Shadowrun 01 - Never Deal With A Dragon (8 page)

__________________________

Takes More Than

a Salary, Man

__________________________

2051.

Samuel Verner had never believed the stories about the Ghost in the Machine.

However bizarre the tale, there was always a reasonable explanation. Some stories were pure fantasy while others were hoaxes by wiz-kid deckers or outright lies by incompetents seeking to hide their mistakes. There was no evidence for a disembodied sentience in the Matrix.

Now, under the electronic skies of the Renraku arcology's Matrix, he began to wonder.

A persona icon had entered the datastore where Sam's own projection was at work. The core of the icon was the standard Renraku corporate decker, the chromed image of a proper salaryman. The Raku logo pulsed in blue neon on the left breast, shoulders, and back of the figure's suitcoat. The chrome reflected the swirling numbers and letters that were the datastore's visual representation. Harsh red lines striped the icon’s surface like angry wounds, rude shadows of the luminous outline that surrounded the humanoid shape.

That wireframe simulacrum was a caricature of a
kabuki
clown. Any patron of that bawdy Japanese theater form would recognize this figure of pathos who inspired laughter among those spared the larger-than-life trials of the clownish victim. Sam was familiar with the image in the
kabuki
, and he was also familiar with it here in the Matrix. The hollow clown and its corporate core was the adopted persona icon of Jiro Tanaka.

But Jiro had been dead for at least three hours.

Just before beginning his work for the day, Sam had made an unauthorized access into the arcology's hospital data bank. Jiro's file was closed but not yet sealed. Within the file, the patient log recorded the cessation of Jiro's brain activity at 06:03 PST. Sam was saddened but not surprised; the young corporate decker had been sinking steadily for five days since his accidental fall from the promenade in the open mall. The two-story drop to the concrete had shattered bones and ruptured organs. The doctor's prognosis had been pessimistic, citing possible brain damage and an apparent lack of will to survive.

Yet now, Jiro's persona icon was active in the Matrix, threading its way through the mazes of data. It moved slowly, hesitantly, like a newly freed spirit adjusting to a novel form and abilities. Ghosts made little enough sense in the real world; they had no business in the analog world of the Matrix. This consensual hallucination used by computer operators to manipulate the immense dataflows at incredible computer speeds was not a real "world." It had no way to trap and hold souls.

Some of the rogue deckers infesting the datanets claimed that a decker's soul could be left trapped in the Matrix when some killer-countermeasures fried his brain. Sam had seen enough scientific documentation to know that such rumors were fantasies. The persona icon was only a placeholder, a marker that indicated where an operator's attention was focused in a computer system. It had no existence, even though another operator in the same part of the system could perceive it. The icon had no objective reality. It simply indicated where the decker was engaged, an analog for his activity among the datalines, optical chips, and computer architecture that was the Matrix. There was no place for spirits in the electronic world. Souls were the province of God, and when the body died they went on to His judgement. No machine could hold them back.

There had to be another explanation. Sam's program continued to run as he pondered the riddle. While his own icon remained stationary among the tumbling alphanumerics, nearly transparent because his cyberterminal was engaged in a "flow-through" search, the Jiro icon passed him. It gave no sign that it noted his presence, no hint of recognition. Sam felt simultaneous disappointment and relief. Even a ghost of Jiro could not have passed without acknowledgement. Whoever was using Jiro's icon was a stranger.

Sam's fingers flashed over the keys of his cyberterminal. The flow-through program disengaged and he activated the program he had named Tag Along. When the terminal brought Tag Along to active status, his icon flashed opaque, resolving into the standard Raku salaryman icon. Sam stood and placed himself behind the Jiro icon, pacing the intruder step for step and turn for turn. Occasionally, Sam's icon flickered suddenly to a new location, "teleporting" with the power of Tag Along to remain out of the Jiro icon's line-of-sight and thereby out of the operator's awareness.

The teleport was a function of the program that Sam didn't understand. He knew
why
it operated, he just didn't know
how
. But then, he was a user not a programmer. He didn't have to know. The ability had proven helpful in the those first few months after the kidnapping incident and that was enough for Sam.

The death of Jiro's wife had affected the young decker radically. His behavior had become erratic, leaving him surly and solitary where he once had been open and sociable. Renraku Corporation had reacted to the change, solicitous of its employees' welfare. When Sam reported the addition the young decker had made to his Matrix icon, the company psychiatrist agreed that monitoring was a reasonable precaution. The physician had authorized company software experts to write and emplace a custom watchdog program that would allow another decker to follow Jiro as he moved through the Matrix. Hardware modifications and custom software embedded in Jiro's cyberterminal workstation made the watcher invisible to the senses of Jiro's icon.

Sam had persuaded the psychiatrist that he was a good choice as a watcher. After all, Sam was one of the few people at the arcology who knew anything about Jiro. The doctor agreed that Sam might have a good chance of noting anomalies in Jiro's behavior, possibly picking up subtle references to past events. In fact, the doctor had agreed so readily that Sam suspected he might have done so because the plan was good therapy for Sam himself. Sam didn't care. Therapy or not, he wanted to watch over Jiro. Their experiences at the hands of the shadowrunners who had hijacked their shuttle had created a bond between them. Sam could not abandon Jiro, especially after seeing how easily his friend absorbed the nihilistic attitude of Alice Crenshaw, the other survivor of the hijacking.

The Jiro icon moved out of the datastore and deeper into the computer system, jolting Sam with a sudden shift in perspective. He was no longer accustomed to the forced movement of Tag Along. It had been months since the psychiatrist had certified Jiro as stable and thus discontinued the Tag Along authorization.

