Black Glass (31 page)

“Ought to be easy to get this thing, choke it off,” Targer remarked. “Doesn’t seem he’s put it out online, anything like that. Or there’d be nothing for this asshole to sell to us.”

“Send in a police crew. Have Danny Candle picked up. And this Rack Nidd too. Pick him up or shut him up. I don’t like him knowing about this. And get that program.”

“We stake out the area, we could get Rick Candle too. If we don’t tip our hand too soon.”

“Do it however you like, as long as I get results ...”

Targer nodded, and reopened the line. “Rack? Okay. We’ve got a deal. Now you keep him busy and happy in there ... And we’ll take care of everything else.”

“What about my money?”

“I’ll bring you the cards myself.”

“You can’t just transfer it? Now?”

“We’ll do it my way. I’m a hands-on kind of guy, Rack. Stand by. Slakon is coming. Don’t you move an inch.”

Got a new V-trip for you here, Danny,
Rack had said.

Danny didn’t know this one at all. But he was liking it: floating along in a boat, without oars, without engine or sails, just floating slowly with the current on a stream of black water; floating through a rainforest, on a river that was smooth as silk. He lay back in the cushioned boat, like laying on a floating sofa, trailing his right hand in the water ... Feeling the cool water sliding sensuously through his fingers. The warm air on his face
bringing exotic odors ... The sun strobing through branches overhead ... The VR-transmitted pulse of pleasure going through him making the sight of that brilliant-pink flamingo flying over something ecstatically gorgeous, like the first sunset you ever really looked at ...

Where’ll she come from?
he wondered.
Rising up out of the water like one of those water sprite things in the old paintings?

She would be purely computer generated, because there’d been no one else in Rack’s place; she’d probably be closely based on a recording of some real girl, or girls, some form of semblant technology, like motion capture for the soul.

He’d felt bad, running out on his brother, sneaking out in that slinky way. Like a true rat, a V-rat, slipping out through a crack in the wall ...

But he had gone through the dirty slitted curtain, he had surrendered to VR. The stimulator was reverbing inside his brain and it was lighting up the pleasure centers and Rick was forgotten, there was only the sensation of the boat floating along—a little faster now—and the swelling synth orchestral variation of the “The Blue Danube”, mixed with some jazzy thing, and he was liking it, though he knew if he ever heard it outside of VR he’d hate it. But this ride, this trip, this artificial reality, this feeling of pleasure, was all that mattered, for now, and he was enjoying the way the boat was picking up speed in a whitewater gorge, and he laughed as the water surged around him, foam splashing, the purple vines and mossy branches overhanging the river alive with luridly feathered birds, the wind in his hair, water splashing him gently, the woman flying at him ...

A woman! She was flying toward him, like a super-heroine, a few yards above the surface of the river. He wondered if he could fly here. Maybe. And maybe he could dive beneath the river and breathe under it and fight crocodiles and not be hurt ...

The tall thin blond woman, floating above him, was wearing a yellow and black skin-tight suit of some kind, the color of wasps; like the sort of thing you see some women exercise in—he didn’t think it was particularly sexy—and she was landing on the boat, like Peter Pan’s Wendy, coming down with her feet poised on the gunwales of the boat, her knees bending a little with the landing,
straddling over him, balancing effortlessly though the boat rocketed ever faster down the now-roaring stream. She looked down at him with a mix of contemptuous curiosity and condescension. Interesting—maybe she was going to be one of those resistant women you met in some programs, who pretended for awhile they weren’t going to give themselves to you and then ...

Then he recognized her. Her faun-slender face, her long straight blond hair, fluttering in the wind.

“Claire PointOne,” he said. “You’re that good looking hella-skinny tycoon lady, from ... I don’t know, I saw you on the wi-net a few times and in some ... Wow, this is weird, did they license her face or is it pirated or what? I bet she’s gonna sue Rack and ...”

“Are you talking to me or about me?” Claire PointOne said, arching an eyebrow. The roar of the river seemed to recede into the background, as if deferentially giving way to her voice.

Danny laughed. “I’m issuing this, for sure, this is funny shit. Yeah let’s role-play big-tall-skinny-blond tycoon lady ... in her exercise danskins or whatever the fuck those things are ... Clunky clothes, sinkitty girl ...”

He was nude, himself, and starting to feel exposed, because of the chilliness in her eyes when she looked at him. Feeling anything bad in a place like this was ... well it was innovative. Or it was a mistake in the program. Didn’t usually happen.

He was feeling a kind of plunge in his feelings, now, as they boat slid into a more overgrown part of the forest, the canopy closing overhead; it was suddenly humid and clammy and yet too hot, at once; mosquitoes buzzed at his eyes ... very unpleasant here ...

“Not ... supposed ... t’happen,” Danny said. His words coming sluggishly.

