Psychotrope

09:48:39 PST

Red Wraith tensed as the other decker peered out from behind the stalagmite. The woman-assuming the decker's gender was the same as the persona's-had abnormally white skin, red lips, and black hair piled high in an elaborate bun. She wore a flowing kimono patterned with glowing red dragons that were probably icons for her utilities. He watched her hands warily, ready to react if she made a move to activate any of them.

She said something, but Red Wraith found it difficult to hear her over the screams of the human figures that filled the cavern.

"What?" he called out. He edged closer but stopped when her body posture told him that she was about to flee.

"Are you the leading player?" she repeated.

Red Wraith frowned. The other decker's question seemed to imply that this was a game of some kind. Had he blundered into some sort of ultra-high-rez, Matrix-based arcade? The other decker seemed to regard him as a potential threat-or perhaps she simply saw him as competition. Was the "leading player" this woman was referring to the game site's sysop?

Red Wraith calculated the benefit of answering her question in the affirmative. But after weighing it against his ability to spin out the lie without having slotted any background data, he rejected this course of action. If she thought he was in control of the game, she might expect him to provide her with data. But if she thought he was a fellow player who wanted to team up with her, information might be more forthcoming. And she seemed to know more about this system than he did.

Red Wraith decided to play along.

"No, I'm not!" he shouted back. "I'm just an ordinary player. I go by the handle of Red Wraith. Who are you?"

"I'm Lady Death." She rose from her crouch but stood so that the stalagmite continued to partially shield her.

"Want to team up?" he asked.

She took a moment to consider his question. "Hat. I guess."

Red Wraith slotted that piece of data away. She'd answered with the Japanese affirmative. She was of Japanese descent then, just as her persona icon implied. Or else she wanted him to think that was the case.

Red Wraith edged closer. The woman tensed-and he resisted the instinctive reaction. Instead of triggering a utility as a defense, he kept his hands in plain sight and stood in an non-threatening pose. A jet of flame flickered out of a crack in the stone nearby; he felt its heat on his legs and side but deliberately did not flinch.

"Watch out for the fire," the white-faced woman told him. "It's blaster IC."

"Thanks. I will." He looked around. "Is there a way out of here?"

The Japanese woman shrugged and looked around. "We could try accessing one of the tunnels. I think they're datastreams."

Red Wraith peered into the nearest one. A river of blood flowed into it, washing its entire floor with red. Blood oozed from the walls, the drops collecting in tiny rivulets that fed the stream. "Shall we?" He stepped to the side and motioned for the other decker to enter the tunnel. She might seem harmless, but he wasn't about to turn his back on her.

She hesitated and curled a delicate red lip, and he realized that she probably didn't want to step into the blood. But then tiny jets spurted from the bottom of her sandals. She hovered, then stepped lightly out on top of the stream.

Red Wraith smiled at the irony that here, in hell, someone should be walking on "water." He laughed at the fleeting thought that this woman might be his savior. Most days, it was hard enough for him to trust himself, let alone a complete stranger.

The tunnel was just high enough for them to walk upright, and just wide enough that Red Wraith could reach out his hands on either side and touch the irregular, weeping rock walls. Or rather, try to touch them. His hands passed through them each time his fingers brushed them, making him wonder if he was ever going to be able to manipulate anything in this system. As an experiment, he reached out and touched Lady Death's back as they were rounding a bend in the tunnel. His hand passed through both the fabric of her kimono and her skin, but if she felt his touch she gave no sign.

The screams of the inhabitants of the larger cavern faded away, and were replaced by the rustle of the Japanese woman's kimono and the gentle gurgle and drip of the stream of blood.

They walked at a normal pace; there was none of the sense of rushing motion or instantaneous travel from node to node that deckers in the Matrix usually experienced. Despite the fact that he seemed to have no solid form, Red Wraith inhabited this landscape as if it were a physical reality, rather than a Matrix construct. And that worried him. He'd heard of systems like this, but had never accessed one before. Known as ultraviolet hosts, they were supposed to have system ratings far in excess of even megacorp or military computer systems. On an ultraviolet host system, the decker was his persona. Which would explain Red Wraith's ghostlike inability to manipulate objects and his complete disassociation from his meat bod. Except that ultraviolet hosts were supposed to be just a rumor…

After a few moments the tunnel ended in a large cavern that was filled with a vast red lake. Metallic-skinned bodies dotted its surface, floating on their backs with arms and legs loosely splayed. They turned slowly, as if trapped in lazy whirlpools. Each figure was a smooth metallic humanoid-the standard USM iconography for a decker's persona. Across the lake, Red Wraith could make out a dark opening where the tunnel they had been following continued.

Red Wraith and the Japanese woman stood on a beach of gray dust studded with bone-white pebbles. Just ahead of them, a black-hulled wooden boat was beached, its bow pulled up on shore. It looked much like a gondola, with a long, single oar at the stern, a curved bow, and a seat for passengers in the middle. Standing on the raised stern was a figure shrouded entirely in black. Pale skeletal hands gripped the oar. The figure turned, slowly, staring at the two newcomers with a face that was no more than an empty shadow under a hood of cloth.