Sam fought off the disorientation, focusing on the task at hand. If this wasn't Jiro, then someone had entered the Renraku system illegally. No legitimate user could operate with someone else's persona programming; they wouldn't have the codes or know the passwords to unlock the software. Sam had a duty to the corporation to prevent misuse of the system.

He thought briefly about disengaging and alerting security, but rejected the idea because it would break his contact with the intruder. The Raku security deckers would probably find the outsider in short order, but in the meantime no one would know what he had been doing. And when they caught up with the icon, a dogfight would likely dump the intruder out of the Matrix. It would get rid of the intrusion but not the mystery behind it. Sam wanted to know who was impersonating his friend.

The icons slid down the datalines, passing by some nodes and through others. Occasionally, they passed images of red neon samurai. These guard figures were fixtures of the Renraku Matrix, the software that provided intrusion counter-measures, or what decker slang knew as ice. The guards were Matrix versions of Renraku's elite Red Samurai security forces, though the icons looked more like ancient Japanese warriors than the real guards in their neo-feudal body armor. As Sam expected, none of the samurai moved to oppose them. The passcodes embedded in their icons attested to their legitimate presence. Whoever was manipulating the Jiro icon was counting on such protective coloration.

In some of the areas through which they moved, the Matrix imagery was muddied, the sharpness of line in the constructs less than standard. At the first few nodes where the phenomena was obvious, the Jiro icon paused, seemingly interested in the effect. This was another clue that the intruder was an outsider, for every Renraku decker was familiar with the fuzzy areas that had become increasingly common along the datalines of the Raku architecture. The imagery-haze phenomena were random in duration and location, seeming not to affect computer performance. None of the deckers knew the origin of the disturbances, and their reports had drawn nothing more than a directive to continue logging all encounters with the phenomena.

The intruder spent time in several datafiles, but not once did Sam observe the stillness and flicker that he associated with downloading a file into a persona's memory. If the Jiro icon's controller was not going to steal any significant data, what was he up to? Was he simply a "joyrider," using Jiro's terminal to play around in the Matrix?

The intruder moved on.

At last the Jiro icon stood before the glittering barrier that the company deckers had tagged the Wall. The Wall was a featureless expanse of sputtering static, shades of gray contrasting starkly with the soft blue glow that suffused the Renraku architecture. This was forbidden territory, even to Raku deckers. The Jiro icon remained a long moment before the barrier as though contemplating it.

Was this the intruder's goal? An assault on the Wall? Sam disengaged the Tag Along just as the Jiro icon stepped forward, merging with the Wall and vanishing from his perception. Before Sam could enter the alert code, the icon reappeared, tumbling backward through the Wall. The clown-shape flickered, hissing and sputtering as the icon crashed into and skidded along the invisible surface that was the "floor" of the Matrix.

At the same moment, the Wall extruded a samurai that was of a piece with its parent, a menacing shape of static. The shifting surface tones blurred and disguised the detail in the samurai icon's imagery. It stepped free of the Wall, drawing a
katana
from its sash as it advanced on the Jiro icon. The sword blade crackled with lightnings as the samurai swept it up.

The Jiro icon rolled away from the first blow, leaving behind a ghostly image of itself. The samurai icon advanced on the ghost image. As the ghost struggled to rise, the samurai attacked, its
katana
slicing through the ghost's neck, neatly decapitating it. The head had barely separated from the ghost's body before both winked out of existence.

Snapping its head to the side, the samurai icon focused on the real Jiro icon. Though the deception had bought only a fraction of a second for the intruder, it was enough for him to ready an offensive program. The interior icon held a deadly looking pistol while the
kabuki
overlay superimposed a sputtering matchlock handgun on the standard Renraku Matrix image of the attack program. Chrome salaryman and wireframe clown raised their weapons, firing as the samurai charged.

The pistol roared on autofire. The reflection matchlock, operating as its prototype never could, fired again and again. In a crazy kind of slow motion, Sam saw the bullets impact the sputtering static armor of the samurai. There was no perceptible damage.

Reaching its opponent, the samurai icon loomed over the intruder. The
katana
swept up above the armored head and poised briefly before flashing down. The sword sliced through the outline clown but failed to connect with the inner chrome shape as the Jiro icon threw itself to the side. The wireframe outer Image vanished with a pop. The samurai took another step forward, twisting its body around to convert the momentum of its swing into another strike. The blow caught the Jiro icon as it tried to stand, staggering it backward. The chrome surface of the Jiro icon blackened where the sword had touched.

As the
katana
swept up, the battered remnant of the Jiro icon lifted an arm in a futile gesture of defense. The sword whooshed down, slicing through the upraised arm and driving into the chromed breast of the icon.

The Jiro icon vanished instantly. The samurai remained poised in full extension from the deadly blow, then snapped to an
en garde
pose. Above its head, the sparkling blade hissed evilly.

Sam remained still as the gray and black samurai turned in his direction. What he had just witnessed was not a computer-moderated game, nor a training exercise, nor a trideo entertainment. Its imagery may have been virtual, but its effects had been very real. The intruder controlling the Jiro icon was now likely dead or a mindless husk, the higher functions of his brain destroyed by the deadly attack of the computer-controlled samurai. Sam feared the samurai's scrutiny as the dark eyeholes of the armored facemask swept across his position, but the guard icon merely sheathed its sword. With a contemptuous swagger, the samurai turned back to the Wall and stepped into the flickering static. The figure merged with the Wall, vanishing as though it had never been.