City of Golden Shadow

  Tasting his own acids, Dread spat again. He must be patient. For the moment, anger was useless except as carefully-controlled fuel; it was far easier and smarter just to keep doing what the Old Man wanted. For the moment. There would be a day later on when the jackal would rise to its master's throat. Patience. Patience.

  He lifted his head into the frame of the mirror and stared at his reflection. He needed to see himself clean again, hard, untouched. No one had made him feel this way for a long time, and the ones who had were all dead now. Only the first few had died quickly.

  Patience. No mistakes. He steadied his breathing and straightened up, stretching the kinks from aching stomach muscles. He leaned forward, zooming into close-up, the hero looking back with dark flat eyes, swallowing his pain. Unstoppable. Music up. Coming back strong.

  He stared at the puke-stained tub for a moment, then turned on the water, washing the vomit away in a swirl of brown. Edit that—edit the whole tub scene. Missed the point. Unstoppable.

  At least this new job would be RL. He was tired of the costumed silliness of these rich fools, living out fantasies that would shame the lowest chargehead just because they could afford to. This task would have real risks, and it would end in real blood. That was worthy of him, at least, and of his special skills.

  The target, though. . . . He frowned. Despite what he'd said to the Old Man, he wasn't crazy about being in the middle of one of these Brotherhood feuds. Too unpredictable, like some net thing he'd seen back in school, kings and queens, scheming, poisoning. Still, such things had a hidden benefit. Let them all kill each other. It would just hasten the day when he could make things happen.

  He rinsed his mouth again, then walked back to his bed. He needed his music—no wonder he felt off-balance. The soundtrack put everything into perspective, kept the story moving. He hesitated, remembering the agony the implants had so recently brought him, but only for a moment. He was Dread, and his chosen name was also his chosen game. His. No old man was going to frighten him.

  He summoned up the music. It came without pain, a firm syncopation, quiet conga drums and dragging bass. He laid a series of sustained organ chords over them. Ominous but cool. Thinking music. Planning music. You'll-never-catch-me music.

  Even now, that downtown parking garage must be full of police detectives, dusting, scanning, taking infrareds, wondering why the crime didn't show up on their closed-circuit camera-drones. All standing around examining the rags of white and red.

  Poor pussy. And she hadn't wanted anyone touching her stuff.

  Another one dead, they'd be saying. All over the net soon. He'd have to remember to watch some of the coverage.

  Dread leaned back against the bare white wall as the music pulsed through him. Time to do some work. He summoned the information the old bastard had sent him, then called up some visuals, maps first, then LEOS scans and 3D blues of the target location. They floated in the air before him like heavenly visions against the background of the other white wall.

  All his walls were white. Who needed pictures when you could make your own?

  CHAPTER 9

  Mad Shadows

  NETFEED/ENTERTAINMENT: Concrete Sun Highest Rated for May

  (visual: several explosions, man in white coat running)

  VO: The series-ending episode of Concrete Sun was the most watched net entertainment for the month of May—

  (visual: man in white coat kissing one-legged woman)

  —appearing in sixteen percent of homes worldwide,

  (visual: man in white coat carrying a bandaged dog through culvert)

  The story of a fugitive doctor hiding out in the squatter city of BridgeNTunnel is the highest rated linear drama in four years. . . .

  Renie turned her head sharply and the test pattern—an unending domino-row of grids in contrasting colors-jiggled. She grimaced. A touch against one of the dimples on the side of her headset brought up the pressure in the padding. She waggled her head; now the image stayed put.

  She lifted her hands, then curled her right index finger. The front grid, a simple lattice of glowing yellow, remained where it was; all the other grids moved a little farther apart from each other, rippling out into the indeterminate distance, one full lockstep into infinity. She bent the finger farther and the distance between each grid shrank. She wagged the finger to the right and the entire array rotated, each a fraction of an instant behind the one before it, so that a neon spiral formed and then vanished as the grids came to rest once more. "Now you do it," she told !Xabbu.

