Psychotrope

09:49:32 PST

"But we've got to share our personal data!" the troll said in an exasperated voice. "We'll never get out of this drekkin' system if we don't!" He looked around at the graveyard, then shook his head.

They'd been talking for what seemed like forever, and frankly, Dark Father was tired of making small talk with strangers. At the speed that things happened in the Matrix-the speed of thought-only a few seconds had ticked by. But seconds were precious here.

Dark Father stared at the other decker, not bothering to keep his expression neutral. If the troll's icon was anything like his real-world body, he was as unpleasant an example of his metatype as any that Dark Father had seen. He had long, matted hair, dirty clothes, and torn face and flesh that looked and smelled as if it had been left to rot. He hadn't even bothered to tuck in his spilled entrails, let alone his shirt. What sort of person would choose so loathsome a persona?

The decker-Bloodyguts-had already admitted to being a criminal and a chiphead. Did he honestly expect Dark Father to feel sorry for him?

The other two deckers apparently did. The Japanese woman in the kimono had tearfully told the story of how she had tried to commit ritual suicide by slashing open a vein after a lover had spurned her, and of the near-death experience this act had produced. The reddish ghost had likewise told of his own out-of-body experience, which had occurred after a sniper's bullet had severed his spine while he was serving as a Dutch soldier in the Euro-Wars. Now both of them stared at Dark Father, expecting him to reveal similarly intimate details of his own past.

"Well?" Bloodyguts prodded.

"Yes, I had a near-death experience." Dark Father directed his answer to the two human deckers. "As a result of a heart attack. I experienced the same things you did: seeing my body from above, hearing the voices of dead relatives, watching flashbacks from my life, and moving through a tunnel of light toward a being greater than myself… All of which repeated itself just before I entered this system."

"But you fought against it and escaped," Red Wraith prompted.

"Yes."

"To a scene from your own worst fears," the Japanese woman added.

"Yes." Dark Father gritted his teeth, unwilling to review the details but unable to prevent himself from mentally doing so. He shuddered. His own son-feeding upon him. Horrible.

"And then you escaped from that, and realized you were still within the Seattle RTG," the troll said.

Dark Father was tired of the troll's simple-minded summary. "That was my conclusion, yes."

"Here's what I figure," the troll said, turning to the others and ticking off points on his blunt fingers. "One: we're the only deckers who broke free-according to Red Wraith here, everyone else is still trapped inside a programming loop. Two: the iconography of everyone's nightmare loop is individual, something from their own phobias or memories. And three: it's all part of some sort of one-minute experiment that began at 9:47 a.m. and was aborted at 9:48 a.m., according to Mr. Bones here."

"I would prefer to be addressed by my proper on-line name," Dark Father huffed.

The troll ignored him. "From what I saw, we're dealing with some sort of psychotropic black IC. And pretty frag-gin' deadly stuff. We got lucky. Thanks to the fact that we recognized its effects as a near-death experience, we weren't willing to be taken along for the ride by the tunnel of light. We fought back and didn't get stuck in the loop."

He curled a lip, revealing a broken canine. "But we're still stuck here, and we're cut off from our meat bods. The question is, where is here?"

"I think we're in a pocket universe," Lady Death said. "One that is confined to the Seattle RTG, but not to any single host. It is everywhere in the RTG-and nowhere."

"And there aren't any exit signs," the troll added in a wry tone.

"That's because it doesn't want us to leave," Lady Death said.

"It?" The troll frowned.

"The artificial intelligence that built the pocket universe."

"Bulldrek," Red Wraith cut in angrily. "There's no such thing as Als. We're still years away from-"

Lady Death cut him off. "But only an Al would have the processing power to-"

"Frag!" the troll said in exasperation. "We've been over this already. You two are starting to sound like a programming loop. We've got to-"

Dark Father ignored the other three deckers and looked around at the virtualscape. They stood in a vast graveyard whose tombstone-dotted fields stretched to the horizon. Thunder grumbled overhead in a gray sky and a cold wind chilled the spaces between Dark Father's bones, making his loose jacket and pants flutter slightly.

He called up a copy of the customized smart frame he'd used on Serpens in Machina, ordered the dog to "Sit!" and "Stay!" and then started editing its programming. The silver-furred German shepherd sat complacently while Dark Father edited its browse and evaluate functions, instructing it to search for any files that contained the words "deep resonance." He also changed its core function from delete to download. Then he gave it a curt command: "Search!"

