From: Phyrebrand <tas@kender%bmrbbs.brewich.com>
Subject: Story - Fusion Run
Date: 12 Dec 1995 00:56:21 GMT

Behold, 'tis a story from Amputek Publications...

                                   Fusion Run
                                 by Phyrebrand

        They were going to keep going until they hit Galveston, then
rebound west along the Pacific coast, maybe up into Canada, waiting for
something to come their way.  They planned to stop in the Houstonian end
of the Complex for a few days while Ace checked up on some old friends
of his, software types with pretty solid connections.

        They were young, inexperienced, three years out of high school
in Atlanta.  They traveled, wandering, in buses, friends' cars, and the
occasional stolen vehicle.  They had dreams of success and money, dreams
they were sure would make a special effort to come true for them.

        First stop in Houston was a crumbling parking garage, nearly
defunct, where Jason paid cash to forget about his van.  It wasn't exactly
his van, he'd been fond of saying, just one that he'd happened to run
across in his travels, and it wasn't smart to drive that kind of car for
very long.  Still, they didn't have too much left in the way of money, so
they spent six bucks a box for two boxes in a coffin rack up against the
Southwestern Bell building.  The night was godawful, hot and humid inside
a little box the color of one of those Port-O-Lets, just a foam rubber bed
covered in vinyl for a floor, surrounded by polypropylene walls and
ceiling, with a door and a little window slot.  The noise from the street
kept him up until three, when he finally fell into exhausted slumber.



        "Jason, I want you to meet my friend Sunbird," Ace said.  They
stood on the street corner, in the shadow of a twelve-story ferroconcrete
parking garage.

        "Hey," said Jason, shaking the man's hand.  Sunbird was tall,
Hispanic, a product of the Complex's information black market.
Communications and mood-enhancer biosofts protruded from behind one ear.

        "Hey," Sunbird replied noncommitally.  He gave off an air of
having better things to do, the practiced, easy air of a street dealer.

        "So," Jason said, "you're giving Ace the software for the run?"

        "Selling."  Sunbird shrugged.  "Same difference."

        "Say," interjected Ace, "hey, when can I pick that up from you?"

        Sunbird reached up, twisted the end of one of his biosofts.
Jason had once fenced one of the same model, a personal organizer with
digital voice recording and neural playback.

        "Hey, business is pretty heavy," said Sunbird.  "You know how it
is and all.  There's gonna be this party Saturday over at a friend of
mine's, so if you wanna come, I can give you the shit then."

        Ace considered.  "Sounds good," he said.  "We'll be there."

        Sunbird nodded, folded his arms, regarded them coolly.  "I'll
mail you the address," he said.



        "Hey," the girl greeted him over the crash blaring from the
stereo speakers, "who are you?"  Her voice was pleasant, cheerful,
non-accusatory.

        Jason looked up from his Coke-bottle bong and examined her
through the beginnings of the THC high.  "I'm Jason," he said, voice
slightly slurred.  "Who're you?"

        She ignored the question, sitting down on the couch beside him,
a glass of something alcoholic mixed with orange juice in her hand. He
couldn't help but notice how perfect her smile was, her face framed by
brown hair with a streak of bright green on one side.

        "You're with Ace, right?" she asked, looking towards the corner
of the living room where Ace sat on the floor, plugged into his desk and
jacked into the Net, playing around with the software Sunbird had sold
him.

        Jason took a long, bubbly pull on the mouthpiece, held the smoke
in his lungs.  He exhaled in a tight stream of smoke.  "Yeah," he
replied.  "What you might call his assistant.  He hacks, I watch out for
trouble."  He fired up the bowl with a cheap, disposable lighter.
"Works out real well."

        She turned on the couch, facing him.  Her breasts were
entrancing behind the unbreachable barrier of white cloth.  Faded
blue-green flannel rode her shoulders.  "He's good, huh?"

        "Real good."  Shit, Jason thought, she wants Ace.

