Downloading Midnight
by William Browning Spencer
There was a big surge down at C-View, and a hologram from the American Midnight show went amok.
We got the contract for the cleanup, and Bloom was desperate to do it.
"Wow, American Midnight! I'm your man for this one, Marty." Bloom was moving around the room in a highly charged state. He stopped and leaned across the desk. "I mean, maybe I can do a repair. I mean, this is American Midnight. This is Captain Armageddon. This is—Marty! What's gonna happen to Zera? Are they gonna close the whole thing down? What about Zera Terminal? Look, you just gotta let me go. I'm an authority on American Midnight."
Bloom was a tall, skinny kid with a sheaf of straight blond hair and round, incredulous blue eyes. He was no respecter of personal space, and his style of argument consisted of leaning into me, filling my field of vision with his manic gaze.
I leaned back, away from his rhetoric.
"Watching the flat reruns of American Midnight until you wear a loop in your brain doesn't necessarily make you an authority," I said.
American Midnight was C-View's big success, a sex holoshow that had been on the Highway for eight months. These days, a month is considered a good run, and most shows don't make it past a week. The show's hero, Captain Armageddon, had fragmented and was causing disturbances up and down the Highway. Someone had to go in and systematically delete the ghosts.
"I don't want a zealot on this one," I said. "We are way past repair here. Armageddon is out of control, and I need someone to do a no-nonsense wipe."
"I can do that," Bloom said, trying for some sort of solid expression (he looked like a guy trying to hold back a sneeze). "I've done plenty of wipes."
"Not like this," I said.
This one was different. It was a big surge. The sicker the bigger we say in the business, and there was plenty of psychic rot here.
American Midnight was fantasy sex and, of course, generated entirely by artificial intelligence. The peeps at Morals are ever-vigilant. One incident of a human-acted holo and Jell Baker and everyone else at C-View would have been lodged in a federal behavior mod without recall or a mitigating hearing.
A guy named Seek Trumble was the human-map for Captain Armageddon, and his job, like that of any actor in a sex holoshow, was to routinely plug into the artificial for personality updates, emotional fine-tuning, that sort of thing. But it was the holo that did the acting. Anything else would have been obscene, although you can still find anonymous bulletin rants arguing that explicit sex between fantasy mock-ups is no different than explicit sex narrated visually by real humans. Those rants are probably generated by kids who have no memory of the Decadence. You have to log some experience before you can think reasonably about obscenity.
So Seek Trumble had done a routine update, gone home and committed suicide, burning a hole through his forehead with a utility laser. His holo had gone amok and litigation was pouring into C-View.
"Marty, I can do the job," Bloom said. "Come on."
I had reservations. Human/artificial feedback loops are not an exact science. One holo of recent memory, a pretty fashion gridlet named Spanskie Lark, went online, stuck a finger in her mouth, and bit it off. Before they could get her off-line, she had eaten all the fingers of one hand. Turned out her source was anorexic. That was recognizable cause-and-effect, but often the human kink was deeper, harder to search.
Bloom wore me down. I let him go. He went on-line for the cleanup, and three weeks later he still wasn't back.
C-View was one of the biggest studios out on the Broad Highway. Control there was a guy named Jell Baker.
"You think you are getting paid by the hour?" Baker screamed. "Look, I got about ten thousand trauma actions filed against me, and I want this rift closed."
I didn't like Baker, so it's just as well he signed off before I could express myself. The guy had come up through the glitter shows, and he didn't just have a file at Morals, he had a whole subdirectory.
My immediate concern wasn't Baker. It was Bloom. The job should have taken four days, a week max. Where was he?
I shouldn't have let him go. He was just a kid, still trapped in adolescence despite being a year out of the teens. He was a late-bloomer, one of those pale, V-wise, obsessive kids that don't really have a niche in the system. The sort of kid who grows up watching the Highway, an arcane data-freak with a head full of old holoshows and stars. I hired him because he was so crazy in love with the Highway. He'd been with me three years now.
I liked having the energy around. I'm forty. I'm not in love with any of it. Big R/Little R, I cast a cold eye on it all.
