back on line. Which would arouse great curiosity…
And which would also explain why Lady Death had inexplicably disappeared, earlier, back when they'd first accessed the Fuchi database via the gravestone.
Bloodyguts nodded silently. He wasn't surprised that Tadashi Shiawase had been roused from sleep. His corporation was heavily into computer engineering. Perhaps his corp spies had heard reports of teenage deckers who ran the Matrix without a deck and were keen to meet one of the otaku. Lady Death's meat bod certainly fit that description.
Bloodyguts watched for a second or two longer, trying to decide if he could use the arcology's security system to get a message to the outside world. In theory, it should be possible. But he wasn't sure what good it would do. Even if the arcology was in the heart of Seattle-not thousands of klicks away across an ocean in Japan-he doubted that anyone he contacted would be able to respond in time. Lady Death had said that the Al controlling the pocket universe they were trapped in was about to self-destruct.
When the Al crashed, the ultra-violet system that Bloodyguts and the others were inhabiting would disappear. There'd be no chance of a graceful log off-they'd simply be dumped. They'd face not only dump shock, but also the psychotropic after-effects of having been in contact with the AL Just like the elf woman whose suicide Bloodyguts had witnessed earlier, they'd be mentally hoop-fragged. Maybe even enough to commit suicide.
In the high-speed world of the Matrix, the end could come mere seconds from now.
They couldn't wait around for the cavalry. They had to act. Right fraggin' now.
09:54:18 PST
Timea crouched behind a partially deflated rubber ball and peered into the building in front of her. It was modeled after a doll house, with one side left open to expose three stories of interior rooms, but was as large as a normal house. The building looked as though it had been constructed from scraps of packaging found at a dumpster. The walls were made of tattered bits of faded cardboard, the windows were chunks of broken glass, and the chimneys that crowned the roof were the sawed-off necks of plastic bottles.
The furnishings inside the house were macabre. Timea could see chesterfields made of slabs of rotting meat that had been crudely stitched together with surgical thread, and chairs and tables made of bones joined together with razor wire. The interior walls looked as though they had been painted with a wash of blood. The curtains were funeral shrouds, and the doors that divided the rooms were hinged tombstones.
Just in front of the opening to each room, floating in the air like day-glo snowflakes, were a series of warning symbols: the yellow skull and crossbones that meant poison; the blue dissolving hand that symbolized corrosive or caustic materials; the crimson flame that warned that a product was flammable; and the yellow three-petal flower symbolizing radiation.
Inside each room sat a battered-looking toy: teddy bears with stuffing leaking out through worn patches; plastic clowns whose paint had faded away to murky pastels; Battle-bots whose fists and heads lolled on rusted springs; and a CuddleBunni Playpet whose plastic fur looked as though it had been singed by fire.
The icon Timea had followed to this place-a doll made of faded pink plastic with matted yellow hair-was in equally rough shape. Its arms and legs looked as though they'd been chewed by a dog, and one of its glass eyes was missing. It was dressed in the ragged remains of what had once been a red and white checked dress.
The doll approached the open side of the house, pushed past a radiation symbol that rotated like a turnstile, and entered a room on the ground floor. Then it dropped into a couch, its arms and legs splayed as if it was a toy that some child had carelessly cast aside.
"That looked easy enough," Timea muttered. But she knew she was kidding herself. The warning icons had to be IC of some sort. They might let one of the inhabitants of the doll house pass, but they'd slag a decker for sure.
Timea had already done a quick analysis of the doll icon. She suspected that the other toys were much the same: program frames-multi-utility programs that roamed the Matrix on their own. Some were "dumb"- they crashed as soon as the decker controlling them logged off the host or system they were occupying. But the "smart" ones remained intact whether their creator was logged on or not.
She was on her own here. After Dark Father had reappeared through the mirror, bringing with him a decker he introduced as Lady Death, the others had agreed to separate, gather what data they could, and hook up again at the Seattle Visitor Center database at 9:55. If Dark Father could find his way back to that node, so could the rest of them-or so they hoped.
Dark Father and Lady Death had disappeared back into the Fuchi star to seek out more information on the virus that the corp had used to infect the Al. They hoped to find the "trap door" they'd talked about. Red Wraith had gone off on his own to see if any military or government database fragments had been used to construct this pocket universe-presumably he was searching for more data on Echo Mirage.