  He carefully wove his hands through a complex series of movements, each of which marked different points of distance and attitude from the sensor affixed to the front of his visor like a third eye. The unending sequence of colored grids responded, spinning, shrinking, changing relationships like an exploding universe of square stars. Renie nodded in approval even though !Xabbu could not see her—the test pattern and the all-surrounding blackness were the only visuals.

  "Good," she said. "Let's try out your memory. Take as many of those grids as you want—not from the front—and make a polyhedron."

  !Xabbu carefully withdrew his selections from the array. As the rest moved to fill the vacated space, he stretched those he had chosen and folded them in half along the diagonal, then rapidly assembled the paired triangles into a faceted ball.

  "You are getting good." She was pleased. Not that she could lake too much credit—she had never taught anyone who worked as hard as !Xabbu, and he had a tremendous natural aptitude. Very few people could adapt themselves to the unnatural rules of netspace as quickly and completely as he had.

  "Then may I put this away now, Renie?" he asked. "Please? We have been preparing all morning."

  She nicked her hand and the test pattern disappeared. A moment later they stood facing each other in a 360-degree ocean of gray, sim to unprepossessing sim. She bit back a nettled reply. He was right. She had been delaying, going over and over her preparations as though this were some kind of combat mission instead of a simple trip into the Inner District in search of information.

  Not that, strictly speaking, there was such a thing as a simple trip into Inner District for outsiders like them. There might very well be barriers they could not pass no matter how well prepared they were, but she did not want to be unmasked and ejected because of some stupid, preventable mistake. Also, if there was something illegal and dangerous going on in Toy-town, discovery of her investigation would put the guilty ones on guard and perhaps even lead them to destroy evidence that otherwise might save Stephen.

  "I did not intend to be rude, Renie." !Xabbu's sim lifted its simple hands in a gesture of peace; a rather mechanical-looking smile curled the corners of its mouth. "But I think that you, too, will be happier when we are doing something."

  "You're probably right. Disconnect and exit."

  Everything vanished. She lifted the visor on her headset and the earnest but seedy ambience of the Poly's Harness Room surrounded her once more. The Bushman pushed up his own visor and blinked, grinning.

  Reflexively, she began one final run through her mental checklist. While !Xabbu had finished his exams—which, the grapevine told her, he had handled with expected ease—she had created not just aliases to get them into the Inner District, but several backups as well. If things went badly, they could shuck off their first identities like old skin. But it had not been easy. Creating a false online identity was no different from creating one for RL, and was in many ways the same process.

  Renie had spent a good portion of her time in the last few days hunting through backwater areas of the net. There were lots of vaguely unsavory people lurking in Lambda Mall's equivalent of dark alleyways for whom setting up false identities was everyday work, but ultimately she had decided to do it herself. If her investigations of the Inner District struck something important, the offended parties would go looking for the bootleg identity merchants first; not a one of them would take a stand for privileged information when their livelih
ood and perhaps even health was at stake.

  So, pumped up on caffeine and sugar, smoking an endless chain of theoretically noncarcinogenic cigarettes, she had set off to do a little akisu, as the old-timers called it. She had worked her way through hundreds of obscure infobanks, copying bits and pieces as it suited her, inserting false cross-check data on the systems whose defenses were outdated or weak enough. She had created a reasonably solid false identity for both of them, and—she hoped—even some insurance if things went very wrong.

  She had also learned a few things about Mister J's along the way, which was one of the reasons she had been drilling !Xabbu all morning. The Inner District club had a very dark reputation, and interfering with its operation might have some unpleasant real world repercussions. Despite her initial impatience, she was glad !Xabbu had talked her into waiting for him. In fact, even another week to prepare wouldn't have gone amiss. . . .

  She took a breath. Enough. If she weren't careful, she would turn into one of those obsessive-compulsives who turned back five times to make sure the door was locked.

