From: tsa@cellar.org (The Silent Assassin)
Subject: Repost of my story, reformatted to 75 characters per line
Date: 21 May 93 19:17:07 GMT


	Hello all.  I recently started trying to write a story in the
CyberPunk genre.  It is still a loooong way from completion, but I thought
I'd post it here so that I could get feedback.  This is my first attempt
at writing a story, and it shows, but I need critiscism if my writing is
going to improve.  Any positive or negative statements will be valued, as
long as they contain "constructive critiscism".  A few brief comments is
enough.  Please don't send me something saying 'It sucked so much I think
you should market it as a vacuum cleaner'.  If you don't like it, fine,
but please at least tell me WHY.

	This is the first two sections.  I have written two more, but they
are incomplete so far.  This is about half of the material which I have
written.  Some things about which I'd like comments:  Setting,
organization , characters, style, realism...

	Thanx in advance for your comments.  Posting this is harder than
I'd thought.  The idea that a band of hardened cyberpunks will be staring at
the 34 inch screen of their Sun SPARCStations and muttering unintelligibly
while reading my work frightens me.  I mean, I can see them reading other
peoples stuff, but mine?  Am I worthy to have stuff read by them? I hope
so.  My E-Mail address is tsa@cellar.org, if ya didn't pick that up by
now.



{Program Book}


{Init 0x01}


	The young man sighed as he stared blankly at the HoloCube screen
in front of him.  Faint sounds from downstairs of his parents fighting
drifted up to him, but made no apparent impression upon his demeanor.  The
Tokuo cyberspace deck on his desk was externally like the rest of the
objects around him-covered in dust, unused, only fighting gravity and
bleeding out the last of its color into the dying room.  But merely from
looking at the outside it was impossible to tell how alive it was
internally.  The circuits hummed with power, were vibrant with energy,
readying their collective electrons for action.  The young man reached
limply for the electrodes, sent a pasty hand behind his ear to clear away
his hair, and plugged himself in.  Instantly things changed.  Instead of
the bleak, insipid room he had left, Mark found himself in the bright,
colorful world of a residential dataswitch.  After spending a moment
savoring the contrast between the Matrix and that other place, he quickly
got into action.  His family could not afford very much time on-line, and
besides, his mother would kill him if she knew how much time he spent
jacked in.  So he had to make himself disappear from the dataswitch
sensors, a routine task which he could do easily.  Reaching behind a small
panel, he accessed the variable fields of the accounting program.  Due to
a security flaw, these fields were open to manipulation to anyone who
looked in the right place.  He only had to change the boolean flag in his
record which alerted the program that the user had jacked out.  The
dataswitch then would decide that he didn't exist, and stop charging him.
Unfortunately, as he had discovered, when that eventuality occurred,
memory and processor time would no longer be allocated for his channel,
and he would be frozen in a pseudo crash until he disconnected.  So before
he changed the flag, he switched himself to an unused maintenance channel.
He was still logged in, and the accounting program knew it, but all of the
computation, variables, and information which needed to be stored were
being done under a different process.  This done, he set the flag, his
original channel was deallocated, and he ceased to exist in the imaginary
world of the accounting program.  Now he was ready to sail through the
vast emptiness of the electronic phenomenon known as the Matrix, a place
which was not a place, an imaginary realm where Deckers hacked, NetRunners
fought ice, and millions of ordinary fools performed their meaningless and
inconsequential tasks beneath the chilling blackness of the nonexistent
void.

	This done, he proceeded to the dataswitch bottleneck.  A new form
of Matrix interaction had appeared in recent times, that which forced the
user to pay.  This occurred when a corporation or group wanted more
money(which in the avaricious mercenary world into which Mark had the
misfortune to be born was relatively often), and had the resources to take
over a section of the Matrix.  They severed all physical connections from
the target area to the outside, and took over any resources within the
local network.  The company would then install a network controller, and
put their own I/O ports between the local net and the outside.  After
that, all they had to do was install security, sit back, and pull in
money.  Such systems usually connected a small area, or an apartment
building, and contained the normal Matrix information gathering resources.
None of them were truly closed systems, they always had a Matrix
connection through which the paying user could leave the system and travel
out through the fiber optic network as a progression of multicolored
photon waves.  It was towards this connection that Mark's movement was
directed.

