Black Glass (32 page)

“What? What about the software? Who are you?”

“Destiny! I am Fate, Kismet, Destiny! Now run! The others are coming!”

She pointed to her left, Danny looked, and saw a phalanx of guerillas coming toward him across a small grassy meadow, a sun-washed clearing in the trees, the light glinting off the guns in their hands. One of them fired and bullets sang past him; two rounds cracked into a tree bole beside him, spitting splinters.

“It’s not real!” he shouted, his voice shaking with a deep existential indignation. But he turned and ran.

His muscles ached; his bones complained.
Even the pain is an illusion,
he told himself.
This feeling of breathlessness. All VR-INDUCED sensation, you fuckin’ duh-taunt! It’s just a first person shooter! Reject its reality!

Then he tripped over a rotting log and fell face first in the richly odorous droppings of some large jungle animal.

Spitting, still clutching the machete, Danny got to his feet, turned—and there was a “Captain Guerilla.” He remembered this bot from the
Combat In Columbia
game; there were four or five enemy types, all swarthy Columbian communists, but this one was more clean-cut than the others, wearing boots and a jacket with a captain’s insignia and an officer’s hat. He had both his ears, too. But his face was almost the same as the other, though clean shaven, and he gave the same grin as he raised the AK47—

A rage rose in Danny. Rage fueled by shame. “Oh fuck you!” Danny snarled, bracing himself. “Fuck the real world and fuck the fake! Fuck you and
fuck the whole thing!”

And then he rushed the AK47, swinging the machete.

He slashed down hard, cutting deep into the bot’s left shoulder—but the guerilla captain pulled the trigger at the same moment and Danny felt himself slammed in the sternum, thrown backwards, a coldness in his back as the bullets tore right through him ...

He fell onto his back on the mossy forest floor. Someone nearby spoke in Spanish. Someone else laughed.

More stunned than in pain. But he felt his lungs filling up with blood ... Felt himself beginning to drown ... his own body was drowning him ...

It’s not real. It’s not ...

But he
felt
it. And his body, back in Rack’s place, felt it. Felt his lungs filling, his heart stuttering, his blood pressure dropping. What he felt in VR his body felt, responded to, his physical heart so integrated with this digital vision, this neurological simulation, that his heart’s missing beats in the game was his heart missing beats in life ...

His heart beating slowly, as he lay there on his back, slowly—then fast, missing a beat ... the sky glimpsed through the trees pixilating ... the edges of the fronds overhead growing low resolution and dark ... His mind losing its ‘rez’ too ... Couldn’t feel his legs or hands ...

“Rick ...” he said. “Oh my brother. I’m sorry. Rick ... Mom ... why ya ... why ya have to ... Rick ... I’m sorry ...”

Low rez. Image too dark. Too dark. Adjust brightness ... adjust brightness, hode ... adjust brightness ... It’s all ... too ...

“Goodbye, little Danny boy,” came the strange, chorused voice close to his ear. And it was the last thing he ever heard.

“W
hat?” Targer looked sharply at Rack Nidd. “You said he had the thing. I assumed you meant he had it with him, right there, on stick.” Targer was standing with Rack and the brawny, dark skinned Slakon-liaison LAPD back-up Officer, Sergeant Tonio Bleeker, the three of them staring down at Danny’s body. The body of the one-time rock star was twisted in the filthy VR webbing; blood trailing from the corners of his mouth. Eyes staring. Bruises on his bared chest.

“No,” Rack said. “I didn’t say that. He said he was going to take me to it. I didn’t know what was going on in there, I had earmites in, I was listening to a tech-cast. I heard him yell some but people yell in VR all the time and I couldn’t tell what the fuck he was saying. How’d I know he was gonna die? He never did before and he’s done my V-rides a lot. I don’t understand how the program he was running got into the system, anyway. I looked at some clips after it went through and—I don’t recognize any of it. He was supposed to get ‘Sweet Island Girl’. He got some kind of variant on an old First Person Shooter. Old thing called
Combat In Columbia.
Those old games, even if you get ‘killed’ you just get a black-out and respawn or it’s game over, and you go and get yourself a fucking beer. I mean—I’ve heard of people getting
stuck
, getting so identified that they, you know, die in VR, but that’s rare, that shouldn’t have happened, it’s not something we ... That I ...” The robot scorpion on his shoulder was stalking back and forth, chittering something. Rack hissed at it, “Quiet, Jiminy, goddamnit!”

“Whatever program you use here—it’s all illegal,” Targer pointed out.

Targer was slapping an RR stick in his hand—recoil reversal. It was also an electric prod, if he activated the charge on the metal-capped end.

