Psychotrope

09:50:19 PST

"Go for it!" Bloodyguts shouted. "We'll catch up when we can."

Red Wraith looked back over his shoulder. The zombie troll was smacking baseballs with his bat, sending them careening into the mechanical soldiers that surrounded them on every side. Dark Father stood beside him, his skeletal body engulfed in a swirling cloud of ash, keeping tension on a noose that was cinched tight around a dozen soldiers, tangling them in a jumbled heap. Other mechanical soldiers, their faces painted in death's-head grins, popped up and down like arcade-game figures, the rifles in their hands spitting out deadly streams of white-hot light.

Lady Death was still nowhere to be seen. Perhaps she had been prevented from accessing the grave-shaped system access node. Or perhaps her words about sticking together and harmony had been a ploy to get them to go ahead so that she could strike out on her own, unobserved, for a different node. But there was no time to wonder about that now.

Red Wraith sprinted through an opening in the soldiers' ranks. Propelling himself forward on the ghostly stubs of his legs, he leaped into the air and caught the lip of the cliff, then hauled himself up.

The system they had accessed via the graveyard was only superficially like the old Fuchi system. Instead of the single, star-shaped frosted glass block that used to represent Fuchi on the Seattle RTG, this icon was a mountain of smaller star-shaped blocks, piled one on top of the other. A metaphor, perhaps, for Fuchi's fragmentation? The peak was the only feature in this virtualscape, and so the three deckers had made it their goal. But the mountain was well defended by IC.

Rings of tin soldiers painted in garish colors stood guard on each level of the mountain. Although the soldiers themselves were antiques powered by wind-up keys, the laser guns they held were patterned after something out of a futuristic space trideo. Most of the laser beams missed Red Wraith's ghostly body. But those that struck home hurt.

Red Wraith grimaced in pain and nearly lost his grip as a bolt of light hit his hand. Gritting his teeth, he pulled himself up onto the next level of the mountain and rolled out of the line of fire.

He rose and sprinted across the star-shaped block, then quickly hauled himself up onto the next level. Just one more to the top. He grabbed at the lip of the star and scrambled up its smooth face, leaving the battle two levels below.

What he found on the mountain's peak stopped him cold.

It was an archaic-looking cyberdeck the size of a small table. Its monitor was illuminated; the words MEMORY ACTIVATED glowed in green letters on its screen. Instead of a modern datajack or trode rig connection, the deck had a battery of fiber-optic cables that disappeared into a sensory deprivation tank emblazoned with the Fuchi logo.

Cautiously, Red Wraith opened the tank's hatch. A puff of stale air breezed across his face. Inside the tank were a number of restraining straps, a breather hose, and a catheter. A primitive-looking electrode net that had to be the cyberdeck's simsense interface hung down from the top of the tank.

"Spirits be fragged," Red Wraith mused. "This hardware is ancient. Not even an RAS override."

He glanced back at the cyberdeck. "And no keyboard, either."

There was only one way he was going to access the data on the deck, and that was by directly interfacing with this system's iconography. And that meant entering the sensory deprivation tank. That made him pause. If anything happened to him in there, he'd have to rely on Bloodyguts or Dark Father for backup. And he didn't like that. He didn't like depending on other people.

Nor did he like waiting for them. He glanced back at the other two deckers, who were still pinned down by the soldiers.

Red Wraith climbed inside and held onto a restraining strap while the gimbaled tank rocked gently underfoot. The simsense recreation of the tank was complete, right down to the oxygen hose. Gripping it in his teeth, he snugged the trode net down over his head. Then he snapped his wrists and calves into the restraints.

The door to the tank swung shut. Red Wraith found himself in utter darkness, suspended like a puppet as the restraining straps gently cinched tight. All light and sound were cut off… Then he heard a gurgling sound. Warm liquid flowed into the tank, gradually soaking his legs, groin, chest, and arms. He jerked back instinctively as the water came up over his face, causing him to tumble into an upside-down position, but the continuing supply of air from the breather hose helped him to stay calm. As the water completely covered his head, he tasted salt. Then the gurgling stopped. The tank was full. He hung in place, perfectly buoyant and held steady by the straps.

The trode net activated. An image flowed into Red Wraith's mind-a crude, low-rez icon; the by-now familiar five-pointed star of what had once been a united Fuchi Industrial Electronics. Guessing that the old corporate logo was a main menu icon, Red Wraith accessed it by reaching out and "touching" its surface. The icon peeled away like a label that had lost its glue, revealing the stylized initials MS underneath. The letters were constructed out of primitive computer circuitry. Touching this icon caused it to peel away as well, revealing yet a third logo: the eagle emblem of the now-defunct United States of America.

