NETFEED/MUSIC: Dangerous Sonics Banned

(visual: young woman in pressurized hospital tent)

VO: After a series of injuries and one death during the latest tour by the power wig band Will You Still Love Me When My Head Comes Off, promoters have banned the use of sound equipment that operates outside the range of human hearing. The ban was prompted when American and European insurance companies declared they would no longer insure events where "dangerous sonics" are used.

(visual: clip from "Your Blazing Face Is My Burning Heart")

WYSTLMWMHCO and other power wig groups have in turn threatened to boycott the US and Europe if necessary, saying they cannot allow bureaucrats to interfere with their artistic expression.

Renie hated it when her father sulked, but this was one time she had no intention of indulging him. "Papa, I have to do this. It's for Stephen. Isn't that important to you?"

Long Joseph rubbed his face with knob-knuckled hands. "Of course it's important, girl. Don't you be telling me I don't care about my boy. But I think all this computer monkeyshines is foolishness. You going to make your brother better with some kind of game?"

"It's not a game. I wish it was." She examined her father's face. There was something different about him, but she couldn't quite decide what "Are you worried about me at all?"

He snorted. "What? Worried that you going to drown in some bathtub full of jelly? Already told you what I think of that."

"Papa, I might be online for days—maybe a week. You could make things a little easier." Her patience was beginning to sift away. Why did she even try to talk to him? What did it ever bring her except aggravation and heartache?

"Worried about you." Her father scowled, then looked down. "I worry about you all the time. I worry about you since you were a little baby. I break my back to give you a home, put food in your mouth. When you get sick, I pay for the doctor. Your mama and me, we sat up nights praying for you when you had that bad fever."

She suddenly realized what was different. His eyes were clear, his words unslurred. The departing troops that had occupied this underground site had taken everything portable that was of value, which had included any stocks of alcohol. Her father had made the beer he'd bought on the way in last as long as he could, but he had finished it the day before yesterday. No wonder he was in a foul mood.

"I know you worked hard, Papa. Well, now it's my turn to do what I can for Stephen. So please don't make it any more difficult than it needs to be."

He finally turned back toward her, his eyes red-rimmed, his mouth curved in a petulant frown. "I'll be fine. Nothing for a man to do around here anyway. And you—don't you get yourself killed in that thing, girl. Don't let it fry your brain or some foolishness like that. And don't blame me if it do."

And that, Renie supposed, was the closest he was going to come to telling her he loved her.

"I'll try not to get my brain fried up, Papa. God knows, I'll try."

"I wish one of us had some medical training." She was examining with some distaste the IV cannula secured to her arm under a thin sheath of permeable latex membrane. "I'm not very happy about having to do this out of a manual. And a military manual at that."

Jeremiah shrugged as he fitted the same device onto !Xabbu's thin arm. "It's not so difficult. My mother was in a car accident and had a wound that needed to be drained. I did all that."

"We will be well, Renie," said !Xabbu. "You have done a good job preparing everything."

"I hope so. But it seems like something always gets missed." She carefully lowered herself into the gel. Once covered, she removed her undergarments and tossed them out over the side. She doubted that Jeremiah cared one way or the other, and her father was off poking around in the kitchen supplies, unwilling to watch the sealing of the sarcophagi, but she still felt uncomfortable being naked in the presence of her friends. !Xabbu, who had no such inhibitions, had removed his clothes long ago, and sat through Jeremiah's last-minute instructions in unperturbed nakedness.

Renie connected the IV tube to the shunt in her arm, then fixed the urinary catheter and solid waste hoses in place, repressing a shudder at their unpleasant, intrusive touch against her flesh. This was no time to be squeamish. She had to think of herself as a soldier going behind enemy lines. The mission was the most important thing—all other considerations must be secondary. She went over her mental checklist for the dozenth time, but there was nothing left undone. All the monitoring and adjustment would be done by the V-tank itself, through the plasmodal gel. She fitted the mask and signaled to Jeremiah to turn on the air. When she felt the slightly clammy rush of oxygen in the mouth-bubble, she slid down below the surface.

She floated in dark weightlessness, waiting for Jeremiah to put the system online. It seemed to take forever. She wondered if there could be a problem with !Xabbu's rig. Perhaps his machinery was faulty, and she would have to go by herself. The thought, and the depth of her own unhappiness in reaction, frightened her. She had come to depend on the small man, on his calm presence and good sense, more than she really liked to depend on anyone, but that did not change the fact of her dependency.

