Psychotrope

09:50:55 PST

Bloodyguts clung precariously to the wall of skulls, his fingers hooked in a pair of eye sockets. The wall formed an impassable barrier that blocked all forward movement. It seemed to have a top; Bloodyguts could see empty black space "above" the uppermost layer of skulls. But the higher he climbed, the farther away the top of the wall seemed to be.

Dark Father and Red Wraith were far below, standing on a mirrored surface that reflected their images like shadows. They had each walked in a different direction along the base of the wall, seeking the ends that-like the top- remained tantalizingly just out of reach. Occasionally one or the other of them would stop and inspect one of the skulls, searching for any anomalies.

While most of the skulls were empty, several had data plugs in their eye sockets. A mass of fiber-optic cables draped the wall like transparent vines, connecting one skull to another. Fat white maggots crawled slowly through the cables. They traveled in glowing pulses-a string of maggots wriggled past, and then the fiber-optic cable was empty of light for a time. Then another string of maggots, longer or shorter than the first, and another. Each time they flowed in through an eye socket, the jaw of the skull would vibrate, causing the teeth to chatter. The vibration was too rapid to follow, but somehow regular. Bloody guts was certain that it was some sort of algorithmic code.

Locking the fingers of one hand tightly into the socket of a skull, he reached for one of the fiber-optic cables and pulled it free. A pulse of maggots-one of the longest and fastest he'd seen yet-was just entering the jack on the end of the cable. Quickly he popped the jack into his mouth. He tried not to gag as the maggots flowed onto his tongue but instead concentrated on swallowing as many of the foul-tasting insects as he could. They filled his mouth and spilled out over his lips, but he managed to choke most of them down. Eyes closed, he sampled the data that flowed into his mind and, ultimately-somewhere in the meat world-into his cyberdeck.

The data was still nonsense, either so heavily encrypted or so glitched that it was meaningless. But Bloodyguts had at last found what he was looking for. Although the fiberoptic cable looked like any other, the analysis provided by Bloodyguts' commlink utility confirmed it: this dataline had an input/output bandwidth of more than one hundred megapulses per second. This was a main communications trunk.

Data continued to pulse through the cable, one string of maggots at a time. Choosing skulls at random, Bloodyguts pushed the data plug into one empty eye socket, then another. Somewhere in the meat world, telecom calls would be scrambled, machines served by slave modules would be receiving meaningless commands, and private or cor porate data would be re-routed to someone else's data-stores. Assuming that the data flowing through the cable was intact-that it had not already been hopelessly corrupted by passing through this system-someone was bound to sit up and take notice.

Someone did. Several someones.

An angel materialized in the air next to the wall. The woman had the classic Christian religious iconography- white gown, glowing halo, and feathered wings-except that her features were ork. She strummed gently on a harp and sat cushioned on a pillowy white cloud.

Next came an Azzie eagle priest, decked out in a brilliant turquoise feathered cape, white loin cloth, and gilded sandals. Large gold earrings distended his earlobes and a jade pectoral carved with glyphs hung against his chest. In his hands he held a small dog-in Azzie mythology, the guardian-guide to the land of the dead.

Beside him floated a Buddhist monk in saffron robes, whirling a prayer wheel. Next to him was an elf woman with East Indian features, brilliant blue skin, and an elaborately sequined sari. And last came a dark-skinned human who looked like a skinnier version of Bloodyguts' own persona, his dreadlocks held back by a colorful knitted toque. He held a water pipe in one hand; the water inside it bubbled as he took a long, slow drag on the mouthpiece. The sweet smell of ganja smoke filled the air.

For a moment, Bloodyguts thought the trunkline must have accessed some sort of religious network. But then he realized that the sculpted system he was in would only accommodate deckers whose personas conformed to its iconography in some way. These deckers all had icons that represented their idealized, "angelic" forms-religious depictions of dead spirits or souls. Despite the fact that they seemed quite capable of movement, they were not very animated. They stared at him with flat, expressionless eyes. After a moment Bloodyguts realized that the icons themselves were flat, two-dimensional. And that they were somewhat distorted, as if reflected by an imperfect mirror.

"I need your help," he said quickly. "I'm trapped here- I can't log off. Tell the sysop of whatever system this is to check on something that's gone wrong. Really fraggin' wrong…"

All at once, the angel hanging in the air next to Bloody-guts changed. Like a card being flipped over it turned end over end, revealing an image on the reverse. The persona it had transformed into was just as cliched as the angel had been-a devil with horns, goatee, and pitchfork. His expression was demonic in the extreme. Reversing the pitchfork, he aimed its three barbed ends at his own chest, then plunged the weapon home. The mirror-for that's what the two-sided persona icon had indeed been-fragmented into thousands of pieces. Bloodyguts heard a woman's voice screaming as the shards tumbled to the plane of the virtual-scape far below, splashing into it and then blending into the floor as if they were made of liquid mercury.

Like dominos, each of the other personas also reversed itself. The Azzie priest became a snake-headed monster dressed in a bone skirt that sank its fangs into its own arm; the saffron-robed priest turned into a leering Tibetan demon who stank of offal and who tore deep furrows in his own flesh with long fingernails; the blue-skinned elf woman into a hooded snake that wrapped strangling coils around her neck; and the Rastafarian into a figure in the costume of an Egyptian pharaoh who flogged his back with a barbed whip. Each shattered into mirrored fragments in turn and fell screaming to the plain below, which absorbed the shards into its rippled surface and then became smooth again.