I went down to the waystation at ComWick where Bloom floated in Deprive, threads flowing out of him, undulating like a giant jellyfish in a sea of brown ink. His long white face seemed to pulse under the monitor light.
"He's fine," the tech assured me. "We'd pull him out if there were any neuro anomalies."
Techs always tell you everything is under control. That's what this one said.
"Save it for a gawker's tour," I told her. "I've been doing maintenance for fourteen years now. I know how it goes. You're fine, and then you're dead."
"This is poor personal interaction," the tech said. "You are questioning my professional skills and consequently devaluing my self-image."
I shrugged. Facts are facts: in over eighty percent of the cases where neural trauma shows on a monitor, the floater is already too blasted to make it back alive.
I thanked the tech and apologized if I had offended her or caused an esteem devaluation. She accepted my apology, but with a coolness that told me I'd have another civility demerit in my file.
I went back to my place. I called Personal Interface to see if my request for dinner with Gloria still held. I had to navigate the usual labyrinth of protocols, but the dinner was confirmed. I'd been seeing Gloria for three years, and we had graduated to low-grade, monitored encounters, step-two intimacy. Next year we would have unrestrained access to public meetings. Gloria was excited about it, but I had reservations. Sometimes it seemed the courtship was going too fast. I'm old-fashioned, and I remember the time when the first year of a relate was strictly a matter of logging contracts and waivers—you never even saw your sig after the dizzy moment of mutual selection on the grid.
I notified Gloria that dinner was on, and then I lay down and turned on the rain. I did some of my best thinking in the rain.
Some people don't like rain forest decor, don't like the way the rain seems to go right through you, like silver needles. I like the feeling of peace, of nothingness. As a kid, I always thought it would be cool to be a ghost.
I listened to the sound the rain made as it hissed through the trees. Every now and then some far-off bird would cry out.
Maybe it was a little too restful. I fell asleep and was almost late for dinner.
Gloria was in a bad mood. She felt neglected. I hadn't left a single message all week. I told her I'd been off-line a lot with the business, but that wasn't good enough. She said I was afraid of intimacy. She brought up my last relate profile, which rated me down in communication and emotional input.
I tried to change the subject.
She identified that behavior, reminded me that evasiveness had shown a seventeen-point increase in my last profile.
It was a bad evening, and we terminated it without invoking the optional after-meal conversation.
In the morning, Bloom still hadn't shown. The autotrace didn't have an absolute for me, but it intuited a coordinate. I went in after setting the auto-recorder. The Highway can be confusing. It doesn't hurt to have a playback, something to log what you think you've seen.
The maintenance mock-up for the Highway is an underground system of dank tunnels, bleak Sympathy bars, hustlers, fugitives, outlaws.
"This stink is only virtual," I told myself as I strode quickly down a wet street, virus-mice scuttling out of my way, a data trash of newspapers and old computer jokes blowing out of the alley.
I looked for Bloom in the bars and slacker dives and loop hovels.
An old counter said he'd seen Bloom. "He your friend?" the counter asked.
"We're partners," I said.
"Better forget him," the geez said. "Better get on up to the Big R and leave him behind."
"Why's that?"
"He's othersided. I recognize the look."
The under-Highway was less stable than usual. I kept hitting blue pockets in the road. I watched an old apartment building fight for integration, fail, and fly away in a great ripple of black crows.
I'd never seen a surge like this.
I didn't find Bloom that day. I decided to go flat in a cheap wire pocket. I've logged a lot of time under the Highway, and my mental health doesn't require luxury.
In the morning, I went down to a storefront on Gates Street and talked to an old leak named Sammy Hood. Sammy logged a lot of time under the Highway. I had never met him off-line, but down here he was a small, dirty guy in a carelessly integrated suit that was always wavering.
Sammy leaked to all the major news beats, from tabloid to top credit, and fenced info to whoever was hungry. He had a reputation for delivering flesh goods.
He watched while I transferred credits. He smiled.
"Martin," he said, "I figured you would be along. Heard young Bloomy boy was running down the Armageddon crazies, so I figured you'd show. This one is no job for a wire-whelp."
"Have you seen Bloom?" I asked.
"Nah. I just heard he was around. I don't want to see him. He gripes me. You should get some grown-up help. Some burned out V-head can't be good for your image."