        "Never been too interested in hacking, myself."  A thought crossed
her face.  "Oh, yeah," she said, "my name's Jane."

        Jason smiled at her tentatively, decently high.  "So, Jane," he
said, and laughed after he said "Jane," for no real reason, "what are you
interested in?"

        She smiled back, took a sip of her drink.  "I'm studying French
lit at the university.  You go there?"

        High-class, he thought.  "Yeah," he said vaguely, trying to
impress her.  Been too damn long since I had a girl, he said to himself.
Need to settle down a while, maybe with her.

        "Hey, cool," Jane said.  "What's your major?"

        Jason thought back desperately to his high school days, trying
to think of something, anything, he'd been good at.  He'd barely managed
to graduate three years before.  Nothing came to mind beyond the fairly
steady trickle of psychedelics and smart drugs he'd kept coming into the
hands of those that wanted them.

        "Chemistry," he said, finally.  "Neural... you know, chemical
chemistry."  He managed what he hoped was a smile one might see on the
face of a chemistry major.

        Apparently it worked, because Jane grinned back, buzzed from the
alcohol and probably not paying too much attention to what he was saying
anyway.

        A tall figure loomed over them.  Young, white, most likely
Anglo-Saxon, almost certainly Protestant, dressed in slacks and a white
dress shirt.  A handgun hung in its holster on his belt.  His hair was
black, cut in a moderately long, fashionably disheveled style that had
been popular in Paris the year before.  Brown, sober eyes glared at
Jason.

        "Jane," he said, eyes never leaving Jason's, "is this man giving
you any trouble?"  His voice, stern and sterile, devoid of any regional
accent, might as well have come from an airport computer; his hand
strayed to his gun and left no doubt as to exactly what would happen to
Jason should he prove a source of trouble.

        "Oh, go away, Rudolph," ordered Jane irritably.  "He's not
giving me any trouble.  We're just talking."

        "Jane - "  Rudolph seemed to be about to continue, but turned
away abruptly and moved to the other side of the room, where he leaned
against the wall, arms folded over his chest, and continued to glare at
Jason.

        "Who was that?" asked Jason as he took another hit.

        "Oh, that's just Rudolph," Jane said.  "Daddy wants me to marry
him, but I won't, so he insists he accompany me everywhere as a
bodyguard, and Daddy says if I don't let him, he'll cut off my tuition.
Daddy's so obstinate sometimes."  She rose, flashing Rudolph a defiant
glance, and extended her hand to Jason.  "Let's go outside to talk.
Can't hear worth a damn in here."

        Jason stood up too, a bit unsteadily.

        By the end of the night, snuggled in his arms, Jane had told him
about herself.  Her father was a highly successful executive for the
Coastal Fusion Bureau.  Her mother had died of an inoperable brain tumor
before she was born.  She'd spent the last four months of her fetal
development in a tank.

        Rudolph came from another wealthy family, and her father was set
on making what he called a "suitable match" between them.  She despised
him, told Jason how he had once kicked to death a bum in New York for
looking at him.

        Jason murmured responses to her when he thought it was required
of him, but mostly he just sat there on the porch, holding her and
loving the sound of her voice.  When she'd ask him questions about his
past, he'd mostly tell the truth, not that there was much to tell.  He
made up some excuse about how he was always studying and the campus was
such a big place and all when she asked him why she never saw him at the
university.  She gave him her number.

        And when morning came and Rudolph came out and glared at them
again before taking Jane home, and Jason went inside to the mess of
cigarette stubs and spilled liquor and heaping piles of crushed beer
cans and Ace, bleary-eyed, came out of a back bedroom, pulling his shirt
on, Jason realized he loved her.



        The motel room was small, dirty, the plaster on the walls
peeling.  In the bathroom, rusted pipes in the fiberglass bathtub
presented Jason with two weak trickles of yellowish water, one hot and
one cold. Plastic rings with hooks, curtainless, hung on the curtain
rod.  He showered and then shaved with an electric razor in front of the
cracked mirror, rimmed with stamped green plastic, over the chipped
porcelain sink.  They had the room for as long as it would take to make
the run, courtesy of Max the Rat Town lightning pirate.

