>From: ion@headcrash.Berkeley.EDU (Iain Shigeoka)
Subject: Justice...Chapter2
Date: 27 Nov 91 04:27:21 GMT

WOW, I didn't know if I could get this done before Thanksgiving...

ENJOY!

This is chapter two in the "justice" thread i've been working on.  Please
send any comments,criticism, and etc. to me: ion@ocf.berkeley.edu  I really
appreciate any feedback I can get...

__________________________________________________________________________
SYNOPSIS:  Chapter 1... Crash has entered the Vulgar Unicorn and has
	been captured by the story of the Raven who is sitting at another
	table.  This story involves the Raven's grandson Jonny G. and
	the Raven's renegade creation... an AI.  Chapter 2 begins
	immediately following the Raven's tale...

__________________________________________________________________________
				
				Justice
			     By Iain Shigeoka

CHAPTER 2


	Crash was startled by the vibrations of his 'silent' beeper.  It
brought him out of his revere, and broke the Raven's spell over him.
Crash wasn't sure wether he believed the story the Raven had just told
but it sounded too much like the truth to be rejected outright.
	Crash brought the beeper out and read it's LCD display.
	"Security failure," it flashed in red, "all sectors breeched.
Security level 0."
	"Shit." Crash murmured as he swiftly got up and tried not to
run over to the pay terminals along the Vulgar Unicorn's back wall.
	Crash logged in and hooked up to his home computer's modem.
He'd set up his hardware and software so that only a very few things
could be done to his system remotely.  Security at the price of
convenience.  Crash sent the 'lock-up' code to his computer which should
re-activate all the security measures both on his computer, and on his
apartment.
	"Shit." Crash repeated.  He turned around and headed for the
door.  Time to get home, and fast.
	Crash noticed that in the short time he'd been gone, the Raven
and his party had left.  In fact, about a third of the customers in
the Unicorn weren't the same.  The night crowd was replacing the
afternoon customers.  Crash squeezed his left arm down against his
body and felt the comforting lump that his pistol made in it's shoulder
holster.

	After an eternity, Crash arrived at his apartment.  The door
was open.  Crash eased his pistol out of it's holster and went in.
	A quick search revealed everything in order and nothing missing
except... the girl.  Crash's world had suddenly narrowed to a singular
thread.  He had only one purpose and one condition for survival.  Find
the girl, or die.
	"How do you get yourself into these messes?", Crash asked
himself, as he turned to begin his search for a girl who was somewhere
in quad 87 of the LASD (Los Angeles-San Diego) region.  His chances
were better to guess the password of IBM's CEO then finding his girl.