  "Okay," she said. "Let's get going."

  They made a few final tests of their harnesses, both of which hung from the ceiling by an arrangement of straps and pulleys that would allow their users freedom of movement in VR, as well as prevent them from walking into real walls or hurting themselves with a fall. When the pulleys had hauled them aloft, they dangled side by side in the middle of the padded room like a pair of marionettes on the puppeteer's day off.

  "Do what I say without questions. We can't afford to make mistakes—my brother's life could be at stake. I'll give you answers afterward." Renie checked one last time to make sure none of the wires would be worked loose by the action of the harness straps, then pulled her visor back down; the visuals flicked on and the gray sparkle of the waiting net surrounded her. "And remember, even though the closed band is provided by the Inner District, not the club itself, once we get inside you'd better assume that someone is listening."

  "I understand, Renie." He sounded cheerful, which was amazing considering that she had already given him the eavesdroppers speech twice before that morning.

  She waved her hands and they went.

  The crowd waiting at the Inner District Gateway was a brightly colored, noisy blur. As the clamor of their multilingual pleading thundered painfully in her ears, she realized that in her anxiety not to miss any possible clues she had set the gain on her sensory inputs too high. A flick of the wrist and a circled finger brought them down to a manageable level.

  After a wait that had Renie bouncing in place with impatience, they at last slid to the front of the line. The female functionary was polite and seemed remarkably uninterested in making trouble. She examined their false identification, then asked if the reason for their visit, submitted as part of the ID package, was still correct.

  "It is. I'm examining an installation we've had a complaint about." Renie's alias showed her working for a large Nigerian programming company with !Xabbu as her trainee—a gear company which, she had discovered, kept very sloppy records.

  "And how much time will you need, Mister Otepi?"

  Renie was astonished—actual kindness! She was not used to tractability from net bureaucrats. She eyed the smiling sim carefully, wondering if she were dealing with some new kind of hyper-actualized Customer Service Puppet."It's hard to say. If the problem is simple enough, I may fix it myself, but first I must run it through its paces to find out"

  "Eight hours?"

  Eight! She knew people who would pay several thousand credits for that long a period of access to the Inner District—in fact, if she had any time left over when they finished, she was tempted to go find one of them. She wondered if she should try to get more—maybe this Puppet was broken, a slot machine that would just pay and pay—but decided not to press her luck. "That should be adequate."

  A moment later they were through, floating just above ground level in monumental Gateway Plaza.

  "You don't realize it," she told !Xabbu on their private band, "but you've just witnessed a miracle."

  "What is that?"

  "A bureaucratic system that actually does what it's supposed to do."

  He turned to her, a half-smile illuminating the face of the sim Renie had arranged for the visit "Which is to let in two disguised people who are pretending to have legitimate business?"

  "Nobody likes a comedian," she pointed out, then exited from the private band. "We're clear. We can go anywhere we want to now, except private nodes."

  !Xabbu surveyed the plaza. "The crowds seem different here than in the Lambda Mall. And the structures are more extreme."

  "That's because you're closer to the center of power. People here do what they want because they can afford to." A thought came swirling up like a flake of hot black ash. "People who can get away with anything. Or think they can." Stephen was comatose in the hospital while the men who had hurt him enjoyed their freedom. Her anger, never completely cold, rekindled. "Let's go have a look around Toytown."

  Lullaby Lane was far more crowded than the last time she had been there, almost choked with virtual bodies. Caught by surprise, Renie pulled !Xabbu into an alley so she could figure out what was happening.

  The crowd flowed past the alley mouth in one direction, shouting and singing. It seemed to be a parade of sorts. The sims were embodied in a variety of bizarre ways, oversized, undersized, extra-limbed, even divided into unconnected body parts that moved like coherent wholes. Some of the revelers shifted and changed even as she watched: one violet-haired, attenuated figure wore enormous bat wings which dissolved into traceries of fluttering silver gauze. Many reformed themselves every few moments, extruding new limbs, changing heads, spreading and curling into fantastic shapes like boiling wax dumped in cold water.