"Renie?" It was Jeremiah, talking to her through the hear-plugs. "Is everything okay?"

"I'm fine. What are we waiting for?"

"Nothing. You're ready to go." For a long silent moment, she thought he'd gone offline. "And good luck. Find out who did that to the doctor."

"We'll do our best." Online gray suddenly surrounded her, a sea of staticky nothingness with no surface or bed. "!Xabbu? Can you hear me?"

"I am here. We have no bodies, Renie."

"Not yet. We need to make contact with Singh first."

She summoned up the military base's operating system, a typically unimaginative control panel full of view windows, simulated buttons, and switches, then keyed the preprogrammed connection Martine had sent them. The control panel blinked various waiting messages, then the panel and the surrounding gray disappeared, swallowed by blackness. After a few moments, she heard the French woman's familiar voice: "Renie?"

"Yes, it's me. !Xabbu?"

"I am here, too."

"All present. Martine. Why are there no visuals?"

Singh's voice rasped in her hearplugs. "Because I don't have the time or inclination to entertain you with pretty pictures. We'll have more visuals than we can stand if we can get into this system."

"Nevertheless," said Martine, "you will need to set some default standards for your simulated forms. Monsieur Singh says that many of the nodes on this network will automatically assign sims upon entry, but some will not. Some of those that do will be influenced by the user's own selections, so you should choose something comfortable."

"And not too goddamn conspicuous," added Singh.

"How can we do that? Whose system are we on, anyway?"

Martine did not answer, but a small holograph cube appeared from the darkness in front of her. Renie found that using standard VR manipulations she could build an image inside it.

"Hurry up," growled Singh. "I've got a window coming up in about fifteen minutes and I don't want to miss it."

Renie pondered. If this Otherland network was actually a huge VR playground for the rich and powerful, as Singh seemed to believe, then a sim that was too generic, too low-rent, would attract the wrong kind of attention. She would indulge herself for once and have something nice.

She wondered whether it would be best to costume herself as a man. After all, the alpha males of the human world hadn't changed much in the last two thousand years, and from what she knew, very few of them seemed to think very highly of women. But on the other hand, perhaps that in itself was a reason not to pretend to be something other man what she was.

If your average crazed, want-to-rule-the-world multizillionaire tended not to think of a woman as an object of respect, especially a young African woman, perhaps there was no better way of being underestimated than to be herself.

"I had a dream last night." !Xabbu's disembodied voice startled her. "A very strange dream about Grandfather Mantis and the All-Devourer."

"Sorry?" She chose the basic human female armature, which appeared in the cube, impersonal as a wire sculpture.

"It comes from a story I learned as a young man, a very important story of my people."

Renie could feel herself frowning as she tried to concentrate on the image of the sim. She gave it her own dark skin and close-cropped hair, then stretched it until it more closely resembled her small-breasted, long-limbed frame. "Do you think you could tell me later, !Xabbu? I'm trying to make a sim for myself. Don't you have to do the same?"

"That is why the dream seemed important. Grandfather Mantis spoke to me in the dream—to me, Renie. He said, 'It is time for all the First People to join together.' But I apologize. I am making it difficult for you. I will leave you alone."

"I am trying to concentrate, !Xabbu. Tell me later, please."

She magnified the face and quickly ran through a number of shapes until she found one close to her own. Noses, eyes, and mouths paraded past like claimants to Cinderella's glass slipper and were rejected in turn until she found a combination enough like her own face not to feel like an imposture, Renie hated people who made their sims impossibly more attractive than the real-life owners. It seemed like a weakness, an unwillingness to live with what you had been given,

She stared at the finished product, scanning the placid face. The sight of what could pass, under swift scrutiny, for her own corpse gave her pause. There was no sense making it too much of a self-portrait. The people whose system they were entering illegally were not the forgiving kind, as she already knew. Why make retaliation any easier?

Renie exaggerated the shape of the cheekbones and chin and chose a longer, narrower nose. She gave the eyes an upward slant. This, she reflected, was not that different from a game of dress-up dolls. The finished product now looked only a little like her, and much more resembled some desert princess from a sand-and-scimitars netflick. She smirked at her work and herself—now who was guilty of glamorizing a sim?

She outfitted her new body in the most sensible clothing she could think of, a kind of pilot's jumpsuit and boots: if the simulation was good enough, then suitability of outfit would be a factor. She then ran down a row of options for strength, endurance, and other physical traits, which in most simworlds was a zero-sum game in which every increase in fitness in one category had to be counterbalanced by decreases elsewhere. When she had jiggled the numbers until she felt satisfied, she locked in the choices. The simulation and its prisoning cube disappeared, leaving her in blackness once more.

