Psychotrope

09:47:09 PST

Seattle, United Canadian and American States

Timea Gelasso walked between the rows of children who sat at computer terminals, their eyes moving behind closed lids as they watched the Matrix unfold before them. The rapid eye movement reminded her of the faces of dreamers. Except that Matrix users sat upright and very much alert, their bodies twitching slightly as they responded to the stimuli of the virtual world their minds occupied.

The reticular-activation system overrides built into each of the decks were doing their jobs, keeping the children's meat bods from physically acting out the commands their brains were issuing to the computers. The RAS overrides suppressed the brain's neural signals in the same way that a dreamer's impulses were suppressed. Occasionally they failed, but actual "deckwalkers" were rare. And there were none in this group. These children all seemed to be quietly enjoying the sensory stimuli of the Matrix.

Timea frowned. They were enjoying it a little too quietly. For the last minute or so, none of the children had so much as twitched. Their eyes remained unmoving, as if they were staring at something directly ahead of them…

Timea shook off the uneasy feeling. It was just coincidence that all of their eyes had steadied at once. The kids were just fine.

The dozen children in the room were a mix of races: human mostly, but with a smattering of the other metatypes of the Awakened world. They probably knew they weren't welcome in this part of town, but the promise of the clinic had drawn them, just the same. And they'd probably faced much worse, in their short lives, than a few racial slurs. Take the slender elf girl whose delicately pointed ears bracketed the electrode net that encircled her head, for example. The sore on her ankle looked like a bite of some kind, and was probably infected. And the burly troll boy who sat at the terminal next to her had a puckered scar on his cheek that might be an old bullet graze. His horns were just starting to bud at his temples; he couldn't be more than six.

The other two metas were a stocky dwarf who sat hunched forward in a battered vinyl chair, his face already showing a downy beard at just eight years of age, and an ork boy. With his gnarled face and jutting brows, that one was harder to put an age to. Timea had to take his guardian's word for it that he was between the ages of six and twelve, as stipulated by the benefactors of the Shelbramat Free Computer Clinic.

Timea had to smile at that one. Benefactors. More like beneficiaries.

Some days, like today, she had doubts about her job. Sure, she was helping the best and the brightest kids to escape the squalid streets of Redmond. But the nagging questions remained. Why didn't any of the kids who were selected for the Shelbramat Boarding School ever respond to her e-mail? Why did the school's headmaster, Professor Halberstam, politely but firmly rebuff her every time she asked if she could visit the facility? She might have popped in unexpectedly on her own by now, but for the fact that Shelbramat was down in California Free State, not here in Seattle.

Timea had her suspicions. The "boarding school" was probably little more than a front for a corporation that recruited the next generation of wiz kids and put them to work as deckers. The "students" probably spent their days running the shadows for the corp, snatching data from its competitors. Children of the barrens and streets, these kids were expendable; even if they were brain-burned by black IC, their parents weren't likely to complain. Not with the hefty stipend these guardians were paid upon acceptance of the child at the boarding school. And best of all for the corp, the kids were a deniable asset. They probably didn't even know that they were working, let alone who for.

They were being used.

But what was the alternative?

Timea stared down at one of the girls, a human about ten years old. Her neatly braided corn rows with their bright pink ribbons were a stark contrast to the torn clothes and dirty synthleather sandals she wore. The girl reminded Timea of herself at that age-a skinny waif with ebony skin and eyes that warily took the measure of every adult she met for signs of betrayal. Timea suspected that the girl's story would be much like her own: a father lost to a BTL overdose; a brother burned to death in a drive-by fire-balling; a mother who sat and cried each night at the sheer futility of trying to keep a family together in a decaying urban landscape but who still had enough hope to tie pink ribbons in her daughter's hair. But this girl didn't have the crisscross of faint scars that marked the inside of Timea's left wrist…

She shook off the memory, focusing on the here and now. The responsibility of caring for her aging mother and two younger sisters-not to mention her own two-year-old son Lennon-now sat firmly upon Timea's shoulders. She needed this job. And she'd worked fragging hard to keep it, polishing her vocabulary at the same time that she honed her decking skills, deleting the gutter talk from her speech. One day she'd have that corporate decking slot she'd always dreamed about; then her whole family would be on easy street.

The children who were chosen as the result of the testing she put them through were probably treated pretty decently at the Shelbramat Boarding School. It made sense for the suits to be nice, she told herself. The corporation would get more use out a happy child who enjoyed "playing" in the Matrix than it would out a terrified slave who ran it unwillingly.

The kids were eating well and having fun and their life expectancies had probably more than doubled, despite the dangers they faced in the Matrix. Timea didn't have to feel guilty about the work she did.

And this job certainly had its perks, over and above the nuyen she received: unlimited Matrix time free of charge, plus bod mods with all surgical expenses paid. The first had been a datajack; the next had been something to help Timea hold her own on this tough piece of turf: an arm fitted with retractable razors.

The free computer clinic was situated in Squatter's Mall, originally a ritzy shopping center but now a haven for Seattle's SINless. Entire families lived in its abandoned storefronts, while gangers sold BTL chips, drugs, and illegal weapons from its back rooms. The clinic itself occupied what had been a suite of offices on the eighth floor of the mall. By mutual agreement of the many gangs who prowled the corridors below, the clinic was neutral turf. The gangers even took turns defending it; the last person who'd tried to boost one of the clinic's expensive cyber-decks had been found hanging in one of the mall's nonfunctional elevator shafts, a fiber-optic computer cable cinched tight around his purple neck.