The police dog ran in a blur from one gravestone to the next, sniffing at each for a mere millisecond before bounding away to the next.

"What the frag are you doing?" Bloodyguts asked.

Dark Father brushed off the troll's belligerence. "Instead of sitting around and making uninformed guesses, I'm searching for data that will provide us with some answers." He favored the other deckers with a cold stare. "Do any of you have a problem with that?"

The Japanese woman shrugged.

Red Wraith shook his head.

They waited a few seconds in silence. Then Dark Father spotted the smart frame returning. The dog loped across the ground, bounding over tombstones and carrying something in its mouth. As it drew nearer, Dark Father could see that it was a large bone, with scraps of meat still clinging to it. He took the bone out of the dog's mouth and ran his finger along the raised design on end: a five-pointed star.

The other deckers crowded around Dark Father.

"What is it?" Red Wraith asked.

"A file," Dark Father answered. The magnifying glass with its mobile eyeball appeared in his hand as he began decrypting the file.

Lady Death leaned forward to look at the raised star. "That's the old Fuchi Industrial Electronics logo-the one the corporation used before it split apart."

Just at that moment, the end of the bone bearing the logo began to rotate. It unscrewed itself like a cap, and a stream of alphanumeric characters flowed out. They streamed in a tight spiral toward the eyeball and in through its pupil. The other deckers had to read the decrypted text as it flowed up Dark Father's arm like a movie marquee. The text that datelined it identified the speaker: Miles Lanier, who had returned as strategic advisor to his friend Richard Villiers at Fuchi Americas last year after pulling off a brilliantly disruptive scam against the rival corporation Renraku that sent the price of Renraku's stock plummeting. The file was a memo, composed last summer at the height of Fuchi's corporate war, just two months before the corporation split apart. It was addressed to Richard Villiers, who was then the CEO of Fuchi Americas. Today Villiers headed up Nova-Tech, the new corporation he had formed out of what remained of Fuchi's North and South American holdings.

Red Wraith whistled softly. "Lanier, huh. That guy's nova hot. He wrote the book on Matrix security. If this is one of his uploads, the decryption should have been a tougher nut to crack. The UCAS military itself uses Fuchi IC as the first line of its Matrix defenses."

"Maybe someone wanted us to read this," Bloodyguts rumbled.

"Quiet, please!" Dark Father closed his eyes and listened to the audio component of the file. Lanier spoke in a military-crisp voice with just a hint of a Boston accent.

Memo upload begins.

One of our covert operatives has uncovered evidence of an otaku colony in the Denver area. The four children positively identified as colony members range in age from seven to twenty-three-one of the oldest reported otaku to date. The twenty-three-year-old had her datajack surgically implanted at approximately age ten, providing further evidence that the phenomenon we are dealing with originated some time around 2047.

Our operative's extreme youth proved to be the key to earning the other children's trust. It was also his downfall. Let me explain.

Our operative confirmed that the otaku are indeed able to access the Matrix by means of a datajack alone, in a process similar-but not identical-to that used by the children discovered by Babel. He also confirmed our suspicions as to the mechanism that is at the heart of the transformative process known as DEEP RESONANCE.

The fact that this mechanism may soon be under our control has immense implications for the future of Fuchi Americas. It will allow us to hurdle over the existing cyber-deck manufacturing and software programming industries, replacing them with a brand new technology that is a quantum leap ahead of the old. Once the general public is able to access the Matrix by means of a datajack alone, as the otaku do, and are able to use the "complex forms" of the otaku in place of program utilities, the products produced by our competitors will be obsolete.

Whoever is the first to develop and market the DEEP RESONANCE process will bury the competition. I only hope that it will be Fuchi Americas. As you know, rival corporations-including the one that once controlled Babel-are also taking steps to acquire and control similar technologies. And as a result of our corporation's current internal difficulties, we are also in a race against our former partners. Unfortunately, I have just this week confirmed that some of the data we have so painstakingly collected has been accessed by Fuchi Pan-Europa and Fuchi Asia.

I must thus reluctantly warn you that, should our former partners gain the ability to access and control the mechanism behind the otaku, we must take the necessary steps to destroy this mechanism. Thankfully, that is not necessary at this time.