Singh's strident voice cut through the emptiness. "Now, I'm going to say this once and once only. We're going in, but don't be surprised at anything—and that includes failure. This is the weirdest damn operating system I've ever run into, so I'm not making any promises. And don't ask me any stupid questions while I'm working,"

"I thought you were one of the people who worked on it," Renie said. She was getting tired of Singh's bad temper.

"I didn't work on the OS itself," he said. "I worked on the snap-on components. The operating system was the biggest secret since the Manhattan Project—that was the first atomic bomb back in the twentieth century, for those of you who don't know your history."

"Please go ahead, Monsieur Singh," said Martine. "We know time is short."

"Damn right. Anyway, I've been running little forays on this system and observing it for a long time, and I still have questions. The thing has cycles, for one thing, and I'm not talking about usage. Usage stays pretty constant overall across all time-zones, although in general it's been picking up a great deal lately—but the operating system itself has some kind of internal cycle that I can't figure out. Sometimes it works much faster than other times. Overall, it seems to be on some kind of twenty-five-hour cycle, so it'll go about nineteen hours at high efficiency, then things kind of get gluey for about six hours or so and it's easier to get around some of the more obvious security precautions. Mind you, it's still twice as fast as anything else I've ever come into contact with, maybe more."

"Twenty-five-hour cycles?" Martine sounded shaken. "You are certain?"

"Of course I'm certain," Singh snapped. "Who's been monitoring this thing for almost a year, you or me? Now, the only way to get through, and to get you people inside as well, is for me to establish a beachhead. That means I have to get the system to open up and let me all the way in, then I have to get a fix so I can get us all off fiberlines and onto a randomizing resat. And you're not going to have any pictures until you're in—I don't have time for any of that kiddie crap—so you're going to have to listen to my voice and do what I tell you. Got it?"

Renie and !Xabbu assented.

"Good. Sit tight and shut up. First I have to get to the backdoor me and Melani and Sakata put in. Normally, that would be enough to get into any system, but they've done some crazy stuff to this one—levels of complexity I've never seen."

Then Singh was gone and there was only silence. Renie waited as patiently as she could, but without the sound of other voices it was impossible to measure time. It could have been ten minutes or an hour when the old hacker's voice buzzed in her hearplugs once more.

"I take it back." He sounded breathless and far less composed than usual. " 'Complexity' isn't the word. 'Insanity,' maybe—everything on the inner rings of this system has got some kind of weird random angle. I knew they were going to install a neural network at the center of this thing, but even those have rules. They learn, and eventually they do the right thing every time, which after a point means more or less the same thing every time. . . ."

It was hard to sit in the darkness and do nothing. For the first time she could remember, Renie yearned to be able to touch something, anything. Telepresence, they had called it in her ancient VR textbooks—contact over a distance. "I don't understand," she said. "What's happening?"

Singh was so discomfited that he didn't seem to resent the interruption. "It's open—wide open. I popped in through the back door. Every time I've probed that before, there's been some weird nesting-code barrier on the other side. I worked up a solution for that, assuming that was just the first layer of defenses around the heart of the system—but it's not there. There's nothing to keep us out at all."

"What?" Martine, too, sounded alarmed. "But does that mean the entire system is undefended? I cannot believe that."

"No." Renie could hear Singh's frustration. "I wish it were—that would just mean a systems breakdown. As far as I can tell, the hole, if you want to call it that, is only in the last ring of defenses, on the other side of my entry point—the back door we built in to this particular bit of gear, decades ago. But it's never been undefended before."

"Forgive me for speaking of something that is unfamiliar to me," said !Xabbu. Renie was surprised by the pleasure she felt at hearing his voice through the darkness. "But does it not sound like a trap?"

"Of course it does!" Singh's bad temper had not stayed away long. "There's probably a dozen of that bastard Atasco's systems engineers sitting in some room right now, like polar bears at an ice hole, waiting to see what pokes its head through. But tell me what else we should do."

Detached from her body as she had never been, floating in a kind of negative space, Renie still felt her skin tingle. "They want us to try to get in?"

