From: szilard@rs1.tcs.tulane.edu
Subject: Story: Neutral Ground
Date: 27 Jul 1994 03:05:33 GMT



Hello all.

I'm new to this forum and haven't written anything for awhile, but I've
been meaning to start up again. . . I dredged up something I'd started
but had dropped in the hopes that if I posted it and got some comments/
criticism back (hint) it would inspire me to finish it. . . if it's even
worth finishing. . .


			       Neutral Ground


	I woke up in a darkly vibrant place, crowded and filled with
grease, lights, clashing music, and the mixed stench of alcohol and vomit.
Although the phrase "woke up" may be a bit inaccurate, as I didn't recall
having gone to sleep, or, actually, much of anything at all before that
point.  Regardless, I woke up with a headache, a dull pain that had
apparently been echoing in my head for some time, and some vague
afterimages of a dream where I was stumbling through endless alleyways.
	It was quite clear to me why I had awaken at that time.  There was
a woman standing before me, the heat of her body pulsing intensely,
causing a sharp pain to stab through my forehead.  She was dressed in a
short, black, cellophanous skirt, a red shirt that failed to reach her
waist, and high leather boots that covered her knees.  She was pointing at
me and screaming.  I couldn't make out the words, but her fear of me was
tangible enough.
	That I was someone or something worthy of fear was news to me; I
had no idea what I was . . . some sort of monster, maybe.  I didn't know.
I wanted to get away, figure out what was happening.  I pulled away from
the screaming woman and slid through the drunken crowd that flowed back
and forth over the street.  I paid them no attention, and they noticed me
even less.  I reached an unlit side street and turned into it.  I needed a
place to think, somewhere I would not be disturbed.  I spied a fire escape
landing on the second story of the building to my right and leapt to it,
clearing the distance easily and landing neatly on the landing.  I then
climbed the fire escape to the fourth story and, from there, leapt again
to the sloping roof .
	Under a sea of stars I took stock of myself.  My body seemed
normal enough in shape, but my arms and legs didn't look nearly as warm as
those of the people I'd seen on the street.  That observation was followed
by the realization that most people didn't see heat.  I could see into the
infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.  Prismatix Nighteyes; I
wondered what color they were.  Red eyes could have explained the woman's
reaction.  Especially, oblivious as I'd been, if I had been walking
straight at her.  I flicked my eyes skyward, looking back into my own head
for a moment.  The little built-in holographic display informed me that my
eyes were indeed red.  How was I dressed?  I was wearing tabi boots,
blackjeans, a grey T-shirt, and a black trenchcoat.  The trench was lined
with what I recognized as polymer armor, it was light, flexible, and
porous, but it would stop anything short of a slug from a FN-38 Valkyrie.
	These were not things that I wanted to know.  Knowing them meant
that either I had very eclectic hobbies or that it was my job to know
about them.  The latter didn't sound promising, but I supposed that a nice
guy with a cushy job and no need to know about weapons wouldn't be
memoryless and sitting on a rooftop in the French Quarter with a set of
fifty thousand ace cybernetic eyeballs.
	The French Quarter. . . I wondered if that was where I was.  It
must be the Quarter.  I know New Orleans.  Skies this clear were rare
outside of rural areas, particularly at night.  New Orleans, though. . .
in the tourist zones the sky is almost always unnaturally clear.  While
most big cities have a sameness about them, New Orleans had somehow
remained separate.  It hadn't aged, or, if it had, it had done at an
amazingly slow rate.  Sure, it was dirty, dangerous, and just as mean as
any other city . . . meaner than most actually. . . but, still, it had a
bit of style to it, an air of dignity and an urban elegance that most of
today's cities had lost long ago.  I could feel that now.  I was in New
Orleans.
	It was odd.  My memory seemed to work relatively well, at least in
reference to things other than myself.  I knew that New Orleans, at least
the New French Quarter and the more well-traveled parts of the city, was a
comparatively safe place to be.  Security was ubiquitous in the business
and tourist areas.  There was a time, maybe sixty or seventy years ago,