As the last persona icon fragmented, Bloodyguts tried to catch one of its shards. The mirrored glass sliced open his hand. The wound burned like fire for a moment, but in the instant before his hand healed itself, Bloodyguts received a brief burst of unencrypted paydata from the data log of the Rastafarian's cyberdeck. The decker had been accessing a slave node that controlled a robotic assembler in an aircraft manufacturing plant in Puyallup. He had been trying to find out why it had suddenly run amok while the rest of the plant continued operating normally. The decker had activated an analyze utility just before his persona crashed, and it had come up with the source of the glitch: a cluster of LTG addresses within the Seattle regional telecommunications grid.

The data that represented those addresses was degrading. Already the addresses had shrunk from more than one hundred in number to less than a dozen. Bloodyguts had to do something-and fraggin' fast.

He jammed the data plug of the fiber-optic cable he held into one of the bullet holes in his chest. He felt a brief burst of pain, then threw his mind out through the connection in an effort to log onto the last of those addresses. He felt his consciousness squirm through the cable together with the other maggot-bits of data, toward a hexagonal coffin. Inside it was a child, curled in a fetal position, thumb jammed in mouth. The child looked up, saw Bloody-guts streaming down at the speed of thought…

And slammed the coffin lid closed.

Bloodyguts smashed into its polished glass surface like a bird striking a window. He reeled back, barely retaining consciousness. For an endless second he hung in an empty void. Then sparkles of light danced around him-fragments of a mirror. As they spun, they reflected his darker side-an image of his meat bod. Of Yograj Lutter, the brain-burner. Bloodyguts could see that shards of mirror were embedded in his head. The chipped-out addict in the reflections gave Bloodyguts a sloppy grin, then jammed another fragment of mirror into his scalp. Cold pain slid into Bloodyguts' own mind like an icicle into warm flesh. Screaming, he balled a huge fist and smacked it into the nearest reflection of himself.

His fist punched home with the snick of a data plug finding its jackpoint.

He connected with…

H…O…I…!

Bloodyguts hung from one hand on the wall of skulls. His other hand-his fist-had punched through one of the skulls and was buried inside it. Blood seeped from cuts on his wrist, flowing down his arm, then up his neck and into his right eye. He tried to blink but could not clear the blood away-and wiping his eye would have meant removing one of his hands from the wall. Since his full weight was suspended from them, his feet hanging free, he didn't dare try.

The gutter slang word for hello with its exclamation mark-HOI!-had appeared slowly, one letter at a time. It remained projected on his right eyelid whenever he blinked. He closed both eyes and the simple, printed text hung in place, refusing to be dislodged no matter how much he rolled his eyes around behind closed lids. His right eyelid was like an antique monitor whose screen had projected the same image long enough to have burned a ghostly pattern on the screen.

Questions raced through his mind. Was the greeting from another decker? And where were they? Who were they?

P… I… P.

The word was burned into his inner eyelid, just as the greeting it replaced had been. Pip? Who or what the frag was a pip? Was that some sort of Japanese word, like otaku?

NOT OTAKU. YET.

Not yet otaku! This was obviously someone who knew about the experiment. Perhaps even the sysop or programmer behind it.

"Where are you?" Bloodyguts asked out loud. "Can you access this node?"

ONLY BY TORTIS. AND IT WUZ HARD. KEP GETTING DUMPED.

The words appeared at a painfully slow pace, one letter at a time. Judging by the rate of transmission, a keyboard was being used. If this was the sysop, he or she wasn't a very good speller-or else was typing madly in the meat-world, unwilling to correct a mistake when seconds within the Matrix counted for so much.

"Can you help me log off?" Bloodyguts asked.

NO.

"Can anyone else help me?"

The answer was even slower in coming this time, as if the other decker were considering the question.

MAYBE GRATE SPIRIT.

What the frag? Spirits were part of the natural world.

They couldn't enter the Matrix-and wouldn't survive inside it if they could.

Perhaps there was another way out. "What is deep resonance?" Bloodyguts asked. "Can it help me to perform a graceful log off?"

For a moment, Bloodyguts thought the connection had been broken. But he could still feel the slide of blood flowing up his arm and the tickle of it creeping under his right eyelid, drop by drop like reverse tears.

EVERYWUN WUZ DEEPRESONUNS. SOMETHING WENT RONG.

"Can the otaku still experience deep resonance? Were they the ones behind the experiment?"

NO. YES.

"Without our permission? Why?"

WUZ GOOD FOR YOU.

Anger burned in his gut. He'd make his own decisions about modifications to his wetware, thank you very fragging much.

"Can the otaku repair whatever the frag went wrong?"

DUNNO. TELL US MO Bloodyguts howled in pain as the jaw of the skull began to move. Its teeth ground against his balled fist, turning it to hamburger. He could feel the bones splinter and his fingers popped like squashed sausages. The pain was unbearable, excruciating…

Swearing, he yanked his hand free. The pain stopped, and he saw that he had been tricked. The hand of his persona was still whole. But whether his meat-bod hand still functioned-or was a squashed mess, or even gangrenous- was impossible to tell.

The skull he had punched had repaired itself. Realizing that he had lost his only contact with the outside world, Bloodyguts slammed his fist back into it. But his hand hit what felt like concrete. The skull did not give. And in all of his thrashing, as he hung from the wall one-handed, the fiber-optic cable that he had plugged into his chest had fallen free. It hung below him, spewing out blurps of maggots.

Then the skull in which his fingers were wedged blinked, ejecting them.

Bloodyguts fell through space. As he raced down toward the mirrored floor of the virtualscape, his reflected image flew "up" to meet him from its depths. He wondered if he would shatter into pieces when he hit…