Psychotrope

09:52:20 PST

Santa Barbara, California Free State

Dr. Halberstam cursed and shoved the cell phone into his pocket as he strode into the monitoring lab. Timea hadn't given him any answers, but maybe the biotechs could. They'd been dealing with this now for-he consulted his watch-nearly five minutes. He crossed the windowless room to consult with his two researchers.

Park and McAllister were both peering intently at a series of computerized displays. One showed a scan of a human brain, its various lobes illuminated in bright blues, greens, and yellows. As the image rotated, the colors shifted position, washing across the brain and breaking apart like brightly flowing phosphorescent waves.

Another display showed what looked like a tangle of multicolored spiders, their bloated bodies connected one to another by multiple tendrils. The "spiders" that made up this neural map pulsed with a rapidity that caused the entire display to twinkle like a field of stars.

The remaining displays showed scrolling numbers, menus of data, and long sequences of text that were filled with chemical formulas. Superimposed over them were pie graphs and charts whose brightly colored bars fluctuated up and down.

"Well?" Halberstam asked. He stood with his arms crossed over his chest, the image of a stern grandfather. His eyes were piercing under thick gray brows and his white lab coat was immaculately starched. A flesh-colored datajack was set discreetly into one temple, and the suit and tie he wore under his lab coat were both a somber charcoal gray. His only adornment was a thin gold wedding band.

Park, a young man whose sky-blue cybernetic eyes were incongruous and jarring in his Korean face, shrugged. "Beats the drek outta me." He leaned back in his chair. Under his unbuttoned lab coat he wore a T-shirt emblazoned with a nineteenth-century print advertisement for Fowler and Wells, Phrenologists. The ad showed a human head, divided into sections labeled with personality traits. "Phrenology reveals our natural tendencies, our capacity for right and wrong, our appropriate avocations," the advertisement read. "Mssrs. Fowler and Wells shall read your skull and direct you how to attain happiness and success in life."

McAllister, the researcher seated beside him, was an elf woman whose single braid of blonde hair was almost as white as her lab coat. She spoke without looking up from her data display.

"We're seeing some rather dramatic shifts in the subjects' neurotransmitter balances," she said in a dispassionate, clinical voice. "There's an increased presence of dopamine; the substantia nigra seems to be producing this neurotransmitter at a greatly accelerated rate. There are indications of oversaturation of the limbic system as a whole, and there are abnormal spike discharges in the nucleus accumbens that are suggestive of severe emotional disturbance."

"And the cause?" Halberstam asked.

"We can't be sure," she answered. "It may not be as simple as a mere overproduction of dopamine. There may also be hypersensitivity of the brain's dopamine receptors."

"It has to be some sort of IC-induced biofeedback," Park said.

"Impossible," McAllister countered briskly. "Our intrusion counter-countermeasures are state of the art. There's no way IC could get through."

Park scratched his crew cut and swiveled his chair so that he was facing a bank of a dozen trideo monitors that were linked into the facility's computer system. Most of their holographic projections showed ever-shifting views of the Matrix-colorful but commonplace images of datalines, geometrical system constructs, and beautiful but surreal sculpted landscapes.

Three of the trid monitors, however, were frozen on a single image-or series of images. Park stared at one of them. The three-dimensional image the monitor was projecting jerked and bounced as if it were a closed-circuit feed from a vidcam held by someone who was running. Filling the display was the image of a woman who the viewer seemed to be chasing. She strode purposefully away from the viewer, shoulders squared and head turned away, her face hidden by long, dark hair.

For just a moment, the scene shifted. The woman was suddenly facing the viewer as the vidcam operator jogged around in front of her, taking up the too-low perspective of a person on their knees, or of a child looking up at an adult. The woman's face, revealed, was horrifying. It was twisted in a terrifying snarl-that of a ravenous vampire with blood-flecked fangs. She licked her lips with a bloody tongue, then leered down at the viewer, mouth gaping wide…

Then the perspective suddenly shifted back to the original image-that of someone following a woman who was walking steadily away. The jogging motion resumed as the chase began anew.

The trideo monitor was labeled: SUBJECT 3. Park thumbed a button on the side of the unit and activated the aural component of the display. A child's voice echoed from the speakers. "Mom?" it said hesitantly. "Is that you? Please don't leave me. I want to go with you. Mom?"

"The same general sequence keeps repeating," Park said. "Kid chases woman, kid catches up, woman scares kid. Although the woman's face is different each time. The combinations are always human and animal, but they're freaky. Nightmarish. They have a surrealistic flow.

"It's like the kid's on a drug trip or something," he added. Then he laughed and cocked an eyebrow. "Maybe someone slipped some coke into the tanks when we weren't looking."

McAllister gave Park a withering look. She shook her head disdainfully at the joke that she seemed to take as a serious attempt by Park to explain what was going on. "If any drug was introduced, it's more likely to have been L-dopa. But with our security, I doubt it. Unless we have a practical joker in our midst."

Park's pale blue eyes stared into space as he continued following his original train of thought. "Or maybe the kid's just having a nightmare…"

"Thank you, Doctor Tong, for your in-depth analysis." McAllister snorted.

Halberstam watched the exchange without comment. When he spoke, it was with the voice of authority. "Whatever is causing this is coming from outside the clinic," he said. "From the Matrix. It's localized in the Seattle grid. It's not interfering with any of the functions of the Matrix, or with any of the hardware that supports the Seattle RTG. If it was, we'd have been hearing panicked news reports coming out of Seattle by now. Whatever this glitch is, it seems to be affecting only the users of the system themselves. As a precautionary measure, we've warned the other subjects to stay away from that RTG until this is cleared up."

He glanced once, briefly, over his shoulder at the trideo monitor. "Number Three appears to be experiencing a loop in its programming, one that was induced by something it encountered in the Seattle grid. But the imagery does not conform to any of the universal matrix specifications codings. That suggests that, if it is IC, it's highly sculpted."

"The IC may be corrupting the reality filter of the subject's MPCP," McAllister suggested.

Park's eyes rolled at McAllister's sudden acceptance of the fact that IC could, after all, have penetrated their defenses. Just because Halberstam said it was so didn't make it so. "Kiss-hoop slitch…" he mouthed behind her back.

"The key point seems to be that dopamine's involved," Halberstam continued. "One of our candidates at the Redmond clinic is experiencing what sounds like a psychotic episode. She's suffering from extreme agitation combined with hallucinations."

"What?" Park asked, coming out of his reverie. "Is she schizophrenic?"

Halberstam stared for a moment at Park. Then he smiled. The biotechnician might be sloppy, he might be a daydreamer, but sometimes he could come up with answers. He'd just earned his nuyen.

"Right," Halberstam said, his voice terse with excitement as he made his decision. "We'll try to correct the problem by introducing an anti-schizophrenic drug to the nutrient. We'll start with chlorpromazine on Number Three, and observe the results."

McAllister favored Halberstam with a kiss-hoop smile. "Brilliant!" she said with a brisk nod, ignoring Park's contribution. "Block the dopamine receptors with a binding agent. That should stabilize the subjects."

Park stared at the flatscreen projection of the brain. "At least we won't have to worry about the kid suffering any side effects," he added with a laugh. "Body rigidity, tremors… Kid doesn't know how lucky he is to be noth ing more than a ghost in the machine." He frowned. "Or how lucky she is."

Halberstam left the room at a run, heading for the part of the facility that contained the holding tanks.