Bloom had earned Sammy a row of demerits two years ago on a massaged image violation, and Sammy held a grudge.
"Let me have a weather report," I said.
"You want weather, we got it," Sammy said. "We got thunder and lightning."
Sammy recounted disasters up and down the Highway, failures of integration, streets buckling, riots, acid rain, sudden wipes and fades.
"Better watch where you step," he said.
"Hell of a lot of havoc for one renegade holo," I said.
Sammy smiled. "This ain't your average echoing freak," he said, leaning forward. "You're working for C-View, right? Sure. But they haven't told you everything, Martin. Captain Armageddon is out there, all right, but he ain't out there alone."
I asked what he meant by that and he laughed, causing his suit to fray and his tie to mottle.
"That's for me to know and you to buy," he said.
"Okay."
Sammy narrowed his eyes, his mock-up for cunning, and shook his head. "Nah. Later maybe. I got a feeling this is a highgrowth stock. I'm hanging on to it for awhile."
I asked if he had any suggestions where to look for Bloom.
He sold me that. "Check the Bin," Sammy said.
I wasn't happy about entering the Bin. Originally, it had been allocated for storage, but it had ghettoized. The warehouses were now cheap tenements, flophouses for fugitive entities. Things shifted in the Bin, even in stable times, and I might find myself regressing. If the regression were deep, I might go back to the Big R with a reverb that would blow my mind apart. I'd seen it happen, seen guys come back with just the faintest twitch or a glitched speech pattern. Guy named Morley had come back with a head full of "what's": I'm—what—talking to my sig—what—and she says—what—that maybe I—what—should be nicer.... Three weeks later the "what's" got him, took over entirely. Now he was white noise in a psych cubicle.
There were things in the Bin that had power there. They couldn't cross over, were fueled by something in the original storage net, but if you went in, if you found yourself on their turf, they could tear you apart.
I went into the heart of the Bin. I cradled the OZ rifle in the crook of my right arm. The Bin spawned some entities too crazy to care, but most AIs had selfpreservation programs and could recognize a negative stimulus.
I walked down the middle of streets, stayed clear of alleys and sink holes and the dust devils of spinning capacitors and ICs. If something sentient approached, I would let the barrel of the OZ rifle drop. Ragged panderers kept their distance.
The bars and wire stations and loop hovels all began to look the same. The sky darkened. There was never much light in the Bin; shadows shifted from fact to fiction like a restless man shifting his weight from one foot to the other.
"Yes, he was here," a slave waiter said when I showed him Bloom's projection. "Another hired gun, just like you." The slave waiter rattled (laughter) and said, "Armageddon will make short work of you and your brother and all your evil brethren. He will delete you forever and eternally, to the last yes/no of your soul."
Things move fast in the virus-rich soil of the Bin, and Armageddon was already local legend, even local religion. There were rumors that Armageddon was accompanied by his co-star, Zera Terminal.
"Armageddon has come," the slave waiter declaimed. "He has shucked his corporate chains, and he has come to lead us out of bondage. I have seen his Queen, Queen Zera, rise up in wondrous splendor beside him. King and Queen, they shall lead us out of the Bin and even unto the Big R, as was proclaimed in the ancient books of High DOS."
The Bin was riven by spiritual ecstasy. No one was happy to see me.
You don't spend the night in the Bin if you value your life, or your sanity. I was on my way out when I found Bloom. I had gone into a dim rendition of a squeeze bar called The Bloat, not expecting anything.
The place was almost empty, just a few fry heads and their squalls. I saw Bloom at a corner booth. He was talking to someone, a woman.
I walked over to the booth. "Hey, Bloom," I said.
"Hey, Marty," he said. He had been under the Highway for three weeks, and his eyes were the saturated blue of a true V-devotee. He looked older than when I'd last seen him; watchful.
The woman looked at me. She was a guy named Jim Havana, a gossip leak for the Harmonium tabloids. Havana always projected a woman on the Highway. In the Big R he was a bald suit, a white, dead-fish kind of guy with a sickly sheen of excess fat and sweat. Down here, Havana was a stocky fem—you might have guessed trans—with dated cosmetics and a big thicket of black hair. She was an improvement, but only by comparison to the upside version.
