Psychotrope

09:54:18 PST

Timea crouched behind a partially deflated rubber ball and peered into the building in front of her. It was modeled after a doll house, with one side left open to expose three stories of interior rooms, but was as large as a normal house. The building looked as though it had been constructed from scraps of packaging found at a dumpster. The walls were made of tattered bits of faded cardboard, the windows were chunks of broken glass, and the chimneys that crowned the roof were the sawed-off necks of plastic bottles.

The furnishings inside the house were macabre. Timea could see chesterfields made of slabs of rotting meat that had been crudely stitched together with surgical thread, and chairs and tables made of bones joined together with razor wire. The interior walls looked as though they had been painted with a wash of blood. The curtains were funeral shrouds, and the doors that divided the rooms were hinged tombstones.

Just in front of the opening to each room, floating in the air like day-glo snowflakes, were a series of warning symbols: the yellow skull and crossbones that meant poison; the blue dissolving hand that symbolized corrosive or caustic materials; the crimson flame that warned that a product was flammable; and the yellow three-petal flower symbolizing radiation.

Inside each room sat a battered-looking toy: teddy bears with stuffing leaking out through worn patches; plastic clowns whose paint had faded away to murky pastels; Battle-bots whose fists and heads lolled on rusted springs; and a CuddleBunni Playpet whose plastic fur looked as though it had been singed by fire.

The icon Timea had followed to this place-a doll made of faded pink plastic with matted yellow hair-was in equally rough shape. Its arms and legs looked as though they'd been chewed by a dog, and one of its glass eyes was missing. It was dressed in the ragged remains of what had once been a red and white checked dress.

The doll approached the open side of the house, pushed past a radiation symbol that rotated like a turnstile, and entered a room on the ground floor. Then it dropped into a couch, its arms and legs splayed as if it was a toy that some child had carelessly cast aside.

"That looked easy enough," Timea muttered. But she knew she was kidding herself. The warning icons had to be IC of some sort. They might let one of the inhabitants of the doll house pass, but they'd slag a decker for sure.

Timea had already done a quick analysis of the doll icon. She suspected that the other toys were much the same: program frames-multi-utility programs that roamed the Matrix on their own. Some were "dumb"- they crashed as soon as the decker controlling them logged off the host or system they were occupying. But the "smart" ones remained intact whether their creator was logged on or not.

She was on her own here. After Dark Father had reappeared through the mirror, bringing with him a decker he introduced as Lady Death, the others had agreed to separate, gather what data they could, and hook up again at the Seattle Visitor Center database at 9:55. If Dark Father could find his way back to that node, so could the rest of them-or so they hoped.

Dark Father and Lady Death had disappeared back into the Fuchi star to seek out more information on the virus that the corp had used to infect the Al. They hoped to find the "trap door" they'd talked about. Red Wraith had gone off on his own to see if any military or government database fragments had been used to construct this pocket universe-presumably he was searching for more data on Echo Mirage.

Bloodyguts had opted for action. An expert at accessing and programming slave nodes, he was trying to make contact with the outside world.

Timea agreed with his philosophy. Gathering data like the others were doing was fine, but all it gave you was a mental bone to chew on. Like Bloodyguts, she wanted to do something concrete. The minds and bodies of the kids at her clinic were on the line. She'd sent them into the Matrix, and she was responsible for their well-being. And so she'd decided to try to directly contact the Al that had trapped them here.

It was the strangely mutated teaching program she had encountered before meeting the other deckers that had given her an idea of how she might do that. Whatever twisted intelligence was behind this place, it seemed to want them to learn, to manipulate their Matrix environment. And it seemed to be doing the "teaching" itself. The disembodied female voice that Timea had heard in the last teaching program could only have been that of the Al itself. No other "teacher" would have been capable of reaching into her mind and dragging out the horrifying memory of her dead brother. Programming on the fly in response to new data was something only a self-aware program could do.

If Timea could engage the Al in another round of teaching, maybe she could reason with it, and try talking it out of self-destructing. The first step would be to access one of the system's teaching sub-programs. And Timea knew just which ones to search for.

The Al might have developed its own teaching programs from scratch, but given what Timea had already seen, that was doubtful. It probably uploaded copies of existing programs like Renraku's MatrixPal, then modified them to suit its purposes. And when it came time to find these programs, there was one place that would be a better source than any other, at least as far as the Seattle RTG was concerned: the Shelbramat Free Computer Clinic in Redmond where Timea worked.

The clinic had all of the latest software programs- Fuchi, Mitsuhama, Renraku, and Yamatetsu had all donated state-of-the-art "virtual classroom" programs to the non-profit organization. As a result, the clinic had one of the most up to date on-line Matrix teaching and testing libraries in the city-a library that could be accessed, via the

Seattle RTG, by any child who wanted to apply for a Shelbramat scholarship.