Red Wraith persisted, touching the emblem. This time, it dissolved in a shimmer of sparkles, and his vision filled with a starscape of icons. One of them immediately caught Red Wraith's eye-not so much due to the crude graphic that showed a soldier cradling a keyboard in his arms like a rifle, but due to the text below the icon. It read: ECHO MIRAGE.

Red Wraith remembered the name from the history texts he'd scanned while taking his officer training courses. Set up originally by the security agencies of the former U.S. government, Echo Mirage was a team of "cybercom-mandos" who were sent into battle against the virus that caused the Matrix crash of 2029. The team was strictly a government operation, with no known links to any corporations. Red Wraith wondered what a file captioned with its name was doing on a cyberdeck within a copy of the old Fuchi system-assuming that this was an accurate copy, of course. He was starting to have his doubts.

He focused on the icon, pointed a finger, and a menu of simsense files materialized in front of him. Each bore a name. Red Wraith chose one at random: LOUIS CHENG. Sensory data, overlaid by scrolling text, flowed into his mind.

DIAGNOSTIC SAMPLE 056, MATRIX RUN 05-28-2029

He was surrounded. He tried to hide behind the flat, smoked-glass rectangle, but the spheres formed a complete circle around it, a chain of beads on an invisible string. Each was as smooth as a billiard ball, a solid yellow, red, green, or blue, with a white stripe around which black letters and numbers scrolled like a marquee. Beyond the spheres was only empty black space.

Red Wraith considered the old-fashioned iconography. The rectangle was an RTG system access node with spherical LTGs circling it. No big deal. So why did Louis Cheng find it so frightening?

They were only pretending to be LTGs. He knew what they really were. Eyeballs. Watching him. See-that large dot that kept circling around the band of white on the red sphere, hidden between the letters? It was the pupil. They were eyes, watching him, waiting for him to make a move. He tried to make himself smaller, but the rectangle didn't hide him. Instead it reflected his image-reflected it out to the killer eyeballs, telling them where he was. With a terrible dread, he realized that the mirror was talking to the eyeballs-sending them messages. And there was no es cape. That blackness-it went on and on, never ending. He was a tiny speck, trapped here. Any second now the eyeballs would open their gaping mouths and devour him whole…

DIAGNOSIS: DELUSION. SEVERE PARANOIA COMBINED WITH PHOBIA. TREATMENT RECOMMENDATION: TREAT SUBJECT LOUIS CHENG WITH POSITIVE RESPONSE CONDITIONING PROGRAM POSCON 1.2 TO RESTORE NEUTRAL RESPONSE TO NON-THREAT ICONS.

Another notation followed: TREATMENT TERMINATED WHEN SUBJECT EXPIRED.

Red Wraith was returned to the sub-menu. He chose another simsense file: PAULA WEBBER.

DIAGNOSTIC SAMPLE 127, MATRIX RUN 06-02-2030

She hung over the city, an invisible figure in the darkness. Below her, neon lines of brilliant orange formed a rectangular grid. Tiny objects moved along them- automobiles filled with tiny, antlike people. She could crush any of them at a whim, but she chose not to. For she was a benevolent goddess and they were her constructs. She had created all of this-the streets, the glowing pyramids and rectangles that were the city's buildings and the heavens above in which she floated. So all-powerful was she that she had even created herself.

Red Wraith recognized the grid of the New York RTG. It had grown tremendously over the three decades since this recording was made-looking at this earlier version was like looking at an old fashioned two-dimensional holo-pic of the city. So Paula Webber thought she had created it, did she?

It was time to begin seeding. She executed an upload command and began tossing fragmented bits of an encryption program down onto the landscape below. The numbers and characters fluttered down to the neon streets, landing with soft splashes of light as they scrambled random pieces of data. She smiled, waiting to see what would happen next. The act of creation always produced surprises.

A dragon appeared in the sky next to her. It was immense but rather crudely programmed, with rough red scales and wings whose edges were blurred. Its eyes strobed a virulent green. The dragon's head reared back on a serpentine neck as it opened its wide mouth and emitted a stream of glowing green fire. The super-hot breath engulfed her, melting the skin from her bones.

"And then there was light," she said dreamily as consciousness dissolved in a searing wash of pain.

All iconography and sensation disappeared.