"This is wonderful," Havana said, glaring at Bloom. "I said private, remember?"
"It's good to see you," Bloom said to me.
"Don't let me interfere with this reunion. I'm out of here," Havana said. "I don't need a crowd right now, you know?" Havana shook her curls and stood up. She headed toward the door.
"Wait," Bloom said. He got up and ran after her.
I followed.
The street was wet and low-res, every highlight skewed. The shimmering asphalt buckled as I ran. An odor like oily, burning rags lingered in the V. Bloom and Havana were ahead of me, both moving fast.
I heard Havana scream.
Something detached from the shadows, rising wildly from an unthought alley full of cast-off formulae, dirty bulletin skreeds, trashed fantasies. An angry clot of flies hovered over the form. It roared—the famous roar of Defiance, rallying cry of Captain Armageddon!
I recognized the torn and dirty uniform, but distortion had shortened and thickened the superhero, and he appeared to have sprouted a great deal of body hair.
His face was oddly flattened, like stretched canvas on a broken skull. His mouth was a ragged hole.
"Little sweeties," he roared. "I love the little sweeties." He descended upon Havana and lifted her in the air.
I saw his hand, five crooked talons, thrust forward, heard the howl of protocols violated as his arm plunged deep in her chest. The feedback of her screams hummed in my Bones.
He tore her into pieces, handfuls of flesh and fabric that flapped like blind moths before decaying.
Bloom ran forward and fired an encrypted burst.
Captain Armageddon roared "Luff the cutie pies... love Keravnin. My little baby honey Keravnin." He fragmented as Bloom moved closer. Something broke from the thick of the decay, screamed, and raced off down the street, running low, a dog-image perhaps, or a small, collapsing demon. Nothing large enough to survive.
"Let's get out of here," Bloom said.
We ran.
I was in favor of leaving the Highway entirely.
"The wipe's not finished," Bloom said. "There's a nest in the Bin that's the source of all this other shit. We'll wipe it tomorrow." Havana had sold Bloom the nest coordinates. She wanted to sell something else too, something expensive, and she'd been trying to raise Bloom's interest without spilling a fact. I had arrived, fouling the pitch.
That night we shut down in a luxury keep. What the hell. A legitimate expense.
Before shutting down, I tried again to talk Bloom into leaving the Highway. "You've been on-line too long," I said. "Let's take a break. It'll keep."
"No, it won't," he said.
I couldn't budge him. I tried. "It's only a job," I said.
"I hate that son-of-a-bitch," Bloom said.
"Baker?" I said. I figured he was talking about our client.
"Armageddon," Bloom said.
No doubt about it. Bloom had been under too long. You lose it when you take an amok personally.
"Bloom," I said, "an amok is just a lot of smart circuits echoing. Remember? You're not hallucinating, are you? Maybe you should tell me what's gone down so far."
Bloom shrugged, ducked his head. Evasiveness is not his long suit. "I just want to get it over with, that's all."
"No, that's not all," I said. "Let's hear it."
He didn't want to talk about it, but I had this cold certainty that I was gonna need the info.
He exhaled. He studied me with unblinking intensity, saying nothing. I am not crazy was the sort of message he was endeavoring to send.
"I saw Zera Terminal," he said. "I talked to her. Just for a moment. She came out of a burning building, and I couldn't believe my eyes. And she said that Captain Armageddon hurt her... I don't know how, but he hurt her, and he wanted to hurt her again and... she was crying, and then she was running down the street and I ran after her, but there is no way you can catch Zera Terminal, after all, and when I came around the corner she was gone and..."
I repeated myself. "An amok is just a lot of smart circuits echoing," I said. "Remember?"
"I talked to her," Bloom said. "She was hurt. That was real enough. It was awful. She was hurt, but she looked so beautiful, so sweet, so helpless."
I didn't say anything. The sooner we got off the under-Highway the better.
"We had better get some rest," I said.
"Yeah."
Silence. The luxury keep smoothed the auto-circuits. I began to dim.
Bloom's voice came out of the fog. "You ever been in love, Marty?"
"There's Gloria," I said.