		*		*		*

	The whole mess had started a week ago.  Crash had been going
about his own business when some dirtboy came running up to him as he
was about to head into the Vulgar Unicorn.
	"Yo, Bash.", the dirtboy had yelled from a couple of yards
behind Crash.  Knowing that he was the only person around, Crash turned
to see who had shouted.  The kid turned out to be about 15, wild brown
hair crushed down in several places, probably by the motorcycle helmet
he held in his left hand.  Leather, studs and chains... typical dirtboy.
	"You got a problem?" Crash asked.
	"Nope, a message.  Mason wants to see you."  With that the
dirtboy turned and gestured towards the Vulgar Unicorn's door.
	Mason was a strange person.  He never was involved in anything
yet his name would pop up everywhere.  Drug deals, assassinations,
security, data raids, you name it, and Mason seemed to have something
to do with it.  What exactly Mason did was a complete mystery to Crash
and everyone Crash trusted enough to discuss Mason with.  Crash had
run into Mason's men several times in the past, but this was the first
time Crash would actually see the man in person.  Crash shoved open the
door, so distracted that he didn't even notice that he was touching the
picture of the Unicorn engraved into the door.
	Mason was seated in one of the corner booths that lined the
Unicorn's walls.  The shadows in this area of the bar were dark and Crash
had trouble making out Mason's features until he was right next to the
man.  With a short gesture, Mason's dirtboy left, leaving Crash alone
with Mason.
	Crash was about to switch his eyes to light intensification, then
decided against it.  Why spoil the effect?  Mason appeared about fourty
years old, his hair was short and most likely dark brown or black.  He
appeared slightly overweight, and was dressed in a very loose fitting
shirt and sweater.
	"Good afternoon, friend." Mason began, "Please, relax, have
a drink."  Crash tried to relax.
	"Uh, no thanks.  Well, maybe a beer."
	Mason signaled one of the serving girls for two beers.  After
their drinks arrived, Mason continued, "There, now that's better eh?
I wanted to see you in person."
	"Why?"
	"Well, I enjoyed that Hack and Slash game you wrote.
	"Thanks", Crash said cautiously, unsure of what that had to
do with anything.
	"After playing it, I thought it may be a good idea to keep tabs
on you.  I don't know why I did it.  For some reason you just caught
my eye.  Of course, after you helped my boys out a couple of times last
year, I became VERY interested in you.  Now, I'm in a little bit of a
bind again and from what I hear, you also are in a bit of trouble
yourself."
	Crash opened his mouth to object, but Mason continued before he
could speak.
	"Well, I thought that perhaps we could help each other out.  I
need a package kept hidden and safe for a couple of weeks.  I can't let
any of my boys hold it, and I can't hire anybody I can trust with it.
Now, you are an outsider and, as far as I can tell, you can be trusted.
In return, I'll pay you handsomely.  From what I hear, you need the
money son."
	"Uh, well." Crash was trying to find a tactful way of turning
down Mason without angering him.  Chase had only helped out Mason's
men because he had had no choice.  He needed money but not badly enough
to die for it.
	"Speechless?  Yes, most people are when I invite them to work for
me.  Well, the package has already been delivered to your apartment and
the storage instructions are attached.  Nice working with you.  I'll call
when I want my package back."  Mason started to get up and leave.
	"But..." Crash struggled to get up.
	"Oh, don't worry about the money arrangments.  I've deposited
some money as an advance into your account.  I'm sure you'll find working
with me quite lucrative... as long as you don't make any stupid mistakes."
Three huge, thugs appeared from nowhere and followed their boss out of the
Vulgar Unicorn.  Crash stood alone, half way out of the booth, a barely
touched beer in his hand wondering how he got himself into messes like this.

	When Crash got home he couldn't find any package waiting for
him.  He knocked on the doors of the apartments around his.  Only one
person was home and she hadn't seen or heard anything all afternoon.
'Great,' thought Crash, 'now Mason is gonna kill me for losing a package
I never even received.'  Resigned to a painful death, Crash keyed open
his door and went into his apartment to get himself a beer.  Plans of
how he could hide from Mason started to formulate in his head.
	Crash was opening the refrigerator when he noticed her.  `There's
a strange girl in my apartment' Crash thought as he reached in and
grabbed a beer.  He had flipped the cap off and taken his first swallow
when his mind caught up with reality.  Crash spilled beer all over himself
as he tried to wrestle his gun out of it's holster with a hand that
was already busy holding a bottle.
	Finally, he abandoned his beer and pointed his pistol at the girl.
The bottle hit the kitchen floor and rolled around in circles spilling
beer into an ever increasing puddle.  It's rolling was the only sound in
the apartment.
	The girl was huddled in a quivering ball on one side of the couch.
The thick, greasy, strands of her dirty brown hair hung over her face,
getting in the way of her furious biting at her fingernails.  As Crash
approached closer he could see she her pupils were dialated to the point
where they seemed to touch the whites of her eyes.  She stared at Crash,
occasionally jerking her head in small movements which seemed somehow to
fit with the constant shivering of her body.  A small strand of drool
hung from her mouth.  She wore a very dirty T-shirt and a light wind-
breaker type jacket ripped in three spots.  She had on blue jeans, torn
in several places, her bare and filthy feet were crammed deep into the
cushions of Crash's once clean couch.
	"Hello," Crash offered cautiously, "are you OK?"
	As Crash approached, the girl started rocking back and forth.
Crash could hear paper crumpling.  `No, this couldn't be...' Crash
thought as he approached.  He carefully circled the couch.  Pinned to
her windbreaker was an envelope.  As Crash approached, the girl started
making small whimpering noises which slowly turned into sobs.
	"Hey now.... shhhhhhh.  I'm not gonna hurt you.  Relax, please,
just relax."  Crash approached and reached to get the envelope from her
back.  Tears were streaming down the girl's cheeks.  "Fucking animals."
Crash muttered under his breath, unable to believe what he saw before
him.  Crash wasn't naive enough to believe people couldn't do this to
another human being, yet it still shocked him to see it.
	Crash grabbed the envelope and ran his fingers around to get
the safety pin to release it from her jacket.  The girl, feeling
Crash's fingers on her back, stiffened, then uncurled.  She began
spreading her legs, one hand started pulling the buttons of her jeans
open, the other lifted her shirt.  She was very quickly assuming a
spread-eagle position on the couch, trying to take off her clothes.
Her tears continued to fall, cutting tracks in the dirt that coated her
face.
	"No don't."  Crash was trying not to vomit.  His head was
spinning at what he was seeing.  This was no girl.  She was a woman,
probably in her early twenties and her entire body was covered with cuts
and bruises.  Burn marks dotted the cross-hatched marks of raised welts
across her stomach, legs, breasts... the work of whips and lashes.  The
few patches of her naturally lightly tanned skin, stood in shocking
contrast to the dark black and green areas that covered most of her body.
Someone who had worked her over was into razors or scalpels, some
analytical part of Crash's mind commented, noticing several crusty cuts.
Crash as a whole wasn't seeing anything though... it was too much.
	The envelope fluttered to the floor, barely beating Crash's pistol
into the carpet.  The girl's eyes were squeezed shut, her face pinched
into a grimmace of pain as if her previous torturers were still beating
her.  Tears now mixed with blood from her lower lip which she had bitten
sometime after Crash had touched her.  Crash slowly lowered himself to
the floor behind the couch.  He sat with his back to the couch, to the
girl, to the unbelievable.  Crash let his head drift back, up to the sky,
up to the clean beautiful heavens he knew rested out there in space, far
away from all this... all this pain and suffering, all this unbelievable
cruelty.  His eyes closed, the sound of the girl's soft sobbing filled
the apartment.

