city blues 01 - dome city blues (40 page)

“Did you already have something?”

She set a blue fiberglass flight case on the bed and popped the lid.  One corner of the case was patched with strapping tape.  “I can’t eat before a run.  A full stomach takes my edge off.”

I twisted the top off the coffee and waited for it to warm up.  “What’s in the shoe box?”

Jackal picked it up and tossed it to me without looking.  “I almost forgot,” she said.  “I brought you sort of a disguise.”

The top came off, but I managed to catch the box left handed while half-juggling the coffee bulb in my right hand.  Inside the box were a pair of electric barber’s clippers and a bottle of peroxide.  Not much of a disguise.

I set the box down, fished out the breakfast muffin and unwrapped it.  “Do you really think this will fool anybody?”

Jackal shrugged without looking up.  “Crew cut, bleached-blonde hair.  If you stop shaving and wear some shades, it might be enough to keep a bullet out of the back of your head.”

“I guess it’s better than nothing,” I said.  I took a bite of muffin.  Greasy, but not too bad.

I swallowed and raised my fingers to touch Sonja’s dressing.  “I’ve got a bandage on the back of my head.  My skull collided with a sidewalk.”

Jackal pulled a tangle of ribbon cable out of the case and dropped it on the bed.  “How bad is it?”

I turned my head so that she could see.  “Not too bad.  Just some split skin.”

“I think we can work around that,” Jackal said.  “We’ll leave it a little shaggy in the back so I don’t have to cut so close.”  She picked up the shoebox and walked toward the bathroom.

“What about the peroxide?”

Jackal spoke over her shoulder.  “It’s a disinfectant.  It’ll probably burn like hell, but it shouldn’t kill you.”

I took another bite of muffin and followed her.  I managed to wolf down the rest of it before she started.

To be honest, Jackal’s own hairstyle didn’t instill me with confidence.  But even a really bad haircut was better than a bullet in the brain.

Jackal’s prediction that the peroxide would burn like hell turned out to be a major understatement.  But she was right.  It didn’t kill me.

When she was done, my hair was very blonde and very short on the top and sides, tapering to a thicker patch in the back.  It was a strange cut, but I could live with it.

I showered while Jackal finished setting up her gear.  Surprisingly, the shower stall wasn’t wired for projection.  No forests, no naked women, no subliminal education.  I enjoyed the chance to shower in silence.

Jackal looked up when I walked back into the room.  “Put your shirt on,” she said.  “I want to get the full effect.”

I slipped on my shirt.

She nodded.  “Better, but you can’t wear the jacket.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re wearing it in the trid that the Man is circulating.  Anyway, it’s like your trademark.”

“I need it to cover up my shoulder holster.”

“I didn’t say you can’t wear
a
jacket.  I said you can’t wear
that
jacket.”  She shrugged off her own jacket and handed it to me.

It was made of forest green synlon, cut in the style of those old bomber jackets.  A strangely angular tiger was stitched across the back in multicolored thread.  Above the tiger, the words MIG ALLEY were embroidered in stylized capitol letters intended to suggest bamboo.  It was at least five sizes too large for her.

“It won’t fit,” I said.

“Try it on.”

I strapped on the shoulder rig before I put on the jacket.  It fit.  The Blackhart didn’t bulge too much.  I took the jacket off again and tossed it on the bed.

Jackal held out an elastic headband set with four disks molded from matte black plastic.  A long thread of fiber-optic cable connected the disks to one of several equipment modules set up on the room’s only table.  “How about it, Mr. Stalin?  Do you want to go for a ride?”

I took the headband.  “Where’s yours?”

She held up a ribbon cable with a gold multi-pronged connector.  “An induction-rig is good enough for piggyback,” she said, “but you have to go straight neural for the big show.  It shaves seven, maybe eight nanoseconds off your response time.”