        In the other room, Ace was setting up his rig.  A '35 IBM clone
desk, 9686 processor, two gigs of RAM, twenty-three gig hard drive.
Jason had rebuilt the desk so many times it no longer looked or worked
anything like the original.  A twelve million baud external modem.  A
virtual reality glasses and gloves for the operating system.  A heart
and neural activity monitor, twin bands that fit around the head and
neck and connected by wires to a display unit.  A direct neural interface
translator, a small box of beige-painted metal with two fiberoptic leads,
one for the desk, the other for Ace.  On the hard drive was a pirated copy
of 3DOS 7.2, a term program, a codebreaker, and an icenet and half a dozen
different threaders he's bought from Sunbird.  On the table, wrapped in
aluminum foil, half a tab of hellfire.

        Jason came in, wearing faded bluejeans, toweling his hair dry.

        "You ready to go?" he asked Ace.

        The hacker was staring into the display unit on his desk, eyes
looking on far-away worlds in his mind, like he always did before a run.
"Yeah," Ace said.  "Get ready."

        Jason picked up one of his white undershirts from the bed,
pulled it over his head.  "So what's the deal with this one?"

        Ace flipped on the desk, tapped the power button on the modem.
Hardware flared to life.  "We're gonna drop to the Fusion Board and turn
on a few circuits, turn off a few monitors so Max can splice in and get
some power."

        "Right," said Jason, and sat down in the rickety metal and
plastic chair beside Ace.  The hacker started up the term program,
dialed in under the hacked city government account Sunbird had given
him.  The Net rose up in three false dimensions on the desk's display,
faint green points of light delineating the three-dimensional grid.
Colorful geometry gave the illusion of realspace to the Net, the grey
cubes of personal accounts and pages giving way to business accounts,
then up through the ladder of wealth and corporate power to the
spinning, untouchable wheels of data that were the lifeblood of the
world's armies, governments, corporations.

        Foil unfolded like an origami flower of dull silver, revealing a
small, pink, perfect half-circle of pure energy.

        "Twice as powerful as what they used in the war," Jason told his
partner.  "This shit's pure."

        Hellfire disappeared between the hacker's dry lips, dissolving.
Gold-plated jack fit, just so, into the steel-rimmed socket behind the
ear.  Ace removed the glasses and goggles, leaned back, closed his eyes.
An expression of calm was on his face.

        Jason's hand lingered over the switch on the translator.  "You
ready?" he asked.  Ace nodded.  Jason flipped the switch, bright steel
clicking against plastic.



        Ace's fusion run took less than half an hour.  He moved through
the Net by will and talent alone, caught and translated by the little box
on the desk.

        Jason watched the display, saw there in two dimensions what Ace
saw in three.  Ace ran the target's coordinates through his term program
and they were there, images blurring past as he moved.  The Republic of
Texas Coastal Fusion Bureau loomed large, a marbled black sphere
surrounded by three shifting translucent orange shells, their surfaces
swirling slowly, like water.

        "Shit," Jason breathed, knowing Ace couldn't hear him.  "Fire's
thick on that thing."

        The outer shell was slow-moving, nonlethal.  Just an intrusion
alarm, Jason figured.  Ace ran the icenet to shield his presence from
the firewall, the program's presence displayed as a lacy white sphere in
the upper right hand corner of the screen.  He ran a threader.

        The shell swirled where the program tried to enter, then opened,
vanishing in upon itself for them.  Next layer.  Threader vanished as it
struck the surface, so Ace ran a codebreaker.  It interfaced with the
shell, surrounded it, devoured it.  That one, thought Jason, would have
been lethal.  Wipe the desk, eat into Ace's mind until there's nothing
left.

        Ace guided the codebreaker into the final shell.  It fixed
itself to it, conversed with it, tried to find the code that would get
Ace inside.