  Welcome to Toytown, she thought Looks like we arrived just in time for a reunion of the Hieronymous Bosch Society.

  She took the Bushman up to rooftop level where they could get a better view. Several in the crowd bore glowing banners proclaiming "Freedom!" or spelled it out above their heads in fire; one group had even turned themselves into a walking row of letters that spelled out "Mutation Day." Although most of the paraders' sims were extreme by design, they were also rather unstable. Some of them fell apart into unstructured planes and lines in a way that did not look intentional. Others flickered in midstep and occasionally disappeared entirely.

  Home-cooked programming, she decided. Do-it-yourself stuff. "It's a protest, I think," she told !Xabbu.

  "Against what person or thing?" He hung in the air beside her, a cartoon figure with a serious expression on its simple face.

  "Embodiment laws, I would guess. But they can't be suffering much if they can afford to hang out here in the first place." She made a small noise of contempt "Rich people's children complaining because their parents won't let them dress up. Let's go."

  They beamed past the procession to the far end of Lullaby Lane where the streets were empty. Without the distraction of street theater the rundown quality of the neighborhood was immediately apparent. Many of the nodes seemed to have grown even more decrepit since her last visit; both sides of the street were lined with skeletal, colorless buildings.

  A distant, skittery flare of music at last turned them toward a garish glow at the street's far end. In such dim surroundings, the awful, throbbing liveliness of Mister J's seemed even more sinister.

  !Xabbu stared at the turreted sprawl and the giant carnivorous grin. "So that is it"

  "Private band," Renie snapped. "And keep it there unless you have to answer a question from someone. As soon as you finish answering, switch back. Don't worry about being slow to respond—I'm sure they get lots of people in that place whose reflexes are not what they should be."

  They slowly floated forward, watching the club's facade gleam and squirm.

  "Why are there no people about?" asked !Xabbu.

  "Because this isn't a part of the Inner District t
hat invites much sightseeing. People who come to Mister J's probably beam in directly. Are you ready?"

  "I believe so. Are you?"

  Renie hesitated. The question seemed flippant, but that was not the Bushman's way. She realized she was wound tight and hard, her nerves thrumming. She took several deep breaths, willing herself toward calm. The toothy mouth over the doorway flapped its red lips as though whispering a promise. Mister Jingo's Smile, this place had been called. Why did they change the name but keep that horrid grimace?

  "It is a bad place," !Xabbu said abruptly.

  "I know. Don't forget that for a second."

  She splayed her fingers. An instant later they were in a shadowy antechamber, a place with gold-framed carnival mirrors instead of walls. As she turned to survey the room, Renie could see that the latency—the tiny lag between initiation and action that characterized complex VR environments—was very low here, a quite passable mimicry of real life. The detail work was also impressive. Alone in the antechamber, they were not alone in the mirrors: a thousand reveling ghosts surrounded them—figures of men and women, as well as some more animal than human, all cavorting around the distorted reflections of their two sims. Their reflections appeared to be enjoying themselves.

  "Welcome to Mister J's." The voice spoke oddly accented English. There was no image to match it in any of the mirrors.

  Renie turned to discover a tall, smiling, elegantly dressed white man standing close behind them. He lifted his gloved hands and the mirrors disappeared, leaving the three of them alone in a single pillar of light surrounded by infinite black. "So nice to have you with us." His voice crept in close, as though he whispered in her ear. "Where are you from?"

  "Lagos," said Renie a little breathlessly. She hoped her own voice, processed an octave lower to match her masculine alias, did not sound as squeaky to him as it did to her."We . . . we've heard a lot about this place."

  The man's smile widened. He made a short bow. "We are proud of our worldwide reputation, and pleased to welcome friends from Africa. You are, of course, of legal age?"