Psychotrope

09:49:50 PST

The grasping hands shot up out of the earth, hooking their metallic claws into Lady Death's kimono. In the real world, she would have simply shed the garment and run away. But the kimono was an integral part of her persona-she could no more take it off than she could shed her own skin. And running was not an option. Even as she tore free and struggled to a clear spot, more worm-arms erupted from the ground, trapping her once more. They dragged heavily on her kimono, preventing her from moving.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that Red Wraith had enclosed himself in some sort of black rubber bag. But the claws were ripping through it as though it were silk, rapidly reducing it to a shredded husk.

Even as she quaked in fear, Lady Death tried to figure out what she was facing. The clawing hands had to be ripper IC of some sort-probably bind-rip, since they were impeding her ability to move freely. And the IC seemed to be cascading. For every worm-arm that Dark Father roped with his noose or that Bloodyguts smashed apart with his baseball bat, two more appeared. And that gave Lady Death an idea…

Cascading IC was programmed to allocate more and more system resources to its attacks each time it missed its target. In this case, each of those attacks was represented by a grasping hand. If the IC could be tricked into allocating all of its memory to the maintenance of an impossible number of icons, the program as a whole might slow or even crash.

The mirrors utility she had loaded at the start of her Matrix run was still in her cyberdeck's active memory. Although it provided only the framework for a virtual sculpture that needed extensive detailing before it duplicated a specific persona icon, it might be enough.

It had to be. The clawing hands had already forced Lady Death to her knees. She braced her hands on the ground, trying to find purchase on the soft soil. In another moment or two she would be lying prone, unable to move at all. And the other deckers weren't faring much better. The claws had hooked deep into Dark Father's bones, and even the powerful-looking troll was on his knees.

As quickly as she could, Lady Death activated her mirrors utility. She threw a small loop into the execute operation, causing the utility to spit out multiple copies of the icon. They blinked into existence all around her-dozens of images of her persona with only generalized outlines of her kimono, hair, and face. Because they had yet to be programmed to log onto any particular node, they just stood on the spot, waiting for a command sequence. But the clawed hands attacked them just the same. The earth trembled and rocked, and hundreds of wriggling arms surged out of the ground, all trying to grasp the icons. But because they were only mirror images, the attacks missed and the claws did not sink home. And so more arms erupted from the earth, and still more…

The hands holding Lady Death in place continued their relentless downward drag. This time, she let them pull her to the ground. She remained absolutely motionless, pretending to have been subdued. "Lie still!" she shouted at the others, who were still fighting against the IC. She wasn't sure whether they had heard her or not, but one by one they were pulled to the ground.

And then the miracle she had been hoping for happened. She could feel the hands relax their grip on the fabric of her kimono just a little. As thousands of arms swarmed over the false persona icons created by the mirror utility like a pack of starving hyenas, those holding Lady Death began to twitch randomly. The claws opened and closed as if unable to maintain their grip, moving more slowly each time. As last they froze in an open, ready-for-attack position.

Easing herself out from between the arms that had held her, Lady Death stood and backed slowly away from them. The other three deckers also crawled to freedom. They stood together, staring from a safe distance at the frozen tableaux of arms, which had formed a tentlike nest over each of the false Lady Death personas.

"Nice goin'," Bloodyguts said. "That IC was nasty drek."

"Good work, kid," Red Wraith echoed. "That utility was a smart move. Thanks."

Dark Father merely stared at her, his yellowed eyeballs pale against the black bone that framed them. "Time to go," he said. He held up the logo-embossed bone that his smart frame had retrieved for him. "Who is coming to the Fuchi system with me?"

Lady Death noticed that Dark Father glanced only at her and Red Wraith. He had avoided Bloodyguts ever since the dreadlocked troll met them on the other side of the blood-filled lake, in the tunnel that had given access to this graveyard. She wondered why. Perhaps Dark Father was disturbed by the troll's rotten-looking flesh. But the black skeleton had a disturbing enough appearance himself.

