Psychotrope

09:52:49 PST

Lady Death held the spotlight in her hands and swept its beam around the room that represented the datastore that she and Dark Father had accessed. Dust hung in the air, scattering and softening the light.

The room was small and cramped, filled with gigantic, old-fashioned metal filing cabinets. Back in the days be fore virtual offices became the norm, cabinets like these had been used to hold hardcopy documents. Each was twice as high as Lady Death was tall, had four oversized drawers, and was a dark, dull green in color. A thick layer of dust covered them.

The winged microphones of Lady Death's browse utility bumped gently against the drawers of several of the cabinets, their wings buzzing. As she swung the spotlight toward them, what had appeared to be unlocked drawers suddenly changed. As the light hit, enormous bombs sprang into view. Made of sticks of red dynamite taped together with a digital readout that read ACTIVATED, the bombs were stuck fast to the drawer fronts. As the beam of light swept away, the bombs disappeared, becoming invisible once more.

"Data bombs." Lady Death spoke in a whisper, as if her voice would trigger them. She turned to Dark Father. "Do you have a defuse utility?"

The skeleton beside her nodded. Dark Father's black bones and clothes made him almost invisible against the darkness, but his white teeth gleamed in a perpetual death's-head grin. His finger bones clicked together as he mimed a scissor-like cutting motion, and a pair of oversized wire cutters appeared in his hand. "Which one holds the most data?"

Lady Death listened to the buzzing of the microphones. "That one," she said, pointing her searchlight at the icon that was buzzing the most insistently. The winged microphone nudged against the lowermost drawer next to the sticks of dynamite.

Dark Father knelt before the filing cabinet. He gently guided the wire cutters forward, then released them and let the icon do its work. The wire cutters drifted first to one side of the data bomb, then the other, rotating gently as the defuse utility decided which string of programming to interrupt. Then the tool positioned its blades over a striped black-and-red wire and snipped.

The readout changed from ACTIVATED to DEACTIVATED.

"Good," Dark Father said in a satisfied voice. "That was easy enough."

Tape unraveled with a hissing noise as the data bomb broke apart into six individual sticks of dynamite. At first, Lady Death thought that this was what was supposed to happen. But then each of the red cylinders elongated and expanded into a red snake several meters long and twice as thick as Lady Death's arm. Bands of gold light strobed down their bodies and green targeting lasers projected from their eyes. Two pairs of finger-thin beams of light locked on Lady Death, and two of the snakes surged toward her, streaking through the air like sinuous arrows.

"Ki o tsukete!" she cried. "Attack IC!"

Dropping the searchlight, she activated the jets in her sandals. The evade utility allowed her to spring up onto one of the filing cabinets in an enormous leap, but the snakes were quicker. One of them opened its wide mouth and engulfed one of Lady Death's legs, swallowing it to the knee. It yanked, and she crashed to the floor. The second snake surged for her head, mouth open. Lady Death threw her right arm up to fend it off-and her hand and forearm disappeared into the snake's gaping maw.

The snakes began to undulate as their throats constricted and swallowed, constricted and swallowed. Lady Death's arm and leg disappeared into the gullet of the snakes, centimeter by centimeter. Then the snake on her arm reached her shoulder, and Lady Death felt searing pain as its teeth sawed home. The teeth crunched through bone, snapping her arm off at the shoulder. Then the snake disappeared, leaving her an amputee.

Through a haze of pain, she saw that Dark Father was faring no better. Three snakes were on him, locked on both legs and one hand. He was thrashing madly, rolling back and forth in an effort to avoid the fourth snake. He'd managed to get his noose around it, which had damaged the IC somewhat, but the snake was still trying to engulf his head. Instinctively, Lady Death knew that if the IC struck that part of his persona, Dark Father would be a dead man.

This IC was deadly stuff-a construct of two separate programs: a data bomb that was easily defused, and some sort of proactive ripper IC that attacked a decker's persona. The attack should have been painless, the damage confined to the MPCP of the deck itself-to the optical chips responsible for creating and maintaining the persona icon. But Lady Death could feel the agony of the snake's sawlike teeth as the serpent reached her upper thigh and began worrying at the flesh of her leg.