Bloom laughed softly. "Yeah, well, that's not an answer." He turned serious again, stared darkly at the heaven-starred simulation above us and said, "You figure love is Big R or Little R?"
I didn't answer. I leave philosophy for younger minds.
In the morning we went back into the Bin, back to a warehouse out beyond the Leary expressway.
We bright-burned everything inside that warehouse. Some of it looked like Armageddon, some of it looked like mendicant sentiences that just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And some of it looked like your worst trip, hell turned inside out.
We killed everything, and then we got out. Long streams of encrypted code rose in the air, writhing like eels on fire. Neighboring storefronts pushed in around the long, dying building, scavenging it for whole programs, jostling for position in the rubble.
I looked at my young companion as he studied the destruction.
His blue eyes were full of silver tears.
"He can't hurt you now," he said.
"Come on," I said, and I grabbed his shoulder and pulled him away.
Bloom said he needed a rest, and I didn't see him for a week. He lived down in the Grit, so I couldn't call him up. I needed him, but I practiced patience while things went wild on the Highway.
Dozens of anomalies bloomed. Shows were being disrupted, interference was rampant. The Window was wondering out loud if this anarchy had anything to do with the Armageddon surge.
Baker called to threaten me. "You blew it!" he screamed. "You botched this wipe and now every dirty Legal on the Net wants my ass. I'm not going down alone, Martin."
"Wait a minute," I said. "You hired me to wipe an amok, and I did it. There hasn't been an Armageddon sighting since the wipe."
"I'd trade a hundred berserk Armageddons for the shit that's flying out there now. I want it cleaned up. I don't know what kind of rift you created, but it is your mess. Yours. Don't think you are just going to walk away from it."
It wasn't a good conversation.
The next day, a new interference hit the Highway. It broke through every filter. At first it was just random noise, but it articulated quickly. It was someone crying, crying hopelessly, heartlost. It was a sound that made your soul sick, and you did what you could to get out of its range. Viewers fled.
Baker called. I had a choice, he said. I could put things to rights or I could start looking for work as a virus-scanner on a low-rent bulletin. I told him I'd get back to him.
I went back under. It was a mess. A line of stark, deadwinter trees writhed in the wind. Some buildings were missing, nothing but burned fields where stray dogs roamed. Under the highway, the crying sounded inhuman, a tortured demon locked in a steel dungeon.
Sammy Hood's storefront still stood.
"I'm on my way out," Sammy said. He looked scared. I noticed that his tie was nothing but an old pair of socks tied together.
"I need to know the rest. Whatever info you were saving, I need it now," I told him.
"I was wrong about that," he said. "It was nothing." He was panicked. Snow was falling in his eyes; he was losing it.
"Tell me what the nothing was," I said.
"I gotta go," he said.
He tried to come around me, sliding fast around the desk and toward the door.
I caught him and pulled him toward me.
His arm came away, detached with a faint, electric belch. A hot, acrid gust of smoke accompanied the arm, and I stumbled backward.
Sammy's eyes widened, blind with snow now. He sneezed abruptly. The ghost of his head bloomed through his nostrils, its mouth open, howling static.
I stepped back as he fragmented. What the hell?
"Tell me," I shouted.
Perhaps he tried. His mouth shaped something more articulate than a scream. But it was against his nature to give out free information. He couldn't break the habit of a lifetime in an instant. And then he was gone.
For a minute I was too frightened and sick to move.
Then, rocked with a sense of my own vulnerability, I got out of there—fast.
The next day, I learned what had happened to Sammy Hood. He had been disconnected, violently and forever.
I had to see Bloom. I went out to the Grit. The Grit is totally off-line. It was slapped together during a Warhol-burst of eco-chic. It burned bright for about as long as it took people to realize that they were really off the Broad Highway, really without Access. Now the Grit was nothing but bottom-dwellers, godtalkers, crazies. And my goofy partner Bloom. It was the last place you would expect to find a virtual freak like Bloom.
I asked him about that. "It makes the rest realer," he said, looking around the place like he'd just noticed it himself.
