From: gdg019@cck.coventry.ac.uk (Ronin Ironpig)
Subject: STORY: MONKEYTRICK (1)
Date: 3 Feb 92 16:02:07 GMT
Welcome back to the Year of the Rat. This story, volume 2 in the Rat series,
is a little slower than volume 1, "BOY", but be patient, this one should be
a cracker. Continuing roughly a week and a half from where BOY ended, the
story continues to follow around Dex Eastman, the Camden Town Boy, but any
more information is giving the game away somewhat. Also, the story should be
sent out roughly once a week, depending on how much real work I have to do
for this crappy company I work for ( I'm allowed to say this as I'm running
it 8*) ). So, until next week, and with intermittent ramblings... enjoy, if
you can...
MONKEYTRICK - by N Ridley McIntyre
1. The Joke Isn't Funny Anymore.
They sit outside and they wait. The night's rain is falling like wet steel
needles over the Manhattan Outzone, bouncing off the roof of the car with a
loud, tinny static noise. Three muscleboys sit in the car with the lights off
and wait. They wait for the Asahi Tag Teamsters watching La Guardia Towers on
East 10th Street slowly eroding in the rain to leave for just ten seconds.
That's how long it will take.
And when the teamsters check out a noise from around the corner and leave as
planned, the three in the car go into action.
The flash is the last thing Dex remembers. Kitty's last memory is seeing her
boyfriend ripped apart by a bright orange blast and scraped across the walls,
just a microsecond before she feels the blast's claws herself.
******************************************************************************
"Let's take a look at his eye, shall we?" A Russian voice.
The house is bathed in angelic white light, of the purest kind. Dexter has a
vision of God. When it goes as suddenly as it came, the girls begin to taunt
him, too, about the visions.
"Didn't you see it?" he screams. "It came through the windows. The light."
"Didn't see a light. Did you see a light, Erica?"
"What light? Has he had a revelation? Has he seen... God?"
"That's what happens when you have girl's eyes. You think you see God."
"Maybe he thinks he IS God."
Dexter hides in the dark warmth of an antique MFI wardrobe and sobs. He wishes
someone older was here so he could get them to tell them all to shut up. He
can't seem to do it himself.
A whisper from the shadows behind him, which is soothing, but so
unexpected and shocking, nearly unlocks his bowels.
"Don't be afraid."
It is that simple. Dexter searches the wardrobe frantically, throwing furs
and leather coats and military uniforms to each side to find the voice, but it
isn't there.
"Look down."
There she is. A young girl about six years with long black hair and very
white eyes. He quickly climbs into a fur coat and wraps himself in it's luxury.
"My name's Dexter. Who are you?"
Pain enters his tiny body and splits the skin envelope in a thousand
places, crying out for mercy under the explosive sensation.
Then darkness.
"Sorry, it was going off track." That Russian voice again.
And the pain is gone and he is new again, and he slowly spends his second
childhood in a Berlin house filled with children who taunt him. But that girl,
whose name is Pain, always protects him. As long as she is there, the other
children stay away. She seems to have this power, this command over them all.
And when they all reach puberty, and the others are experimenting with each
other's sexualities, Dexter and Pain play games in the darkness, and no matter
what the game, Pain always wins. Everytime.
******************************************************************************
"Is he done?" A new voice, English. Female.
"This is about as good as he gets." The Russian voice.
"Well, keep running the program for about another month. Then, tell him what's
happened."
"You're the boss."
"Damn right."
*******************************************************************************
Soho. The London Outzone. The Year of the Rat.
There is a burned-out shell of a pub called The Blue Cross which lies in the
underworld of one of the London Outzone's huge tower blocks. Inside things are
busy, but running on candlelight thanks to one of the frequent brownouts the
area gets when the Feds find one of the cables tapping the monorail lines high
above.
This is a steamer pub, filled with long-haired heavy drinkers with rough
voices and no respect for females. Dex and Sarah find it strange that the women
there treat their men the same way. Dex had told her to dress down, so she wears
a white lace blouse and black jeans. He almost feels embarassed to be with her.
Instead he feels contempt. She follows him through the dark crowd and attracts
a couple of glances here and there from the men, but not enough to make her feel
any smaller than she already is. Out of her depth here, she needs someone like
Dex to keep her from drowning. And Dex needs her if he wants to stay alive.
Dex is rushing through this crowd looking for one person, and when he finds
the young man, the poor kid can't recognise him.
The young man is dressed as a steamer, with a leather roughrider's jacket
and leather jeans and steel-plated, knee-high boots, but his hair is too short.
He fits, but he doesn't fit; a person Dex, the eternal Stranger In A Strange
Land, could completely identify with. Had he not met him before.
"Long time, no see, Motorhead."
Motorhead is drunk as usual and strains his memory to name the face. Dex finds
it impossible to believe that this seventeen-year-old has taken Dex's place
with the Sodha roughriders. Finally, Motorhead makes a noise. "Who the hell
are you?"
Dex's face is expressionless. "What, don't you remember the Boy? I used to
run with you back in the Year of the Goat."
Motorhead returns to his drink. "Wrong. Try another one, matey, the Boy's
dead. The Fed's got him. Blew him and his girlfriend up in the Manhattan
Outzone."
Dex remained where he was. "Remember in Seven Stars? That night in the Goat's
summer when we got smashed and you dared me to ask that woman to dance with me
and it turned out she was FDI? We nearly ended up publicly hanged for that one.
Or that time in the Ether when you got caught in a Worldbank shell and I had to
make up some software really quick to bail you out? Damn you, look at me. It's
me, Motorhead. It's the Boy."
Motorhead looked up when Worldbank was mentioned. Someone could have found
out about the Seven Stars incident, the two of them were real legends in that
place, but no one except the Boy knows about the Worldbank thing, it would be
bad for business if that got out.
"So? If you're the Boy, what the hell are you doing here?"
Dex looks at the blonde woman behind him, a furtive gaze in her grey-green
eyes. She gives a hint of a shrug and hides her thumbs in the back pockets of
her jeans. Behind them all, next to the door, a fast fistfight breaks out.
"I'm in trouble, Jez. Real trouble."
Motorhead cocks his head to the left. "Yeah," he says. "When have you ever
been *out* of trouble?"
****************************************************************************
Dex says they need a place to talk. Somewhere private. Motorhead picks one of
the hologram lions around a hologram Nelson in Trafalgar Square, the one that
faces north towards the foggy outline of the four huge cylinders of Tottenham
Court Points that thrust into the clouds above the Outzone.
They sit around the red hologram lion and Dex tells a story of how he left the
London Outzone because of the wars between the Sodha and Kistna roughrider teams
and went to Norfolk, Virginia to join with the Martial Government Air Force as
their security would mean he couldn't be found; how he went AWOL on leave in
Seattle and became one of the enemy, running with Kreskin's nomad Joker clan,
smuggling contraband between Seattle and New Atlantic City until eventually,
he found himself a home in the Manhattan Outzone. He had just settled himself
in, he had money, a girlfriend, and was ready to return as the Boy - one of
the top 30 hackerjacks in the world - when three hired ronin fired a high-
explosive missile into his apartment. Everything he had, his home, the woman
he was nearly in love with, his money, his life, had been torn away from him.