Rack was looking at the RR stick. Then up at Bleeker, the backup cop, in uniform, assigned to help Targer; a broad-shouldered Chicano/black man with short, immaculately shaped hair, a small mustache, a luminous
LAPD RULES OK?
tattoo on the back of his right hand, and an auto-shotgun held loose in his left.

“The ambulance is coming, Mr. Targer,” Bleeker said. “But this boy’s been dead too long. Already starting to stiffen up. Nobody going to bring him back.”

Targer nodded. “Well, now. Is it the dead body that smells in here, Officer Bleeker, or is it this scumbag of a V-rat hook-in here?”

“Too soon for the body,” Bleeker said with a straight face. “I think it’s our scorpion boy here we’re smelling.”

Rack’s eyes flicked back and forth between them, taking in the expressions on their faces. He backed away, toward the filthy curtain, his robot scorpion capering on his shoulder, hissing. “Hey—this ain’t my fault, hode. And you owe me, I found the hode and called you—you can search his place, search his snapper. . .”

“His snapper, from his satchel? The one that was completely wiped?”

“What? I didn’t wipe it!”

“I just checked it, the thing’s been wiped.”

“I didn’t do it but that model, hode, it can be wi-wi’ed.”

“And who did the wireless wipe?”

“I don’t know! Whoever fed him that sick killer program maybe, there’s shit comin’ in here from outside that shouldn’t be—okay, uh, I’m gonna leave you guys to it—just ... just transfer the reward to my account ... I’m gonna ...” He backed through the curtain into the loft’s main room.

“Seems like he’s rabbiting outta here,” said Bleeker. “And him a suspect in illegal VR, with a dead V-rat on the premises.” It was, really, a kind of suggestion—and a query.

“Can’t have him running,” Targer said, answering the almost unspoken question. They couldn’t have Rack running around, talking or posting or texting about the semblant decrypt software. That would not please Mr. Grist.

They followed Rack out, caught up with him trying to go out the loft door. Targer hit him in the right shoulder with the RR stick, fairly hard, and the technology doubled the impact so that Rack was sent spinning—the robot scorpion clinging, hissing—to fall on his side. He lay there groaning. The robot scorpion climbed onto his back and hissed, made threatening motions at them with its stinger.

“You know, I hear if you give those little pet robots a charge, they get all kinda funny and forget who their friends are,” Bleeker said.

“That right?” Targers switched on the electric prod function of his RR stick. He hunkered just within reach of the scorpion, as Rack tried to get to his hands and knees, and reached out, touched the scorpion with the electrified tip. Sparks flew and the robot scorpion did a backflip, ran back and forth, giving off little wisps of smoke—and spasmodically slapping its stinger down into the nearest target. Which was Rack Nidd.

Rack shrieked and writhed and yelled at Jiminy but it was over, pretty quick.

“So he does have poison in that thing,” Bleeker said, watching Rack’s convulsions. “Thought he might. Never sorry to see these guys check out.”

“Might’ve been a little precipitous,” Targer said, stepping back from the robot scorpion as it ran toward him. Watching as Bleeker crushed it under his boot. “Maybe I shoulda waited and asked some more questions.” Thinking that he’d killed Rack as much out of revulsion, as anything. And frustration. Letting the ex-rock star die—putting Danny Candle out of reach. Now there were more imponderables. Loose ends. “He might’ve known something more about where that memstick is. If there is one.”

Rack had stopped convulsing. Targer nudged the hook-in with the toe of his boot. He was dead.

“We can try to find out where he’s been staying ...” Bleeker suggested. “Search the place. This one and then ... wherever this
Danny has been.” He cleared his throat. Added in a low voice, “Might help if I knew what the software was.”

Targer chuckled. “There’s an old saying about, ‘If I told you ... ’”

“Oh, you’d have to ...” Then, it seemed, Bleeker realized that, despite the chuckle, Targer wasn’t kidding. “Whatever. Just tell Mr. Grist I’m doing my all, here. I’d like to work closer to the company one of these days. I need better benefits than I’m getting where I am ...”

“I’ll tell him. Let’s toss this place and then see what we can do about tracing the road-killed party animal in the back room...You said there was an ambulance coming?”

“Yeah. You don’t want it? Figure it’ll scare your man away?”

Targer shook his head. “Actually—he sees his brother loaded into an ambulance that might bring Candle rushing right into our hands.” He tapped a wrist talker. “Mike? You there? Any sign of Rick Candle?”
“No sir.”

But Rick Candle was there.

It had taken some time to find out where Rack was currently holed up. People on the street were reluctant to give up the information. Candle had bruised his knuckles finding out.