	He floated down the corridor, turning occasionally at
intersections, until he appeared before a nondescript door, which bore the
legend "LAM Connection.  Connection price quadrupled for all time spent
past this point."  He examined the door carefully.  His one previous
attempt to get out had been unsuccessful, and he still had a faint
headache from the incident.  It had been his first experience with gray
ice, and despite his native talent, he had been severely overmatched.
Fortunately, the escape programs Typo had written for him were well done.
He didn't have the coding skill Typo did, but his ability to utilize the
available tools evened him up.  The two made an excellent team.  Now that
his mind had been brought to it, Typo should be here with the new sensor
package which he had written.  The program was supposed to use fuzzy
neural networks  to process all available information, and then
extrapolate from the data what it could not see.  It could figure out the
code for a process from observing that process.  By watching an ICE
program search out and brainfry someone, for example, the sensor package
could determine the underlying code routines of the ICE.  A hacker, such
as Mark, could then examine the routines and attempt to find weaknesses,
without having to go through the tedious task of searching through the
hidden layers and secret routines which were usually required to look at
code.  Mark looked around, but didn't see Typo.

	Typo grinned from several feet away, as Mark's sensor program
requested a readout of all present processes.  He hadn't shown up, because
his icon was transparent.  An icon, sometimes known as an avatar, is the
figure which represents a decker in the Matrix.  This figure can be
whatever the decker wants, and is displayed to all who "see" the decker.
Typo had made his icon absolutely transparent, using algorithms to display
whatever sensors saw on one side of him on the other.  He was not truly
transparent, but more a chameleon, his icon automatically became whatever
the observer should see.  If he was standing with his back to a door, his
front would show an image of the door, perfectly proportioned as though it
was several feet behind him.  He had heard of many attempts to create
invisible avatars, it was an obvious notion, but most of them ended up as
solid white or something else which caused observers to laugh at the
pathetic attempt.  Most also had the problem as showing up on non-visual
scans, those which listed all currently active processes.  Typo was not
only visually transparent, but was disguised as a daemon, a background
maintenance process.  Only his user name/ID number had been changed, but
standard scan programs omitted any process with a name that resembled a
daemon from its listings.

	Mark was surprised when he was tapped on his electronic shoulder
by Typo.  He turned, and saw nothing.  Warily loading attack and defense
programs from local storage into readiness, he looked for the icon of the
unknown process.  Seeing nothing, he looked more carefully.  His
underlying sensor programs requested a complete description of all present
processes, and he found nothing.  Delving deeper, he asked the sensor
program to show him everything, daemons, people, anything which could be
classified, and he discovered that Typo was standing in front of him.  He
still could not see the icon, but his sensor programs gave him constant
updates as to his friends position.  Loading up his D-- compiler, he wrote
a quick procedure which read in Typo's location from the low level Matrix
utilities and displayed a red dot there.  Typo was slightly surprised when
Mark turned to face him, no matter where he was.


	The two had a brief discussion, and Typo complimented Mark on his
quick thinking.  Shit happened.  Liberated from the confines of their LAM,
the two entered the Matrix.


{Fight 0x02}


	The pair exhaled a collective gasp as they beheld for the first
time the glory of the Matrix.  Huge shapes hovered everywhere, dazzling
the pair with their luminescence.  Brilliant geometric figures whose
shapes were so complex as to defy understanding upon cursory inspection
filled the empty blackness of cyberspace.  Never before in their short
lives had they seen a site as awe-inspiring as the tiled landscape which
lay before them.  Even the high-rez colors of StandComs, three dimensional
comedies, spliced directly into their optic nerves fell far short of the
computer generated universe which they beheld.  The harsh physical reality
from which they had come was like a single photon compared to the Nova of
the matrix.  For a fleeting second, Mark wondered if men were truly meant
to observe this beauty, if he was transgressing upon some alien land which
was too spectacular for human comprehension.  But he quickly banished that
thought to the void from whence it came, and pulled himself back from the
brink of insanity.  Turning to Typo, it appeared as though his friend had
much more mundane considerations in mind.  Typo was struggling to absorb
all of this new data, his sensor programs churning away at the monumental
task of categorizing everything which lay before him.  He was frantically
absorbing the volumes of information with a ferocious intensity that
belied his appearance.  Typo's chameleon icon flickered and was obscured
by static as the ten parallel Motorola MC92080SS processors in his deck
struggled to cope, and didn't have the time for inconsequential tasks like
icon updating.  Mark began to wonder if Typo would manage.  His deck was
more oriented towards off-line than on-line computing, the SS suffix on
his microprocessors denoted SupraStorage, a version which was designed to
handle large amounts of hard drive and RAM, and emphasized storage rather
than speed.  Typo was currently using his own programs for sensor and
monitoring activity, which meant that he lacked the normal safeguards
built into commercial software.  His new software had bugs, and as a
result could not handle the vastness of the Matrix.  It was trying not
just to observe, but to understand the full bandwidth of the datastream.
And it was failing monstrously.  Suddenly the red dot beside Mark
disappeared.  Either Typo's system had crashed, or he had decided that it
would be easier to jack out that to wait for his softwear to finish.  The
dissolution of his friend brought Mark out of his reverie.  He realized
that he was alone, in a large place, with less clue than an average
President about what the hell to do.  He had read The Silent Assassin's
guide to netrunning, as well as any other material he could get his hands
on, but he was not adequately prepared for the array of choices which
presented itself to him.