For one simple reason.
Vijayanta FC needed him. Vijayanta destroyed him, and they put him back
together again in 3 months. They even grew a paving slab of skin for him to
replace the all the damaged stuff. He is nearly perfect now, except for the
dreams they gave him, but Dex manages not to mention those.
"I don't get it. Why kill you?"
The blonde girl steps in here. "Vijayanta taketh, and Vijayanta giveth back.
He's more use to us dead than alive, if you know what I mean."
Motorhead switches confused glances between Dex and Sarah. Finally, he settles
on the girl. "Nope."
"She means that if I'm officially dead, then I can't get hanged for breaking
the law," says Dex.
"But why you?"
Dex nods to Sarah. She stares at him coldly, then eventually gives in. "Ever
heard of Iapetus?" she asks Motorhead.
It rings a bell in the young man's head. "That's an Artificial Intelligence
code, isn't it?"
Sarah nods. "Vijayanta Foods FC's Artificial Intelligence."
"So."
"We've lost it."
Sarah's matter-of-fact answer makes Motorhead laugh. Then the thought of
someone 'losing' an AI makes him laugh harder. Then, when he realises that a
Federated Company has 'lost' it's major AI, probably the one thing that knows
more about the company than all the intelligence reports that Federal
Government would ever possess, he laughs harder than he ever has since Dex
left for America. The sound echoes around the antiquated, post Storm-War
buildings to create a confusing collage of ambience that seems to radiate
cruelty to the other two.
They are not laughing. They each watch Motorhead in their own way; Sarah,
through scared eyes, and Dex through eyes which once belonged to someone else.
When Motorhead looks up at them from the floor where he fell off the podium to
the hologram lion, he calms down.
"I'm sorry. But that's pretty funny."
Sarah and Dex's eyes give the game away. He slowly realises exactly why they
have come to see him. And the joke isn't funny anymore.
******************************************************************************
TO BE CONTINUED...
COPYRIGHT N RIDLEY MCINTYRE 1992
--
N Ridley McIntyre - Ronin Ironpig - gdg019@cck.cov.ac.uk | The one and only
"God money let's go dancing on the backs of the bruised | |)
"God money's not one to choose " - NIN | |\ <> |\| | |\|
Sig Virus 2.0: copy me backwards from how you read me | IRONPIG
From: gdg019@cck.coventry.ac.uk (Ronin Ironpig)
Subject: STORY: MONKEYTRICK (2)
Date: 3 Feb 92 16:07:31 GMT
Synopsis: It is the Year of the Rat...
Dex Eastman, the Camden Town Boy, is officially dead. Unofficially, he's
been resurrected by Vijayanta FC to help them find their lost Artificial
Intelligence, Iapetus. Returning to London, he has found the only person
he knows who might help him, another hackerjack called Motorhead, who is
none too happy about giving a hand, but hasn't got much of a choice. But
something isn't right with Dex. Something to do with the dream he had
when they fixed him up. And for the life of him, Dex can't remember a damn
thing...
MONKEYTRICK - by N Ridley McIntyre
2. Toys.
The suite on Floor 113 at the Miramar Hotel in the center of the St. James
Secure Zone has a dry, air-conditioned taste to it. Motorhead finds himself
pulling his stuck tongue from the roof of his mouth as he waits with Dex for
Sarah to get dressed down again. Sarah doesn't have that many street clothes,
as she doesn't touch the streets that much. She's much more used to this kind
of life, up here in the sky, where you can't even see the London Outzone thanks
to the dirty grey clouds that blanket the entire view from the window.
Motorhead almost feels like he could jump on top of them and they'd be sturdy
enough to take his weight. Piercing the clouds far away are the columnic towers
of various other Secure Zones. Battle Bridge Points, Tottenham Court Points,
Bowling Green Points, Camden Points, Canbury Points, the tip of the Smallpox
Hospital spire and the various billowing stacks of the Workhouses. Underneath,
he knows, are the countless crumbling smaller towers of the Outzone, none of
which stand more than 100 storeys high.
Unlike Motorhead, Dex has tasted rooms like this before. They are nothing new
to him, but they call up a certain brand of feeling that Dex doesn't want to
have running around his guts just now. So he distracts himself by checking out
the Disney channels on the colour TV, then, realising that they only make the
feeling worse, he switches off the set. To utter silence.
Motorhead shuffles a bit. Then he slumps down on the couch and runs his fingers
over ultravelvet smoother than the skin on a 20 Rupee kitten. Finally he jerks
himself back to his feet.
"Have they got room service here?" he says.
Dex points him to a machine in the corner that will produce anything to order
within fifteen seconds. Motorhead orders a plastic bottle of cider.
"Want anything?" he offers to Dex. The Boy shakes his head. "Fair enough."
When the cider arrives - Motorhead times it at 12.48 seconds on his antique
Seiko digital watch - he opens it and downs it all in one. It has a lot of
flavour, but no bubbles, and Motorhead wonders whether it's flat or that's the
way it's meant to be.
He stands in awe of the room, scared yet admiring. "Like the places in the
TV soaps, innit, Boy? Only in colour."
Dex sits down with his hands in his lap and tries to think of nothing. But
that memory keeps coming back, and it's tied to his dream. That dream he had
in Berlin with the children and the girl called Pain. Somewhere there is a
link in all this. He had to be here for some other reason than Vijayanta's
threat, but his mind is averting it, everytime he tries to think about her,
tries to remember her face, he thinks of something else. Vijayanta wants him
to forget, and it has nearly worked. Remembering is the key to the pain he is
feeling, but remembering what?
He looks at Motorhead, but he's trying to find a pocket in his black leather
jacket that will fit the bottle. Real petroleum plastic, worth a lot on the
streets of the Outzone.`No, he wouldn't know,' thinks Dex. `He wouldn't
remember.'
The sun is starting to break through on this side of the Miramar building and
its tiny arc pours red/purple light into the room through large circle windows.
The light brings out the contours and some of the unhealable scars on Dex's
face. Motorhead notices for the first time that his black hair is all implanted
and bald patches show through it. It is also much longer than Dex ever used to
allow. Motorhead can see that something's wrong there. Vijayanta put his body
back together, but his brain isn't what it used to be. Dex has lost his old
self, and it sends a stealthy shiver crawling down Motorhead's thin neck.
******************************************************************************
It takes them most of the morning to reach their destination. They find a
cycle-rickshaw that will take them and they ride in the back. Dex spends most
of the ride either watching the beggars and street vendors and kittens - pre-
pubescent prostitutes - plying trade in the darkness under the city's towers,
or hiding his face in shame as Motorhead makes a play for Sarah. She takes it
all calmly, filling in her company background: Born in Milton Keynes which is
at the centre of Thames Midland, she followed her father into biochemistry at
Vijayanta and became head of Information Services for the Federated Company
after only three years there.