	The note was typed and contained very little.  "1: Feed her
regularly.  2:  No permanent damage to her body.  3:  For your own
protection minimize your contact with her (DO NOT EXCHANGE BODY FLUIDS)".
Crash threw the note in the trashcan.  He still couldn't believe what
was going on.  He wondered what he could do.  What were his options?
After a few minutes he got up...

	Crash spent the entire week constantly nursing the girl back to
health.  He purchased some of the latest in NewTech with his 'advance'.
Nanomachines were the big new thing, and they worked wonders.  The
massive bruising was almost completely cleared up in five days.  Most of
the cuts healed without scaring.  The whip welts, and some of the old
wounds the girl had gotten were tricky, but Crash found a new strain of
nanomachine/virus hybrids that promised to solve even that problem.
Without conciously realizing what he'd done, Crash blew the rest of his
advance on the new machines which delivered just as they promised.
	He bathed her.  Surprisingly, this seemed to improve her appearance
almost as much as all the NewTech did.  Giving her her baths was an
adventure in itself.  Whenever Crash touched her, the girl would assume
"the position" and start crying.  It took several days to train the
girl that everytime he touched her, Crash didn't want to have sex or
hurt her.  At the end of the week, Crash could touch the girl without
having her drop to the floor and strip all her clothes off.  It made
life a little more managable.  She stopped crying.
	It wasn't all positive.  Any solid contact with her still
caused her to whimper and fall into a quivering ball on the floor.  She
wouldn't or couldn't speak.  Her mind, if it existed, was still hidden
from the outside world.  She didn't respond to anything other than touch
and harshly spoken commands that one would usually use to direct a dog.
She would spend hours on end watching the walls.  This frustrated Crash
to no end.  He spent many long nights trying to reach past those glazed
eyes and kindle some spark of humanity.  Even the online help of the
psychological support systems failed to break through her past pain and
re-animate her.  And he named her... Helen.

		*		*		*

	"So, you realize you couldn't handle it anymore and for the first
time in eight days you go out for a drink and real human company.  When
you return... whamo! No girl.  Shit, Crash you've got all the luck in
the world doncha?"  Crash scolded himself as he stood in the middle of a
four-way intersection somewhere in quad 87 of LASD.  Crash was worried.
He was worried for Helen.  He was worried about Mason.  He was worried
that his fears were centered around finding Helen looking as she did that
first day he found her, rather than around seeing his dead and mutilated
corpse floating in the Pacific.  *Worry about your own skin, damn it.*
01:00am.  *shit*  Crash had just bought Helen new clothes and physically
she was about as attractive as women get.  The outfit set off her slender
body and...
	"Crash start thinking about finding her and stop getting
sidetracked." Crash yelled to the empty intersection.  01:01am in LASD
quad 87 was not a good place to be alone.  It was even worse if you
were a lone female, and worse still if you didn't have the common sense
to avoid trouble.  Crash was worried.

