Psychotrope

09:56:56 PST

Santa Barbara, California Free State

Harris pecked away at the keyboard in front of him, cursing under his breath. Drek, but this was slow. Slow as a fragging glacier!

Harris was used to decking at the speed of thought, not at the speed of a two-fingered typist. Here he was with the hottest deck on the market balanced in his lap-a Fair-light LX cyberterminal-and they'd made him turn it into a tortoise.

In the meat world, Harris was overweight and unfit. In the Matrix, as Doubting Thomas, he was lightning quick. His official job, when not teaching decking to the Shelbramat students, was to ridicule any decker who seemed to be getting a little too close to the truth about Dr. Halberstam or the Shelbramat Boarding School. In keeping with the personality he'd so carefully honed, Doubting Thomas also flamed any similar posting he could find on the Matrix: whether it was aliens from outer space doing the abducting or secret vampire cabals. You name it, Doubting Thomas was getting his two megs worth in, always being certain to comment that these rumors were as "equally ludicrous" as those of children being kidnapped for medical experimentation.

Being reduced to no more than his meat bod, having to rely on his fat and clumsy fingers, galled Harris. How he wished he was thirty years younger-that he could be one of the ones whose brains hung suspended in solution in the lab down the hall. Gripes but those kids were wiz.

Harris just itched to pick up the fiber-optic cable that hung dangling from his cyberdeck and slot it into the data-jack behind his right ear. But after he'd seen what had happened to Fetzko and Thiessen, he'd reluctantly agreed to this safer, slower approach. The blood was still drying on the monitor that Fetzko had put his head through when he started raving like a madman and tried to "enter" the Matrix head-first. And Thiessen had looked pale as death when his unconscious form was lifted from his chair. Harris wasn't even sure he'd been breathing.

Harris was old for a decker. At thirty-nine, he was old enough to remember his teenage excitement when the first cyberterminals became available to the public. And he was mature enough to realize his own mortality. "There, but for the grace of routing, go I," he'd muttered as they'd carried Thiessen and Fetzko away. Then he'd gotten back to work.

The problem wasn't with the hardware; Harris was sure of that. The diagnostics programs that were constantly running in the background of the mainframes that served the Shelbramat "boarding school" would have detected any system errors and automatically re-routed functionality to one of the numerous backup arrays of optical chips.

No, it had to be black IC of some sort that had proliferated like a virus throughout the Seattle RTG. Usually, an intrusion countermeasure program induced biofeed-back responses that slotted up the bod, causing heart fibrillation, respiratory paralysis, or uncontrollable muscle spasms. But some countermeasures-and it looked like this IC was among them-went straight to the decker's head, so to speak. Harris had heard of IC that, instead of killing the decker, slotted up the wetware but good. The neurological damage it inflicted caused its victims to lose their short-term memory, to hallucinate, or to lose all fine-motor control. Thank the spirits Harris hadn't run into any of that drek-none that he couldn't handle, anyway-in his long career as a decker.

Then there was the IC that was even more subtle. Psychotropic black IC. It didn't leave any traces behind when you jacked out. Not at first. But over time, the decker began to notice the effects of the subliminal programming that had been done on his wetware. Compulsions began to surface-compulsions to turn himself in to the corp whose database he'd just raided. Or inexplicable mood swings that mimicked the cycles of a manic-depressive, making the decker either so cocky that he took stupid chances or so uncertain he hesitated and got burned. Or phobias-like a fear of the Matrix itself.

Judging by the conversation Harris had overheard coming from the bio monitoring laboratory next door, the facility's little high-rez wonders were suffering from SMS: scary monster syndrome, decker slang for a greenie who got spooked by frightening iconography. But Dr. Halberstam had found a quick fix: a drug that sorted the baby deckers' wetware out. The scary monsters had been beaten back under the bed.

Now it was up to Harris to bring the three lost students home.