"I nearly cried when Iapetus disappeared. We looked for it everywhere within
the system. But it was nowhere. It wasn't compiled, or compressed. It was just
gone. No trace."
By the end of the journey, Motorhead is starting to give up on the woman, who
is pretty, but not very interesting. Her entire manner seems to reveal to him
certain flavours of non-life that must exist in the world of the Secure Zone.
Sarah is People Who Don't Like To Party Because They Have Work To Do flavour.
"How comes we're doing it this way? I mean, you lose something that big and
it's a Fed problem, innit? The FDI should be doing this."
"Let's just say that Iapetus is holding some things that we don't really want
the FDI to find out about. So keep your trap shut about this." Her voice is
stern, but calm. Dex can still feel her temperature bunny-hop a degree.
"So just tell me one more time why I should help you and the Boy find it," he
asks her with a frown.
"Do you like your life?" she replies. He nods. "Then you do as I tell you."
Covent Garden Market is a technical bizarre. The rectangle is covered by
rusting corrugated iron and sheets of gas-planet pvc. The surrounding towers
cast a grim shadow over the whole affair, and though the far-off sky is blue,
twinkling with the new stars of low-orbit workstations, down here cold and
dampness pervades the air.
"Who did you say we could find here again?" Sarah asks.
Motorhead barges his way through the slow-moving crowds, jostling with scores
of people who seem intent to just stand at look at the merchandise, rather than
buy or move on. The couriers sell data cubes, minicubes for those who like
plugging things straight into their neural systems, stolen Fednet PC's, valve
amps, monochrome TV's and even headset radios at their stalls. None seem to want
to undercut anyone else's prices.
"Nukie Brown. He's one of the best technojacks this side of the river. If he
can't fix us up with another deck, no one can. He got mine for me."
Nukie Brown is a steamer, too. His hair trails lank and greasy around his
broad shoulders, eyes wide open and wild, with pin-prick pupils, and he stands
taller than anyone Sarah has ever seen, at least two metres high. Sarah
concludes that Nukie Brown is the biggest, ugliest man this side of Milton
Keynes.
"Howay, 'headman. Who're they?" Nukie has a Geordie accent which is slowly
tempering in the London Outzone. A product of growing up in one place and having
to work in another. South Shields, the small industrial complex where he was
born, has been abandoned by Sukhoi FC, and the whole workforce can now be seen
dotted around Thames Midland trying to find work. Nukie's father worked on
computer components for Sukhoi automobiles, and the young man has picked up a
lot of his technical flair.
"This is Sarah. And this is the Camden Town Boy."
"Pleased to make your acquaintance," he says to them. His face doesn't register
Dex's pseudonym. The Boy must have been before his time, and Nukie's scarred
face makes him look old enough to be Motorhead's father.
"So what're you after?"
Dex steps in before Motorhead can make any comprimises or deals. "I need a
military Etherdeck. Grade Four or higher. And some software design packages.
Maybe a Fednet PC to cover the trail."
Nukie's scarred face breaks into a toothy grin. "Not after much, are we? I'll
have you one by tomorrow morning, depending on how much you're willing to pay
for it."
"Depends on how much you're willing to charge."
Three roughriders at the stall to their right argue over the price of a drum
minicube, drowning out much of the conversation, making them repeat nearly
everything twice. Sarah stands back and watches. In a place like this, it's
all she knows how to.
*******************************************************************************
The following morning, Dex is woken by a tickling sensation on his cheek.
Unconsciously, he goes to scratch his face when his fingers knock an unphased
roach to the dusty carpet in front of his face. The roach scuttles off towards
the safety of the skirting board. Dex opens his other eye and remembers that
Motorhead somehow managed to convince him to sleep on his floor.
"Drink, Boy?" Motorhead is standing at the door to the kitchen. It instantly
makes him remember Kitty in Manhattan, only she used to lean against the door
frame; while Motorhead has his arms stretched across the entrance, and peers
in.
Dex has a dry mouth, filled with carpet dust, so answers with a nod.
"Can I ask you something, Boy?" Dex hears Motorhead shuffling around the tiny
kitchen. "How much thumb has she got on you? How badly do you belong to her."
Dex rubs his eyes and yawns. "Well, I can't say she saved my life, but... Look,
if I find this thing then they might leave me alone. They rebuilt me, made some
minor modifications along the way. I was rewired again so I'll be faster in the
Ether, and my sensorium has been rebalanced so I can sense certain things more
than others. Like my olfactory system and my taste is pretty poor, but my
tactile nerves are hotter than before." He feels like telling him about the
dreams, but he decides to leave that in case of emergency. He didn't want the
younger hackerjack to know too much.
"Must be weird, being officially dead. Means you have to really lay low."
Dex agrees to himself. Yeah. Really weird.
Motorhead comes in with coffee made from a Vijayanta ration pack and scalding
water. "You'd better get ready. It's nearly eight o'clock. Sarah'll be here
soon, and I've gotta date with my boss."
"Where to today?" Dex asks, then burns the roof of his mouth with the coffee
and is glad for some sensation there.
"Etherland, matey. Your toys have arrived."
*******************************************************************************
TO BE CONTINUED...
COPYRIGHT N RIDLEY MCINTYRE 1992
--
N Ridley McIntyre - Ronin Ironpig - gdg019@cck.cov.ac.uk | The one and only
"God money let's go dancing on the backs of the bruised | |)
"God money's not one to choose " - NIN | |\ <> |\| | |\|
Sig Virus 2.0: copy me backwards from how you read me | IRONPIG
From: gdg019@cck.coventry.ac.uk (Ronin Ironpig)
Subject: STORY: MONKEYTRICK (3)
Date: 3 Feb 92 16:15:44 GMT
Warning: I asked a little while if anyone minded use of profanity in my
story... The general consensus was that you didn't mind, but I should
put some sort of warning up here for those who may be shocked or offended.
The following material may shock or offend, though I seriously doubt it'll
turn your children into devil-worshippers... NRM.
Synopsis: It is the Year of the Rat...
Dex Eastman, the Camden Town Boy, is officially dead. Unofficially, he's
been resurrected by Vijayanta FC to help them find their lost Artificial
Intelligence, Iapetus. He returns to London with Vijayanta's computer
cheif, Sarah, and enlists the help of another hackerjack, Motorhead.
But Dex can feel that something isn't right, and it has something to
do with the dream he had when they fixed him up. And Dex seems to have
lost certain parts of his memory. Motorhead took Dex and Sarah to see Nukie
Brown who'd help them with the tools they'd need for the job. Now they have
arrived and it's time to go to work...
MONKEYTRICK - by N Ridley McIntyre
3. Witch Hole
"So you say he wants to patch things up?"
Dev Lung is a short, stocky man in his mid-twenties, who sits behind his steel
desk in the Paddington warehouse and looks down at everyone through thick,
square-framed glasses. His hands resting on the blotting pad on the desk, stubby
fingers interlocked and thumbs habitually dancing around each other while he
thinks. Motorhead sees him as one of those small people with a lot of power.
