Psychotrope Read online

  SHADOWRUN : 33

  PSYCHOTROPE

  Lisa Smedman

  March 19,2060

  The day it ended . . . And began . . .

  09:45:05 PST

  Seattle, United Canadian and American States

  They'd come for Pip in the middle of the night. Sneaked in the door of the squat, past the bars and locks and the mean old dog that slept in the hallway and that would'a chewed the arm off anyone but Pip and Deni.

  Skulked their way past all of the magical wards Deni had set up to keep his little sister safe, past the howler sensors that he'd rewired to run off a power cell taken from the abandoned car out back. Stolen Pip right off the mattress she shared with Deni, right out of Deni's arms.

  Nothing about it made sense. Deni and Pip were nobodies—just a teenage kid and his eight-year-old sister trying to scrape by in one of the roughest neighborhoods of the Puyallup Barrens. They got by as best they could and stayed clean. Mostly. Deni hired out his shamanistic talents, running astral recons for the scavengers who raided the nearby Black Junk Yards. Pip stayed safe in-side the squat, playing with the MatrixPal learning computer that Deni had given her to try and jazz her into talking, to break through the silence she'd blanketed herself in since their dad died.

  Pip and Deni didn't bother anybody, and nobody bothered them.

  Until now.

  Now Deni was racing after Pip, pumping his mana to the max to follow her trail. His meat body was still back at the squat, curled in a ball, nose to knee. But his astral body was loping like Dog, nose to the ground, tracking Pip's astral spoor.

  The snatchers had taken Pip out across Hell's Kitchen, the wasteland of ash dunes and crusted lava that was left behind after Mount Rainier blew its lid. Pits of hot mud that would'a boiled the skin off your bones bubbled like open sores, and sulfurous wizz-yellow steam rose into the air. It all passed by in a blur below him as Deni zipped along at maglev speeds.

  He passed a nature spirit, its astral form a beastlike cloud of swirling ash. The thing glanced at Deni with lava-red eyes, but Deni was past it before the spirit could attack. He was moving at nova speed, burning up his body's essence at a furious clip. Bit of a brainwipe thing to do, but he had no choice. Pip's life was at stake.

  He could see where they'd taken her now. Her scent led to an abandoned power plant. He slowed a tick and took in the sprawling complex of gray concrete walls, massive black pipes that disappeared into the ground, and skeletal towers whose dead high-tension lines lay sprawled on the lava fields like limp snakes. Then he circled the complex once, giving it a quick sniff in about the time it took for one wag of a tail. Satisfied that no nasties were guarding the site, he loped in through the graffiti-smeared wall nearest to the spot where Pip was, moving at a more cautious pace than before.

  He was expecting cold gray walls and rusted turbines, dark stairways and garbage on the floor.

  Instead he found a toy store.

  The rooms were lit like day, the floors clean. The walls were covered in, holopics of simsense stars and the floors were knee-deep in toys, all of them new and expensive. Huggable, mood-inducing "feeling foam" dolls sat propped against walls, and miniature maglev trains raced along tracks that wound from room to room. A model space station bobbed gently in mid-air in a darkened office, a holographic spread of twinkling stars surrounding it, and a floor-to-ceiling doll house filled another room. One area held a knee-high table set with toy plates that projected a three-dimensional display of grub, and under it two Battle-bots tussled back and forth across the floor, their metal fists making tiny clanking noises as they traded punches.

  Deni saw all of this in a heartbeat as his astral body flashed through the abandoned geothermal plant, bearing down in a laser-straight line through walls toward Pip. It confused him. He'd figured the goons who snatched his sister to be body boosters or pimps. If so, they made their captives pretty drekkin' cozy.

  He was close now. Pip's astral scent was strong. Deni flashed through a heavy door of metal-sheathed plastic, then jerked to a halt at what he saw.

  There was Pip sitting on an overstuffed couch in a room filled not with toys but with computers. And not kiddie decks like the one Deni had boosted for her, but mega-yen models with squeaky-gleam cases so new they still smelled of plastic. Pip was playing a game on one of the decks, her hands a blur as they flicked the toggle sticks back and forth. She wore her favorite blue dress and her "circuit sox"—black nylon shot with brilliant yellow glofiber. Her curly blonde hair was uncombed—as usual—and her pale skin was unbruised. Deni was glad to see that whoever had taken her hadn't messed her up any. Her aura was bright, clean.