Had headed over here quick as he could. Gotten within a block of Rack’s, that warm, misty evening, and he’d seen a guy he figured for a Slakon operative. He’d seen him, four years back, somewhere around their security operations. Mike something.

So Candle had skirted the block, found a back way into a moldering SRO hotel across from Rack’s. Now, hunched against the rain, hands in his coat pockets, he was watching from the black-tar roof, catty-corner from Rack’s place.

Thinking maybe he should get in there, whatever it took. But some instinct told him it was no use.

Somehow, he knew Danny was dead.

There was an empty spot in him. It ached like the hollow you pulled a tooth from. Usually he had an awareness of Danny, just the
Dannyness
of him, of his brother being around somewhere
in the world, in that spot.

Now that place inside him was empty.

Maybe just anxiety, worry, my imagination
, he thought.

Kenpo would be skeptical. “That kind of thing, too subjective, might be real, might not, best to ignore it, at the level we function on,” Kenpo had said, once.

“Ignore it,” Candle muttered, swiping wet hair out of his eyes.

But he knew. Danny was gone. So he stayed where he was, letting the knowledge smolder. It wasn’t a flame yet. But it would be. And then he’ d do something about it.

Don’ t jump at it, Rick.
Maybe the kid was okay. Maybe it was his imagination. Maybe ...

A siren came yowling closer, its sound warping in the city canyons. Like a howling announcement, a confirmation of what he suspected.

Maybe it’s not for him. Going somewhere else.

But the ambulance drove up the street, wavelengths in its yowling getting shorter. The cry suddenly cutting off as it pulled up.

A few more minutes. Then the attendants were guiding the walking robotic gurney down the stairs to the street. And he could tell from here—he knew the hair, poking out from under the sheet—that it was Danny.

He could tell by their lack of hurry, no urgency at all, that Danny was dead beyond recovery. No resuscitation possible.

“You fucking ...” So disgusted with himself he couldn’t think of an insult strong enough. “You let him wander off ...”

He watched the attendants and the cops, standing around chatting in a leisurely way, exchanging information, loading the body into the ambulance.

Not surprising, seeing a second body come out of the building. Rack Nidd, probably. In the same ambulance with Danny’s body. Which was wrong, all wrong. That scumbag in there with Danny Candle. Collaborator in Danny’s death, one way or another.

Candle was sorry he’d been cheated out of personally killing Rack Nidd.

Was Targer here? Maybe he should take out Targer right now. But if he did, he’d go down himself, with all the thugflesh here,
and he wouldn’t be around to take Grist down.

Candle watched the men on the street below, feeling like he was made of stone; like he was a gargoyle carved on the roof. Like he couldn’t feel the rain. Just that heavy rocky deadness. That granite feeling, over his whole body. Watching as they loaded the ambulance and went away.

The Slakon operatives were still there. A uniformed cop. And a familiar figure in a long coat—Targer, wasn’t it? Slakon security chief? Targer looking around. Getting reports. People shaking their heads, shrugging. No one looking up at the roof across the street.

Another flurry of activity. Targer ordering his men to carry boxes of VR gear and snappers out of Rack’s place. Put the stuff into the vans.

Finally ... they were giving up and going away. Or at least seeming to. Maybe some of them left around, somewhere, watching Rack’s building. Waiting for Candle to show up.

Grist had done this.

Must have found out about the semblant software Danny had. Sent his men to kill Danny and Rack. Make it look like the two criminals had resisted.

Grist.

Candle stood there a while, getting slowly, slowly wetter. Water crawling down his neck, his shoulders, his back. As the night thickened around him.

Finally he made himself move. He turned away, walked stiffly to the door that went to the stairway ... . taking the stairs down ...

Down to the first floor. Stepping over numbdumbers in the pissy hallway. Going out back to the trashy ruin of the building behind ... Slipping through it, slipping away ... But not running. Walking slowly, carefully, implacably. Hitting the street ...

To begin the hunt.

He found Spanx watching a cracked old PC; it was streaming television that was like slightly unfitted jigsaw pieces because of the crack in the monitor.

“Hode—how’d you get in here?” Spanx asked, looking up from the center of the swirling pile of debris that was his living room. He was sitting on an old brown leather foot-rest on the matted, brown—possibly brown—carpet.

“Your place is about as difficult to get into as a two-dollar whore,” Candle said, looking around. “You ever clean this scuzz-hole ?”

“I did once. It was sad. When it was clean it made me miss my mom.” Spanx looked back at the TV. “People keep fucking dyin’ on me, hodey brudder.” He glanced at Candle. “You’re all wet big Candle brudder. Even I got an umbrella. I mean, it’s all, like, down in there somewhere. It’s under all that shit. Happy-happy shit, some of it fit.”