The second snake reappeared. It zoomed in for an attack on her other leg. Reacting instinctively, Lady Death used the jet in her remaining sandal to boost her out of the way. The snake missed by a centimeter, its jaws closing on dust and air.

She had nothing with which to attack the snake. She was a Matrix surfer, not a real shadowrunner. Her deck carried no combat utilities. She was dead.

She twisted violently as the snake rippled forward in another attack. Her shoulder banged against a filing cabinet. It shifted slightly, and Lady Death saw that the drawer had slid open wide. It was empty, save for a single manila file folder.

The snake attacked again, and Lady Death ducked so that the filing cabinet drawer was between her and the IC. Instead of completing its attack, the snake veered off to one side. And then Lady Death realized that there was a way out. The IC was programmed to prevent deckers from accessing the datafiles. Whoever had programmed it had left one tiny loophole-the IC was unable to recognize the spaces inside the filing cabinet itself.

Lady Death screamed as the snake on her leg completed its attack by neatly snipping off that member. In the same moment she activated her evasion utility, optimizing it fully. The jet in her sandal washed the room with a brilliant light as Lady Death was propelled head-first into the filing cabinet. She looked back through the opening at her feet and saw the snakes writhing in the air, searching for their target-who now lay inside the open drawer. Then they disappeared from sight.

She was safe.

She heard the rattle of bones banging against the floor, somewhere outside.

"Dark Father!" she cried. Her voice was loud in the coffin-sized space of the drawer. "They can't access the datastores! Try to get inside!"

A loud clank reverberated through the filing cabinet in which she lay. A skeletal hand powdered in gray dust gripped the edge of the drawer. Lady Death twisted around, grabbing it with her free hand. Then she activated her evasion utility once more. With a rattle of bone against metal, Dark Father was yanked into the drawer with her. The snakes that had reached his knees and elbow, despite his shield utility, vanished, taking his lower legs and arm with them.

Lady Death felt movement. Slowly the drawer of the filing cabinet slid shut, plunging them into utter darkness. Dark Father began to tremble violently next to her. But Lady Death was too numbed by the loss of her arm and leg to speak to him. She lay in the darkness, gasping slightly as she fought back tears.

Praying that it was still functional, she activated her restore utility…

It was. Brilliant light made her blink. She was sitting in a comfortable chair in front of a wide mirror framed with lights. A makeup artist fussed over the empty space where her arm and leg should have been, drawing an outline with liner, then slowly filling it in with foundation and white powder. Long seconds dragged by as the restore program slowly went about its work. When the makeup artist at last drew back to admire his handiwork there were still blank spots; Lady Death's little finger and part of her next finger were missing. But her arm and leg were more or less whole.

She sighed with relief. "Thanks, Hiro."

The makeup artist bowed to her. Then he, the illuminated mirror, and the chair disappeared.

Lady Death found herself seated at a board room table. The other seats were filled by a dozen men and women wearing expensive business suits. Each of these individuals was detailed in the extreme, with distinctive features and clothing. All were completely motionless. They sat frozen in place, staring attentively at an Amerind man in a fringed and beaded buckskin suit who stood at one end of the table. A name tag on his jacket identified him as R. Kahnewake, of FTL Technologies. Just behind him was a wall-sized hardcopy file: a folded piece of rectangular cardboard with a reference tab on top. The man was also frozen in place, one hand directing a needle-thin laser pointer at the tab at the top of the file, where block letters were printed: PSYCHOTROPE. A corporate logo decorated the bottom corner of the file. It took her a moment to recognize it. The logo resembled the NovaTech starburst, but instead of clean white light it was formed from a spray of red liquid, erupting in all directions from a central point. It even had an olfactory component-the metallic smell of blood.

One of the chairs beside Lady Death was empty. A moment later, a familiar all-black figure shimmered into existence. Dark Father! He too must have had some sort of persona-repair utility, for the bones of his legs and arms were fully restored. His pant legs and suit sleeve, however, ended in a jagged tatter in the places where the ripper IC had torn them.

"Thank the spirits!" Lady Death gasped. "You survived."