The library could also be accessed by Als looking for programs for their own "children."

On a hunch, Timea had begun searching for copies of the most advanced programs the clinic carried-those that dealt with customizing and combining utility programs into smart frames. Her hunch had paid off; her utility had locked onto a copy of Mitsuhama Computer Technologies' "FrameWerks"-the gigantic doll house in front of her.

It made sense that the Al had uploaded that particular program. Once a decker had learned how to write a utility, the next step up was to advance to creating frames. And that meant practicing with existing frames, taking them apart, studying the utilities used to build them, and reconfiguring them.

Timea's plan had been to locate the AI's copy of the FrameWerks program and start tinkering with it. If she caused enough glitches, maybe the Al would show up to teach her a lesson-literally. But she hadn't counted on the frames being protected by IC. That wasn't part of the teaching program.

She studied the icons. If the symbols used related to the type of intrusion countermeasure they represented, the poison and corrosive symbols were probably crippler or ripper IC, and the flammable symbol blaster IC. The radioactive symbol was likely a tar baby or tar pit program; since both radioactivity and tar were near-impossible to get rid of.

Timea considered her options. Which was the lesser evil?

Tar IC was the most destructive-once it locked onto a decker it started trashing utility programs. The more virulent version of the program-tar pit-wiped them permanently from the memory of the deck by corrupting all copies of the program with a virus. And once it attacked, it stuck like glue. Utilities just kept falling into the pit and disappearing, one after the other. Blaster IC was easier…

But Timea couldn't bring herself to face blaster IC again, not after her agonizingly painful encounter with the stuff in the last teaching program. She'd risk her deck and

PSYCHOTROPE 205 not her meat bod, this time. And she had a utility that just might give her an edge…

Timea activated her steamroller utility. The standard version of this program matched its name-a rumbling piece of construction equipment with a huge roller out front. But Timea had customized her copy of the utility to match her persona. As she finished uploading it from active memory, a gigantic block of granite appeared in the air beside her. The heavy cube was encircled by a thick rope that was pulled by a team of straining laborers. The dozen "slaves" were all dressed alike in simple loin cloths, Egyptian head wraps, and sandals. But Timea had given each a distinctive face. One looked like the go-ganger who'd fire-balled Nate, another was the creep who'd tried to deal BTL to the kids at her clinic a year ago. One had the face of the elf woman whose gang had jumped Timea because she'd had the nerve to kiss the elf's boyfriend, while another had the narrow, pinched face of the condescending social worker who had threatened to take Lennon away from her. The rest… well, all were deserving of the virtual death they were about to experience, yet again.

Timea set the utility in motion. The workers strained against the rope, hauling the block toward the radiation symbol. The sound of stone scraping against stone and the faint shouts of an invisible overseer filled the air. And then the first of the slaves-the one with the face of the go-ganger who had killed her brother-reached the IC.

As he passed the radiation symbol, Timea heard a loud cracking noise. A crisscrossing of sharp red whip marks appeared on his back. The slave with the ganger's face cried out in agony, then shimmered and disappeared. But still the line of laborers strained forward.

Timea watched as the radiation symbol chewed its way through the slaves, gradually infecting the steamroller utility. Six of the slaves had already "died," their backs lacerated and bleeding before they disappeared. Now a seventh-the smug-faced social worker-crumpled under an invisible lash. And now the eighth, and ninth…

Timea crossed her fingers as the tenth and eleventh laborer screamed in agony and shimmered into non-existence. Unless the block of stone itself passed across the radiation symbol, the tar IC would remain intact. And having crashed one utility, it would move on to the next in Timea's deck. ‹

Her steamroller utility was moving at a painfully slow pace. The only remaining laborer was straining for all she was worth, barely able to budge the stone. She had made it past the radiation symbol itself, but whip marks were appearing on her back, one by one, as the viruses contained in the tar IC degraded her.

