Psychotrope

09:46:15 PST

(02:46:15 JST) Jackpoint: Osaka, Japan

Lady Death smiled as she put the finishing touches on her virtual sculpture. The icon that hung in front of her was a perfect duplicate of her own Matrix persona: long, dark hair drawn up in a bun at the back of the head, skin a pure, dead white as if drained of blood, face with red accents on the lips and cheeks. It was dressed in a flowing white kimono-the color of mourning-patterned with glowing red dracoforms.

The image was drawn from kabuki-the overly formal, traditional style of Japanese theater whose feudal tragedies played so well as simsense. Lady Death's icon was that of a woman who had committed shinju-double-lover suicide. Which was both appropriate and ironic…

Satisfied with her high-resolution double, Lady Death sent the icon out into the Matrix. While it dutifully logged onto AS/NIPO-TOK-5673, the telecommunications grid that was home to one of Tokyo's many cramming schools, Lady Death would be elsewhere. The icon was merely part of a mirrors utility that would fool her guardians into thinking she was logged onto the juku. She even had an excuse to explain why she had awakened at the unusual hour of just before three a.m. to study. This was university entrance exams week, and the Osaka telecommunications grid was jammed from five a.m. on. She was just getting an early start to her cramming.

The icon disappeared into a system access node. At the same moment, her cyberdeck's masking program activated, throwing up a shimmering haze that rendered her actual persona almost transparent.

Beside her, a miniature lion, seemingly made of folded origami paper, sprang into being. It stood quivering on clawed feet, as if sniffing the air. It inclined its head slightly toward where Lady Death hung, its glowing yellow eyes shifting back and forth as tiny red numerals scrolled across the spot where its pupils should have been. Then its nose snapped around as if picking up a stronger scent. It leaped into the SAN and disappeared with a papery, rustling sound.

"Desu," she whispered to herself. "The trace program has been fooled. Time to go."

Still maintaining her masking program, she pushed aside the painted cloth banner that hung in front of her. In that one motion she exited from her family's private LTG into the Shiawase Corporation system itself.

The system was patterned after a kare-sansui garden, but with high-tech imagery overlaying the traditional elements. Instead of following a Western-style, right-angled grid, data flowed in sinuous curves reminiscent of raked sand. The ripples fed into the fiber-optic roots of the miniature bonsai trees that were the system's datastores, or flowed around the clear glass boulders that represented sub-processing units.

At this early hour, the system contained only a handful of deckers. Their icons were scattered across the huge expanse of landscape that stretched out on either side of Lady Death-tiny, human-shaped figures that swam like tadpoles through the datastreams below.

Lady Death plunged downward, toward the raked-sand plain. In an eyeblink she was inside a datastream, surrounded by the pea-sized grains of sand that represented individual packets of data and moving rapidly amidst the flow. She came to another SAN, this one sculpted to resemble a temple gate with ornate brass scrollwork and dark, heavy wood. She pushed it open, stared at the more conventional grid of right-angled neon lines that lay beyond, and entered the address of the LTG she wanted to access. Then she flowed through the door and into the rigid Western-style grid of the Seattle RTG.

The database she sought was a fansite devoted to manga musk. Like the two-dimensional animated cartoons of the previous century from which it took its name, manga music was over-the-top-devoted to action, color, and spectacle. The singers who fronted its bands wrapped their music in cartoonish elements, using a blend of illusion magic and high-rez graphics technology to produce incredible spectacles.

The manga music fansite offered free simsense downloads-home recordings done by fans at live concerts. These allowed other fans from around the world to experience the thrill of seeing their favorite bands perform live. Many of the simsense recordings were crudely edited, or were marred by having been shot by fans who were jazzed on amphetamines or hallucinogenic drugs. But it wasn't the experience of seeing her favorite singer that Lady Death was after. She wanted to find out where Shinanai was. Perhaps one of the fans had seen one of the underground, unauthorized concerts that Shinanai was rumored to be secretly giving in UCAS.

Shinanai-the legendary lead singer of Black Magic Orchestra. Shinanai, the woman whose name meant "deathless." Shinanai's image was burned into Lady Death's memory: tall, thin, with nearly translucent white skin and silver-blonde hair shaved high over elven ears but long in the back. A delicate tracery of luminescent blue face paint accentuating high cheekbones and piercing aqua blue eyes. Black leather pants, cinched tight with straps and buckles from ankle to thigh. Red mesh shirt covered by a black leather jacket with its sleeves cut out. Fingertips, each and every one bearing the tattoo of a grinning skull. And a voice that could howl as raw as a shadowhound or sing as sweet and pure as a synthesized flute.

Shinanai was just one of many aidoru-singers who were idolized by Japanese high school students. But to Lady Death, Shinanai was everything-and the only aidoru worth thinking about. She had an intensity, a way of mesmerizing you and stealing your heart away with just one smoldering, shiver-inducing look. And so Lady Death-or Hitomi, as she was known in the meat world-had slipped away from her guardians and sneaked backstage to meet Shinanai in person. Captivated by the singer's magic, she had run away from home and school and family to become Shinanai's lover.