when crime and urban violence in New Orleans was among the worst in the
world.  Tourism had died in the city.  The casinos were em pty and the
bars dried up.  With the city as dependent as it was on the tourist trade,
it too almost died.  Instead, though, it made a last ditch effort to fight
back against the crime that had infested it.  It failed, of course, so it
promptly sold out to Spectrum Entertainment.  S.E. rezoned the city,
brought in a virtual army of mercenaries, cleaned up the new business and
tourist zones, and, remarkably enough, managed too keep them that way.  Of
course, if anyone was to step out of the patr olled areas. . . It didn't
really surprise me to remember what some of those unpatrolled areas looked
like.  Of course, it didn't make me happy either.
	I heard a creak on the fire escape.  Someone was coming. It
wouldn't be street punks.  They'd either rush up quickly or move
completely silently. . . never in between.  It must be security.  I
wondered how I knew that as I shifted my eyes to a neutral co lor.
Formerly an inhuman red, they were now a relatively generic brown,
undetectably synthetic.  A quick shock ran through me.  How else was I
synthed?  I remembered how I had gotten up here.  Full of nervousness, I
knelt down to examine my legs.
	"All right, mister, I want you to stand up straight with your arms
where I can see them."  Hike.  The cop.  He was just coming up over the
other side of the roof.  I concentrated and could make out his heartbeat
and breathing pattern against the din from the streets below.  His
breathing was regular, calm and self-assured, but his heartbeat was
becoming a bit excited.  I stood up slowly, my hands at my sides.  He was
a SeeCure agent, which, in general, meant that he was little more than a
hired thug.  He was also armed: a pistol in a side holster.  I almost
surprised myself by being able to make out its International Arms emblem.
It was probably the H-8 Gladiator, a nasty weapon and standard issue for
SeeCure goons.  He was also holding a peace baton, a cross between a
billy and a cattle prod.  I didn't want to know what it felt like to be
hit by one.  From the manner in which he held it as he approached me,
however, I gathered that he was a bit overeager to impart such knowledge
on me whether I wanted it or not.  "Hands up, buddy."  He leered at me,
saliva forming at the corner of his mouth.  When he was slightly less than
three meters away.  I raised my arms above my head and backed up to the
edge of the roof.
	"You can put the stick down, sir.  I'm not going to do anything
stupid."  I tried to placate him, telling him what he wanted to hear.  My
words were innocent, yet the sound of my voice surprised me.  It is a
strange thing to hear your own voice and not recognize it.  It was
totally unfamiliar, and, to me, it sounded fighteningly menacing.
	The guard only snickered as he raised his truncheon. "Standing
still isn't too. . .," he said as I stepped backwards off the roof and
fell four storeys.  I was all right, though.  I landed on my feet.  I knew
that they were synthetic, and I assumed that they could handle the fall.
It wasn't a dumb guess.  Not many people were as synthed up as I seemed to
be.  The only ones who were either had been victims, whether of accident,
disease, or violence, or were predators, tools of governments or
corporations or people wealthy enough to buy themselves a new and improved
body.  A victim mightn't have had legs that could withstand the shock of a
four storey fall.  A victim, however, would also have had no need of a
targeting system built into his right eye.  It had clicked in
automatically when I saw the guard.  Let me correct that.  It had actually
clicked in when I saw he was armed.
	My synthetic legs had handled the fall nicely, but the shock had
to go somewhere.  It did, of course, causing an intense pain in my hips,
where my synthed legs met the natural part of my body.  As I stumbled into
the shadows, the induced endorphin surge hit, washing over the pain.  I
heard the guard swear as I slipped down the dark side street.  As I
walked, I examined my right hand.  As I expected, there was a spot on it
that radiated no heat.  I was surprised, however, to note two such spots.
The first one, which I'd expected, was near the base of my thumb.  It
would be the jack for an optic link for a gun.  The second was between my
first and second fingers.  I looked at my left hand, and there was one
there too.  I didn't know what they might be.