"I don't know," the old hacker said. "I told you, this operating system is unfathomable. By far the most complicated thing I've ever seen—I couldn't even guess how many trillions of instructions per second. Jesus! These people are really going top-of-the-line—I haven't even heard whispers of processing speeds like that." There was more than a little admiration in his voice. "But we can't just assume it's a trap. For one thing, that's a bit stupidly obvious, don't you think—they just turn off the security we were expecting to have to hack through? Maybe it's nothing to do with us at all—maybe the operating system's doing something critically important somewhere else and it's diverted some resources from the inner circle of security, figuring it can reestablish them if something gets past the outer circle. If we don't try to go in, we might discover later we'd been counting the white-and-pearlies of the world's biggest gift horse."

Renie pondered for only a moment. "This may be our best chance. I say we go in."

"Thank you, Ms. Shaka." Underneath the sarcasm, there was a discernible note of approval.

"I am troubled by what you tell us." Martine sounded more than just troubled: there was unhappiness in her voice that Renie had never heard before. "I wish I had more time to consider."

"If the operating system is diverting resources, they could be planning some big change," Singh replied. "I told you, there's something going on—usage is way up, and there seem to have been a lot of alterations. They might even be planning to shut the whole thing down, or cut off outside access completely."

"I told Renie that I had a dream," offered !Xabbu. "You may not understand, Mister Singh, but I have learned to trust such messages."

"You had a dream telling you today was the day to break into the network?"

"No, of course not. But I believe you are correct when you say this opportunity may not come again. I cannot explain why I believe it, but your words speak to me as my dream spoke to me. The time has come for all Grandfather Mantis' children to join together—that is what my dream said."

"Huh." Singh's laugh was brief and harsh. "So, that's what—one 'yes,' one 'not sure,' and one 'I had a dream about a bug'? I guess I'm a yes, too. So we give it a try. But don't be surprised if I blow the whole thing up right away—I don't think they can backtrace me, but I'm not even going to give those bastards the satisfaction of trying if I can help it."

With that, he was gone. The silence descended again.

This time the waiting seemed even more unnaturally long. The blackness was everywhere; Renie could almost feel it seeping inside her, too. What did she and the others think they were doing? Four people trying to break into the world's most sophisticated network, then—what? Sift through unimaginable complexity in search of answers that might not even be there? Finding a particular grain of sand on a beach would be easier.

What is he doing? Is he even going to be able to crack it?

"Martine? !Xabbu?"

There was no reply. Either through some quirk of Singh's system or some failure of her own, she was temporarily incommunicado. The knowledge only added to her claustrophobic anxiety. How long had she been in the darkness. Hours? Renie tried to bring up some kind of clock, but the system was unresponsive to any of her signals. For a moment, as she moved hands she could not see, to no discernible effect, she felt the beginnings of real panic. She forced herself to lie still again.

Calm down, you silly cow. You're not down a well, or buried under a cave-in. You're in a V-tank. !Xabbu and your father and Jeremiah are only a few feet away. You could sit up if you wanted to, just rip out all those tubes and push open the tank lid, but that would spoil everything. You've been waiting for this chance for a long time. Don't ruin it. Be strong.

To occupy herself—and to prove time was really passing—she began to count, bending her fingers in turn as she did so to remind herself that she had a body, that there was more than blackness and her own voice in her head. She had just passed three hundred when something crackled in her hearplugs.

". . . Think I'm through . . . some . . . interfering . . . routers will. . . ." Singh's voice seemed very faint and far away, but even with his words coming in staticky bursts, his fear was unmistakable.

"This is Renie. Can you hear me?"

The hacker's voice was even fainter now. ". . . No reason to . . . crazy, but . . . being stalked. . . ."

'Stalked'? Had he said 'stalked'? Or 'stopped'? Renie fought against her own rising terror. There was nothing to fear, really—nothing except discovery and reprisal, but at this point those were beginning to feel like old friends. Only a superstitious idiot could be afraid of the net, she told herself.

The serpentine arms of Kali arose from her memory, mocking her.

Another burst of static, but no words this time. She suddenly realized that she was very, very cold. "!Xabbu! Martine! Are you out there?"

Silence. The cold was growing deeper. Psychosomatic, surely. A reaction to the darkness, to the isolation and uncertainty. Hang on, girl, hang on. Don't panic. No reason to be afraid. You're doing this for Stephen. You're doing this to help him.

She was shivering. She could feel her teeth bouncing against each other, clicking and rattling her jawbone.

Blackness. Chill. Silence. She began to count again, but could not keep the numbers straight.

"Renie? Are you there?" The sound was thin, as though it came to her down a long tube. The sheer joy at hearing her name spoken told her how frightened she was. A long moment passed before she realized whose voice it was.

"Jeremiah?"