Except that he couldn't just deck into the Seattle RTG and take them by the hand. Uh-uh. Roughly a minute after the crisis had begun (an eternity in the millisecond-quick world of the Matrix) the deckers had rallied to protect their own. The posting had gone out across the Matrix: the Seattle RTG was officially an "extreme danger" zone. It was impossible to post a warning at every single SAN that led to the grid, but the deckers had done their best. Then they'd waited outside in neighboring grids while the nova-hot ramjammers went in for a look-see. Captain Chaos, Renny, and Brother Data each entered the Seattle RTG from different nodes…

And never came out again.

That was about the time that Harris had jacked out to warn Thiessen and Fetzko-and had realized that he was too late to help them. Now he was under orders from Dr.

Halberstam himself not to go back on-line. And to figure out what had gone wrong, using as his interface nothing but the clunky keyboard they'd plugged into his Fairlight LX.

Yeah, right.

The basic idea made sense, in a crazy sort of way. Harris was to program on the fly, remotely reconfiguring and monitoring a specialized trace and report program. After homing in and locking onto the personas of the three high-rez wiz kids, its routing codes would offer the students a lifeline that they could follow back to the Shelbramat system. Even if they perceived the trace program as a threat and ran from it, they wouldn't be able to avoid it for long. A trapdoor built into each and every one of the Shelbramat students' personas rendered their evasion and masking programs useless against it.

Harris had written the trace and report program himself. It was intended to track the little buggers down, should any of them ever try to run away from Shelbramat, and yank them back for a spanking. Now it was their only hope of escape.

He looked over the complicated series of commands he'd keyed into the deck. He'd filled the flatscreen with text-based commands twice over, but wasn't even close to finishing all the modifications to the program. Still, he had managed to access the Seattle RTG, and was actually getting back from it. A series of LTG addresses scrolled across the bottom of his screen: every host system the students weren 't in.

Harris smiled and gave himself a mental pat on the back. It would take time, but eventually he would bring the kids "home" again. Too bad about the non-disclosure in his contract, or he could brag, later, about this amazing success and the odds against which it had been achieved. But Harris knew that if he ever let the word out, his contract with the Shelbramat Boarding School would be cancelled. Permanently.

Harris felt a familiar presence behind him. In his peripheral vision, he saw Dr. Halberstam standing in the doorway to the decker's lounge, arms crossed over his chest.

"Have you got them yet?" Halberstam asked.

"Almost." Harris continued pecking at the keyboard on his lap. He actually had no idea how close he might be. The Seattle RTG had thousands of local grids and hundreds of thousands of hosts. Fortunately, the trace and report wouldn't have to scan every single one. But it would have to navigate the maze of SANs slowly enough that Harris could track it-and send a duplicate tracking program in through another route, if the first one fell into whatever black hole was at the heart of the Seattle RTG.

Harris paused, studying the pop-up flatscreen display on his deck. The trace program had just encountered a fascinating anomaly: an entire series of SANs that were vanishing and reappearing on an intermittent basis, constantly reconfiguring the data links that existed between them.

Harris turned to Dr. Halberstam. "I think I've found-"

His words were drowned out by a whoop from down the hall. "They're back!" a voice cried. "Subjects 3, 5, and 9 are back on line!"

Dr. Halberstam nodded once. "Good work," he told Harris.

"Huh?" Harris looked down at the flatscreen display. The anomaly was gone. The trace and report program was still chugging merrily along, searching for the students.

Harris' eyes widened as he realized that Dr. Halberstam was praising him for something he hadn't done. But the gleam in the doctor's eye suggested a possible pay raise.

So he kept his mouth shut and answered Dr. Halberstam with a smile. If they found out later that Harris had nothing to do with bringing the students home, he'd at least be able to say he'd never actually claimed that accomplishment out loud.

As soon as Dr. Halberstam left the room, Harris grabbed the fiber-optic cord that dangled from his deck and jacked in.

If he was the first to reach the students, maybe he could persuade them to attribute their successful return to him…