Motorhead nervously squeezes a squash ball in his hands. Everyone knows that
Dev Lung has an evil spirit in him, and that that spirit waits for the one time
when no one will expect him to take control. Motorhead has seen the spirit
and survived, albeit by the skin of his teeth. He has mastered a way of getting
around the man by being brutally honest with him. A trick that the Camden Town
Boy taught him before the roughrider wars. Back then the Boy was Dev Lung's
hackerjack, on call to the man whenever he needed to know things; and Dev Lung
is a man who needs to know everything.
Now Motorhead holds that position. The young hackerjack nods to the man and
throws the squash ball at the wall, catching it in one hand.
"He says he's making a start again in London and he doesn't need any enemies."
"Is that how he really feels? I mean, I don't know, I want us to be friends
again, but I can't take him on with Sodha because you're here now. But I'd
rather he was on my side than Kistna, you know? What do you think? Is he for
real?"
Motorhead screws his face up and sighs. "Dunno," he says. "He's changed a lot,
but I don't know if that's him, or something that Vijayanta did to him. He's
really cold and single-minded. I took him out to the Blue Angel last night and
he just stood there and watched us all charging, slowly getting shit-faced. I
know he ain't a steamer, but that man never used to miss a party, no matter
what the style. His whole story was that he could fit in anywhere. Now it seems
like he doesn't fit in anywhere."
Dev Lung shrugs. "If he's making an effort to patch it up, then I can't really
say no to him. But if he tries to go against me again, he's mincemeat."
"Hate to say it, boss, but he's been killed once already, I really don't
think he cares what happens to him now."
Dev Lung puts his thinking face on and Motorhead waits, bouncing the ball
against the wall. He knows that the Boy is back at his place waiting for the
Recon program to map out Vijayanta Core 274, where Iapetus was stationed. They
are both being extra careful about this affair. Neither of them has ever done
this kind of job before. It's hard enough to find something that exists, but
when it has broken ranks and could be anywhere in the world... Motorhead finds
himself covering his face with a bony hand.
"Get him to see me. Tell him I'm prepared to forget the whole thing as long as
he does. How does that sound?"
As Motorhead leaves the warehouse under armed escort from a group of six Sodha
roughriders wearing loud hawaiian shirts and cycling shorts, the sudden
realisation of his part in all of this makes him want to puke.
*******************************************************************************
"How's it looking?"
"Not good."
Dex is slumped in a fluffy brown armchair with a collection of broken pistachio
shells around his feet. A fly buzzes around the shells, feeding on what's left.
"So what happened? You can tell me, I'm a doctor." Motorhead takes his leather
jacket off and hangs it on the handle of his bedroom door. He clears a space
for himself by kicking a few cider cans to the walls of the living room.
"Recon program mapped the core, and there's a huge hole in the sphere where
Iapetus should be. Want to see?"
Motorhead switches on the Fednet PC and calls up the image. "Well, that's a
surprise," he says.
Dex snorts a cynical laugh. "What's strange is that it *is* a surprise. Look
at the shape of the hole."
Motorhead looks carefully, then fiddles with the perspective to get a better
look, panning around to see it from a better angle. The hole in the core's
opaque glow is a giant dodecahedron, but their seems to be more missing, some
kind of shadow within the hole that disappears in the fog of the core.
"When it went, some of the system went with it. I called Sarah and she said
that checks out. It means that it wasn't stolen, it sort of clawed its way
out of the core, but it didn't go through the core. It sort of caved in on
itself."
Motorhead shook his head at the screen, coming to the same conclusion, a look
of awestruck confusion on his lean face. "How the fuck did it do that?"
Dex makes a face at him. "Beats the hell out of me."
******************************************************************************
They drew wires and Dex lost. Now he's here, a floating decimal point in the
Ether. A meaningful nothing in a vast sensorium of something that doesn't
really exist. A ghost in the machine.
He pushes himself through the Ether, a simulated sense that rushes through
his nervous system, his body feels like he's swimming through a sea of
powdered milk. Some sort of electronic hyper-rush, and the Ether is still, yet
he can feel it's constant data flow all around him. Vijayanta Core 274 is
alive with paradox and irony, and the Boy's enhanced senses are having no
trouble getting the joke.
There. The hole. He moves around the outside of it, utterly scared of it's
intention. In the five years that he's spent running the Ether, he's never
gone into a witch hole before, and he knows of no one else who has ever dared.
He can see from outside the problem. Iapetus was confined to this space,
but it grew larger somehow, always finding new places to store information
within it's parameters. Eventually, it became too dense for the Core, and
instead of shutting down, as a normal program would have done, it has imploded
itself, taking some of the Core with it. And now the hole left behind can never
be filled again.
******************************************************************************
"Don't take your eyes off that screen. If I lose it, pull me out immediately,"
he said.
Motorhead watches the screen. His own Demon program sits in the Ether, holding
the stringy end of a Trace Strand that follows the Boy through the Core. The
short-haired steamer can see Dex's position on the three-dimensional vector
map he made. The witch hole is there, and the Boy circles it as slowly as
possible.
Motorhead takes a quick glance to see if the real life Boy, attached to the
Etherdeck by a primitive cyber helmet that trails a score of microthin leads
between the two, is still breathing steady. Satisfied, he returns his vision
to the brown Fednet PC screen.
When the Boy slides into the witch hole. Motorhead panics.
******************************************************************************
No feeling. That's what he notices at first. Like the sensory deprivation
tanks his father used to turn into shower units in the Camden Resettlement Camp.
He said floating in one of those took away all feeling, so you you could reach
a perfect thoughtlessness for meditation. The whole concept is outdated even
by New Churcher standards, and the Boy isn't quite sure if he likes it at all.
Though he soon comes to realise that this isn't the same. He *can* feel
something. A rushing sensation, a dream of falling that he used to have as a
kid on continuous playback, and no way to wake up. Falling further, spinning
madly and flailing, so that all notion of orientation is lost completely.
Then stops. Landing on his feet in a living room in Paddington, with Japanese
cartoons on the colour TV and his hand in the hand of a beautiful, small
Bangladeshi woman with long dark hair. A woman he knows by the name of Pain.
******************************************************************************
TO BE CONTINUED...
COPYRIGHT N RIDLEY MCINTYRE 1992
--
N Ridley McIntyre - Ronin Ironpig - gdg019@cck.cov.ac.uk | The one and only
"God money let's go dancing on the backs of the bruised | |)
"God money's not one to choose " - NIN | |\ <> |\| | |\|
Sig Virus 2.0: copy me backwards from how you read me | IRONPIG
From: gdg019@cck.coventry.ac.uk (Ronin Ironpig)
Subject: STORY: MONKEYTRICK (4)
Date: 7 Feb 92 18:01:11 GMT
Synopsis: It is the Year of the Rat...
The Camden Town Boy is dead. But Vijayanta FC put him back together and
sent him back to the London Outzone to help them out with a little
problem they were having. Their Artificial Intelligence, Iapetus, has
disappeared. So the Boy; V's representative, Sarah; and a local hackerjack
called Motorhead are forced to find the thing which is holding information
which could compromise it's master company.