	It is common knowledge that one shouldn't walk the streets alone,
and that to do so at night is tantamount to suicide.  I knew that wasn't
true.  People who walk the streets alone at night do so because they don't
have anything to fear.  Either they are adequately armed, or they are on
business and can call for assistance through a corepager.  I assumed that
I appeared to be the first, mainly because of the trenchcoat.  People wore
trenchcoats for one of two reasons, either because it was cold or because
they had something to hide underneath it.  With a coat like the one I was
wearing, a person could lug around a heavy assault rifle with hardly a
bulge showing.  Though the night was not extraordinarily hot, it didn't
come close to warrant my wearing the coat - it rarely would in New Orleans
- and the trenchcoat would, I assumed, warn any reasonably intelligent
street punks to stay away.  Of course, I thought as I noted movement on
both sides of me in my peripheral vision, there are few street punks who
were even reasonably intelligent.
	I tried to walk casually and stuck my hands in my pockets.  My
right hand felt a piece of cloth.  Pulling it out, I looked at it in an
attempt to appear as unconcerned as possible.  I hoped that either the
punks would assume that I wasn't afraid of them, or they would decide that
I was really oblivious and they, in turn, would be overconfident.  I knew
enough to expect one of these things, but I had no idea what I could do.
Maybe I normally carried a gun.  If so, I'd lost it.  The truth was that I
actually was deathly afraid of them, and would have been even if I'd had a
gun.  Showing that fear, however, would likely get me killed.
	The piece of cloth, as far as I could figure out, was a glove.  I
pulled it over my right hand.  It fit well, but it was odd.  It had two
holes in it, one over each of the "cold spots" on my hand.  The glove was
a light polyweave, reinforced with a mix of kevlar and polymer armor.
The odd part was that the first two fingers and the space around the hole
in between them were the most heavily armored parts of the glove.  Then I
realized why, just as the gutterpunks closed in around me.
	I heard the whisperings first.  Strangely dark and sensual, they
sounded as if they were intended primarily to unnerve me.  Probably they
were, but I was too afraid of being killed to be scared of the manner in
which my potential murderers whispered.  Street gangs sometimes ran by
themes; these punks were gothix.  I noted this as the first one moved into
my field of view.  He was as pale as a corpse and was, of course, dressed
all in black.  His hair was long, standing off his his head at odd angles,
and it, too, was black.  His eyes glowed red.  I was shocked for an
instant before I realized that they were unlikely to be cybernetic and
were probably just infused with a cheap bioluminescent implant.  As he saw
me examining him, the goth pulled back his lips and showed me his fangs.
Gothix tended to aspire to be vampires.  Sometimes they were actually lead
by a synvamp.  This one wasn't a synvamp, though, his body-heat pattern
was far too normal.  Two others moved into my field of view, but I knew
that there were at least three more behind me.  The one with the teeth
showed them to me again in a mocking smile, "Thiss on iss pretty, yess?"
He lisped the words, half whispering.  I heard an affirmative response by
each of the others, almost so quiet as to have been subvocalized.  The
fanged one spoke again, this time in a low chant, "Hiss blood shall be
accepted unto uss.  Hiss life shall be for our strengthh. . ."  He went
on, but I ceased to listen.  I was thinking of a way to escape, or at
least trying to do so.  "Come forward, mortal."  I did, and he reached out
with a pale hand to stroke my cheek.  His other hand hung by his side,
clutching a ceremonial dagger.  He was a bit taller than I was, but he was
very thin.
	Probably on an all-blood diet, I thought, then shivered because it
was likely true.  He looked at me with something that seemed to approach
compassion, but was more likely the gratitude that the predator feels
towards its prey for giving it such pleasure.  "Doess the mortal have any
last wordss?" he whispered.
	I shrugged, touched his chest tentatively, "I would have liked to
have lived for an hour."
	He looked down at my hand briefly, pleased, I thought that he
probably liked it when they begged.  "You have lived your lasst," he said
almost sadly.
	I shook my head.  "I have not yet finished my first," I said.  He
looked confused for a moment, but then I killed him and the confusion
stopped.  Death was something he understood, something he worshipped.  As
I ran past his stunned followers, I straightened my wrist out in line with
my forearm and spread out the first two fingers of my gloved hand.  The
eighteen centimeter blade silently retracted into its housing in my
forearm, leaving a bloody mess between my fingers.  I glanced back.  They
hadn't followed me.  They had stooped over their fallen leader.  Probably
drinking his blood.  It revolted me, almost as much as the fact that I had
just killed a man.  I supposed that I must have killed before, it seemed
unlikely that I had blades encased in my forearms to aid me in culinary
endeavors, but that. . . earlier self. . . wasn't me.  I meant what I had
said to the now-dead cretin.  I had been alive for less than an hour.
Whoever had inhabited this body before was dead, and that was probably a
good thing, for, from all indications, I didn't think that I would have
cared for him all that much.
	I stopped running shortly.  Not because I was tired, but because I
had already covered a tremendous amount of distance and lacked any sort of
a destination.  I really had no idea as to what to do.  The logical thing
would be for me to try to find out who I was, but I didn't want to do
that.  I was mildly curious, yes, but I realized that ultimately I really
didn't want to know.  I wanted to live my own life, not someone else's,
even if at one time I had been that someone else.
	I kept walking, looking for a familiar landmark.  I hit Napoleon
Street and turned right.  The Spectrum Tower, second in height in the city
only to the regional TelCore office, stood ahead of me.  Even this late,
the tower was buzzing with aircars and gyrobarges.  I knew where I was
now.  All I had to do was to figure out where it was that I wanted to go.
First thing, though, I needed a name.  As it stood, I wouldn't be able to
buy anything in a place that scanned without using the old name that this
body had assumed, and, at least outside of the suicide strips, it was
nearly impossible to find a place that didn't scan.  It was almost funny.
I didn't think, not even for a moment, that my former self could have been
traveling under his true identity.  I needed a good coreman, someone who
could find out if I was being tracked by scanner and, if so, give me a new
identity.
	I suddenly realized how tired I was.  I had only been . . .
self-aware for a short period of time, but it had been a very eventful
one, and I had no idea as to how long my body had been going before then.
I looked around and saw a building behind me tha t looked abandoned.  That
didn't surprise me.  I was in the neutral ground between the patrolled
area and the wild zones.  Abandoned buildings in the neutral ground. . .
that's what the neutral ground was.  I found a room and sat, my back
against the wall.  Setting my eyes to their motion-alert mode, I cut off
their connections to my optic nerve.  As darkness and sleep hit me, a name
came unbidden to my head, Yusaf Martan.  I knew that he was a man who
could help me.