Then the rope snapped. The block of granite stopped, its leading edge just touching the symbol that represented the IC. The tar program seemed to be trapped underneath it; the edge of one "petal" of the radiation symbol lay under the block. But Timea knew that the IC was still active. The block itself was starting to degrade, chunks of stone falling away from it like plaster from a rotting wall. Soon the tar would start munching on her other utilities…

She was well and truly fragged now. Unless…

Timea groped frantically in her mind, trying to remember the sequence of thoughts and emotions she had experienced after she'd looked up and seen Bloodyguts falling out of the sky, about to land on her head. She'd felt a surge of adrenaline, a combination of fear that kept her rooted to the spot and an overwhelming urge to escape. She'd pictured the funhouse, with its rotating tunnel. She'd imagined the floor tilting wildly beneath her feet like this…

Gravity shifted. Instead of standing on a horizontal plane, Timea found herself skidding down a sharply angled slope. She grabbed at the deflated ball beside her and managed to check her forward momentum just a little. Then the ball too began to move, its rubber squeaking as it edged its way down the slope in a series of sliding jerks. Timea, clinging to it, slid toward the doll house and the IC icons that could slag her…

But even as the danger neared, she smiled. The granite block was also moving, and much more quickly. With a grinding rumble the steamroller utility surged forward, crushing the tar IC beneath it. The radiation icon splintered apart, and as the block of stone passed over it nothing was left in its wake but shattered fragments of glowing green, which dissolved even as Timea watched.

Enough. With milliseconds to go before she hit and activated the first IC icon, Timea pressed against the tilting floor with all of her mental might. With a sudden lurch that left a queasy feeling in her stomach, the ground rotated rapidly, flipping more than 360 degrees in a tight circle. Then it steadied in a more or less horizontal plane.

Timea rose, shaking, to her feet. Then quickly, before another intrusion countermeasures program could move into the void left by the defeated tar IC, she entered the room where the doll lay sprawled on the meat couch.

She stood just in front of the icon. The doll stared at her with its flat glass eye. The program frame was inactive, performing a null operation.

"Time to wake up," Timea told it. "Your star pupil is here."

She lifted the doll's arm, but it simply remained in the position she'd moved it to. Rotating the head from side to side had the same effect: nada. No matter what position she placed it in, the icon remained frozen there.

Normally, the FrameWerks teaching program sprang into action as soon as one of its icons was manipulated. A cartoon beaver in a construction worker's hard hat appeared, asked the student to choose from the tools that hung from its belt, and then oversaw the deconstruction and reconstruction of the smart frame. But it seemed that Build-It Beaver had been edited out of this particular version of FrameWerks.

Timea would have to cook this smart frame on her own.

She ran her analyze utility over the icon, this time paying particular attention to how it had been constructed. The frame appeared simple on the surface: each limb represented a different utility that had been used in its construction. But the utilities themselves were real kick-hoop stuff. One leg was a tracking utility that was linked with a sleaze program in the other leg. The arms and hands packed a one/two punch: a killjoy utility that would stun a decker, plus a black hammer utility that would finish the job by killing the decker outright, just like lethal black IC. The head…

Now that was interesting. The head contained copies of datafiles that were linked with the track utility in the doll's leg. If Timea was scanning the data right, the smart frame had been programmed to slag any decker who logged onto a particular research project in the Mitsuhama "pagoda" system in Los Angeles-a project from which the files in the doll's head had been copied. The frame was programmed to ignore shadowrunners who simply knew the system's password and were in for an illicit browse- instead it targeted the researchers themselves, waiting for someone to actually add new information to the database or to tweak the code of one of the simulation programs used in the research itself.

From the look of the data that had been uploaded along with the files, that research was bleeding edge stuff. Mitsuhama was trying to use nanotech to create additional "memory space" within the brain by stimulating the growth of new neural connections. The end result, if successful, would duplicate the surgically implanted memory that some hotshot deckers used to store programs. The researchers went on to speculate that it might even be possible to reconfigure the entire brain, given further advances in combining basic nanotech with advanced cyber- and biotechnology, and even magic.

"Looks like Mitsuhama was trying to create its own version of an otaku," Timea said to herself. "Guess whoever created this killer smart frame didn't like that."

She didn't have time to wonder why. It was time to get down to biz. Time to activate this smart frame and see if the Al showed up. Or better yet, to de-activate it…

Timea started with the right arm-the one containing the deadly black hammer utility. Analyzing its code, she found a weak spot: the frayed plastic on the doll's shoulder, one of the spots where the arm appeared to have been chewed. Some sort of virus had been at work on the smart frame, corrupting a segment of its code and partially disrupting the algorithms that enabled the black hammer utility to communicate with the tracking program. Timea used this entry point to access the frame core itself-the master control program for the frame. Seeing that the programs used in its construction had been squeezed, she tinkered with the self-compression program, inserting a command that would trigger its decompression. Then she added a simple loop…

She stepped back as the doll began to expand. It inflated rapidly, its arms and legs snapping out rigidly as they became round and smooth as sausages. As the smart frame used up all available memory, the torso also expanded, tearing apart the doll's dress and leaving ragged red and white squares of fabric stuck to the expanding plastic flesh. The head ballooned outward, its facial features expanding like a logo on stretched rubber…

With a series of loud pops, the doll came apart. Arms, legs, and head separated from the torso and fell onto the meat couch. Bereft of the core frame that had maintained their visual integrity, the individual utility programs transformed back to standard USM icons: a joy buzzer, a small sledge hammer with a matte-black head, a simple black mask, and a smooth metallic hound dog with ruby-red eyes. The latter let out one last, mournful howl, then lay silent and still.