  As if sensing his presence, she looked up with a puzzled frown at the spot where Deni hovered in astral space, panting from his run across the wasteland, his tongue lolling. Then she looked back at the screen of the cyberdeck in her lap and she laughed. Out loud. And then she spoke, her eyes still darting as they tracked the game.

  "I like it here," she said. "This is fun."

  What the . . . ? Pip was happy here? Pip was talking?

  No, frag it. She had to be on some kind of mood-altering mind benders. That was what had loosened up the emotional knot that had kept his sister silent all these years.

  Pip must've been tricked into coming here. And it didn't take a technowiz to figure out how. She'd probably met her new "friends" over the Matrix. They'd talked her into leaving the squat by promising her everything Deni couldn't give her: shiny new toys, the latest computer games, an entire playhouse to roam in.

  She'd slipped out of bed, tiptoed past the dog, and unbolted the locks on the front door of the squat herself.

  Somehow she'd gotten through Hell's Kitchen—Deni didn't even want to think how dangerous that had been—and come here.

  And gotten her reward. But Deni knew in his gut that there had to be something nasty waiting at the end of it all.

  Deni growled. The fraggers who'd lured Pip here would pay but good. But why hadn't he seen anyone yet? Pip had said "friends," And that meant more than one . ., She glanced up from her game as a boy walked into the room and greeted her. He was native, with wide cheek-bones and dusky skin. Maybe fifteen—about Deni's age, but not runty like Deni. He was healthy, well fed. And clean. His clothes looked new, and trend-smart, except for the knitted red and white scarf around his neck. But his eyes had the wary look of someone who'd grown up in the Barrens, hungry and on edge.

  When the kid turned, the gleam of a datajack flashed from his temple. Deni's astral vision showed the wires that fed the jack as veins of silver, webbing their way through the kid's brain. He frowned. A datajack was some expensive drek. Where'd a kid get the nuyen for that?

  Deni growled as the kid sat down beside Pip on the couch. But the kid didn't make a move on her and Pip didn't seem to mind him sitting there. And what the frag could Deni do about it, anyhow? This recon had taken only a few seconds, but by the time Deni returned to his meat bod and slogged it across the wasteland of Hell's Kitchen—assuming he didn't boil his brains by falling into a mudhole—an hour or more would have gone by. Better to keep an eye on Pip, for now, and see what went down next.

  The kid was talking.

  "You'll like being otaku," he told Pip. "Playing in the Matrix is even more fun than playing with toys."

  Pip stared at him a moment, then nodded gravely. "I know."

  "There's a special place there. A place that makes you feel happy. When you get your datajack you'll be able to go there as often as you like."

  Deni bristled. What was this fragger trying to talk his sister into? Was he trying to get her hooked on BTL? But that was chips. You needed a chipjack for that. Not a data-jack. Datajacks were for computers . . .

  "We're going to take a lot of peop
le to the special place today," the kid told Pip. He glanced at the watch on his wrist. "In just a few seconds. Would you like to come too?"

  Pip nodded. A smile lit her tiny face.

  The kid handed her an electrode net and smiled as she strapped the array of sensors onto her head and plugged its fiber-optic cable into the deck on her lap.

  No! Deni raged. Don't trust him, Pip! He flailed forward, but his astral body bounced back as it encountered Pip's aura. He whirled, reached out and tried to claw the thing off her head. But it was no fraggin' use. The hands of his astral body were thin as mist.

  Pip closed her eyes. Her body relaxed into a slump.

  Deni stared at the kid on the couch beside Pip, wanting to take the silly scarf around his throat and choke him with it.

  The kid stood up and walked over to a telecom outlet. Seeing him pull a fiber-optic computer connection cable from it, Deni figured he was going to attach it to a cyberdeck. But instead the kid slotted the cable directly into the datajack in his skull. Carefully paying out the cable, the kid sat back down on the couch beside Pip. Then he too leaned back and closed his eyes.