        The codebreaker vanished, swallowed up by the fire.  Ace ran
four threaders at once.  They meshed, trying to disguise the damage they
were trying to do to the firewall.

        A hole opened, not quite a grid square big.  Ace dove.

        The firewall closed on him, an amorphous mass now, blacker than
the spaces between the stars.  The icenet shattered.  Paralyzing
code ripped into Ace, teeth buzzed, muscles locked.  A high whining
sound whirred from the back of his throat.  Heartrate stopped abruptly
on the monitor's display, brain activity jumped and pulsed as the lethal
firewally interfaced with Ace's nervous system, tried to shut his brain
down.

        Jason grabbed the DNI cord, jerked it from the socket.  The
firewall receded, leaving them.  He seized the desk, punching the screen
with his finger, stabbing forward for the sphere of black marble.
Beside him, Ace's head slumped forward onto his chest, but he was
breathing.  Neural activity was normal, heartbeat was weak but steady.

        The surface of the sphere rippled like thick, black water,
parting for them.  Maps, switches, databases flared like phosphorous
supernovas on the screen.  They were in.

        Ace stirred and gagged, endurance and concentration heightened
by the hellfire.  Jason grabbed the plastic wastebasket and held it in
front of the hacker's face.  Vomit spilled forth in torrents, but when
it was over, Ace looked up.

        "We're in," the hacker said softly.

        "Damn right we're in!"  Jason slapped his friend on the back.
"We did it!  Sonofabitch, we did it!"

        Ace smiled.  "Have to do it manually," he said, his voice weak
and hoarse.  "Don't want to take a chance on that happening again."

        "Hey," Jason warned, "be careful.  Could still wipe the desk if
it gets you again."

        "Right," Ace whispered.  His fingers trembled, but they traced
patterns among the maps and switch charts with a master's touch, and data
blossomed at his touch.



        "Nine thousand, nine hundred fifty, ten thousand," finished
Jason, setting the last of the rumpled Union bills in the pile on the
bed.  "We're rich, Ace, you know that?  We got money.  Ace?"

        The hacker sat, slumped, in one of the metal chairs, facing away
from Jason, gazing blankly at the root directory construct of 3DOS.  A
battered tin cup of coffee laced heavily with spiced rum was in his hand,
wisps of steam rising from it.  "I got burned," he said.  "'S never
happened before."

        "You got us in, man.  We got the job done, we got paid, and
that's all there is to it."

        "I could have died.  That firewall was big, man, it was fucking
huge.  Screwed up for a second and it just leaned in and stepped on my
mind."  Ace took a sip of his coffee.

        "Aw, hey," Jason said, standing up and walking over to Ace
across ragged, dirty carpet.  "It can happen to anyone.  Comes with the
territory, I guess."

        Ace said nothing, eyes fixed on the display.

        "Hey, tell you what," Jason said to him, "you go ahead and take
all the money on this one."

        Ace looked up at him quizzically.

        "Well, almost all of it," Jason amended.  "Most of it, anyway."
He was quiet a moment.  "Well, sixty-forty split, eh?"

        The hacker smiled weakly.  "Yeah," he said.  "Sure."

        Jason went back over to the bed, counted out four thousand for
himself, stuffed it into a portable safe on a chain.  The other end of
the chain he hooked to his beltloop.  The rest of the money went into
the hidden pocket in Ace's suitcase.

        "Hey," Jason said, "listen, why don't we go celebrate?  Sunbird
told me about this hacker bar, Silicon Rose, just a few blocks from
here.  We'll go get smashed."

        Ace got up.  "You go," he said.  "I gotta get some sleep."



        Jason left, called Jane up from a payphone.  He didn't pay for
the call.  "Hey," he said, "you wanna go someplace today?"

        "I'd love to," she told him, "but I can't get out."

        "Oh," Jason said, disappointed.

        "Let's go tonight, instead," Jane suggested.  "Where do you want
to go?"

        "Uh," he began, "um."