		*		*		*

	Eleven blocks southeast of Crash, the girl, he called Helen,
was stumbling through an alley.  Primitive thoughts skimmed across her
mind.  *Escape* *Scared* *Home* *Safety* *Escape* She tried to avoid
people and light.  Her head hurt, slashing and ripping pain like some
creature was entombed there and was clawing it's way out.  *Home*  She
tried to orient herself.  Memories floated like will 'o wisps, teasingly
at the corners of perception yet impossible to pin down and examine.
*Confusion* *Pain* *Home* Her surroundings loomed and shrunk in lurching
perspectives.  Her vision swam.  *No* *Home* *Please* *Home*  She stopped
to steady herself.
	"Hey girlie.  Looks like you had one too many!  Where's your
friends?"  The yell came from down the alley.  A couple of dirtboys.
They approached cautiously.  They were drunk.
	Helen frantically turned and tried to run back into the darkness.
*Home*  *No pain...Please*  Her head was exploding in fragments of pain.
	"Where ya goin' huh?"  The dirtboys were gaining confidence.
They were grinning ear to ear knowing opportunities like this didn't
happen very often.  Sex, violence, and speed were what they fed upon.
It looked like they would get two out of three tonight...
	Helen tripped and fell.  *Home* *Escape*  She crawled in the
trash and grime.  She was sobbing.  Tears raced down her face as the
dirtboys closed.

		*		*		*

	05:30am.  Crash stumbled down the latest alley he'd discovered.
He'd never realized how many alleys, bars, parks, and other possible
hiding places a major metropolis can cram into such a small area.  He'd
stopped counting alleys after two hundred.  His feet and head throbbed
with pain.
	He placed his hand inside his jacket, resting on his pistol as
he kicked a cardboard box over.  A dirtboy lay inside.  Crash's IR scan
told him the kid was very dead.  How many bodies had he found during the
night?  This kid was probably the fifth.  No obvious wounds.  Probably
a drug overdose.  Crash moved deeper into the alley.  As he approached
the end of the alley he started to hear a soft sobbing.
	"Helen?" he whispered.  Crash rushed to the end of the alley.
A large pile of assorted junk was piled there.  The crying was coming
from behind the pile.  As Crash rounded the debris, he saw another
dirtboy.  The kid had his pants pulled down around his ankles.  Both of
his hands were clutching his head.  He had stiffened in a grotesque
contortion that even in death looked painful.  This kid also lacked any
wounds.  The bloody knife that lay by the kid hadn't been used on him.
What the hell was going on?
	Backed up to the alley wall, as if still blindly retreating from
the boy, was Helen.  Rape was a grotesque understatment for what had
happened.  It was evident where the blood on the knife had come from.
Visions of his first sight of Helen's mutilated body in his apartment
eight long days ago swam before his eyes.  A wave of vertigo threatened
to overtake Crash's senses.
	"Helen..."  Crash's voice shivered and shook as much as her body
was.  Crash closed his eyes in the vain hope that when he opened them, it
would all go away.  Helen, the inhumane pain she represented, everything,
Crash just wanted it all to go away.
	"Crash?"  A weak whisper.  Crash's eyes flew open.  "Medea.  My
name's Medea."
	Helen... no Medea was squinting up at Crash through her eye that
wasn't black and blue, puffed shut.  Her eye reflected an overwhelming
flood of pain, relief, hate, hope and dispair.  The glaze that had shut
Crash out was gone.
	Crash couldn't take it, couldn't understand it... "What the HELL
is going on?!?"  A primal scream to the towering buildings that surrounded
him.  He wondered how an ordinary guy like himself got stuck in messes
like this.  Why wouldn't anybody just explain what the fuck was going on?
	
	The morning sun broke over the horizon and slashed through the
cracks between skyscrapers.  It's brilliant rays exposing the death and
grime that even the night shadows couldn't keep hidden forever.  Another
day had come.


*************************************************************************

Once again, YES, I basically want to be the sole profiteer of this stuff
so all the legal stuff applies (IT'S MINE, ALL MINE!!)  Of course, if
ya contact me i'm sure we can talk about sharing etc... (If you want
to "join" in the writing please mail me!!)