Delving into he sensory net environment known as the Ether, the Boy has
found the Witch-Hole where Iapetus once was, and foolishly gone inside it.
Now he has been sucked into the tear in the fabric of the Ether that Iapetus
made, but instead of finding the AI there, he has found Pain...
MONKEYTRICK - by N Ridley McIntyre
4. Pain.
The room smells of plastic roses which invades Dex's nostrils and causes his
over-worked breathing to calm down.
"I thought you were dead, Dexter. Then it told me you were still alive. It
knew you'd come here. " Her voice is sweet, carried along by the warm rose air.
It has a strange tinny quality to it that never used to be there, but it's her
voice. Her tones.
She walks about the room with a resigned comfort, like a prisoner walks
around his cell. This room has become something she's used to, something
she wants out of but she knows her place now. And it is here. Dex reads
all that from the look in her eyes when she turns to him.
"I'd give you a hug, Dexter, but I can't touch you."
He sits on the right arm of a black leather sofa and rubs his face. "This
is going to sound horrid, I know. I know you as Pain, but that's not your
name is it? I mean, whenever I became close to you in the dream, I..."
She moves away from him. "You went into convulsions. It was part of the
program."
Dex shakes his head as she takes a real apple from a fruit bowl on the
black plastic sideboard and nips a small bite from it. He looks back at the
bowl and another has appeared to take it's place.
"Like this one?" Dex asks finally. "I mean, that's what this is, right?
A construct of your father's living room with you in it."
She talks through gritted teeth. "This isn't a construct, Dexter. This is
*me*. Iapetus has stolen my body and now I'm here."
******************************************************************************
"So you say he'll lead us to it?"
Sarah squirms nervously in a brown leather office chair, her face contorted
into a squint as the sun's light diffuses across the tower's windows. She nods
to her skinny superior.
"I think of him more as bait. He'll lure Iapetus to where we can find him,"
she says.
The skinny man in the tan-brown suit takes a drag from a slender Havana cigar,
as he exhales, every swirl of the grey smoke seems to tumble through the hard
rays of light through that large window.
"Like a monkeytrick," he explains softly to himself. He touches a screen on the
long, brown trapezoid desk and the screen is alive with the chubby face of his
secretary. "Bring in Mister Lung," he says to the screen and the face fizzes to
black.
"What of the other boy? Motorhead."
She shrugs. "Motorhead was Dex's idea. I didn't have any plans for him. He's
Lung's hackerjack anyhow. If you're dealing with Lung, then maybe you'll know
what to do with him."
The man in the tan-brown suit pouts and rocks back and forth slightly on his
booted heels. "I'll leave him be for now, then. Until he makes a mistake. Then
I'll hammer him down with the rest. You've done a good job, Sarah. You can go
back to Milton Keynes now and do some real work."
Sarah can feel Dev Lung's aura of madness as she passes him at the door to the
skinny suit's brown office. She doesn't know exactly why the roughrider boss
is there, but she knows there's more to this than a missing AI.
Alone in the Executive Elevator, she looks out over the zones she's growing
accustomed to, realising how much she hates her position. She has so much power,
but she knows so little, and that's what counts in the Secure Zone. Out there,
in the Outzone, she's something, but up in that office, she's just like Dex.
Bait. Another monkey waiting to be tricked.
******************************************************************************
Dex taps a beat on the back of the sofa with his fingers. "Why don't I
remember your name?"
"You don't want to," she answers. Then she takes another small bite from
the apple. "Oh, it's not your fault. You brought me into the program, and I
shouldn't have been there. So they erased me. I asked Iapetus while it was
destroying me."
She walks over with silent footsteps. "Don't you remember? You saved my
life. I'm Kayjay."
******************************************************************************
Sarah dreams of the London Outzone. Her visions of the place are romanticised,
a soft-focus world of crying babies and neo-medievalism. Better still, that's
the place that created Dex and Motorhead. Now it's her ideas that have destroyed
the former, and her ways that will ultimately destroy the latter.
She dreams of Motorhead's ignorance. She knows he's a fast and sharp kid, who,
if he were brought up in the right place - the Secure Zone - he would be higher
than she is by now.
She dreams of animals on her way to Milton Keynes by high speed monorail. She
dreams of a bear, a chicken, a fox and a monkey. The chicken sends the fox and
the monkey into the jungle to catch a tiger. The monkey goes inside, with a
rope for the fox to pull him out if the tiger gets him. But the tiger chews
the rope, and the tiger eats the monkey. The fox just stands there, not knowing
what to do next, and the chicken tells the bear what happened. When he hears
that the monkey is dead, he sends not the fox to find the tiger, but the
chicken. And the tiger is out there, waiting.
*****************************************************************************
The monkey's days are finally over.
"You have to go, Dexter. You weren't meant to be here."
"But I can't go back until I know what happened."
She points a slender finger at Dex's chest. "You're dying up there. The Witch-
Hole's got you."
"Not me... you. What happened with you and Iapetus?"
"Iapetus used me. It copied me into the system and unloaded itself into me.
Right now, it's in an intensive care ward in the Smallpox Hospital, using my
body to escape. It just broke free of it's position, found me attached to all
those ECG trodes and got started. But there's one thing he did first."
"What?"
"He told me the real reason why Vijayanta want him so badly."
******************************************************************************
Back in Motorhead's living room, the convulsions finally stopped. The screen
of the Fednet PC sprayed white noise static into the room. Motorhead, who had
spent the best part of three minutes trying to keep the Boy from damaging
himself too much or swallowing his tongue or drowning in his own vomit, finally
gave up.
A pounding thunder in his skull, he searched the flat for some painkillers or
anything, but he was fresh out of luck and drugs. Deciding he needed some air,
he grabbed his leather jacket and ran out of the flat.
******************************************************************************
The brown leather office chair is still warm when Dev Lung takes the other's
offer and sits down. He exudes a strange air of tepid confidence, a big fish
in the same tank as a bigger fish, and the bigger fish deliberately makes him
nervous.
"Would you like a cigar? I have some contacts in NAM Prefecture who offer me
bribes every now and then to keep my nose out of their affairs, even though it's
my job to do so."
Dev Lung rests his wide head against the back of the chair. "And I always
thought people like you were more respectable. Especially when they're in
charge of security."
The man allows himself a tiny smile to creep through his pouting, thoughtful
lips. "Your Kistna boys nearly own the London Outzone, don't you?"
"The West part, yes. Sodha still keeps East London from me, and the Yak will
always be south of the Thames, but yes, I have more influence than any of these,
so I suppose you could say I do. Why?"
"Because, to put it bluntly, I want to buy you out."
Dev Lung's lips spread into a wide smile, showing yellow teeth that can never
be saved. "What do I get out of it?"
The man remains still, silhouetted against the bright window. "What do you
want?"