"Not just survived." Dark Father's white teeth grinned in his skeletal face as he nodded at Lady Death. "I've been busy. I thought you might like to scan the file we fought so hard to access. It's quite interesting."

He rose from his chair and walked to the front of the room. Grabbing an edge of the giant file folder, he pulled the cover down to the floor, revealing a gigantic, printed page. The man at the front of the room came to life and began moving his laser pointer. As the beam of ruby light swept regularly across the page, a line of text appeared, glowed brightly as the speaker read the words aloud, then faded as the line below it was revealed.

Dark Father returned to the chair next to Lady Death and watched with hollow eye sockets as she read the data in the file. »The psychological diagnostics program Psychotrope was first developed to aid in the diagnosis and treatment of cyberpsychosis back in the late 2020s by members of the Echo Mirage team, working under contract from the then-existing United States federal government. Part of the team's early work involved a comparative study of psychoses induced by the overwhelming sensory signals generated by the early cyberterminals, and psychoses induced by drugs such as cocaine or amphetamines. »Because of the vast quantities of data that had to be uploaded from the minds of the afflicted deckers-samples of complex, multi-sensory psychotic episodes of several minutes' duration, recorded in the moments just before the team members' deaths-an increasing number of computers were required. Eventually, Psychotrope was housed in a host comprised of a multi-tiered configuration of computers-a nation-wide computer linkup spread across a number of RTGs.«

Lady Death leaned forward as the page turned. The text continued. »The data collected by Psychotrope allowed Echo Mirage to develop a number of positive-result conditioning programs that lessened or corrected the trauma produced by cyberpsychosis. In order to administer this treatment, the team developed a number of semi-autonomous expert systems that would deliver the programming to the afflicted decker. These "knowbots," as we call them today, were programmed with a number of random-decision pathway capacities and were slaved to an individual decker. At the first sign of cyberpsychosis they went into action, instantly repairing the damage done. »The early PosiCon programs relied upon generalized imagery-calming and restorative images drawn from the collective subconscious. These programs were later replicated in the private sector, by Matrix Systems of Boston. After this company came into the Fuchi fold, their pairing with Fuchi's state-of-the-art hardware made further developments possible. The resulting programs were tailored in the extreme, capable of sampling an individual decker's subconscious thoughts and desires and creating positive conditioning imagery drawn directly from the decker's own memory and imagination.«

"My memories of Shinanai," Lady Death whispered to herself. Thoughts of the aidoru flooded her mind-of Shinanai's crushing embrace and hot kisses. Blushing, Lady Death raised a hand to hide her mouth and glanced around at Dark Father and the frozen executives who sat next to her. Were her memories being sampled even now? »In the early 2040s, something happened. The original Psychotrope program started acting erratically. At the time, we simply thought that its code had been corrupted, causing the observed glitches. But we were later able to piece together what had happened, and to make inferences based on the small amount of data we were able to retrieve. »We now believe that the knowbots that served as Psychotrope's delivery system achieved connectivity, some time in the mid-2040s. Somehow, Psychotrope became a single, self-aware program capable of self-programming in response to new data. It also appeared to be capable of self-regeneration. Those knowbots that were destroyed by IC or that became afflicted with a virus were either replaced or repaired-independent of any input or guidance by a human programmer. By all definitions, Psychotrope had become a true AI.«

"So ka?" Lady Death said. "I knew it!"

Dark Father nodded. "It's true. I think I spoke to it."

Lady Death turned to him, a thoughtful expression on her face. "I also spoke to it."

That startled him. For a moment Dark Father stared at her. Then he turned away as the executive icon at the front of the room continued its presentation. »In 2047, Psychotrope disappeared from the Matrix. We believe that it retreated into a host of its own creation- a virtual "pocket universe." A sanctuary that we could not locate.«

"And that we haven't been able escape from," Dark Father muttered grimly. "Yet." »When we re-discovered Psychotrope two years ago, we concluded that it must have been contemplating its own self-awareness all this time-the Al equivalent of a hermit retreating to an isolated cave to ponder the meaning of life. Its knowbots had disappeared from the Matrix, years ago, and there appeared to have been no activity that could be related to the program. But then one of our researchers inferred a startling correlation with some disturbing real-world events. »Back in the early '50s, disturbing rumors had begun to surface. Impossible-sounding stories of deckers-none of them older than their mid-teens-who could access the Matrix without a cyberdeck. Something had happened that allowed them to use the datajacks implanted in their minds to access the Matrix via nothing more than a fiber-optic connection and jackpoint.«