	As he was contemplating the panoramic vista which spread itself
out before his wondrous eyes, a blue shape streaked past him.  Turning his
head to look, Mark saw a nebulous blue cloud circle back and come right at
him.  Marc ducked, and the cloud laughed.  As the avatar came back for
another pass Marc looked at it more carefully.  It was a phosphorescent
cloud of shimmering incandescence, rippling with colors.  Blue
predominated, but flashes of violet, purple, and red occasionally leaped
from the heart of the icon.  Marc was temporarily mesmerized, until he
felt a sharp pain in the center of his forehead, and realized he was under
attack.

	Quickly turning his mind from contemplation to combat, Mark
examined his opponent's process.  While doing so, he loaded his offensive
and defensive programs into RAM, and executed several.  The process was
short and simple, and Mark realized quickly that it was a fake, and that
the real one was hidden somewhere beneath layers of obtusity and
intricacies.  He examined the code structure carefully, when the world
faded to black.



	This was his first experience fighting a real enemy.  Sure, he had
practiced on the sims, and none of his friends had ever written a sim he
couldn't dismember, but this was different.  Unlike the sims, people were
unpredictable, chaotic.   You never knew which hand they'd hit you with.

	The lack of vision indicated that his sensor and IO programs were
having problems.  His adversary had rendered him blind and deaf, with a
skill that Mark found frightening.  It would have been easier to kill him,
he mused with youthful naivette, why was he still alive?  "He's playing
with you, like a samurai with a homeless bum", answered the small mature
network of synapses which resided in his lower left lobe.

	Frankly, this poor kid was getting his ass beat.  Even worse than
that, his ass was being smacked, abraded, and then salted and roasted over
a Coleman stove, with the finished product handed back smelling faintly of
A1 steak sauce.

	But in his foes confidence lay Marks greatest chance to avoid
brainfry, for he was being handed time on a silver platter, time to "Reach
out and Touch" his unseen enemy, as the slogan of a long defunct primitive
communications carrier ran.  And he was using that time.  He was carefully
examining the microcode of the cloud, following an apparent dangling
pointer that actually called a main code segment here, going into
procedures executed merely by storing the right values in key variables
there, and making a mental map of the code layout.  All the while, he was
searching for a weakness, a bug, a screw up that he could use to save
himself, and avoid being yet another victim of Evolution in Action.

	Then he convulsed.  He let loose an appalling shriek, a piercing
ululating sound that carried far into the deep brown sky, conveying the
agony of a human being suffering pain so intense that no mere words from a
writer like myself can describe it.  Picture the sound you would make if
someone ran 40,000 volts through your testicles (females, sorry, pick
another tender place), while concentrating lasers on your eyeballs,
roasting you alive, whipping you with bicycle chains, prying off your
fingernails with icepicks, and hypnotizing you into believing that you
were madly in love with Al Gore.  Then increase that a bit.  That sound
would be as nothing compared to the pain that Philadelphia heard that
night.  The only comparable sound was that heard when some poor guy was
set up on a blind date with Chelsea Clinton.

	In his little room on the second floor of a dying building, Marks
mouth was frozen in a rictus of pain.  His hair was smoking and the entire
room smelt of cooked flesh.  The delicious odors wafted outside and
tantalizingly drifted past a poor homeless  man, an innocent piece of
flotsam tossed aside by the tides of change, who sniffed with olfactory
appreciation and emoted envy.  Yet still Mark lived.  And with living came
the desire for revenge.  The small part of his mind which still functioned
normally fought on, refusing to die.  It found a bug in the main loop of a
program it no longer remembered, and wondered what to do.  It knew that it
needed to act, but all it felt was a vague nagging that it was supposed to
crash the program.  Wondering why it was doing so, it created a process
with a twisted name.  The name sent a sensor procedure into an endless
loop, which, since the procedure has been  stupidly left in the main loop,
crashed the entire program.  He was safe from further torture.


{Dispose}
{Program prematurely terminated}
Libertarian, atheist, semi-anarchal Techno-Rat.
-PGP 2.2 Public Key available upon request-
I define myself--tsa@cellar.org