******************************************************************************
--
N Ridley McIntyre - Ronin Ironpig - gdg019@cck.cov.ac.uk | The one and only
STOP MUCKIN' ABOUT! | |)
- the Kenneth Williams Fan Club | |\ <> |\| | |\|
Sig Virus 1.0: Copy me into your .signature and join in | IRONPIG
From: gdg019@cck.coventry.ac.uk (Ronin Ironpig)
Subject: STORY: MONKEYTRICK (5)
Date: 10 Feb 92 10:31:55 GMT
Editorial: Well, this little tale should be nearing it's climax very soon,
hopefully next episode. Whether or not there's a third story to complete the
"trilogy" depends on the players and whether or not they want me to carry on
the game or start some fresh characters, but that's role-playing. As to how
much of the game I run gets into these stories, I must admit that the answer
is not much. The characters are there, the situations are there, but a lot of
the other stuff is either cut out or embellished, depending on space
constrictions. Part 4, as you may know, I was none too happy with because it
was rushed and badly structured. This one, however, I am happy with. Read on...
Synopsis: It is the Year of the Rat...
The Camden Town Boy is dead. But Vijayanta FC put him back together and
sent him back to the London Outzone to help them out with a little
problem they were having. Their Artificial Intelligence, Iapetus, has
disappeared. So the Boy; V's representative, Sarah; and a local hackerjack
called Motorhead are forced to find the thing which is holding information
which could compromise it's master company.
Sucked into the tear in the fabric of the Ether where Iapetus used to be,
the Boy has found the key to the dream, and Iapetus has taken over a woman's
body in the Smallpox Hospital in London. The Boy himself, is finally dead,
his mind trapped in the Ether, leaving Sarah and Motorhead to piece together
the remains of the puzzle...
Oh, there's no place that you can go,
You think you can run but I don't know
- Big Audio Dynamite II
MONKEYTRICK - by N Ridley McIntyre
5. I Don't Know.
An apartment like any other. Lifeless. Dead. Then Sarah presses her palm
against the lock and the door slides open, the hall lights flicker on
and bathe the place in sea green splendour; an effect that sends a warm
shiver through Sarah's spine. She's home.
Each room is a different colour. She uses them to enhance her moods and
keep her sane; a constant reminder of variegation in such a monochrome place
as Milton Keynes.
Her living room is a subtle contrast of turquoise walls and aquamarine
furniture. She places herself at her petroleum plastic desk and flicks the
switch on the blue-screen Sony PC she uses to keep in touch with her work.
After logging on, she runs through her packed message box, filled with faces
from the Information Services department asking about her whereabouts. She
absent-mindedly skims through each one. The last face, Dex's face, shocks
her tapered finger, and she can't press a single button while he plays.
"Sarah," he says. "I know about Shelley's deal. Now, I can tell the Fed's
or I can talk to you. So reply to T7088-Vja274-DEX. Okay?"
***
His own deck and he loves the machine like a child loves his mother. He
powers it up, plugs the lead from the customized cyber helmet into the back,
and hits the start switch, shuddering into the Ether.
Using copies of the Trojan that Sarah gave the Boy, Motorhead follows a
strand through the hardened shell and the shell accepts him gladly. Without
the Boy's recon map, Motorhead is having a hard time orientating himself
inside the shell, but he relies on his memory of the place and sends some
Find slaves in likely directions, hoping one will run into the Witch-Hole.
When he receives a positive message from one of the slave strands, he
follows it's path and then stops dead in his tracks.
The Witch-Hole has been filled with another program of some sort. Tentatively,
he calls in his other Find slaves and sends an Identifier slave to the
opaque area ahead of him. The thin blue thread touches the skin of the
dodecahedron. The name that registers in Motorhead's senses causes him to
tear the cyber helmet from his head.
Plunging back into his own body, he reels from the chair in which he was
sat and makes a run for the window, feeling sense shock pulsing through
him, but he's too slow, and he can almost feel the inner walls of his stomach
meet as he retches into a convenient plastic box.
He wipes his moouth with his shirt sleeve and allows himself time to take
it in. His old friend, Dex, is dead. His body, at least. Somehow, the Ether
had pulled his soul through to the other side when he entered that Witch-Hole.
Now, with his body cremated by the Sodha roughriders at Motorhead's request,
the Boy seems damned with eternal life in the innards of Vijayanta core 274,
Iapetus' replacement.
For a full, painful hour, Motorhead cannot close his eyes without that AI
code filling up his sensorium. T7088-Vja274-DEX.
***
Shelley's thin face, the face of the skinny man in the tan-brown suit, fills
the blue monitor screen, his eyes looking out of shot to his own screen in an
office in London.
Sarah regards closely the bony features of the man on the screen. The blank,
poker-face expression and cold, dark blue eyes that in actuality are brown
piercing the corner of teh screen the way an insect sits perfectly still and
watches it's prey.
"What's wrong, Sarah?"
She shrugs, off-camera. "I got a message from Dex. Something's happened. He
seems to be caught in the core. I think he's dead."
The expression doesn't change. "What was the message about, Sarah?"
"Something about a deal you've made. He says he'll take it to the FDI,
whatever it is. Is Dev Lung involved?"
Shelley's lips pout in thought. He shakes his head. His voice takes on a
stern, yet sincerely concerned tone. "You could be in considerable danger,
Sarah, so I'll have you moved. Put into a safehouse, I mean, just until this
blows over. Stay in your flat, and I'll send someone to pick you up. Just
stay where you are, okay?"
She hangs her head. "Okay." The screen flickers and then returns to it's
normal blue fuzz.
Sarah stays in her flat for a full three minutes before she packs a small
black sports bag with her Enkagirl's outfit and a tiny hold out pistol and
heads back to London.
***
When Sarah's round face appears at the door, he slams it shut.
"Motorhead," he hears her pleading. "This wasn't supposed to happen. It was
a simple monkeytrick. I used Dex as bait to lure Iapetus into the open. I
didn't know he would go into the Witch-Hole. Look, you have to let me in.
They're after me, too. He left a message for me in Milton Keynes and I need
to talk to him."
"You can't talk to him, you stupid bitch. He's dead." Motorhead is leaning
against the steel front door, his face in his hands. In the bedroom, on the
other side of the apartment, his cellular phone buzzes; waiting to be answered.
"I know that, Motorhead. But he's in my system somehow. He can talk to me, so
I must be able to talk to him."
The phone in the bedroom still buzzing impatiently.
"He's dead. D-E-A-D. He's not in your system, he's not a ghost, he's just
dead. Just piss off and leave me alone." As he leaves the door to answer the
phone, he can just make out her words as she calls through the steel.
"You don't understand. Something happened. He went into the Witch-Hole and
something happened, didn't it? I need to know what happened!"
Motorhead pulls the aerial up on the phone and presses a button as he wipes
sweat from his brow. "Yes," he manages to say.
"Open the door and let her in, Motorhead. And keep the line open." It's Dex's
voice. Motorhead rushes for the door.
***
He'd jacked the cellular into an old tape recorder which was the closest they
could get to Conference mode on the thing. Dex explains everything. Iapetus'
escape into the mind of Kayjay and Kayjay's whereabouts, and he tells them
about the deal.
"Shelley wants to own the London Outzone. I've seen it a hundred times before.
