Psychotrope

09:48:59 PST

The instant Bloodyguts opened his eyes, a gigantic scythe whooshed in a murderous arc for his throat. He threw himself to one side, avoiding its deadly swing by mere centimeters. The point of the scythe caught the fabric of his tattered shirt, slicing it open from collar to shoulder. Then he landed on the ground-hard-and rolled frantically to one side to avoid the scythe's next swing.

All around him, closing him in like a forest, were wooden stakes as tall as he was. Each had been driven into the ground and crudely hacked into a point, and on each was impaled a severed head. Scrambling behind one, Bloodyguts got the stake between himself and the scythe. The harvesting tool with its brilliant chrome blade sliced into the wood with a thunk, quivered a moment, then reversed and poised itself to swing again.

The deadly tool was operating independently, floating above the ground and zigzagging back and forth in order to get a better angle of attack. It had to be IC-but there was no time to wonder what type. Bloodyguts had to crash that fragger. Now.

A utility icon appeared in his hand: a baseball bat made of dull white bone. A baseball with an outer layer of stitched human flesh appeared about a meter in front of Bloodyguts at chest height. Slamming the bat against the ball, he sent the ball flying at the scythe. It struck the long wooden handle just at its midpoint and exploded in a flash of light, splintering it in two. The two halves of the scythe stuttered, blinked…

Bloodyguts grinned and lowered the bat. Then he swore as the lower half of the scythe arced around a wooden stake and slashed at his stomach. He threw himself to the side but too late-the blade snagged a piece of entrail and snipped it neatly in two. Blood-flecked data spiraled out of the severed ends and the bat in Bloodyguts' hands shimmered, losing its cohesiveness.

Drek! This IC was tough!

Bloodyguts grabbed the severed ends of his entrail in one hand, squeezing them shut, and at the same time dodged behind another stake. But now that the scythe had a shorter handle it was more maneuverable. It zinged between the stakes, following Bloodyguts' every move.

Cursing, Bloodyguts pumped everything he had into his crash utility. This time, the ball that appeared in front of him was softball-sized and tattooed with skulls and cross-bones. Wielding his bat with one hand, Bloodyguts swung it in a wild arc as the scythe zoomed in for the kill. The bone-bat connected with the ball and sent it hurtling on a collision course with the scythe blade-which shattered into a million glowing fragments as the ball connected and exploded. A rain of steel-colored fragments of light showered Bloodyguts, pocketing his skin with tiny perforations.

He howled in triumph as the scythe disappeared. "Home run!"

The bat in his hand disappeared. Quickly, before any more data was lost, Bloodyguts tied together the severed ends of entrail and watched as they fused back into a smooth loop. He'd crashed the IC, but he had no way of knowing whether his meat bod had suffered any damage as a result of the attack. He was utterly cut off from any true physical sensation, as if his RAS override had been pumped to the max. But since he was still conscious, he had to assume his heart was still beating-that he was still alive.

Might as well try to figure out where the frag he was.

He took a closer look at the severed heads closest to him. Their skin gleamed with a metallic sheen, as if they had been dipped in metal. They were identifiable by metatype: one had the narrow face and pointed ears of an elf; another the knobby forehead and jutting horn of a troll. He could even tell which were male and which were female. But all of the heads looked pretty much alike. They were caricatures, not individuals. Icons.

The stakes on which they were impaled stretched across a plain that disappeared into an indefinite horizon. There were hundreds of them-thousands. The faces were frozen in a single expression-abject terror-but the stakes themselves seemed to be… flowing. Peering at one, Bloody-guts could see that the grain of the wood was constantly shifting, kind of like the current of a river.

Data! It had to be a flow of data. But how to access it? The wood was coarse and solid under Bloodyguts' fingers and refused to be dented by his thumbnail; it was not permeable at all.

Something moved on the head. Bloodyguts jerked his hand back, instinctively reacting to an insect-sized creature that was scuttling across the frozen ridges of metallic hair. The thing looked like a combination of robot and dragonfly-a tiny silver-metal creature with articulated legs and wings, and arms that ended in miniature tools. Its face was featureless except for a single vidcam lens.

Bloodyguts watched, fascinated, as the thing drilled a hole into the head. A probe extruded from the insectoid's arm and vanished into the hole. Then it was pulled back, and the miniature robot used the circular saw in its other limb to cut a larger hole. Flipping it back like a trap door, the insectoid exposed what looked like an old-fashioned circuit board, one with resistors and capacitors as large as fingernails, plastic-clad copper wires thick enough to be seen with the naked eye, and metal-on-plastic circuitry. A dull red light glowed on one of the insectoid's limbs as the circular saw turned into a soldering iron, arid then the creature went to work, soldering in a new wire to bypass a section of the board.

Taking a quick glance at some of the other impaled heads, Bloodyguts saw similar creatures at work. Some heads contained archaic cog and wheel mechanisms, powered by wound springs; others held what looked like the glowing fuel rods of a nuclear power plant. In every case these mechanisms were being tinkered with.

If this Matrix system was an actual representation of what was going on in the meat world, and if these were actually deckers, someone or something was messing with their wetware. And judging by the expressions on their faces, they were finding it about as pleasant as a bad BTL chip dream.

Bloodyguts growled. What was he dealing with here? He decided to activate an analyze utility to find out.

He pointed at one of the robot insects and a palm-sized plastic card appeared in the air just above it. The three-dimensional holo programmed into the card showed the image of the bug icon in various poses, while stats scrolled across the flat surface of the card itself.