On the table top, between the comp and the matrix generator, was a pale green plastic cylinder.  Jackal picked it up and pressed one end against her white jeans, on the inner slope of her left thigh.  The cylinder made a soft popping noise followed by an even quieter hiss.  When the hissing stopped, Jackal pulled the cylinder away from her thigh.  About three centimeters of ceramic needle protruded from the end.

“What’s that?”

She sat in a chair and massaged her left thigh where the needle had gone in.  “Zoom,” she said.  “Mega-amphetamine.  It’s a Cuban combat drug designed to hype the shit out of your reflexes.”

She scooted the chair up to the table and plugged the connector into the back of her head.  “Sit down, Stalin.  Get comfortable.”

I sat on the bed and pulled the headband over my head.

There was a tiny microphone attached to the left side of the rig by a curved polycarbon arm.  I swung it down in front of my lips.

A color bar test pattern appeared in front of my eyes.  It was disorienting, because the left eye was nearly in focus, and the right wasn’t even close.

Jackal’s voice resonated inside my skull.  “Move the trodes around until the test pattern is nice and sharp in both eyes.”

I experimented with the black plastic disks for a couple of seconds.  “Okay, I’m good.”

“Have you ever been in the net before?”

“Simulation gear,” I said, “but not neural.”

“Sim isn’t anywhere near fast enough for what we’re going to do.  Remember this though: neural is a lot faster, but it’s also dangerous.  If things get hairy in there, get that rig off your head.  Don’t wait for me to tell you.  Got it?”

“Yeah.”

“Good,” she said.  “Now, hang on to your ass.”

She punched a key and the DataNet construct exploded into my head.

Deep space.  Black.  We are a tiny spark of white light.  A star hanging in a starless void.

Kilometers overhead, a florescent blue grid divides one axis of the void into perfect squares.

Without warning, the void spins one hundred eighty degrees.  Vertigo as the grid becomes the ground instead of the sky and we plummet toward it.

Details form below, tiny dots of color clustered around intersections of grid lines.

Still falling.  Diving toward the latticework ground.  Accelerating.

Colored dots increase in size, begin to assume individual shapes.

Shapes growing, expanding, increasing in clarity and detail until they are building-sized slabs of 3-D monochrome color scrolling below us at breakneck speed.

Still descending, we drop below the tops of the building analogs, careening through canyons of imaginary neon skyscrapers.

Vision blurs as a vicious snap-turn changes our course ninety degrees in a microsecond.

Beads of colored light flash down grid lines, brilliant sparks chained together like electronic strands of DNA riding the laser-fine blue graticules of the net.  Subliminal flickers and surges as subroutines rocket from database to database, handing off blocks of information code.

We circle a slender green skyscraper of data.  It sits at the intersection of two graticules, grid lines extending from it in four directions.

Despite my first impression, the skyscraper analog is not featureless.  Rectangular patterns of lighter and darker green mottle the surface.  The variations in shade are subtle and constantly changing as the database sorts and assimilates new information.

“That’s it.”  Jackal’s voice in my head.  “The number on the back of your trid.  It’s a public service line for Pacific Fusion and Electric.  I guarantee that PF&E has no idea that their line is being used as a callback service for murder.”

We skim the grid, carving a square perimeter around the PF&E database at a distance of two graticules, perhaps a hundred meters.

Every time we pass over an intersection of two grid lines, Jackal deposits a dense globule of program-code.  The globules attach themselves to the intersections and hang there like fat prisms of oily crystal.

We scroll sideways and survey Jackal’s handiwork.  Eleven prisms.  The twelfth is missing, leaving a single gap in the crystal perimeter.

“What now?”  Oddly, although Jackal’s voice sounds like it originates inside my head, my own voice sounds distant.

“We call the number,” Jackal says. “Read the poem, and see what happens.”

Before I can respond, she says, “Okay, it’s ringing.  We’re
in
.”

Her voice recites the strange verse inside my head.  “The time has come, the Walrus said...”