Dev Lung was the same, too, but the opposition was too great. That's how the
roughrider wars began, when I left for NAM Prefecture. Now, Dev Lung thinks he's
got himself a second chance. Shelley's offered him a deal to give Sodha
exclusive supplies of Vijayanta 'lost' produce in the London area. It means
that Sodha will have the black market cornered, with Shelley holding the
strings. This wouldn't be so bad if he hadn't given Kistna the very same offer.
It seems that he wants to start the wars again. And why not? Once they're out
of the way..."
"He'll have full control," Motorhead finished. "What can we do?"
"Well, we have to stop him. Dev Lung won't listen to us if we tell him he's
making a bad move, so we'll just have to stop Shelley. That means we have to
get Kayjay's body out of the Smallpox Hospital. She holds the trump card."
"I can still get us into the St. James Secure Zone. Once we get in I can get
us into Brook Street Points, where Vijayanta's London offices are, but we'll
need an army to get past the security," Sarah suggests.
Dex's voice provides the answer. "No need for a whole army. I'll get some
ronins in. A Raven squad. I have access to the accounts here, so I'll transfer
the fee from Shelley's own salary. He won't be needing it. That's it settled
then. Get Kayjay and I'll sort it out. You have to be quick, though, Secure
Zone curfew hours and all that stuff. I'll have the Ravens meet you at the
Marble Arch, so go in at the Tyburn Road Gate, okay?"
Sarah finds herself nodding unconsciously to the phone. Motorhead unjacks
the thing from the tape machine.
"So there it is," he says. "Dex is your new AI. But tell me, what the hell
are we supposed to do with Iapetus when we get to Brook Street Points?"
She looks at the young hackerjack and sighs. "I don't know. I really don't
know."
***
TO BE CONTINUED...
(c) N RIDLEY MCINTYRE 1992
--
N Ridley McIntyre - Ronin Ironpig - gdg019@cck.cov.ac.uk | The one and only
STOP MUCKIN' ABOUT! | |)
- the Kenneth Williams Fan Club | |\ <> |\| | |\|
Sig Virus 1.0: Copy me into your .signature and join in | IRONPIG
From: gdg019@cck.coventry.ac.uk (Ronin Ironpig)
Subject: STORY: MONKEYTRICK (6)
Date: 17 Feb 92 11:50:50 GMT
Well, last part of this one, and I'll be sad to wave goodbye to some
of these characters. Still, that's the way it goes. Tomorrow, I'll re-post
all the parts again for those who missed/lost them. Thanks for all your
support over the last six weeks. If you have any more criticism of this
piece, email me, I'm glad to have something to read each morning, and
I don't care how bad it is.
NRM.
Synopsis:
It is the Year of the Rat...
The Camden Town Boy is dead, but his spirit lives on in the Ether. Sent
on a mission to find Vijayanta FC's missing Artificial Intelligence,
Iapetus, in the London Outzone; himself, VFC's representative Sarah and a
local hackerjack named Motorhead have gotten involved in a plan which would
give Shelley, the head of security at VFC, control of the Outzone. On the
run now, Sarah has as much reason to hate Shelley as Motorhead, whose friend
he had killed, and the Boy, trapped in the VFC core.
Sucked into the tear in the fabric of the Ether where Iapetus used to be,
the Boy has found the key to the plan, and Iapetus has taken over a woman's
body in the Smallpox Hospital in London. With the three of them almost ready
to solve the puzzle, they first have to get Iapetus from the Smallpox
Hospital and into the Secure Zone...
MONKEYTRICK - by N Ridley McIntyre
6. Thursday 12th.
The misty skies over the London Outzone have turned red in the hot spring
afternoon. Solar satellites and workstations form spiny constellations that
twinkle above. Sarah turns her attention back to the busy streets as they roll
through the sparse traffic in a wodden cycle-rickshaw.
"Who is this Kayjay, anyway?" she asks Motorhead, wary of hitting any raw
nerves in his already tender mind.
"She was a Sodha roughrider that the Boy had a shine on. She was the daughter
of a Sony shaker, but she was a young rich rebel. She ran away from home when
she was 11 and ended up in the Camden Resettlement Camp where she got attacked
by New Churchers and raped. She would have been killed if the Boy hadn't
stepped in. Her father rewarded him with access to the Sony flat in the Camden
Secure Zone and him and Kayjay became best friends. That's where the Boy was
born, with her father's Sony etherdeck, so the legend goes." He watches her as
she looks out at the streets of the Outzone; feels her taking in the life here.
"Anyway, Kayjay had to take a side in the roughrider wars and the Boy couldn't
do that, so he left for NAM Prefecture. She was cut up about it, but she got
over it - I mean he never contacted her or anything - and then she heard that
he'd wound up in the Manhattan Outzone with some other girl, a courier. So she
forgot about him. Two months ago, she got caught in Kistna territory; she had
a deal there or something. They gave her a trial by ordeal for being with
Sodha. Hot rodded her. That's why she's in hospital."
"Hot rodded?"
Motorhead sighs. "It's Kistna law. To prove your innocence, you have to carry
a piece of red-hot iron ten metres and drop it in a vat of water. If your hands
show no blisters after three days, God has smiled on you."
"And if the blisters are still there?"
"They cut your arms and legs off and leave you die."
The conversation stops there. The cycle-rickshaw turns quietly onto the
Paddington to Islington New Road and the nine-year-old boy at the front pedals
steadily towards Pancras, the brown spires of the Smallpox Hospital can just
be seen disappearing into the red mist at the road's horizon. To each side, the
crumbling towers form a canyon of granite grey, an effect which makes Sarah
sink a little in her seat.
"How are we going to get into the Smallpox Hospital?" Motorhead asks. "They'll
never let us near Kayjay and sikh hospitals are notorious for their high
security. They like to keep their dying away from the prying eyes of everyone
else."
Sarah thinks for a few seconds, realising now that they weren't cut out for
this kind of work at all. A Vijayanta shaker and a hackerjack. She smiles to
herself at the irony of these two traditional enemies having to work together
for one common purpose - retribution on Shelley. "I think we'll go for plan B,"
she says.
"One problem. I don't have a beard."
"Me neither," she says to the streets, and Motorhead finds himself laughing
for the first time since before the Boy died.
***
Plan B failed before it even started. There was no discernable back entrance.
So, they implement Plan A. The reception office is a wide transparent plastic
fish tank filled with tiny sikh women sat behind Fednet terminals typing in
administration details. They all ignore Motorhead and Sarah as they enter the
cavernous foyer. There is one open window in the fish tank. Sarah tries it.
"Is it possible to see a girl called Kayjay? She was admitted here two months
ago."
Motorhead steps in when he sees the confused look on the sikh woman's tiny
face. "Uh, her full name is Kashenjunga Praphubhai. We're friends of hers."
The woman flicks lightning fast fingers across the terminal's touchpad, thin
blue light dances over her face. Then the screen changes to bright white and
Sarah guesses that a videostat of the girl must be on the record. The
receptionist tries to find the English words to convey what is written in
Punjabi on the screen.
"She is gone today," the woman says proudly.
Motorhead's face drops. "What do you mean, gone?"