Bloodyguts watched the stats scroll past. The insectoid icon was one weird piece of programming. It seemed to be uploading and downloading data at the same time that it was performing a number of editing and disinfecting functions. It hadn't been written using any of the common programming languages-at least not any of the languages Bloodyguts recognized. Its code seemed to contain elements of HoloLISP, Oblong, and InterMod, but the blend kept changing, as if the utility were reprogramming itself in response to new data.

It reminded Bloodyguts of black IC-intrusion counter-measures programs that sampled the command transactions between decker and cyberdeck and then injected dangerous biofeedback responses into the deck's ASIST interface.

The program was obviously proactive, but it wasn't responding to Bloodyguts' presence. The insectoids were ignoring him-they weren't drilling into his wetware, thank the fraggin' spirits. At least, not as far as he could tell. He still seemed to be thinking normally-or thought he was.

He shifted the analyze utility, pointing at the head itself. The card shimmered, and the face of an elf female replaced the insectoid holograph. After a millisecond's hesitation, a new set of code began scrolling across the card.

Bloodyguts whistled in surprise. It was a decker, after all-the head was an abbreviated version of the standard USM persona icon. The stats suggested that the elf was using a hot deck-one that would leave her wide open to the potentially lethal effects of black IC. The deck's condition monitor was fluctuating wildly, one moment showing massive amounts of neural overload and the next reporting that all mental functions were within normal limits. She wasn't taking any physical damage, however.

So the robot bug wasn't lethal black IC, or the poor fragger would have been dead already. And if the insect was causing mental damage, it was repairing it as quickly as it occurred. When the decker logged off or jacked out, she might never realize that her wetware had been tampered with. And that suggested only one thing.

Psychotropic black IC.

Bloodyguts had heard about that stuff. Even though it was non-lethal, it was nasty drek. It fragged you up just as thoroughly and irrevocably as a bad BTL chip. What it did was reprogram the decker's wetware, leaving subliminal compulsions behind. Some were relatively harmless-like producing a warm, fuzzy feeling each time the decker saw a corporate logo. Other types of psychotropic black IC caused lasting psychological damage, rendering the decker prone to phobias, maniacal rages, suicidal depressions, or… hallucinations.

Bloodyguts looked around at the forest of impaled heads. Was that what this was? A hallucination? Or the iconography of a Matrix system? The imagery didn't feel like it was being generated by Bloodyguts' own wetware. At least, it hadn't felt that way since he escaped from the tunnel of light and the image of Jocko that had somehow known his real name.

Without warning, the head popped off the end of the stake.

"Frag!" Bloodyguts shouted. Without thinking, he lunged forward to grab it. But the head disappeared. Bloodyguts' hand passed through empty space-and was impaled on the stake. He tried to jerk it free but couldn't…

He was a tiny speck of consciousness, racing through a swirling river whose borders were the waves of wood grain. He came to a knothole, whipped once around it in a spiraling circle, then popped through it, emerging on the other side like a cork. He battered against something-a solid well of empty space that he instinctively knew was the end of an unconnected data plug-then was swept back and away from that terminus. For just a moment he found another knothole to bob into-a connection with the cyberdeck's built-in cybercam and microphone. A scream tore through his consciousness, and he saw lens-framed images of an elf woman plunging her hands through a window, using its shattered glass to lacerate her wrists until the flesh hung from them in bloody ribbons. Behind her, a man stood frozen in horror, holding a fiber-optic cable connection, a look of disbelief on his face.

Before Bloodyguts could see more, he was drawn back along a retreating wave of data. He tried to fight the tide, but it was too strong, too overwhelming in its single-minded direction. It forced him back through several knothole nodes, swept him helplessly tumbling across a strangely transformed landscape of the Seattle RTG, then raced back into the wooden stake and out of its sharpened tip…

Bloodyguts' outstretched arm fell to his side as the wooden stake that had impaled his hand disappeared. He looked down at his hand and saw that it was shaking but undamaged. Without realizing that he was doing it, he wiped his wrist against his pant leg. Then he shivered and stared at the insectoids as they carried out their diabolical surgery on the heads that surrounded him.

Had he really just witnessed another decker's suicide? If so, this psychotropic IC was deadly stuff; it seemed to have an onset time measured in milliseconds.

Bloodyguts was suddenly very glad he hadn't been able to jack out of the Matrix after his fight with the jaguar-icon IC. He might have wound up dead.

He might still, if he didn't figure out what the frag he'd blundered into.

The safest thing was to get out of this system before the insectoids decided to burrow into his wetware. But where were the SANs? As an experiment, he wrapped his hands around one of the stakes that did not hold a head, knelt slightly, then strained upward. The stake pulled from the ground with a loud pop! leaving a hole behind. Tossing the stake aside, Bloodyguts scuffed at the hole with his toe…

The virtualscape spun wildly as Bloodyguts' foot disappeared into the ground, sucked down by a whirlpool-like force. Spiraling out of control, he felt his body compress into a long, thin, tight strand. He spun down and into the hole like water through a drain. Then his body began to twist in reverse, like a rubber band reversing itself.

He emerged through pursed stone lips-the mouth of a gravestone cherub. Landing heavily on the ground, he raised himself with shaking arms as his body finished unwinding itself. Then he looked around.

The impaled heads and stakes had disappeared. He lay in a graveyard, on freshly turned soil. And staring at him, apparently surprised at his sudden appearance, were three grim-looking figures: a black skeleton, a legless ghost, and an Oriental woman with death-white skin.