  A strange thing happened. The kid's aura went totally weird.

  The weirdness began just above the kid's scalp. His aura turned a bright silver color over a point on his datajack, and then lines of energy suddenly sprayed out from this point. Tiny bolts of light, maybe as long as a monowhip stretched out straight, spiked out like roving spotlights, growing thinner and thinner the farther out from the kid's head they got, until they just disappeared. They smelled hot somehow, like electricity.

  "I'm in the Matrix," the kid told Pip. "Can you see me?"

  "Yes," Pip whispered. "It's beautiful here."

  "Just wait," the kid said. "It'll get better."

  Even through his rage, Deni knew this had to be a scam. There was no way that kid was in the Matrix. Deni knew enough tech to realize that you had to have a cyberdeck to jack into the virtual reality of the Matrix. You couldn't just slot a cable from a telecom outlet into your datajack. No deck, no dice.

  But there was that weird aura . . .

  Deni glanced at the kid's wristwatch and saw that it was blank—then remembered that abstract data like numbers couldn't be seen in astral space. Still, the time had to be somewhere just before ten a.m. He tried to figure where his chummer Alfie would be at this hour. If he could get her to buzz him out here on her bike they might arrive in time to save . . .

  Pip let out a soft sigh. Then her body suddenly tensed, and her thin chest stopped moving. Was she still breathing? Oh frag. Was she alive?

  Pip's chest rose . . . and slowly fell. She looked like a coma patient. Except that her limbs were rigid as death.

  Drek. Deni had to do something. Fast.

  He booted it on back to his meat bod, loping across Hell's Kitchen as fast as his dog legs would take him.

  09:46:12 PST

  (18:46:12 WET)

  Jackpoint: Amsterdam, Holland

  Red Wraith dove for cover as the rumbling tank bore down on him. A nearby I/O port formed a perfect foxhole: a triangular-shaped "hole" in the military-green corrugated metal floor. The tank clattered closer, a monstrosity that dwarfed Red Wraith, towering over him like a mobile office block. Its matte-black treads were studded with chromed spikes, its body warted with rivets. Neon-red lasers beamed out from sensors on all sides of the metal beast, and its barrel and turret swung back and forth, seeking a target. In seconds it would find where Red Wraith had gone to ground, would crush him into a bloody pulp with its treads or blow him to pieces with its cannon . . .

  The tank was just a Matrix construct—a metaphor for a computer program. Just as Red Wraith's persona icon, with its ghostlike body that ended in dripping red mist where the lower legs would normally be, was a virtual representation of the decker named Daniel Bogdanovich. But Red Wraith used the adrenaline rush the tank image gave him, let it spike his consciousness into hyper-awareness. He'd come so far to reach these personnel records . . .

  He wasn't going to give up without a fight, even if it cost him his deck. Not when he was this close.

  He used his cyberdeck's masking program to change the appearance of his on-line persona into a shimmering cloud of glittering silver confetti. With luck, the tank-shaped intrusion countermeasures program that was bearing down on him would mistake him for a stream of data, one of dozens that flowed back and forth across the inside of the octagonal box that represented the sub-processing unit he'd decked into. The false datastream created by the masking program would glitch up the actual data that was flowing into Red Wraith's "foxhole"—in the real world, the hardcopy printer that was connected to the port would hiccup and spew out a page or two of jumbled graphics. But with luck, the admin clerks at UCAS Seattle Command would lay the blame on a hardware glitch.

  Red Wraith crouched lower in his foxhole as the tank rumbled closer. Crashing the IC wasn't an option. A stunt like that would trigger too many system alerts, and then he'd have hostile UCAS deckers to tangle with. Instead he had to find some way to subtly defeat the program.

  As the tank loomed over his foxhole, Red Wraith could feel the walls and floor of the I/O port rumbling. Then the tank's tread sealed off the hole, plunging him into darkness, and Red Wraith was engulfed in the stench of hot exhaust and oil. Part of his mind acknowledged and appreciated the detail of the programming, noted the effectiveness of psyching out the target by overwhelming his senses with such oppressive detail. Another part of him responded with the fear the tank's designers had intended to induce. But the logical, methodical part of Red Wraith's mind—the part that had given him the steady hands and cool head to perform assassinations—was in control. Almost instinctively, he tucked away his fear and activated an analyze utility.

