Psychotrope

09:48:45 PST

Dark Father crawled out of the hole and into what looked like a gigantic abattoir. Conveyor belts crisscrossed the inside of an infinitely large building, carrying chunks of flesh and broken bone along at blurring speed with a rattling, clanking clamor. Some of the belts were horizontal, others vertical or angled or even upside down, but the bloody meat they were carrying stayed firmly in place, in defiance of gravity.

The conveyor belts seemed to be linking the various system icons that dotted the landscape, carrying the meat from one to the next. Within Dark Father's immediate view was a massive pyramid of skulls, a pagoda shingled with tombstones, a ball-shaped knot of gigantic wriggling worms, and a multi-faceted office tower made of gleaming black coffins.

It all looked familiar, somehow-familiar, but wrong. It took Dark Father a moment to puzzle out why. He realized suddenly that he was looking at the vast expanse of the Seattle RTG, subtly transformed. The geography was still the same, but the iconography had drastically changed. Everywhere he looked, the system icons were constructed from symbols of death and decay-except for the three-dimensional star of the Fuchi system, although it was too far away to see in detail.

He was within the Matrix, that much was certain. And he'd escaped from his personal nightmare of being devoured by his ghoulish son. Assuming he was still alive and not just a bodiless spirit trapped within the Matrix, he could log off, now that he knew what RTG he was in. He executed the command that should have allowed him to perform a graceful log off…

Nothing happened.

He used a browse utility to locate the access node that would take him back to the Midwest RTG…

Nothing. He remained exactly where he was.

In desperation he tried to simply log off, even though he knew that the dump shock might kill him after the mauling that Serpens in Machina had given him…

Nothing.

The conveyor belts rattled past, carrying their gruesome cargo.

A flash of silver caught Dark Father's eye. Something was lying between the hunks of meat, being carried along the belt with them. It had looked like a human figure-one of the UMS icons used by deckers who couldn't afford the software needed to customize their personas. If another decker were riding the conveyor belt datastream, perhaps Dark Father could, too.

He reached out a skeletal hand and grabbed the frayed fabric of the conveyor belt. With a lurch that nearly jerked his bones apart, he as in motion. He sailed at breakneck speed in and out of the pyramid of skulls that was likely Aztechnology Seattle, and through the pagoda that was probably the Mitsuhama system. But instead of accessing those systems, he simply swept through them as if they were mere illusion. The conveyor belt carried him high above these icons toward a gleaming crystal skull that was probably a system access node-then plunged in one empty eye socket and out the next, looping over like a demented roller coaster without ever letting him access the node. Then the rattling, bone-jarring conveyor belt dragged Dark Father back down with it toward the landscape once more, hurtling toward the "ground" at breakneck speed. For a second, third, and fourth time his hopes soared as he was carried to one of the skulls-only to be dashed again as it proved impossible each time to let go of the conveyor belt during the millisecond or two he was actually inside the node.

After his fifth attempt at using the conveyor belt to access another node, Dark Father released his grip and instantly came to a stop. At first he merely held his position in space, but then he discovered that he could approach one of the crystal-skull SANs on his own, without the aid of the conveyor belt. He heaved a sigh of relief at the knowledge that he had some control. He could move freely in this landscape, at least.

He watched the datastream continue on its crazed, looping path in and out of the skull's eye sockets. The conveyor belt carried chunks of meat both in and out of the SAN-which meant that data was probably still flowing in and out of the Seattle RTG, even if the Dark Father himself was trapped here.

Every now and then there was a flash of chrome as another UMS persona icon appeared on the conveyor belt. Always they appeared on the incoming belts. The deckers never exited the system, only entered it. And they lay on the conveyor belt as lifeless as the chunks of meat next to them.

Hmm. It seemed that deckers-assuming that's what they were-could log onto the Seattle RTG but not log off it again. If indeed this was truly the Seattle regional telecommunications grid and not some distorted mirror image of it.

Dark Father stared across the virtual landscape, letting his gaze wander. Then he noticed something. Each of the conveyor belts, at one point in its routing, traveled to a central location-an enormous silver urn that lay on its side. Descending toward it, Dark Father could see that the urn was as large as an apartment block. Its interior looked like a cave, with moss-draped sides and stalactites inside. Low groans and faint screams echoed in its depths. Hundreds of Conveyor belts flowed in and out of the mouth of this tunnel, the air from their passage stirring the swirling gray ash that lined its floor it into long, foglike tendrils. Dark Father's legs grew cold and clammy where this ash wafted against them.