Or at least, she had allowed Shinanai to love her. It had been enough simply to allow Shinanai to embrace her, to stroke her skin, to kiss her lips with a passion that Hitomi had never felt before. Shinanai neither asked for nor accepted physical stimulation in return. Instead Shinanai drank of Hitomi's soul.

A little too deeply. When the shadowrunners who had been hired by Hitomi's father caught up with Hitomi, they found her on the blood-soaked bed of the hotel room in Seoul that Shinanai had vacated moments before. Hitomi had died of blood loss after Shinanai had drunk deeply from her femoral artery, letting the passion-pumped blood flow until Hitomi expired. For Shinanai was a vampire.

The runners' shaman and medic had been able to revive Hitomi, to pull her back from just over the brink of death. He said her ki was strong, despite the fact that the vampire had been supping upon this life force. But Hitomi knew that her will to live came not from any physical or psychic strength. It was simply that she could not bear to die and never see her beloved aidoru again. She had walked away from the brink of death by choice.

They had kept her in isolation in her family's private medical clinic for many months after that. Her guardians kept watching and waiting, fearful lest Hitomi herself become a vampire. But somehow her body had resisted the HMHVV virus.

Hitomi knew that Shinanai had intended for her to become a vampire, that Shinanai had killed her so she could share eternal life. Only the shadowrunners' arrival had forced Shinanai to flee. In her heart, Hitomi knew that Shinanai would be happy to see her again, would be hoping that Hitomi would be able to track her down. But a part of her still wondered why Shinanai had fled from the shadowrunners, instead of fighting them. Vampires were supposed to be legendary in their strength…

Ironically, Hitomi-as Lady Death-had once claimed expertise on vampires and had commented more than once on their cruel, sadistic nature on the Shadowland postings she loved to frequent. But her information had come from tridcasts and news reports. After having met a vampire first-hand, after having become Shinanai's lover, Hitomi now knew how wrong she had been. She only wished she could convince her guardians of this fact.

Since that night in Seoul, two separate attempts had been made on Shinanai's life, forcing her into hiding. No more was Shinanai giving live concerts-at least, not for the general public. Hitomi had no doubt that the shadow-runners hired by her father were to blame, and that they would continue tracking the vampire until their job was done.

In killing Hitomi, Shinanai had ensured her own death. Double-lover suicide.

As for Hitomi herself, she had not been allowed to leave the Shiawase arcology for the fourteen long months that had passed since her "death." Her guardians made sure she did not stray, that she could not follow through on her compulsive need to see Shinanai again. But that did not mean her mind could not wander freely, that she could not access Shinanai in other ways as Lady Death…

The manga music fansite was tricky to find. Few regular deckers even knew it was there-only hard-core manga fans ever accessed it. The fansite was located on the Seattle RTG but was invisible, due to the fact that it could only be accessed by means of a "vanishing" SAN-a system access node that allowed entry only at specific times of day. In addition, the SAN "teleported" on a regular basis, switching its network address to various locations on the Seattle RTG according to the dictates of a secret algorithm. To know where to access this SAN and at what time, a decker had to know someone who knew someone who knew the sysop who had created the algorithm… and so on. It was kind of like scoring a BTL chip-or so she guessed, since she'd never had cause to purchase illegal simsense. It was a highly secretive process, based on word of mouth and trust.

Lady Death followed a dataline to the pulsating drumhead that was the icon of a nightclub known as Syber-space. The dull black octagonal sent out a steady rhythm that Lady Death could "feel" in her meat bod-a bone-thrumming bass that mimicked a syncopated heartbeat. A favorite nightclub of deckers, Syberspace was physically located in downtown Seattle. But the virtual nightclub was accessible to deckers around the world. And one of its nodes, seconds from now, would connect with the manga music fanbase.

Lady Death dove through the head of the drum, into the Syberspace construct itself. It looked like a nightclub, complete with a mirror-backed bar stocked with glowing bottles and a large dance floor. The icons of other deckers drifted through the room, occasionally touching a bottle to access a biofeedback program that would either stimulate or sedate their meat bods, as desired, or placing a palm on one of the many bar stools whose seats resembled trode rig interfaces.

Although the nightclub construct was realistic in the extreme, the deckers' icons gave the place a surrealistic feel. A somber-looking man in top hat and tails sat next to a gray and white cartoon rabbit with white gloves, big floppy ears, and a gleeful grin. A topless teenage girl with mohawk hair and baggy shorts rode a jet-propelled surfboard past a clown, a gigantic red cockroach, and an Asian woman in a stylish business suit. A sasquatch jived alone in the center of the bar, his massive, hairy hands moving in intricate patterns like those of a Balinese temple dancer, while in another corner a trio of personas whose faces and bodies were smooth metal ovoids stood silently, accessing the program that would induce in their minds a simsense recording of the live performance that was actually going on in the meat-world nightclub.