"She is discharged today, you see? Gone home. She's better now."
The screen changes back to blue and the woman reels her hands back as if she's
touched a wrong button, though her hands were by her face when it happened.
Punjabi characters scrawl themselves across the screen faster than her typing
could ever write; repeating themselves over and over. She turns the screen
around to face Motorhead and Sarah, who look inquisitively at her.
"It says turn screen round," the woman says.
The screen blanks into dark blue again. The words this time come up in English.
DON'T ASK HOW NO TIME KAYJAY HAS COME HERE SO GET MOVING TO MEET THE RAVENS
YOU HAVE TO GET THERE BEFORE SHE DOES DEX
Motorhead spends a second taking it in, then nods to the receptionist in
thanks just as Sarah grabs his arm and drags him out of the hospital.
***
Shelley has set the holoroom for a snow-covered winter's noon on Capitol Hill.
He closes the door behind him and steps up to the bench by the black steel
railings that surround the grounds of the NAM Prefectural Museum, a modicum of
green astroturf leading up to the white building.
Dex sits at the corner of the bench wearing a black pilot's jacket and baggy
red jeans. His face slightly different to the videostat Shelley remembers from
Sarah's screen, and his hair is patchy and longer, but effectively the Boy is
as he was before he died, with his arms spread along the arm and back of the
bench and his right foot tucked in by his buttocks on the seat. Shelley sits
down next to him.
"Thought about my offer yet?" the shaker asks.
"Thought?" Dex laughs. "I said give me a couple of hours to think about it,
so you call me back a hundred and fifteen minutes, and thirty-eight point seven
one two six seven seconds later and ask me if I've thought about it. I have
specific time allocations, you know. I'm not a technojack, if I say I'll take
two hours, I'll take two hours. Jesus, you must be desperate."
"Well, have you?" Shelley puckers his lips in frustration.
Dex looks at a hypothetical watch. "Now I have, yes. You can kiss my arse."
He raises his eyebrows a touch.
Shelley looks away toward the view of Washington. Far away to the south he
can just make out a section of green land that lies beyond the walls of the
Plex. "Fine. Then I'll call in some Fednet boys and have you shut down."
Dex shakes his head, the smirk still on his face. "Sorry, matey, but I've
rigged myself for replication. If you shut me down here, I'll pop up in two
other cores. And if I'm shut down there I replicate again, to an exponential.
Eventually the only way I could die will be when the whole of Fednet crashes
because it can't handle all my processes. I made it a principal a long time
ago never to work for Federated Companies. Now I'm dead, I figure I've all the
more reason to stick to my principles, seeing as they're about all I've got."
Shelley doesn't hide his annoyance. His lips are pursed tighter than ever. He
stands and walks a few steps across the sidewalk. "You seem to have me in a
potential blackmail position, Mister Eastman. What do you want from me?"
When Dex gives him the answer, Shelley just laughs in disbelief.
***
"Remember the deal? As soon as the lift opens, you roll to the left and you
roll to the right. We'll cover you from here."
The two ronin from Raven are called Hill and Slauer, and they ooze a certain
professionalism seen only in super-efficient offices and on TV talk shows. They
wear tight black jackets and sweat pants under bulletproof armour that bristle
with magazines. They have given Motorhead and Sarah a HK Uzi copy each for
self-defense, though none of them expect the two to fight again after the
bloodbath that occurred in the basement motor pool. Sarah still has the shakes
from that incident, her heart thumping so loud in her ears that she's sure
everyone in the lift must be able to hear it.
Hill fires a torpedo of crash up each nostril and offers one to Motorhead. The
young hackerjack declines, knowing that he'd never be able to handle speed
derivatives in a situation like this. Sarah regards Hill's broken nose quickly,
set uncomfortably between two gleaming Sony eyes. Sarah feels stupidly naked
in the never-ceasing glare of those eyes. Despite the fact that x-ray vision
is impossible, she still feels that he can see her flesh through the
bulletproof vest, bright pink t-shirt and black cycling shorts - the real Sarah.
The lift stops rather suddenly and they slide the levers back on their
weapons. When the door slides open, Motorhead and Sarah dive to the sides as
instructed under the stutter of heavy rifle fire. The corridor's empty. No
security guards here. No Shelley. No autocannons she'd suspected lurking in the
corner.
Nothing.
They make their way along the edges of the corridor. Sarah and Motorhead
following behind the two ronin. Shelley's office at the far end of the corridor
is a closed door.
When they reach it, just about to hit the switch, it opens. The four drop
instinctively to their chests on the floor.
In front of Shelley's desk, Kayjay holds a gun to the shaker's head. Neither
of them seem to be nervous.
"Throw the guns in here," Kayjay says. "Throw them in here or you'll be
murderers. Metropol are waiting at the bottom of the tower."
Sarah stands up. She throws her Uzi copy into the office and motions to the
others to do the same. They remain on the floor, but throw their weapons into
the room. Hill and Slauer begin sub-vocalising plans of action to each other.
She doesn't give anyone enough time to act. Just as Kayjay is about to make
some smart comment, Sarah takes her holdout pistol from her pocket and shoots
the small Bangladeshi woman in the face. Her cybernetic legs lock in place and
her top half folds over them, falling into a A Frame of bloody, dead flesh.
The two ronin stand up. Motorhead wants to puke. When Shelley's blood
spattered face breaks into a tight smile, she uses the other bullet to blow
him across the desk, his neck cracking on the back of his office chair.
***
The holoroom is set for Paris, the base La Tour Eiffel. Sarah steps up to
Dex's apparition and folds her arms.
"Okay, you've got your revenge. Now what did you have to do with it?"
Dex puts on a mockingly innocent face and shrugs. "I just told him that the
best way out of his situation was suicide. He didn't have the guts to do it
himself, so he waited for you to arrive instead."
Sarah unfolds her arms and gasps. "There's so much more behind this that you
haven't told us, isn't there?"
Dex nods.
"Fancy parting with some of this information?"
"Nope. I told you what you needed to know to get the job done. I mean you
stopped him, right? No one knows what happened. Metropol weren't informed, it's
more than his job's worth for them to know."
"Vijayanta are still after me, though, aren't they?" She shrugs, not knowing
what to do next.
"Go back to the Outzone. It's more exciting than Milton Keynes. Anywhere's
more exciting than Milton Keynes."
With her eyesw low, she nods and takes the suggestion into her head. "Okay,
I'll put with Motorhead for a bit."
"Good." Dex turns away, walking north.
"Where are you going?" she calls after him.
He wheels around to face her a final time. His eyes are alive with
possibilities. "Well, I figure I can go anywhere I wanted. Oh, and by the way,
Kayjay says thanks. She didn't want her body running the place giving her a
bad name." His arms stretch out to each side. He laughs hard and spins himself
dizzy, heading north until he disappears into the wall.
Sarah turns and laughs as she walks out of the room. Behind her in a hologram
Paris, rain begins to fall.
FIN
(c) N RIDLEY MCINTYRE 1992
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"And they looked from man to pig, and pig to man, | |)
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