From: jerryn@glnserv.UUCP (Jerry Norris)
Subject: LineRunner, Part II
Date: 15 Feb 92 09:06:42 GMT

00:04:45.882

The slick laid it down fast and smooth.  Well rehearsed.

Three Turing agents had done some legwork in Euronet concerning some
problems with a possible renegade Artie.  It was all rumor and ghostwork,
see a shade and look for the body.  What they found was a guy named Rutger
asdkfjasp[dfaw834u !@# Fsad

00:04:43.517

Flash of white noise.  In the net!  Surl says it manifested as some type
of blade; I think he said a scythe.  He countered with a mutating defense
algorithm.  Gotta hurry and bring this up.  It's found us.  We must be
close.

This Hoorlin was evidently a meat puppet for the Artie in question.
Something sipped the info from out of our stacks and fifteen minutes later
there are three neighborhoods in rubble where the operators were
positioned.

00:04:40.006

Okay, that explained the secrecy, and I had an idea of what I was supposed
to do, but I had to ask.  The woman I started calling Slick explained.

Turing knew that I'd programmed our stackdef in collusion with an Artie.
Since I was the only one with that type of a connection, they figured I
might be able to get it to help me find this other Artie, the one they
called the Puppeteer.

"So where's my deck?"

She shook her head.  In the subdued lighting sparks seemed to fly from her
hair as it shook.  Lightwires.  "We have to assume that you will have to
act very quickly on this, so we're forced to deal with devices which have
not completely finished their testing cycle."

Turns out the technology was in the box.  Three ounces of grey
protocarb-chips.  Take living tissue that grows in a programmable matrix,
link this to a Rolex electron analyzer with controller and you had a
system that computed and stored on the sub-atomic level by reading
individual electron shifts.  Theoretically, the matrix in the box worked
on the order of terabytes in a megaflop plus range.  But ghost stories
came of people who went Out with those things in their head.

00:04:30:474

She was good.  Cut to the chase.  Most of the techs were there to monitor.
Two Cors, a Fin, and an Amerind who looked like he'd seen his better days,
but he wouldn't be here if he weren't the best.  Turing wanted me in and
quick.  The Chins would do the op-and-seal in five minutes, and as soon as
all systems were online I had to flatout.  I've been there before.

Then she gave me the chaser.

"The reason you are being monitored has, essentially, one purpose."  She
pointed to a large red light overlooking all of the panels.  "These are
living tissue.  They have been set at a certain tolerance, and your
offices inform us that you may exceed that point.  If you do, you may
cause a change in the matrix.  A mutation.  If such a mutation were to
occur, then there is a 93.717 percent chance that your Chord may
dissolve."

00:04:28.395

I nodded.  "Do I get a warning?  Or is it just ghost time?"

She explained the timer on the visuals and that the monitors would be
doing backup scans in order to help prevent me getting lost.  The timer
started at five minutes on a retro count.  If I wasn't out by zero there
was a good chance that the matrix had degraded to a point to where
withdrawal was the only answer.  I didn't ask what happened then.  I knew.
Two wannabees signed up in a Chiba black lab.  They thought they had a
matrix sim from Oshoga-Nagi; ported it through a powerdrain lapse.  The
matrix went bad almost instantly.  The girl still has to be restrained to
keep from tearing pieces of her skin off, while the other kid, a guy out
of the Sprawl, lays in a medroom with no eyes and ejaculates every thirty
minutes.  Pretty stiff incentive.

00:04:27.690

They were in a hurry.  I wanted to get it over with.  I'd done crazier
shit when I was working solo.

I never woke up.  Not in the sense that you get up, open your eyes and
look at the world.  No.  I was jacked and shimmering.

The goop was incredibly fast.  I did a multi; set up a precis and sent it
to Surl on the Dorothy Special, set up a zone scan for loose data trails,
and set up my anchors.  The last I spent the most time on, setting up the
other processes and then linking them to the goop.  Anchors are special.

Most people enter and exit the net through pro software.  They never do
the anchor setups or linkage that keeps you from getting lost in the net.
People have different analogies for it.  Most see it silver or copper or
some other metal.  Some see it neon.  I use what's handy.  Everyone calls
it the Chord.  The link back with the meat.  The thing that gives you the
chance to slap the button and power out when the dark stuff has sniffed
you.

What I saw was pretty much intuitive.  The anchors were three gold posts
that formed an isocolese triangle, then faded to shade as they expanded.
I had decided to use three chords; I could always ditch one or more of
them if they slowed me down, but the goop made this shit happen fast.

It was time to hunt.

00:04:23.108

The zone scan had produced nothing but penny-ante scamlines.  It was about
what I figured, this close to Night City and the japanese coast.  I threw
in the coords for a rendezvous with the Special.

I was there.

Blink.

It usually doesn't happen that fast.  I've never beat the Special here,
though Surl has.  I watched the Special arrive.  It's a favorite of mine;
a quick and dirty.  This little black terrier icon acts as a boost for the
datatrail:  the defense setup in the algorithm is a seventeen point
dispersal to a random setting with trailer bits that latch hold of a
datatrail and ride it, unobtrusively, to another address in the matrix,
also chosen at random.  From there the data does a quick pentapattern
skip, going from point to point in different matrix assignment.  Since the
icon was still chasing the data instead of riding it there had been no
interception attempt.  The data was a small globe.  I beamed it the
integral equation we'd agreed upon as a signature, and it flashed the
coords for a second.

Blink.



later,
jerry.

email addres: xcluud!glnserv!jerryn| aka  Jerry Norris or (Vermithrax)
As usual, all flames will be judged on originality and color offset, with
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