        "Hey, Verdant Sparrow's playing at the Mausoleum at nine.  Why
don't we go there?"

        Jason didn't have any idea as to exactly what or who Verdant
Sparrow was or where the Mausoleum might be, but he said, "Yeah, that'd
be great," anyway.

        "You know how to get there?  Right past Market to the north, big
arch thing over the door.  Can't miss it."



        Jason, in fact, missed it several times, wandering past the
grey plastic arches on foot in his search for Market Street.  By the
time he finally found it, it was 9:20, but Jane, bouncing happily to
wrap her arms around him as he came in, didn't seem to mind.  Rudolph
stood near the exit and fixed Jason with his baleful gaze as soon as he
entered.

        "Sorry," he said, "I got lost."

        "That's O.K.," she said.  "Let's dance."

        And so they spent an hour and a half at the Mausoleum,
slamdancing to the music.  The Verdant Sparrow's members played an odd
mix of hardcore punk and Erisian crash, sporting brilliant glow-in-the-dark
mohawks and environmentally conscious lyrics.

        During one song, Jane drew Jason aside.  "I brought something
for us," she said, "two hits of Light Angel from Sunbird."  She smiled
mischievously.

        She handed him one and they set off through the crowd to their
respective restrooms.  The drug kicked in as Jason was leaving the men's
room, racing along his nerves, shooting fire through his veins and sending
him speeding into a reeling world of superintense color, heightened
perception, elation.

        Jane was waiting for him when he came out.



        She slammed the car door on her way out of it, running
hand-in-hand with Jason to the automated clerk at the coffin rack.  Jane
pushed her bank card into the slot, withdrew it quickly.  Jason noticed
that it was gold, the magnetic strip black, that the numbers seemed to
jump at him from the surface.

        "Never stayed in one of these before," she said.

        Jason grinned at her like an idiot, then turned his head and
grinned at the glowering Rudolph in the front seat of the limousine.

        Reflexes hyped up to a level near what hellfire would have done,
they scrambled up the ladder and catwalk with the magnetic key like
spiders on a web.  The coffin smelled of sweat and old cigarette smoke.

        She was on him, then, shutting the door as they kissed.  His
hands slid up under the back of her shirt, running up her back, holding
her to him.  Her fingers found and undid the button, the zipper of his
jeans, and she helped him pull off her shirt.  She straddled him, back
bent in the cramped confines of the coffin, reaching down to pull off
his.  Jason reached up his hand, touched her shoulder in the pitch
darkness, and pulled her down.



        The day dawned hazily through the blanket of smog outside,
unseen by either of them.  Jane was the first to awaken, brushing
Jason's lips with her finger.  He smiled at her sleepily, half-sat in
what little space there was, pulling on his pants.

        "Wow," he commented, brain fuzzy with the afterglow of the drug.

        Jane, her jeans already on, grinned at him as she pulled her
shirt over her head.  "You and Ace," she said, "you did a run yesterday,
huh?"

        "Yeah," answered Jason, "we did a run."

        "On the Fusion Bureau, right?  Sunbird was telling me about it."

        Shit, thought Jason, her father works for them.  He didn't say
anything, just put on his shirt and nodded vaguely.

        Jane scampered towards him, hugged him.  "I knew it was you,"
she whispered into his ear.  "That's so noble of you, fighting the
government monopoly like that."

        "Well... you know," he mumbled, "just... one of those things, I
guess."

        She snuggled against his neck, her hair smelling of perfume and
baby oil.

        "Hey," Jason said, "you think Rudy's still out there?"

        "Oh, shit, you're right," she cursed, scooting away and pulling
on her shoes over bare feet.  Her socks she stuffed into a pocket.
"Daddy's gonna be pissed.  I'll call you later today," and then she was
out the door before he even knew it was open, out onto the catwalk and
climbing backwards down the orange-striped ladder.  "Love you," she called
to him, casually, and he looked out in time to see the limounsine swirl
away, flinging up street refuse in its wake.