Four trains of multicolored sparks shoot out from the base of the skyscraper and race through the grid at blinding speed.

When each of the routines hits the intersection at the first graticule, it fragments into three smaller chains, one traveling straight, one turning right, the other left.

In an instant, four pieces of code have become twelve, all racing away from PF&E’s green data analog in different directions.

Eleven quick flares as all but one of the speeding pieces of code are gobbled up by Jackal’s booby traps.

The last program shoots through the opening in the perimeter.

Jackal screams down the grid line after it.

Our quarry pulls a ninety-degree turn at a junction and changes its appearance dramatically, sparks shift color and intensity.  Jackal sticks with it, hurtling through the net at the speed of thought.

“That’s one smooth block of code,” she says.  “It just turned itself into a Federal Tax Audit.”

“Can you follow it home?”

“That depends on how smart it is.  If it knows we’re on its ass, it won’t go home at all.”

The subroutine changes direction and color three times in rapid succession.

“What if it doesn’t go home?  What if it’s a decoy?”

“We catch it and take it apart.  I might be able to figure out who wrote it.  The little bastard just turned into a diplomatic inquiry from the Dominican Republic.”

Suddenly, we turn left.  The program goes straight.

“Why are...”

“Chill!”

We turn right and parallel the elusive subroutine, one graticule to its left and slightly to the rear.  It’s harder to see from here, but Jackal manages to follow it through a series of ninety degree acrobatics.

Her reflexes are unbelievably fast.  The Cuban mega-amphetamine is pushing her reaction time into the realm of the supernatural.

“If we give it a little breathing room, maybe it’ll think it’s shaken us.”  Her voice has a brittle metallic quality.  The drug is talking.

A picture pops into my head.  An image of the two of us sitting in a shabby room in Iron Betty’s little cult haven.  My body is perched on the bed, unconsciously bobbing and weaving in time to our perceived maneuvers through the net.  Jackal’s eyes are closed, her fingers fluttering across the keyboard.  Her lips are pulled back in a skeletal grin, the rictus of the Cuban speed riding her brain.

It is the illusion of flesh.

Reality lives in the DataNet.

The routine dodges and mutates.  It becomes a subscription pitch from a long distance company.  A prize notification from the State Lottery Commission.

Jackal whistles inside my skull.  “There it goes.  I think it’s headed home.”

The program pulls a final identity shift and shoots into the side of a towering red slab of data.

Jackal shears off and we climb away from the grid until the red analog is the size of a child’s building block.

“What is it?”

“An AI,” Jackal says.  “A big, ugly one.”

“Who does it belong to?”

A rectangular field of alphanumeric data pops into existence, superimposed over the image of the net.  Bright green numbers and letters flit and shift as the data runs through a sort.

After a couple of seconds, the data field vanishes, leaving a single line of green characters: 
29503.3>>13296.4>>55703.6>>LADG
.

“The mainframe’s right here in LA,” Jackal says.

“How can you tell?”

“From the grid coordinates.  The last four letters stand for Los Angeles Data Grid.”

“Can you find out who it belongs to?”

The rectangular data field reappears, and more numbers and letters flit by.  “It’s registered to somebody named Henry Clerval.”

“Excellent,” I say.  “See if you can get an address.”

“Hold up,” Jackal says.  “The name is phony; I guarantee it.”

“How do you know?”

“Nobody uses their real name in the net,” Jackal says.  “Not when they’re pulling something illegal.  If the owner of that AI is half as smart as I think he is, the registration will lead through an elaborate system of fronts, blinds, and re-posts that ultimately dead-end in some data-haven.  Maybe Key West, or one of the other Florida Pirate Republics.”

“So how do we track him down?”

“We take the direct approach,” she says.  We bank suddenly and plunge toward the red slab.

“Jackal...  I don’t think this is a good idea.”

The slab grows larger rapidly.