			*       *       *

	During the day, the streets were both less friendly and less
violent.  I supposed that made sense.  At night, if you weren't nice to
someone, he might kill you, or at least leave you bleeding for the rats.
During the day, though, such things were less common, which is not to say
that they didn't happen, and people were less careful about what they said
and far less cooperative.  I realized this fairly early in my attempt to
find Yusaf Martan.  I knew that he was a coreman and that he lived in the
city, but that was all.  I couldn't go to a termbooth.  They had built-in
scanners, and, moreover, I was fairly certain that his address wasn't
listed in the core.  I shortly gave up my random questioning of
shady-looking strangers and remembered the Mondo.
	The Mondo was in the Old Quarter, the real French Quarter, not the
mockery that Spectrum set up for tourists when it took the city over.
Rumour has it that the Mondo was hundreds of years old.  I didn't know
much about it, only that it was a club of sorts, a place to go when there
was someone, or something, you wanted to find, but I was somehow certain
that I would find Yusaf there.
	I wasn't too far from it now.  My wanderings last night had pulled
me almost half of the way there from the New Quarter, and I had been
moving in that direction since I awoke this morning.  Where was I now?  I
looked for a street sign.  Carondelet.  I turned right.  The buildings
here were older, remnants of the city's past.  This was the part of the
city that I seemed to remember best, the part where the buildings were
still made of cement, stone, and brick, instead of artificial resins,
polymers, and orbit-mixed metallic alloys.  No one had bothered to build
new buildings here.  The place had been left to rot, left for the use of
street gangs and drug addicts, petty theives and fences, the scum of
humanity.  Left for my use.  I crossed the skywalk over Canal Street onto
Bourbon.  I was reminded of the moment last night when I awoke.  The
smells were the same, alchohol and vomit, but here there was also a lower,
more basic smell, one of decay.
	The street was sleeping.  It had probably been active till shortly
before, or perhaps even after, dawn, but now it was almost noon and things
had stopped.  I could see the remnants of last nights activities, however.
Broken glass littered the streets, and I saw a few comatose bodies.  The
dead ones had undoubtedly been dragged away by now.
	I turned right down a side street that was little more than an
alleyway and walked the few blocks to the Mondo.  The Mondo was always
open, and it was always busy.  Two of the cars parked out front caught my
attention immediately.  A Berenyi Artiste and a Royce-Baldwin, they
clashed with the surroundings as well as each other.  One reeked of
extravagance and speed, while the other gave off a sense of luxury and
class.  The smell of the river was nearly overpowering here with the levee
just past the club.  I hurried inside, past the flimsy plastic walls.  The
walls were replaced every few months and were pleasently scented, a
necessity this close to the river.
	The guard inside was short but solid and so was his handgun.  He
had the Melchert on me as soon as I walked in the door.  I glared at him,
and, when he saw my face, he blanched and lowered the gun.  "Sorry sir. .
." he mumbled, making every attempt to avoid looking me in the eye while
gesturing inside.  He knew me.  That meant others here would likely
recognize me as well.  I walked in.
	Even at noon, the club was far from empty.  I scanned the room.
To my right there was a group gathered around a table.  A well-dressed
woman and two thugs sat, as if waiting for something.  I decided that she
probably owned the Royce.  I tried to peg the owner of the Bere‚nyi.  He
was at the bar.  From his clothes and too-soft face, I felt like I knew
him.  A rich kid who thought he was a poet or artist, or maybe he was just
a rich kid drug addict.  It didn't matter.  He was babbling away at
someone who could have been a drug dealer.  I looked down the bar and saw
Yusaf.  I hadn't been able to call up a picture of his face in my mind,
but I knew him instantaneously.  He was wearing a retrotech robe over a
silvery bodysuit.  The robe contained a multi-colored fluid that swirled
around inside it.  I think that the fluid's movement was affected by body
heat.  It was old technology, retrotech.  They were wayfarer clothes.  I
walked toward him.  "Yusaf."  He turned, recognizing me, and fixed me with
a mixed stare of disbelief and what could have been hatred.  This, of
course, caught me off guard.  I had thought Yusaf would be willing to help
me.  I decided to ignore the stare he was giving me.  Continuing toward
him, I looked at him a bit pleadingly until his stare broke.  He looked
curious.  "Yusaf," I said, "I need your help."  The room was silent.  From
the corner of my eye, I saw the woman whisper something to the thug on her
left.  Then the rich kid started babbling again.  Yusaf looked at me.
	He shook his head.  "Not here."  As he stood, his eyes moved
warningly to the woman and her thugs.  He walked to the door, and I
followed him.  Yusaf had a skycar, or at least something that vaguely
resembled one.  It was an old Matsushita-Toyota.  It must've been forty
years old.  The corp didn't even exist anymore.  He didn't speak until we
were inside, and, when he did, he didn't look at me.  "I can't believe,"
were his first words, "that you actually came in to look for me.  Why the
hell didn't you use the pager like we agreed?"
	I turned to him as he took off, shooting us thirty meters into the
air, "Sorry. . . I seem to have. . . forgotten."
	He glanced over at me with a curiousity in his eyes that seemed to
subdue the anger in his words.  "What's gotten into you?  How the hell did
you forget?  . . . or are you just joking with me?"  He began to mumble
something about my perpetual lack of a sense of humour, but I interrupted
him.
	"I'm not sure how I forgot, but I seem to have forgotten all sorts
of things.  For starters, I have no idea who I am."
	Yusaf's voice came back as little more than a whisper.  "Faraway.
. . You serious, man?"  I nodded.  It was not as if he saw me nod, but my
silence was affirmative enough an answer.  Neither of us spoke until we
reached the building Yusaf lived in.  He flew straight into the seventh
floor garage and parked the car.  We took the elevator up to the
fourteenth floor.  Once we stepped out of the elevator, the fifth door on
the right would be Yusaf's apartment.  I'm not sure how I knew that.