        Jason sat back against thin blue polypropylene, the two words
hanging in his ears, the euphoria more powerful than the Light Angel.



        "Hey, Ace, where you going?" Jason asked, shutting the chipped
slab of particle board and formica behind him.  Tiny flakes of plaster
drifted from the ceiling.  "Are we getting kicked out of here?"

        Ace zipped up his suitcase, set the last of his rig lovingly
into his foam-lined briefcase.  "I got a job," he said.

        "Aw, shit, you mean a real one?  Like with hours and wages and
all?"

        The hacker chuckled.  "Up in Seattle," he told him.  "Friend of
Sunbird's heard about the run, wanted me to go up there and make a run
or two."

        "Hey, that's good," Jason congratulated him.

        Ace looked up at him, regarded him for a moment.  "You wanna
come along?"

        Jason took a deep breath.  "I'm gonna stay here," he said.
"Things are good now, you know?  Got some money for a while, got a girl,
all that.  Maybe I'll sell hardware or something."

        "Yeah?"  Ace picked up his luggage.  "Hey, I got a plane to
catch, private, out of Intercontinental.  I'll look you up next time I'm
down here."

        "Yeah, later."

        The door opened and shut, leaving him the only occupant of the
room.  The phone rang, an annoying buzz.

        "Hello?"  The reciever was mismatched, beige, sticky with
something.

        "'Ey," growled the voice on the other end, the clerk's voice,
"you got e-mail down here."

        "You want me to come down and get that?"

        "Nah, nah," the clerk said, "deleted it already.  Some Jane
wants you to go meet her at this Mouse-O-Leum place, says you'll know
where it is."

        "Thanks," Jason told him.

        The clerk's grating chuckle came through the fuzzy connection.
"You gonna score, kid?"

        "Something like that."  He hung up.



        One arm wrapped itself around his stomach, the other around his
throat.  Someone pulled him right off the street, threw him behind a
dumpster.  Rough brick scraped his arms and he narrowly avoided landing
on a jagged, broken beer bottle.

        Then Rudolph was on top of him, one knee digging painfully into
his stomach, the barrel of his handgun inches away from Jason's
forehead.

        "You're gonna die now, thief," he growled.

        "Where's - " Jason struggled to breathe.  "Where's Jane?"

        Rudolph laughed softly, a triumphant, bitter sound.  "She's off
in France, visiting relatives until she's thirty.  After this is over,
I'm going to marry her over there.  She's French, you know that?  Whole
family's French.  She left this morning."

        Jason said nothing, feeling the cold touch of the bottle against
the side of his hand.

        Safety clicked off, fingers tightened around the trigger.

        Jason thrust his head to one side as the gun went off, the
bullet ricocheting off the concrete.  The bottle was in his hand,
tracing a dull brown arc through the shadows on its way across the back
of Rudolph's wrist.  Blood spurted like a red fountain,
spattering across Jason's shirt, and Rudolph dropped the gun,
tumbling off of Jason, clutching his wrist.

        Jason jumped up, snatching the gun from the ground.  "Bad cut
there," he said.  "You oughta go see a doctor."  He pulled the trigger.

        Rudolph looked up at him, rage in his eyes, and then his head
exploded.  There was a lot of blood.  Jason dropped the gun and looked
away, glanced around the edge of the dumpster.  A few pedestrians
hurried by, clutching briefcases or shopping bags or small
children - Rudolph had been right; everybody had been too scared to
make a fuss over just another shooting, and the wrongness of it
depressed him.

        Jane was gone, as good as dead to him, beyond his reach for over
a decade.  Ace would be somewhere over New Mexico by now, he
thought. He bent down and picked up the gun again, turning it over,
thoughtfully, in his hand.  So easy -

        "Fuck it," he said, tossed it back down.  "I got a bus to
catch."

        The sun blazed silver and bronze off the glass of the
skyscrapers.


  Copyright (c) 1995 Phyrebrand.  All rights reserved; free distribution
  permitted.