"It looks as though he's waiting for passengers," Red Wraith whispered to his companion. He gestured toward the boat. "Should we risk a ride?"

"Omakase shimasu-it's up to you," she answered. "I have no idea where we are." She kicked a pebble into the lake and watched silently as ripples spread outward from it in a perfect square.

That made Red Wraith pause. "No?" he asked. "But I thought you'd played this game before."

"You think this is a game?" she asked. Her voice bordered on shrill. "If it is, I'm not interested in playing any more!" she shouted at the cavern ceiling. "I just want to go home!"

"Shut up!" he hissed at her. "Do you want to alert every IC program on the system to the fact that we're here?"

Her lower lip curved into a pout. "I thought you were going to help me."

"We've got to help each other," he told her. He paused. "You really don't know where we are?"

She shook her head.

Red Wraith sighed. So much for that faint hope. "I have no idea, either. But from the feel of this place, I'd guess we've blundered into an ultraviolet host of some sort. And that requires a supercomputer of incredible processing power-one capable of handling megapulses of data."

The other decker's eyes brightened. "I have heard of those," she said. "According to the data I've scanned on the shadowfiles network, an ultraviolet host requires an artificial intelligence to operate and maintain it. Imagine- we could meet an actual Al here…"

"Nonsense," Red Wraith broke in sharply. "A sufficiently powerful processing complex might spontaneously develop an ultraviolet host without any input from its operators, and that might lead them to believe an Al was at work, somewhere behind the scenes. But true Als don't exist-the closest anyone's come is a semi-autonomous knowbot with random-decision pathway capacities. Even the megacorps are still years away from developing anything with enough code to enable self-programming in response to new data. Every decker knows that."

"Ha! You think you know everything?" She flung out a hand to point at the gondola. "Then tell me what that is, sensei."

Red Wraith stared at the Japanese woman. A suspicion was dawning. "How old are you?" he asked.

"Old enough to know as much about decking as you. Maybe more."

A realization struck him: this decker was much younger than he was. He'd been trusting to some kid to lead him around. He'd assumed, since she'd been in the cavern before he arrived, that she knew more about this system than he did. Now he knew better. He wouldn't make that mistake again.

He glanced at the gondola. The hooded figure at the oar hadn't moved; it seemed to be waiting patiently for them. Red Wraith deliberately turned his back on the girl, walked to the boat, and climbed aboard. The padded seat supported him when he sat down, even though his hands ghosted through it. Perhaps because he expected it to?

But the one thing he couldn't do was access the data he had fought so hard to download-the UCAS military personnel file that was his first step in tracking down Lydia. It seemed that only the active memory of his cyberdeck was usable-he could still run his utilities, but the storage memory to which data files were downloaded remained inaccessible to him. Worry gnawed at him-he could only hope that the chips hadn't been fried, that the data he'd taken such pains to access was still there.

The shrouded figure in the stern stood utterly still, as if it were an icon waiting to be activated. Realizing what it wanted, Red Wraith accessed a simple utility he used for on-line payments. He chose an icon that represented a basic unit of ten nuyen and pushed the symbol toward the ferryman. As the icon was absorbed into a fold in the robe of the hooded figure, the ferryman leaned against his oar, and the gondola slid away from shore. As it did, the girl in the kimono looked once behind her and then wrung her hands. "Wait!" she called out, then ran to the boat across the lake and clambered aboard.

"You're not leaving me behind!" she told Red Wraith firmly as she settled onto the seat beside him. She kept a wary eye on the shrouded figure in the stern.

Red Wraith nodded. "All right. But if we're going to get out of here, we have to work together. We need to figure out where the hub of this system is. And that means knowing how we entered it. What system were you accessing before this one?"

The girl-which was how Red Wraith thought of her now, even though her icon suggested a mature woman- eyed him with a guilty expression, as if being asked to confess something.

"A manga music fansite."

"A what music?"

"Figures you wouldn't know," the girl muttered.

The figure in the stern worked the oar back and forth, rippling the water and propelling the boat forward with soft splashes.

"Manga," Lady Death said slowly, as if explaining something obvious to someone stupid, "is cartoon illusion. Manga music is-"

"I get it," Red Wraith said. "What was its LTG address?"

The other decker shrugged. "I don't know. It was connected to the Syberspace nightclub system, but only for a second through a vanishing system access node that kept changing its LTG address."

"So when you tried to log off, the node you used to exit the system could have led anywhere?"

The girl shrugged, then nodded. "Anywhere on the Seattle RTG."

Seattle? Red Wraith filed that one away. He too had been accessing that RTG. There was a possibility they were still within it.

"What happened while you were logged onto the fan-site?" he asked.