Timea glanced at the ganger who was guarding the entrance to the clinic today. He was a white boy, but cute just the same, with a sensuous curl to his sneer and dark hair that swept back in oiled ringlets from his face. He was probably in his teens, but his streetwise eyes made him look much older. He shifted to show his muscles, made a suggestive motion with the heavy Warhawk pistol he cradled in his fist, and then gave Timea a wink. Although she felt old beyond her twenty years› Timea wasn't so ancient that she didn't want to flirt back. The boy wasn't exactly father material for Lennon, but he might be fun in…

The children began to scream.

The ganger sprang into a ready pose, pistol leveled and eyes searching the room for a threat. Timea whirled to face the kids. They were all sitting bolt upright in their chairs, bodies rigid and trembling. Their mouths were open, their lips pulled back in grimaces that revealed their teeth, the classic grin of fear. And they were screaming. Screaming with a shrill terror that sent a bone-deep shiver through Timea.

And their eyes were still staring straight ahead under closed lids…

Timea ran to the side of the nearest boy, knelt beside him, and pressed two fingers to his throat, searching for a racing pulse or other signs of induced biofeedback. She reached for the cable that connected the boy's electrode net to the cyberdeck on the table in front of him. Should she jack him out? What the frag was happening here?

Timea's mind raced through the possibilities as the children continued to scream. The kids were running cool decks; the sensory input wasn't much more than that of an off-the-shelf simsense unit. They faced no danger from any black IC they might encounter, save for the possibility of being temporarily stunned by it. But they'd be slagged by dump shock if Timea simply unplugged them…

The children continued to scream.

Two more gangers ran into the room, weapons in their fists.

"Whuzzit?" one barked. "Why are the ruggers bawlin'?"

"I dunno," Timea shouted back, slipping into streeter before she could correct herself. "I'd have to jack in to find out."

The ganger that Timea had been flirting with raised his pistol and fired a round into the ceiling, making the other gangers jump. "Hoi! Shut the frag up!" he shouted at the kids.

The children didn't even flinch.

Timea's eyes narrowed. "They can't hear you," she shouted. "They're in the Matrix. Something there is creepin' 'em out."

Weird, that it had hit all of the children at once. The kids' personas should have been scattered far and wide across the Matrix, testing their fledgling decking skills in widely scattered systems. They wouldn't all have blundered into the same node at once. Would they?

The oldest ganger returned his attention to the corridor outside the door. "Chill it," he told the others. "The ruggers may be a distraction. This could be a bang-up."

The cell phone on Timea's hip began to vibrate. In the bedlam, she couldn't hear its soft ring. Instinctively she picked it up and jammed it against her ear, placing a finger in her other ear so she could hear above the din. She recognized the voice of the caller at once. An older man's voice, crisp and precise.

"Timea? What's going on there?"

"Mr. Halberstam?"

"Something's disrupting a number of our… students," the headmaster continued. "It seems to be centered in the Seattle RTG. What reactions are you seeing at your end?"

"I… The kids…" Timea's eyes swept over the screaming children. Their bodies were starting to twist now as their terror pushed the RAS overrides to the limit. What was doing this to them?

There was only way Timea could find out. "I'm going to jack in," she told the headmaster.

"Don't!" Halberstam barked. "We've already lost two deckers who tried to access that RTG. Try-"

Timea lunged forward, dropping the phone. But she wasn't quick enough to stop the ganger who'd fired his gun earlier. Scowling at the children, shaking his head at their screams, he strode over and yanked the electrode net off the nearest child's head-the elf girl. She flailed out of the chair and convulsed across the floor, heedless of the chair and table legs that her limbs were striking.

"No!" the girl screamed. "Get 'em off! They're biting me. Get 'em awaaaaay!"

"You fragging brainwipe!" Timea shouted at the ganger. "Why'd you jack her out?" She shoved him aside before he could repeat the damage he'd done. Then she moved to the girl, tried to get her to stop beating her arms and legs against the wall.

"Get 'em off!" the girl wailed.

"Get what off?" Timea caught hold of the girl's wrists, dodged her kicking feet. "There's nothing on you!"

"Devil rats!" the girl shrilled. Her open eyes darted back and forth as she watched some private horror that only she could see. "They're in the squat, Ma. They're biting me…"

"Timea!" the cell phone squawked from where it lay on the floor. "It sounds as though that subject is suffering from a psychotic episode. What other manifestations of-"

Timea reached for the only cyberdeck in the room with a DNI plug. "I'm going on-line," she shouted at the phone. "It's the only way I'm gonna see what's wrong."

She glared at the ganger, who sneered back at her, his machismo insulted. He didn't look so cute any more. Just stupid.

Timea flexed, and the razors in her arm slid out, then back. "Don't unjack me," she told him grimly. "Unless you want a taste of these."

She jammed the plug into the jack at her temple and logged onto the Seattle RTG in the space between one heartbeat and the next.

The clinic disappeared.