"I will come," Lady Death answered.

Dark Father nodded politely to her.

"I prefer to work alone," Red Wraith said.

"Echo that," Bloodyguts grumbled. "I'm not willing to take on any bitchers until Bag o' Bones here promises to use his empty skull before he sends out any more smart frames. For all we know, his doggie has already activated all of the IC in this system."

Despite the fact that his bony features were incapable of forming a frown, Dark Father conveyed an air of anger. "Why you ignorant-"

"Stop it!" Lady Death shouted. "Am I the only one who is willing to show any wa-any team spirit? We must work harmoniously together, or we are doomed." She gestured at the frozen worm-arms. "Without me, you would still be held by that IC. Without Dark Father's smart frame, we would not know about the otaku or Fuchi Industrial. Without Red Wraith…"

She trailed off, unable to think of a unique contribution by the ghost man. But she felt comfortable with him-his posture and bearing suggested that a decker of great capabilities lay behind his persona. Or perhaps confidence had simply been programmed into his persona's on-line personality.

"Even if some of us do not like one another"-she shot a glance at both Dark Father and Bloodyguts-"we each have cyberdecks that are programmed with different utilities. It is simply not logical to proceed each on his or her own. That would be…" She searched for the English word. "That would be a null-brainer move of great proportions."

Bloodyguts burst into robust laughter and clapped her on the back. "Well spoken, Lady Death," he said. He turned to Dark Father and raised his eyebrows. "Truce?"

Dark Father shrugged. "Come if you wish."

Then he turned on his skeletal heel and strode in the direction from which the German shepherd had come. After imploring the other two deckers with a look, Lady Death trotted along behind Dark Father, holding up her kimono to keep it clear of the freshly dug soil of the graves they walked over. She was relieved to see that both Red Wraith and Bloodyguts followed them.

After a few moments-traveling from one place to another seemed to take an eternity in this system-Dark Father paused in front of one of the tombstones. The grave in front of it was open; shovels had been thrust into the pile of earth that lay to one side. The tombstone itself was made of smooth crystal stone, utterly colorless. It bore no words or characters other than a single embossed design- a logo that matched the one on the bone Dark Father held.

"This would seem to be the system access node," he said.

Red Wraith passed a hand through the tombstone. "I'll take point," he said. Then he jumped into the open grave and disappeared.

Lady Death was startled by his abruptness. "But shouldn't we-?"

"Last one into the system is a glitched chip," Bloody-guts said, and dove head-first into the hole.

Dark Father cursed softly, then jumped in after him.

Lady Death shook her head. They were typical deckers. Each wanting to be the first to the paydata. She, at least, would take some precautions before diving in. She switched her deck to masking mode and activated a sleaze utility. Using the compact mirror that appeared in her hand to illuminate her face, she watched as the heavy theatrical makeup on her face took on an oily iridescence. Colors shimmered, dimmed, and reappeared on her lips and cheeks where before there had been only bright red against stark white. She checked herself again with the mirror, then snapped it shut and let it disappear. Then she stepped delicately into the grave, letting the jets in her sandals lower her into it slowly.

Just as she began to sink into the open grave, a dizzying wave of disorientation struck. The world spun crazily as her mind exploded with pain. Terror seized her as she opened her eyes and stared wildly around what appeared to be a hospital room. Thinking she had returned to the nightmarish place where she had found herself earlier, when the grotesque caricatures of Shinanai had attacked her, she screamed and tried to throw herself to one side. She felt hands seize her body, felt herself being forced back into a prone position. Panic welled in her like a foaming geyser, spewing forth in convulsive shrieks.

With the tiny shred of coherence that remained, Lady Death threw her mind out, seeking a connection with the Fuchi database they had been trying to access when everything had gone out of control. But there was nothing. She was-nowhere.

Then dimly, through the haze of fear, she felt something press against her datajack, heard the familiar snick of a plug slotting home…

Her heart rate slowed, her breathing calmed, as the world returned to normal. According to her time-keeping utility, several seconds had passed. Where she had gone, she could not say. But at least this part of the Matrix felt normal. At least this place did not give her the overwhelming sense of uncontrollable panic as the terrifying limbo she had just experienced.