Lady Death smiled. So it was true. Wonderful. »We dismissed these stories as rumor, at first. But when we heard the first reports of the "deep resonance" that these so-called otaku experienced, we realized what must have happened. When we heard deep resonance described as being an intensely emotional experience, one that first laid bare the deepest fears of the subject, then calmed the mind and forever laid those fears to rest, we realized that positive conditioning was at the heart of it. And the only known program capable of producing such profound results was our own: Psychotrope. »We now know what the artificial intelligence has been up to for the past fifteen years: rewriting and "repairing" the "programming" of the human brain. Working with children rather than with adults, since children have a greater capacity for learning language-including the "language" of Matrix iconography. Turning these children's brains into bioprocess computers. Creating otaku. »At first we had hoped to study this process, to duplicate it. But it appears that the Al and the "deep resonance" effect it produces are an essential part of the process-one that cannot be omitted. Those whose minds and wills are strong enough to survive it are transformed-those who do not are plunged into cyberpsychosis. »We had hoped to keep any knowledge of the Al firmly within the confines of NovaTech until we found a way to utilize it for our own purposes, but we now realize that there were data leaks to Fuchi Asia-and possibly to Pan-Europa Fuchi as well. And now all indicators point to our former partners as being on the verge of a major technological breakthrough, thanks to this leak. In the meantime, we remain unable to, ah… persuade the Al to cooperate with us. It seems to have rejected us, in the same manner that a child will reject one of its parents and favor the other in a divorce. »We simply cannot allow our fiercest rivals to succeed where our own researchers have failed. If this happens, NovaTech will be the one left in the dust, when all existing computer technologies become obsolete. And thus the drastic measures recommended by Mr. Lanier several months ago now must be taken. The Al must be destroyed. »Fortunately, the Echo Mirage programmers who developed what would later become Psychotrope included a "trap door"-a password that would allow access to the heart of the program itself. Using this trap door, we intend to insert a virus into the programming of Psychotrope- one that will confuse its core programming, forcing it to continuously edit its own logic systems until it has achieved "perfection." But the code it uses to perform this operation will be flawed. Instead of drawing from its own positive conditioning programs, the Al will be using the comparative data on psychoses and other negative experiences. The more it attempts to repair itself, the more "psychotic" it will become. Eventually, the Al will have no other option but to crash itself-to self-destruct. »We anticipate that the virus will be ready in mid-March. And then the threat faced by the intractability of the Al will be at an end.«

The executive at the front of the room froze in place once more. The file folder closed.

Lady Death looked at Dark Father, her eyes wide. "They want to make it kill itself," she said softly. "That's what the crystal child meant when it said that soon its pain would end. The Al wants to commit suicide."

Dark Father nodded. "And we're trapped inside a pocket universe of its creation," he said. "On an ultraviolet host, the deckers themselves are at risk, exposed-not just their personas. If the artificial intelligence 'dies' and the ultraviolet host crashes, what will happen to us?"

"We might die," Lady Death said in a trembling voice. "The child told me that when its pain ended, my pain would end, too."

Then a thought struck her.

"We can try using the trap door to escape!" Lady Death said. "Perhaps by using it we can find a way into the core programming of the Al and can repair the damage done by the virus. Then we can ask it to set us free. Perhaps the algorithm for the trap door is in the file we just read-"

"I searched it already, the first time I scanned this file while you were executing your repair program," Dark Father said. "I tried every keyword I could think of, but none worked."

Lady Death felt a rush of anger. "You were going to leave me here," she said accusingly. Tears filled her eyes as she turned her back on him. "I hate you!"

Dark Father clapped his bony hands together, applauding her. "A fine performance," he said dryly. "But where's your sense of wal Remember what you said earlier? We need team spirit to get out of here."

"Then we should find the other deckers," Lady Death said petulantly.

"Yes," Dark Father agreed. "We'll need all the help we can get."