	The apartment didn't look familiar at all.  It was typical
wayfarer, though, combining lowtech, retrotech, and newtech in both
function and decor.  In one corner of the room there was a Bodybag VR
system hanging near a meditation mat.  In the center of the room there was
a low couch and table.  The table held a couple of practically ancient
artifacts: a lava lamp and an old microcomputer that still used
laserdisks.  There was an enormous box full of them at the end of the
table.  On the opposite wall, off to the side of the room's sole window
there was an old satellite antenna dish.  Along the right wall was what
appeared to be Yusaf's workbench.  It was scattered with bits and pieces
of computer gear.  Some of it looked so new as to be still experimental,
while there was some which appeared older than the dino he had sitting on
the couchtable.
	Yusaf stepped in and, after I followed him, closed the door.  He
gestured to the couch.  I sat down, and he walked over to the meditation
mat, where he sank into a full lotus position.  "Now," he asked, "would
you please tell me what's going on?"
	"Um, before I say anything that could get one or both of us wiped.
. . It might be a good idea to check if I'm being sniffed."  Yusaf looked
at me incredulously.  "You mean to tell me," he said as he flowed upright
and stalked over to his workbench, "that you came here without knowing
whether or not someone is tracking you?"
	"That's what I came to find out."
	Yusaf picked up an odd looking cable, looked at me, and shook his
head.  "Man, you're real faraway.  Totally gone, aren't you?"
	He hooked one end of the cable into a hidden port near the base of
my skull which I hadn't known existed.  I suppose that I ought to have
known about it.  If I had artificial eyes and synthetic tissues in my
limbs, I pretty much needed a neural processor of some sort in order to
translate between the artificial and the meat.  A synthetic eye doesn't
work by neuron firing, and the brain doesn't understand data conveyed by
fibop cable.  The other end of the cable that Yusaf had stuck into my head
went into a port on the little computer on the table.  I saw now that it
wasn't as old as I'd thought.  It was a relatively new EON.  The laserdisk
setup was a auxiliary jimjob.
	"Allokay?"  I nodded, and the cable didn't even fall out of the
back of my head.  Good enough start.  He keyed in, and shortly began to
let out an almost subvocalized keening sound from the back of his throat
as his fingers began typing furiously.  A sharp pain struck my chest, and
I doubled over.  I heard Yusaf curse as the room began to fade.

		       *        *        *


Copyright 1994 by Stuart Broz

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