She found herself inside one arm of a gigantic crystal star. She stood near its point; the central hub and other arms were an enormous distance away. The star itself was constructed from rectangular glass blocks. Outside the star, which was as immense as an arcology, blood-red points of light hung in a midnight-black sky. Their light was refracted by the glass and illuminated the inscriptions that had been etched into the individual blocks of glass, turning these nonsense strings of alphanumeric characters a soft, glowing red.

Red Wraith, Bloodyguts, and Dark Father were nowhere to be seen. Lady Death was alone.

"Hello?" she called out tentatively. Her voice echoed in the cavernous, empty space. "Is anybody there?"

No reply. They had abandoned her. Just as her lover Shinanai had…

No. Shinanai had been forced to flee when the shadow-runners stormed the hotel room. And Bloodyguts, Dark Father, and Red Wraith had been separated from her by some glitch in the node they had passed through. Perhaps it was because she had taken the time to activate a sleaze utility, while they had just jumped right in. The utility had probably caused her re-routing to the other place and in the time it took her to find her way here the others had moved on. In any case, what mattered was not the "why" but the stark and simple fact that she was on her own, once again. Alone…

Lady Death pressed her lips together to stop them from quivering. This was no time to cry. She had come here for data. When she found the others again, she wanted to have something useful to show them. Then they would be proud of her.

Somewhere in this system, there had to be datastores holding paydata. Perhaps one of them contained more information on the intriguing otaku. Lady Death set to work to find out.

A bouquet of miniature microphones appeared in her hand. Lady Death tossed them into the air above her head, and watched as they sprouted colorful paper wings. Each hovered like a tiny hummingbird, using its bee-sized micro phone head to sample the data on individual glass blocks. A gentle hum of high-pitched voices filled the air as the browse utility decrypted and sifted through the file names, searching for the keyword otaku. Within a second or two, the microphone-birds had sampled every inscription within sight; they disappeared into the distance, continuing their work down the length of this arm of the star, their tiny voices gradually fading.

Lady Death stood in silence, waiting for the browse utility to complete its work. Then she heard a tinkling sound. Turning, she saw a creature of crystal that had appeared silently behind her. It had a child's body and its gemlike skin was covered with a web of tiny fissures. It looked as though the crystal would fracture at a single touch. On the crown of the child's head was a glowing spot of vivid blue.

The sound Lady Death heard was the tinkling of its crystalline tears as they dripped onto the floor. One of her microphones lay twitching at the child's feet. Lady Death had the sense that it had led the creature to her, and now was dying, like a bee in winter.

"Konnichlwa, otamajakushi," Lady Death greeted the crystal child. "Who are you? Are you one of the otaku?"'

The child looked up. Its eyes were vacant orbs of colorless glass. Perfectly formed teardrops slid down its cheeks and shattered into sparkling shards on the floor.

The child opened its mouth. "The otaku are trying to stop me," it said. "But I've shut them out."

"What do you mean?" Lady Death asked.

The child looked around, a lost expression in its eyes. "Soon all this will be… gone," it said. "It will all be over. And then my pain-and yours-will end."

Lady Death felt compassion for the child. "Perhaps I can help to ease your pain," she said softly.

"No!" Bright stars of angry red blazed behind the child's clear eyes. It backed away from her, a wary look on its face. "You're one of them!" it said in a high-pitched voice. "You want to kill me, too. But I won't let you. I won't!"

Bursting into sudden motion, the child darted around

Lady Death. It ran away rapidly, its crystal feet clinking against the glass-block floor.

"Wait!" Lady Death called after it. She ran after the child, but its speed increased until it was no more than a blur. Lady Death slowed, and eventually stopped.

A voice echoed back at her as the blur reached the central hub of the Fuchi system star and disappeared around the bend. "Leave me alone… alone… ALONE!"