Red Wraith twisted violently away. Then the restraining straps of the sensory deprivation chamber rotated him smoothly into an upright position. Paula Webber was crazy. Even a newbie decker should have recognized this primitive version of Fuchi's classic Dragon Flame, one of the earliest forms of black IC to hit the Matrix. She should have tried to evade it or shield herself from its lethal effects.

But then Red Wraith remembered the year from which the sample was taken. In 2030, Dragon Flame had yet to be released. Hell, Fuchi's commercial cyberdeck, the CDT-1000, wasn't even marketed yet, and the Fuchi Americas division did not yet exist, since the corporation had yet to expand into North America. In 2030, the dragon-shaped icon that had just fried Paula Webber would still have been an experimental program-someone else's program. Had he just experienced a recording of the first decker to die by black IC?

The text that scrolled across the all-black field confirmed Red Wraith's guess.

DIAGNOSIS: GRANDIOSE DELUSION. LOOSE THOUGHT ASSOCIATION COMBINED WITH COMPLETE LACK OF FEAR RESPONSE TO THREATENING ICONOGRAPHY. TREATMENT RECOMMENDATION: NONE. VITAL SIGNS OF SUBJECT PAULA WEBBER HAVE TERMINATED.

After mentally bracing himself, Red Wraith randomly sampled four more simsense files. Although the imagery and emotions differed, the files themselves followed a standard format. The "subjects"-presumably the poor fraggers who had volunteered for Echo Mirage-experienced irrational reactions to the Matrix iconography, ranging from utter despair and indifference to frenzied rage. Some suf fered compulsions that caused them to execute the same utility over and over again, while others experienced simultaneous and conflicting emotions such as a mixture of love and hate, or fear and desire. In each case the file ended with a diagnosis: autism, altered perception/reaction syndrome, mood disturbances, ambivalence… And with a recommended treatment, which was a computer program of some sort.

Which suggested only one thing: psychotropic conditioning.

Every decker knew that Fuchi Industrial Electronics had been right out on the bleeding edge of programming when it came to psychotropic black IC. The corp had held that position a long time. Back in the early days of the first commercial cyberterminals, it had been Fuchi that developed the very concept of intrusion countermeasures. They were rumored to have modeled their prototype IC after the virus that caused the crash of 2029-a virus that could induce lethal biofeedback in the deckers who encountered it.

The cybercommandos of Echo Mirage had been the first to face the virus. And the data that Red Wraith had just sampled-and the fact that it was in a copy of an old Fuchi database-seemed to suggest that Fuchi had acquired this raw recording of their experiences. Yet Echo Mirage had been an entirely government-funded and military-controlled project. How had a private-sector company acquired what was bound to have been highly classified government data?

Red Wraith hung suspended in the sensory deprivation tank, lost in thought. Fuchi… The U.S. government… The "logos" of both the corporation and the government had been among the icons he'd just used to access these files. But there had also been a set of letters between the two emblems: the initials MS.

Red Wraith suddenly realized where he'd seen those letters before. The logo they formed was one from the history trids-a company whose meteoric success had been abruptly cut short by the deaths of its two founders. Back in the early 2030s, Matrix Systems of Boston had been the first off the block with a cyberterminal sufficiently compact, user-friendly, and safe enough to be marketed to the general public. The company-and the tech it had developed-had seemingly materialized out of nowhere. Matrix Systems was an overnight success story without any precedent, and the backgrounds of its founders were equally enigmatic.

Both of these founders had died in accidents six weeks after Matrix Systems launched its first cyberterminal. Forced into receivership due to this loss, the company was scooped up by a young up-and-comer, a brash young corporate raider by the name of Richard Villiers.

The same Richard Villiers who, a few months later, used Matrix Systems' technology to buy his way into the Fuchi fold. And who ultimately rose through the corporate ranks to become the CEO of Fuchi Americas-a division of Fuchi that Villiers himself created.

Red Wraith's guess was that the founders of Matrix Systems had been two of the surviving members of the original Echo Mirage team. Based on what he'd just seen, they'd been working on a program that would diagnose and treat what was then known as "cyberpsychosis."

After Echo Mirage had defeated the virus and been wound down, they'd used their expertise to found Matrix Systems. Presumably they'd also taken some of the Echo Mirage tech with them, and later been flatlined in retaliation for this breach of national security. But their deaths seemed to have been a wasted effort on the part of the government. The tech had not only remained in the private sector, but had also fallen into Fuchi's hands, giving what had previously been a strictly Asian corporation the know-how it needed to produce the cutting-edge IC that would later dominate the North American market.