"I can't be certain." The girl frowned. "I uploaded some data, then tried to log off the fansite. I somehow became- separated-from my connection with my cyberdeck and lost all sense of my body. I wound up in what I thought was a datastream of pure white light and heard the voice of…"

She shivered. "I saw my life unfold as I floated above my own body. It was pleasant and dreamy, at first. But then it turned into a nightmare. I thought…"

Tears brimmed in her eyes and streaked dark furrows down her cheeks. Her pale complexion, Red Wraith saw now, was no more than makeup. After a moment, the streaks erased themselves. Lady Death looked at the skeletal figure in the back of the boat and then back at Red Wraith with a stricken expression.

"We're not dead-are we?"

Red Wraith fought down his own uncertainties. "We're still in the Matrix," he told her firmly.

"Hai," she said. "I know it's a crazy thought. But it all seemed so… Just like before when I was…"

Understanding dawned. The experience the girl had been trying to describe bore an uncanny resemblance to his own.

"Accessing this system reminded you of a near-death experience you once had?" he asked.

She nodded.

"Me too,"

They sat in silence as the gondola glided along. Red Wraith wasn't about to share the story of his brush with death with a complete stranger, and the girl seemed to feel the same way.

"I wonder if the others are experiencing the same thing," she said at last.

"The others?"

"The damned. The screaming people." She jerked her head. "Back there. I touched one, and saw her nightmare. It was…" She shuddered. "Horrible."

Red Wraith heard a soft thump and looked over the edge of the boat. A moment ago, the boat had been crossing an open stretch of water. Now a body that had appeared from out of nowhere was gently bumping against the side of the gondola. Although it seemed to be made of gleaming chrome, the metal was pocked with rust-rimmed holes and a strong smell of rotting meat arose from it. If it was, as

Red Wraith suspected, another decker who had just logged onto this system, would it be possible to communicate? Red Wraith reached a hand through the side of the boat and brushed his misty fingertips across the body…

He was walking through a forest on a hot summer day. Somewhere behind on the trail, he could hear a faint buzzing noise. Something sweet-smelling and sticky was on his skin, and he had to find water to wash it off before it attracted…

Flies. One buzzed toward him, circling him in lazy loops. Then another. The first one landed on his arm and bit. Red blood welled in the tiny wound. Then another fly landed, and another. Their buzzing grew louder, filling his ears.

Flies the size of grapes landed on his skin and bit into it with sharp, stinging bites. They laid eggs, injecting them into his skin like tiny bullets. They sought out his eyes, invaded his nose and ears, flew into his mouth each time he opened it to breathe or scream. He scratched, he slapped at the insects, but there were too many of them. He ran blindly as they covered his flesh, attracted by the sticky sweet syrup that covered it.

Now the eggs were hatching. Maggots wriggled just under his skin, their bodies humping up the flesh in obscene lumps. He fell to the ground, to the rich damp soil. Worms wriggled up out of the leaf mold and sought out the holes the flies had left in his skin. They feasted on the rot the maggots had left behind, consuming him piece by piece until there was nothing left. There was no escape…

The scene blinked like a bad simsense edit.

He was walking through a forest on a hot summer day. Somewhere behind on the trail, he could hear a faint buzzing noise…

Red Wraith drew his hand away. Shuddering, he glanced down at his body, absently slapping at his misty skin to drive away the burrowing insects. It took him a moment or two to shake off the phobia that was not his own. All the while Lady Death stared at him. "What did you see?"

"A nightmare," Red Wraith answered. "Hies. Maggots. It repeated, as if there was a loop in the programming. As if the decker was trapped…"

He watched the chrome body float away as the gondola left it behind. "If the bodies are deckers, they seem to be unable to move around freely in this system. We seem to be the only ones capable of doing that."

Lady Death looked out over the lake. "They are all standard icons," she mused. "You would think that a highly sculpted system like this one would include less primitive iconography. Something that matched the rest of the system."

Red Wraith looked up at the other decker in surprise. Sculpted system? He had known it instinctively, but only now were the ramifications clear. "That's why we're the only ones capable of moving around or interacting with the system," he said. "Our personas fit its central metaphor: death."

He gestured at the bodies in the water. "Theirs don't, and so they appear as universal matrix symbolism icons. The reality filters on their decks' MPCPs won't allow them to interact with this system's sculpture. For some reason, its data is being translated into nightmarish images that they loop through over and over again. They're trapped here."

"So are we," Lady Death said quietly.

"I don't think so," Red Wraith answered. "We're capable of movement and interaction with the system. There's still hope."

"Hai," she stared out past the bow. "I suppose so." The gondola had nearly reached the opposite shore. "As long as we don't run into any black IC."

Blood fountained up from the lake in a sudden spray. The boat rocked violently to one side and Lady Death screamed. Red Wraith turned to face the threat and saw a black, bony hand gripping the side of the boat. A hideous black skeleton, its clothing soaked with blood and its yellowed eyes bulging, hauled itself into the boat and lunged straight at them in a frenzied attack…