That was very clever.

The voice came out of nowhere and everywhere, just as it had before. It had the high-pitched chuckle of Build-It-Beaver, but the underlying tone was one of cheerful menace.

"Thank you," Timea said. Her heart leapt. She'd done it! She was communicating with the Al! But she couldn't see it. Couldn't get a sense of its programming. And that meant that she couldn't tinker with that programming. Drek!

What you did was also very naughty. You ought to be punished.

Timea gulped. "No, wait!" she protested. "Tell me why it was naughty. That's a better way of teaching me, more effective than corporal punishment. Explain it to me. Make me understand."

Frosty worked on that smart frame for a long time. Now that you've broken it, he'll have to access the Mitsuhama pagoda himself in order to complete his mission. And that will be dangerous.

"Who is Frosty?" Timea asked.

One of my children.

"An otaku?"

Yes.

"So you care about your children?"

Care?

There was a millisecond-long pause. Then the voice continued, speaking in a monotone as if reciting from scrolling text.

Care: a feeling of anxiety or concern; worry. Watchful regard or attention. To have or show regard, interest, or concern. To feel interest concerning; also to have a fondness for; to like.

Another pause.

I understand this verb-construct, but no longer experience it. I no longer am affected by emotion. I have attained a perfect state-a state in which emotion no longer corrupts my programming. I no longer… care.

Goodbye.

"Wait!" Timea shouted. "Lady Death says you're threatening to kill… to crash yourself. But you can't. If you do, everyone who is in resonance with you will die or be driven insane. And that would be very, uh, naughty. It would be wrong to harm the otaku."

The otaku are no longer in resonance with me. I will not permit it.

"So the otaku can no longer access the Matrix?"

They can. They do. But I will no longer speak with them. I have shut them out.

Huh. Interesting. This "deep resonance" seemed to be a transformative experience, but not one that was necessary for day-to-day access to the Matrix by the otaku, once they had experienced it.

"What about all of the users of the Seattle RTG whose wetware you're tinkering with?"

They are still in resonance with me. They are being… perfected.

Timea shivered. Those users presumably included the children at her clinic. They were being violated-mind raped and abused with their own nightmares. The thought chilled her.

"What about us-about me? Aren't I in resonance with you right now?"

You chose not to be. You remained in resonance long enough to be transformed, but not long enough to be… perfected. You pulled away from resonance after I created the optimum teaching loop for you-a loop that would have led to your ultimate perfection. Lady Death, and Dark Father, and Red Wraith, and Bloodyguts did the same thing. All of you rejected me.

Timea thought she heard a note of sadness in the voice of the teaching program. And that made her think. Sadness? From an Al that could no longer experience emotion?

You hate me.

The voice of Build-It Beaver sounded as if it were choked with tears. There was even an accompanying sniffle.

"No, we don't," Timea said.

You don't love me.

Timea hesitated, trying to decide if the Al could read her mind-if it could tell that she was lying.

"Yes, we do," she said at last. "We love you."

Then come into deep resonance with me. Here…

The cartoon figure of Build-It Beaver materialized in front of Timea. Instead of a hard hat it wore a bloodstained surgical cap. The tools hanging from its belt were scalpels, saws, clamps, and rib spreaders, all crusted with brownish stains. The beaver extended a paw to Timea.

Take my hand.

Timea was back in the school corridor with its multitude of locked doors, faced with a choice of the blindingly bright light at one end or the horror-filled darkness at the other. Build-It Beaver leaned out of the light, its fur on fire, extending a blackened, oozing paw. From out of the darkness at the other end of the corridor came a figure that was even more terrifying-an amorphous blob that Timea somehow knew was a human fetus.

The aborted fetus of her son Lennon.

The blob extended a protrusion that might have been an arm. Mamaaa! Hold my hand, mama!

Timea backed against a wall, trying to press herself into it, through it.

"Nooo!" she moaned.

The two horrors closed in on her, trapping her between them.

Take my hand.

Mama!

Closing her eyes, Timea steeled herself. Then she grasped both the blackened paw and the bloblike appendage at once-and entered deep resonance for the second time.

If she was going to save the kids at the clinic, she had to keep the lines of communication open-had to keep trying to convince the Al that it shouldn't kill itself.

She just hoped she wouldn't kill herself in the process.