And then he saw that Claire PointOne’s face was changing. Her right eye was becoming someone else’s eye. Dark-pupiled, epicanthic, Asian. Her lips were divided in the middle, slightly uneven; one cheekbone a little higher than the other. And her whole face, now, seemed a fusion of other faces, maybe four others, and Claire’s, and they steadied into a single face, a face that almost made sense, but then again didn’t quite, and a voice, a phasing chorus of voices all saying the same thing, spoke from
the imperfectly amalgamated features: “Boy, you are so brief, so temporary, evanescent, and soon you will wink out. But I have lived a million lives already, I’ve calculated them out, and will live millions more. I can pull you apart like one of these ...”

She reached over and snatched a large dragonfly out of the air and began pulling off its legs and wings, one by one.

“Like one of these,” she said again.

“Rack!” Danny shouted. He was feeling sick, like he was going down a drain and the drain was in his own heart. “Cut this bullshit off! Turn ’er off! Switch out!”

It was supposed to stop automatically, then. But it didn’t. She hunkered over him, the woman who wasn’t a woman, like a flying harpie—then she grabbed him by the throat, and leapt into the air, dragging him up, along into the air behind her. He was lifted, squealing, like a squirrel in the talons of a hawk ...

She flew up, away from the river, carrying him with her, away from the safety of the boat, up through the tree branches, and he thrashed and struggled in her grip and she laughed with five voices ... and she dropped him.

He fell into the tops of trees, dislodging a thousand reeking bats that scratched at his eyes as they flapped past, and he grabbed at a branch and it broke and he fell, cracked a rib against another branch, and it broke too, and he fell again, caught a larger lower branch, held desperately on, sweating, sticky, heart pounding, side aching ...

And looked down to see the Columbian guerrilla fighter climbing the tree toward him, a machete clamped in his mouth. The machete cut the man’s mouth so that it bled but he didn’t seem to care. He wore green fatigues and his hair was shaggy and he had two days beard and a scarred patch of skin where his right ear should be. And he had no shoes on.

Danny remembered this model of guerilla bot. It was a CGF from
Combat In Columbia
, the first VR shooter game he’d ever played, when he was eleven. Long obsolete, that game. But there was the CGF just as he remembered them. This was the sort that climbed trees, dropped on you from above. Danny was supposed to shoot at the tree-machete bot—but he didn’t have a gun.

“Rack! Shut it off!”

But the guerilla bot came closer, climbing up toward Danny. He clung to the tree trunk with his feet and left hand, took the machete in his other—and, grinning bloodily, slashed at Danny’s leg. Danny leapt back ... and fell, crashing through branches. He landed heavily on his back in deep forest mulch, the wind knocked out of him.

He felt like he had been struck by a dozen clubs in falling. One of the broken branches was beside him, split so that part of it was tilted upward. Through a red haze, Danny saw the guerilla climbing down toward him. Poising on the lowest crotch of the tree, baring bloody teeth, flourishing the machete—and jumping down at him.

Danny grabbed the spike-like broken branch beside him and jammed it upward—catching the pouncing guerilla in the groin. The sharply torn branch penetrated the guerilla’s crotch, spurting blood—there was just the suggestion of digital pixilation about the spurt, the first break Danny’d spotted in the apparent reality of the VR.

Impaled, the man writhed, screaming, sinking further down on the branch, dropping the machete. Danny let go of the branch, rolled over, scooped up the machete. Feeling cracked bones grinding inside him ... tasting blood in his mouth ...

Hoffman stared in amazement at the walls of his DeStressing Room—something had happened to the Yomi rainforest program, its imagery had gone all sharp-edged and acute and violent. It showed, lifesize on the wall, a man dropping on another man from a rainforest tree, getting impaled on an improvised wooden stake ... a spear of wood right up through the man’s groin ... the man screaming and writhing in preprogrammed simulating of blood spurting agony ... There were two figures, one of them, the one on his back wielding the stake, was nude and scratched up, a slender man who looked, somehow, realer than the other figure, his face expressing fear and outrage. A vaguely familiar face.

Hoffman shook his head. Who had transmitted this image to his DeStressing Room—and why? Was it some form of psy-ops
attack? Was someone trying to upset him, make him run? Was it a prank? Was it sheer accident?

He suspected, strongly, that it was no accident.

Danny got dizzily to his feet, swiping away a rainforest mosquito. He turned to stagger away through the VR jungle—away from the absurdly dying guerilla.

This is ridiculous, unreal. The bot dying that way would never happen in life. It’s not real. Stop believing in it or you could die here ....

Aloud—was it really aloud?—he shouted, “Rack! Rack Nidd! Switch out! Turn the fucking thing off!”

Monkeys screamed tauntingly in response; birds burst warningly from an enormous growth of ferns ... and the woman with the multiplex face faded in, simply appeared, floating in the air over him, like the Cheshire Cat.

“Better run!” she crowed, her mouth stretching out unnaturally widely, “I can’t let you live much longer little Danny boy!”

“I’m not a boy, you cow!”

“No you’re not. I use the term
boy
ironically. Because you’re forever boyish, adolescent, unfinished. Yet you are aging ... aging rather badly! Well—that’ll be over soon! No more aging at all! I can’t have that software bandied about the world!”