No further data could be recovered by our covert operative, who broke contact with us two days ago. I am sorry to report that all indications point to him having joined the colony and become otaku himself. The colony has since disappeared. Despite an extensive search, our regular security forces were unable to track down a single member. In addition, the tracking device that was implanted in our covert operative has ceased functioning. We are unable to locate his whereabouts.

I am thus forced to report that we have been unable to capture a subject for study. I await your further instructions.

Memo upload ends.

Dark Father opened his eyes and released the decrypt utility. The magnifying glass disappeared. The other three deckers had crowded close, reading the text as it scrolled up his arm. Dark Father stepped back from them, putting some distance between himself and the putrid-smelling troll.

"Can't you delete the olfactory component of your icon?" Dark Father asked.

Bloodyguts grinned and shook his head. "Nope. Comes with the persona."

Dark Father grimaced.

Red Wraith was shaking his head. "I don't believe it," he said. "Decking without a deck-with just a datajack? Impossible!"

Bloodyguts had a strange expression on his face-part loathing, part disbelief. "If it's true, those poor kids are fragged up worse than a chiphead," he said. "If their wet-ware is linked with the Matrix, how can they tell where reality ends and the Matrix begins?"

"That would be wonderful," Lady Death said.

"Huh?" Bloodyguts looked at her as if she were crazy.

"To access the Matrix any time, without need of a cyberdeck," she added. "It would be so-freeing."

"If it were possible," Red Wraith added. "Which it's not."

"I've scanned rumors of this in the shadowfiles," Lady Death continued. "Of a tribe of kids who were nova-hot deckers and who live in the Denver area. The other deckers called them otaku-zoku-'honored sir.' They made fun of these 'otaku' because the kids were smarter than they were."

She made a face. "The other deckers joked that the kids were more machine than human-that the process of interfacing with computers all day long, at the expense of human interaction, had turned their brains to silicon." She shrugged. "And who knows? Maybe they were partially correct. Maybe the kids' brains were different. Maybe some of the programs the kids encountered changed the way their thoughts were channeled, altering their brains so that they could access the Matrix directly, without needing a deck to-"

"Frag," Bloodyguts croaked, realization dawning on his ugly face. "That's what the insects were doing-not just implanting psychotropic suggestions, but actually cooking the deckers' wetware."

"I wonder," Lady Death mused. "If it is possible to access the Matrix without a cyberdeck, is it also possible to access the Matrix without a body? Are we dead, after all?"

"I still find the concept hard to believe," Red Wraith said. Then his voice grew grim. "But I do know this: if either of the remaining Fuchi divisions or NovaTech was behind this little 'experiment,' we're fragged. Between the three of them, they've got the hardest-hooped IC on the Matrix. And their programmers don't play nice-just look at what they did to each other during the corporate war."

"I'm not certain that Fuchi-or even NovaTech-was the instigator," Dark Father said. "According to the memo, other corporations were also experimenting with deep resonance. Remember that the experiment was aborted, according to the inscription on the urn, one minute after it began. Perhaps our nightmares, and all this"-he gestured at the tombstones-"wasn't what the experimenters intended. Remember that our journey here started out as a pleasant enough experience-and only later turned nightmarish. Maybe Fuchi-or NovaTech-corrupted the experiment somehow. The key to escaping would seem to lie in finding out what went wrong."

"Yeah, right, Perfesser Bones," Bloodyguts said. "So where the frag do we start?"

Dark Father tapped the raised logo on the bone. "We start at the beginning of the story, with Fuchi Industrial Electronics. If this pocket universe contains copies of Fuchi memos that were created prior to the corporation's breakup, it may also contain old Fuchi files that include the background information we need to-"

Dark Father suddenly stumbled to one side as the ground shifted violently beneath his feet. As he fell to his knees he saw scabrous hands erupting from the graves, reaching for him and trying to rend him with scythe-blade fingernails. He tried to crawl away but there were dozens of them, hundreds. The arms flowed from the ground, impossibly long and wriggling like rubberized worms, their claws tearing at his clothes and scoring his black bones.

As he scrambled to get away from the grasping hands, he heard Lady Death scream and the troll's booming voice.

"Spirits frag you!" Bloodyguts screamed as he whirled a baseball bat around his head. "Whoever's behind all this, your drek-hot utility led their IC straight to us!"