Lady Death bowed to the club's sysop-a portly man in bacchanalian toga and headband of gold grape leaves- and asked for her "drink" by name: Magical Mystery Tour. The bartender smiled and crooked a chubby finger, and a yellow bottle floated over to Lady Death. For just a moment, the bottle took on a new shape: long and cylindrical still, but with a periscope and portholes down the side. Hurriedly, before the vanishing node disappeared and the submarine became merely a bottle again, Lady Death touched it…

And found herself inside the manga music database.

After the high-resolution realism of the Syberspace system, it took her a moment to get used to the overly simplistic but crowded landscape of the fansite. Everything was outlined in heavy black lines and deliberately pixelated, so that individual dots of primary color could be seen within each icon. Cartoonish renderings of manga music singers and musicians capered and wailed across a landscape rocked by explosions, while rocket-propelled Battlebots roared unnoticed above the heads of adoring prepubescent fans whose overly large eyes slavishly followed the musicians' every move. Although music was being performed with furious abandon, no aural elements were included. The only "sounds" were the cartoon speech bubbles that hung above the musicians' heads and the musical notes that swarmed around them like bees.

To access one of the simsense recordings that had been posted here, the decker reached out and touched one of the cartoon speech bubbles. Their captions were sometimes cryptic and sometimes straightforward, but were always punctuated to the max: "Meta Madness rocks Orktown!!!" or "Chillwiz concert a SCREAMER. I yarfed my lunch!!!" or "Guess Hue?!?"

Lady Death searched for anything that looked like a Black Magic Orchestra concert upload. A total of three cartoonish icons of Shinanai materialized in front of her, making Lady Death gasp with longing. But the captions above their heads were already familiar; these were sim-sense recordings of concerts from a previous UCAS tour, from before the time when Shinanai went underground. Lady Death considered sampling them, then reluctantly realized that downloading them onto her cyberdeck would increase the chance of her foray into the manga music site being detected by her guardians. She dismissed them with a wave and set her browse utility scanning on a variety of keywords. But the titles to Black Magic Orchestra's hit singles came up dry, as did the names-both real and stage names-of the band members.

Lady Death paused, frustrated and disappointed. No new postings. Donzoko. She stamped a foot in frustration. How would she ever find Shinanai?

Then she remembered the lyrics to the song that the aidoru had been composing, back when they had been together in the hotel room in Seoul. To the best of Lady Death's knowledge, it had never been performed at a public concert. Based on a tanka, a traditional thirty-one-syllable poem, the song had compared a woman to a well in which water rose anew each spring, and from which her lover drank again and again. Lady Death now realized that it was a veiled reference to Shinanai's vampirism. At the time, she thought it was simply a metaphor for love.

She chose the title of the song as the keyword for her search: Shunga. In literal translation, Spring Pictures-a euphemism for erotic simsense. Within a nanosecond or two, a cartoonish image appeared before her: that of an androgynous singer with a sexy pout, clad only in a black velvet cape that was wrapped tight around his/her body. Bright pink cherry blossoms drifted down like snow as the singer crooned silently into the speech bubble that floated above. The icon was human, rather than elven, and did not look a thing like Shinanai. But the caption over the head of the figure fit the imagery of the song: "I wish you well. I wish you would. I bet you WILL!!!"

Lady Death touched the caption and began downloading the simsense recording into her cyberdeck, onto the optical storage chip that was deliberately not listed on any of the deck's directories. As the data flowed, she noted the date and time that the recording had been posted, and the jack-point of the decker who had uploaded it. It had been posted just yesterday, from Kobe, a suburb of the Osaka sprawl. If it really was a recording of an underground Black Magic Orchestra concert, recorded by one of the fans who had seen the show live and then immediately uploaded the recording after the show, that meant that Shinanai was barely a five-minute maglev ride away from Lady Death in the meat world.

After so many months of numbness, Lady Death felt a rush of emotion. Joy and happiness warred with caution and fear. She could barely contain her impatience during the few nanoseconds it took to download the simsense recording; she simply could not wait to log off the Matrix and scan it. Perhaps Shinanai had hidden a secret message in the song, a call for the school girl Hitomi to rejoin her lost love.

Lady Death checked her cyberdeck's time-keeping log. It was 9:46:59 PST in the meat world-2:46:59 in the morning in Osaka. She had been running the Matrix for a mere forty-four seconds. Hopefully, her guardians had not yet noticed that she had strayed into the forbidden territory of the manga music fansite. If they had, there was a possibility that Shiawase deckers had already erased the contraband simsense recording as it flowed through her family's private LTG and into her deck. But if all was still well and Lady Death's mirrors utility and masking program had done their work, in a second or two, when she jacked out, Lady Death would at last know where her beloved Shinanai was today…