"The tank—your temperature readings are way down." His voice was only a little clearer than Singh's had been. "Do you want. . . ." A hiss drowned him out.

"I couldn't hear you. Jeremiah? Can you reach !Xabbu in the other tank?"

". . . Such a big drop. Do you . . . want . . . pull out?"

She could tell him she did. It would be easy. With just those words, she would be released from these strange, bleak spaces. But how could she do that—how could she just give up? Out of the void, clearest of all the phantoms flickering in her thoughts, she saw Stephen's face behind the crinkled transparency of the oxygen tent. This—darkness, isolation, nothingness—was his reality every single day. Could she let a few moments of it frighten her away from what might be his only chance?

"Jeremiah, can you hear me? There's interference. Just say yes if you can."

A quietly crackling pause. Then a sibilance. Yes.

"Okay. Don't pull us out. Don't do anything unless our vital signs go completely wrong—unless we're in real medical trouble. Do you understand? Don't pull us out."

She heard nothing but crackle.

Okay, she thought. Now you've done it. You've sent him away. No one to step in and save you, even if . . . even if. . . . Hysterical, girl, you are getting. . . . She tried to reach a calm center in herself, but was convulsed with shivering again. Jesus Mercy, it's cold! What's going on? What's gone wrong. . . ?

Something was growing in the darkness, so faint that she could not be sure that it was not a trick of her reeling mind. A few spots became brighter, glowing like luminescent fungus in a root cellar. Renie stared, all of her attention focused, as the spots became lines, then moving smears of white and gray, resolving at last into a living image, blasted inside out like a photographic negative.

"Singh?"

The figure hanging in the emptiness before her raised its hands, its jerky movements oddly out of phase. Its mouth worked, but there was no sound in her hearplugs except her own shallow breathing. The old man wore the same threadbare robe and pajamas she had seen before. But how could that be? Surely he would have constructed a sim for himself, something that would hide his identity.

The cold grew heavy, pushing down on her like a great hand, sending her into spasms of trembling. Singh's image expanded, stretching and distorting until it filled the entirety of her vision, reaching away into infinity at its corners. It opened a twisted mouth the size of a mountain and the face around it contorted in pain. The sound which scraped and roared through her hearplugs, loud as a jet engine, was only barely identifiable as speech.

". . . IT. . . ."

And now, even through the killing cold that was making her body shake itself to bits, she could feel something else, a presence that stood behind the bizarre, gigantic apparition of Singh as the endless vacuum of space stood behind the blue sky. She could feel it looming above her, a mind like a fist trembling over a table-crawling gnat, a thing of pure thought that was nevertheless idiot-empty, a presence colder than cold, sick and curious and powerful and completely insane.

Her thoughts were flying away like roof tiles in a hurricane. Hyena! a part of her shrieked, !Xabbu's stories and her dreams giving the fear a name. The Burned One. A moment later, as it blanketed her with darkness and the cold burrowed into her guts, something else !Xabbu had said heaved itself up from her memory.

All-Devourer.

It touched her idly then, nosing at her as a beast might nose someone pretending to be dead. An icy void, but something squirming at the heart of it like cancer. She felt certain her heart would stop.

Singh's voice again blasted in her ears, a gigantic howl of agony and horror. "OH, GOD! ITS . . . GOT ME. . . ." His image contorted, twisting itself inside out, and Renie shrieked in startled terror. A hideously distorted but indisputably real vision of the old man as he must be at this very moment filled the blackness—his turban askew and bathrobe tucked under his arms as he convulsed like a worm at the end of a cruel hook. His eyes rolled back until only white showed. His toothless mouth gaped. Renie could feel his pain almost as though it were her own, a terrible tension that ran through her like an electrified wire. It flared and then stopped. She felt Singh's heart burst. She felt him die.

The image vanished. The dark settled again, the cold clutched her and held her, and the inconceivable something brought her close.

Oh, God, she thought hopelessly, I've been so stupid. She could feel her brother and her father and so many others, crying out their anger at her. The cold grew deeper, impossibly complete, as if every sun in the universe had been extinguished. Her body was now too weak even to shiver. She felt strength whistling out of her, her mind floating, dying.

Something abruptly opened before her, a lessening of density dimly perceived. She felt herself falling into it as if from a great height. She was going through something—an opening? A gate? Had she passed through into . . . into wherever it had been that she had once wished to enter, eternities ago? Was she being allowed in?

Somewhere a memory. Teeth. Miles of gleaming teeth. A giant mouth, grinning.

No, she realized, a last flicker of reason in her dying mind. I'm being swallowed.