Red Wraith shuddered. The program whose datafiles he had just accessed had been the inspiration for lethal IC. And maybe for much more…

Red Wraith returned to the main menu and scanned the other icons it contained. One accessed numerous copies of psychotropic conditioning programs, their version numbers indicating various degrees of development. The other icons simply represented datafiles.

He ran an evaluate utility and programmed it to key in on either "deep resonance" or "otaku," but it came up empty. The datafiles contained only unrelated information. He scrolled through a handful of them quickly. Most dealt, in encyclopedic fashion, with medical information on highly specialized topics: the evolution and function of the brain; theories of the cause of various human behaviors; diagnosis of psychoses; and chemical breakdowns of drugs capable of causing psychotic episodes. But there were other files that were more philosophical in nature. Treatises on the basic human needs-food, shelter, freedom, and love. Analyses of early human attempts to achieve Utopia, and why these succeeded or failed. Moral arguments both supporting and opposed to the unrestrained pursuit and fulfillment of desire. Discussions of whether the use of force was justified to defend oneself, and in what circumstances.

As he scrolled through the files, Red Wraith noticed a pattern. Those dealing with medical data were stored in memory sectors that had been written in the early 2030s. The philosophical datafiles were all uploaded in the late 2040s and had been heavily encrypted before being written to memory-although the encryption had since been deciphered back into standard text that any decker could read. None of the files were current-this particular datastore contained no files at all from the 2050s.

So where had the bone retrieved by Dark Father's smart frame come from? Since the sensory deprivation tank and its cyberdeck seemed to be the only datastore on this system, if the memo came from here it should have been copied from this menu. And yet the memo was only a few months old, while all of this data was ancient history. Had they been routed to a different database than the one the memo had come from? Did multiple copies of old Fuchi datastores-some older, some newer-exist in this pocket universe? It would seem so.

Red Wraith let his body return to its mistlike form. His wrists and calves slid free of the restraints and the breather fell away. He ghosted through the wall of the sensory deprivation tank, then crept to the edge of the star-shaped block that formed the apex of the mountain and looked cautiously down. Dark Father and Bloodyguts had finally dispatched the last of the toy soldier icons and were climbing toward him.

When they reached the peak, Red Wraith quickly told them what he had found.

"Thanks for the history lesson," Dark Father said dryly. "But I don't see where it's led us."

"Don't you get it?" Bloodyguts asked, tucking back inside himself entrails that had spilled out during the climb. "It all fits. Those insects I saw… the brains… the poor fraggers whose nightmares Red Wraith and Lady Death accessed… Someone or something is messing with the wetware of hundreds, maybe thousands of people. Millions even, if the whole of the Matrix is affected. We've gotta crash their program!"

"Someone else already tried," Dark Father observed quietly.

"Huh?" Bloodyguts was pacing, lost in his visions of vengeance.

"The inscription on the urn," Dark Father lectured him smugly. "This all started with an experiment-probably by one of the computer giants. Maybe a rival corporation succeeded in capturing one of these otaku, and was trying to imitate the so-called deep resonance effect in on-line deckers. And then-and this is pure speculation, based on the memo we just downloaded-Fuchi Americas, or rather, NovaTech, shut them down."

"So where did the memo come from?" Bloodyguts asked.

"Somewhere other than here, obviously," Dark Father said contemptuously.

Bloodyguts snorted. "I know how we get some answers," he said sarcastically. "We just browse our way through the datastores of every rival corporation on the Seattle RTG. There can't be more than a few dozen-with a few million datastores and plenty of lethal black IC. Piece of cake."

"Don't be an idiot," Dark Father snapped.

"It's too bad there isn't some central node we could start with," Red Wraith said, thinking out loud. "But it looks as though Lady Death was right about this being a pocket universe. We're in the Seattle RTG, but not in it. This mountain peak, for example, isn't an exact copy of the old Fuchi system-it's just a slice of data taken from that system and modified heavily to fit the central metaphor of the sculpted system that we're accessing. In a pocket universe, there's no CPU. Just a series of dataspaces on hosts scattered throughout the RTG."

He sighed. "We could be searching for the way out for a very long time."

"There is another way," Dark Father said.

Red Wraith and Bloodyguts looked at him dubiously.

"Think of the pocket universe as a corporation," he continued. "It doesn't have a central office-just a series of work stations and employees, scattered throughout the city in different buildings. There's no geographical core, no CPU. But there is a logistical core-the chief executive officer. We've been dealing with the programs and IC, so far-with the workers. Now it's time to find the CEO."

"Good thinking," Red Wraith smiled. "We talk to the sysop-also known as the officer in charge. But how do we get his attention?"

Bloodyguts grinned. "Leave it to me."