Stepping back from the urn, Dark Father saw that the sides of it were covered in ornate characters. Despite the urn's size, the words engraved on its tarnished silver surface were in so small a script as to be unreadable.

Suspecting that scramble IC was involved, Dark Father activated a decrypt utility. An old-fashioned magnifying glass appeared in his hand. Instead of glass, its black metal frame held an eyeball that moved back and forth as the eye scanned the text engraved on the urn. At the same time, glowing green letters scrolled across the back of the eyeball, flowed down the handle of the magnifying glass, up Dark Father's arm, and into his mind.

The flow paused for a second as Dark Father puzzled over what he had found. Despite the decrypt utility, most of the file on the urn icon was gibberish. But one segment of data, reminiscent of a tombstone inscription, was still coherent:

Deep Resonance Experiment

Born: 09:47:00 PST

Aborted: 09:48:00 PST

Resonance in peace

Dark Father released the magnifying glass, which broke apart into pixels and disappeared. He looked around at the landscape with its eerie death imagery. Just prior to the time listed on the urn, Dark Father had been in the Virtual Meetings conversation pit, battling for his life against Ser-pens in Machina. One second later, at precisely 9:47 a.m. Pacific Standard Time, some sort of experimental program had chosen him as its guinea pig, yanking him out of that cybercombat, forcing him to re-experience his death and birth and then thrusting him into a system whose iconography was based on his own worst nightmares of ghoulish feeding frenzies. And then-either as a result of Dark Father's own frantic attempts to escape the ghouls or simply by virtue of the fact that the experiment had "died" one minute later, he'd emerged into this weirdly corrupted version of die Seattle RTG.

He didn't know whether to be thankful for having escaped Serpens in Machina's potentially fatal attack or resentful at having been drafted into an experiment without having given his permission. And there was no way of telling whose experiment it was. The conveyor belt data-streams that entered and exited the urn seemed to connect to every node on this RTG. It wasn't as if they all congregated at the skull pyramid that was probably Aztechnology, for example, or at the bone-barred dungeon that hunkered where Lone Star's system had once stood. They went everywhere, connected everything.

Connected everything to this urn.

The answer had to lie inside it.

Dark Father activated his sleaze utility. The urn was probably just a sub-processing unit, but he wasn't about to enter it naked and unprotected. His black top hat shimmered and then melted downward, transforming into an executioner's hood that hid all but his yellowed eyeballs. Peering from within it, he reached out a hand, braced himself for the jolt, and grabbed onto one of the conveyor belts leading into the urn.

The datastream wrenched him off his feet.

Dark Father found himself immersed in warm liquid, thicker and more cloying than water. His hand was empty; the conveyor belt had disappeared. All was darkness; it was impossible to tell which way was up. Within seconds his chest felt heavy, his legs and arms weak, and blood pounded in his ears. His sodden clothes dragged him down and the hood obscured his vision. He was drowning.

Crashing his sleaze utility, Dark Father at last was able to see a light that he assumed was the direction of the surface. He swam frantically for it, but his skeletal hands and feet gave him no push against the liquid. He had only a meter or so to go now, but was getting nowhere. But then he saw something splash into the water from above. Long and slender, it looked like the bottom of an oar. Grabbing it, Dark Father pulled himself hand over hand, up toward the bulging black form that was the hull of a boat. He grabbed the side of the boat, which tipped violently toward him. Thrashing madly, he lunged up and over the gunwale, sputtering and gasping and reaching desperately for whatever would give him purchase…

Someone was screaming. Dark Father looked up and saw a woman in a white kimono scurrying away from him across the tilting deck of the long, narrow boat. Behind her, a hooded figure mechanically worked an oar back and forth. Another figure-a headless red ghost-stood with its head in its hands, as if about to pass it to Dark Father like a basketball.

Sensing that he was about to be attacked by another decker, Dark Father arrested his forward motion and instead fumbled for the noose at his neck. Then the head in the ghost's hands spoke.

"Make one more hostile move and I'll crash you," it said.

Dark Father hung, limp, across the gunwale of the boat, his legs still dangling in the warm liquid. "I won't," he gasped, at last finding his breath. He looked between the three figures already in the boat. The one handling the oar seemed to be executing a looped sequence; its stiff, repetitive movements were those of a program icon. But the other two were definitely deckers.

"Are you the ones running the experiment?" Dark Father asked.

"We-" the ghost began to answer.

"What experiment?" the woman said at the same time.

The ghost shot her a look, then replaced his head on his shoulders. "He's another decker," he told her. Then he leaned over and extended a hand toward Dark Father to help him into the boat.

"Welcome aboard our nightmare."