Psychotrope

09:48:27 PST

Lady Death stood in a vast cavern whose high ceiling reflected the red light of fires that erupted in flickering jets through cracks in the stone floor. Streams of blood wound their way between these fires, entering and exiting the cavern through gloomy tunnels, and sulfurous yellow smoke obscured the air. The walls echoed with the screams and cries of the damned.

They were everywhere: perched on stone stalagmites, curled in fetal positions on the hard rocky floor, or beating fists or foreheads against walls in an effort to dull their agony. Some were submerged in the stone floor, with only grasping hands or quivering feet showing above its surface, trapped like living flies in amber.

They were humanoid figures having neither distinguishing characteristics nor gender, smooth and gleaming as if they had been dipped in molten chrome. Their heads were hairless and their faces identical; they had eyes, noses, ears, and mouths, but all looked the same. Only their voices differentiated adult from child, or male from female. Agony echoed from every tongue: groans, shrill screams, or low moans.

Lady Death shuddered. She would have gone back to face the vampires again, but the door had disappeared the moment she locked it shut. Although their screams caused her to wince, the damned seemed to offer no real threat. They were oblivious to her, each wrapped in his or her own private hell. They stood, sat, or lay in place, faces distorted and mouths open and screaming.

Was this the Matrix? It had to be. If she had died, the gaijin hell was the last place she would have expected to wind up. Her parents had schooled Hitomi in the Shinto religion; she'd rejected it and considered herself an atheist. The only way she'd have wound up in a scene out of Dante's Inferno was if someone else had programmed it and put it in her path. The vampires and hotel/hospital room had been drawn from her own fears, but this place was someone else's nightmare.

"So Ka," she whispered to herself. "I am in the Matrix. But where? And what does this represent?"

Although the damned themselves looked like standard USM icons, the landscape they inhabited did not conform to universal Matrix symbolism. It looked custom-designed, like a sculpted system. The rivers of blood had to be data-streams, just like the sand ripples in the Shiawase system. The stalagmites were probably datastores or sub-processing units, and the tunnels system access nodes or input/output ports. But it all felt so real. The heat from the fires was causing rivulets of sweat to run down her temples and back, she could smell the heavy stink of sulfur, and her mouth and nose were dry from breathing the hot air. The screams…

Were those other deckers? Lady Death moved cautiously toward one. She chose a small figure; by the size it was a child about half her age. The kid was lying on the cavern floor and kicking her legs, beating at her body with her hands.

Lady Death knelt down and touched the child's shoulder…

She was lying on her foam mattress in the squat and it was dark. Outside she could hear angry shouts and the sound of automatic weapons. Light slanted through the boarded-up window beside her. Something was on her bed-something nearly as big as her. Its eyes gleamed red in the dim light and its pointed ears twitched. Its mouth opened wide, grinning, and its hairless tail lashed back and forth. It sniffed at her, whiskers twitching, as she lay tangled in her torn woolen blanket, terrified and unable to free herself or kick the gigantic rat away no matter how hard she thrashed her legs. Then it bit. Warm blood flowed down her calf as its sharp teeth worried their way into her flesh. She cried out for Ma, but Ma wouldn 't come. She was in the next room with a "customer" and that meant she was busy. And now more devil rats were pouring in through the cracks in the wall, dropping from the ceiling onto her mattress, crawling up through the ventilation shafts, pushing the board away from the window to get inside, chittering with evil laughter, coming to tear and rend and gnaw at her, smothering and suffocating her until she…

"Get them off me!" Lady Death screamed. "Get them off! Takukete! Help meee-!"

She tore her hand away. She stood, shaking, for several long seconds. Shudders ran the length of her spine and tears streamed from her eyes. She looked down at where the girl lay thrashing and could still feel her terror, even though she was no longer experiencing it first-hand. Horrible.

She looked around. If she touched another of the deckers, what other nightmares would she experience? She didn't want to know.

Lady Death knelt and dipped a finger into one of the streams of blood. She braced herself for more horrific images, but instead her mind was filled with a stream of meaningless data. Word fragments echoed in her ears, kaleidoscopic images flashed before her eyes, meaningless clumps of English letters and pseudo-Japanese kanji characters scrolled rapidly past, and fragments of tactile sensation assaulted her. The blood was a data stream-but one that seemed hopelessly scrambled. She flicked the blood from her fingers and the sensory jumble cleared from her mind.

She stood and touched one of the stalagmites instead. It seemed solid, its lumpy limestone formation like an upside-down ice cream cone. If it was indeed a datastore, it wasn't giving up any of its secrets. Unless…

Lady Death pushed against the tip of the stalagmite. She felt it give a little, and pushed harder. A crack appeared just below her hand. The tip shuddered and felt as though it were about to break off…

A jet of reddish-orange flame erupted at Lady Death's feet. She jumped back, but it licked at her kimono and set a corner of the fabric on fire. Lady Death smacked at it with her hands until it went out, then contemplated the black singe mark that was left behind. Had she just been attacked by IC? Had she just activated some sort of defensive utility? She could no longer tell what was going on. She could not feel her body in the real world, nor did she have a sense of which utilities she had loaded and ready to run.

As an experiment, she tried to activate one of her programs-an analyze utility. She had been expecting it to fail, so she was startled when a theater-style spotlight appeared in her hands. She shone its bright beam on the jet of flame and waited for the returning flow of information. It appeared in her mind as a page from a script: The pan of the blaster IC is being played by hellfire. Its role is to attack any who would cause the leading player harm. It is a minor character of low rank.

Lady Death shut the spotlight off and stood, lost in thought. Gray IC then-black would have been assigned a more prominent part. But the "leading player"? Was that the sysop for this system?

Something moved in her peripheral vision. Lady Death spun around, her kimono whirling. Then she backed up slowly, concealing herself behind a stalagmite and trying not to draw the attention of the figure that flowed out of one of the walls like a ghost. Like the damned that surrounded her, it was a humanoid figure, but unlike them it was neither smooth and featureless nor metallic. Instead it seemed to be composed of swirling red mist. Jets of flame showed through its translucent body as it moved past them. It paused a moment, then moved further into the cavern with a sure stride, despite the fact that its legs ended in stubs several centimeters above the floor. Drops of red fell from the ends of these stubs onto the stone, where they hissed and bubbled as the heat evaporated them.

As the figure drew closer to where Lady Death was hiding, she could see that it was a man. His hair swept back from a high forehead and his chin and cheeks were dark with beard stubble. He wore a loose-fitting robe that looked more like a shroud, a tattered reddish-brown fabric the color of dried blood. He balanced on his three-quarter-legs with the poise of a martial artist and his arms were raised in a defensive posture. He glanced warily around the cavern he had just entered, eyes flicking from one to another of the damned.

Then they locked on Lady Death. She tried to duck back behind the stalagmite but wasn't quick enough. The ghost man had seen her. Frantically, she tried to ready a defensive utility. Would the ghost attack? What would her best defense be? Should she hurl an attack program at it before it could "Wait!" the ghost man called out. "Don't go! Who are you? Where are we? What system is this?"

Lady Death paused, confused. He didn't sound hostile. He seemed as confused as she was. But maybe it was a trick.

She activated one of her utilities. Miniature jets appeared in the bottom of her wood-block sandals, lifting her a fraction of a centimeter from the floor. The extra speed and maneuverability they provided would add precious milliseconds, should she have to avoid this other decker- or whatever he was-in combat.

She crouched down low, ready to jet into the air at the first sign of a hostile move, then peeked out from behind the stalagmite.