  The utility appeared next to him in the customized iconography he'd given it: a trode-patch electrocardiograph monitor like those used in hospitals. Programming on the fly, Red Wraith modified its outer casing, shaping it into a gleaming chrome spike like those on the treads of the tank. Then he reached up and jammed it home. The trode patch on the wide end of the spike sampled the graphic imaging of the IC, then adhered firmly as it was incorporated into the tank's programming.

  A series of pulsing red lines appeared in the darkness in front of Red Wraith as the utility began its analysis. He scanned them quickly as the tank rumbled clear of the I/O port, noting the oscillation of the sine wave and the frequency of the peaks on the baseline below it. The readouts told him not only what type of IC he was up against—blaster, an attack program that could send his cyberdeck's MPCP chips into meltdown on a successful hit—but also how tough the program would be to crack.

  Diagnosis: tough. But not mega. And that puzzled Red Wraith. He'd decked into a military computer system containing confidential personnel datafiles; the IC here should have had ratings that were off the scale. Sure, the datafiles were merely the records of personnel who had "retired" from active service. They hardly contained anything that would be considered damaging to UCAS national security. Just addresses, medical records, next-of-kin forms. No active service records. But they should have been guarded more closely, just the same.

  Hmm. . .

  A sudden shift in perspective took Red Wraith by surprise. Suddenly he was lying on the "floor" of the system construct, looking across an expanse of corrugated metal at the glowing rectangular block of the datastore he'd been trying to access before the tank materialized. The I/O port he'd been hunkering down in was nowhere in sight.

  He processed the shift in the visual landscape and instantly realized what had happened. The I/O port had gone off-line, ejecting him back into the octagonal box that represented the sub-processing unit as its icon disappeared.

  The UCAS SEACOM's sysops must have noted the glitch in the printer and taken the port offline. Now he was fully exposed. . .

  Light flared explosively around Red Wraith as an IC attack hit home. The resolution of the images that surrounded him shimm
ered and blurred. When they came back into focus a moment later, the colors were muted, the resolution grainy. And it was getting worse. The walls and floor of the sub-processing unit were losing their solidity, just the peaks of the corrugations showing in a barlike pattern that revealed gaping, empty, non-space beyond . . .

  Drek! The system was also protected by jammer IC! It was messing with his deck's sensor program, messing up his ability to distinguish the iconography of the Matrix. It had already partially wiped his ability to process the visual component of the tank. But he could hear the bone-jarring clatter of its spiked treads and could feel the subsonic rumble of its engines, even though he couldn't locate the direction from which these sensory signals were coming.

  He was equally blind to the jammer IC that had put him in this fix. But his tactile sensations hadn't been glitched yet.

  He felt around him, patting his hands gently over the corrugated floor. There! A round device with a button on top: a land mine. The IC was a nasty little piece of programming. Its first, undetectable attack had been when Red Wraith first logged onto this system, rendering the jammer IC invisible to him. Now he knew what he was "looking" for. But unless he wanted to move at a crawl, feeling his way blindly along, he'd be hit with attack after attack until all five of his virtual senses were down.

  And now the tank was almost upon him. The floor was vibrating wildly under his feet There was only one thing to do—hunker down and pray his utilities would protect him.

  He activated his deck's shield utility. A rubberized black body bag appeared around him. The zipper closed, sealing him inside, and for nearly a full second Red Wraith saw nothing but darkness. He initiated a medic utility, rerouting functionality to the backup chips in his deck's MPCP. And then he waited while the medic utility did its work. He heard a rumbling, felt a heavy weight pass over him. But the spikes on the treads of the tank did not penetrate the thick rubber shielding of the cocoonlike bag.

  He waited until the medic utility had finished its work. Then he opened the body bag's zipper—and was relieved to see that his graphics-recognition capacity had been restored. Peeling the body bag away from his body, he stepped back into the iconography of the sub-processing unit and surveyed the field of battle. Now he could see the previously invisible land mines that were the jammer IC. This time, he would be able to avoid them.