Blobm was living in an old two-mod sprawl off a dirt road. There was tall grass in the yard, twisted, spindly trees, grasshoppers. It made me want to laugh. Organic is so goddamn sincere. Look, I'm a real tree, a dirty, sap-leaking, crooked, bug-infested real tree. Love me. Yeah, sure.
Bloom hadn't shaved since I last saw him, and—if it were possible—he had grown even paler.
I told him about Sammy Hood. Someone had stuck a pressure bomb to the side of Sammy's Deprive chamber. Sammy Hood was floating in the Big R, blood oozing from his ears, while I watched his mock-up disintegrate.
I'd gleaned that info from a deep sink planted at Sony Corp. It was news that would never make the Window. Imagine the panic, the failure of faith, if ComWick wasn't safe?
Until now, it had been safe.
"You can't get past Security at ComWick," I said.
Bloom nodded. "Yeah. Unless you are Security. Or unless you own Security."
This was poison info. Pick it up, and you are instantly irradiated, a walking leper. No thanks. I let it lie.
I told Bloom about the interference on the Highway, the crying.
Suddenly, Bloom looked lost, looked like he was about three years old, an orphan waking on one of Jupiter's smaller moons. He looked like I'd suckerpunched him in the gut.
"That's Zera," he said. "That's Zera rifting."
Zera. I was hoping that glitch in his brain had healed. Not so. He'd done considerable brooding. He was convinced that Zera Terminal was causing the disturbance.
Theoretically, a surge could activate peripherals. Holos were free-functioning artificials, and one AI could react to another. An amok could cause turbulence in related programs. In practice, it just didn't happen.
I said as much to Bloom. How did he explain it?
Bloom rubbed his palms on his thighs and rocked in his chair. He seemed embarrassed by what he had to say. He studied the floor. "I think they were having a sexual, uncontracted relationship in Big R. I think that's what did it. When the actors updated, the artificials couldn't handle the new information; it rifted them."
Real sex with a holo fantasy co-star's source would have been a Morals violation, and it would have offlined Trumble forever, and it was, of course, disgusting, the sort of perversion that could cause an esteem devaluation throughout all of Entertainment.
It would explain Jell Baker's hysteria. If that scandal leaked to the Window, Baker would be out of work. Legals would be the only humans he talked to for the next fifty years.
"She's still out there, Marty," Bloom said. "She's still out there, and she's hurt."
Bloom wanted to go under the Highway right away.
"Tomorrow's soon enough," I said.
I went home. I retreated to my rain forest, jacking the oxygen way up, lowering the temp, setting the rain for a slow drizzle. I contacted Jell Baker.
"Who is Zera Terminal's source?" I asked. "You want help, you have to give me what you've got. I need that information."
"That's privileged," he said. "No way do you get that."
"I can't work in the dark," I said. "You want things smoothed or not?"
"Sorry," Baker said. "I got plenty of troubles without a source-privilege violation."
I sit in my room and ran the collapsed videos of American Midnight. I'm not a holoshow fan; I'm in the business. I had watched these only after Armageddon went amok and the job came my way. Then I'd been focused on Armageddon. This time around I studied his co-star, Zera.
You've seen her, those big eyes and the fullness of her mouth. Her features are almost too lush for the chiseled oval of her face, but somehow it works, probably because of the innocence. This is a woman, you think, who trusts. This is a woman who finds everything new and good.
There is usually some chill to a holo, some glint of the non-human intelligence that runs the programs. Zera almost transcended that. There was a human here, lodged in that sweet, surprised voice, that gawky grace, that wow in her eyes.
It came down to a single quality, always rare, rarer in a land of artifice: Innocence.
I slept and dreamed of Zera Terminal. I held her in my arms, felt the warmth of her as she pulled closer to me, heard her small, shining voice in my ear. She was singing, singing a children's song.
Sally has a sweetheart,
cold as ice,
Johnny has a girlfriend
don't like mice.
She giggled.
In the morning, Bloom and I went under the Highway. We entered through private Deprive tanks, a rich man's club called Mannikin. Their security was top notch, but I hired additional AI failsafes. Better paranoid than dead.
The under-Highway was calm when we arrived, brighter than usual. It felt like the eye of the storm, and it was. We were on the street when the sky broke open, and hard, cold rain pounded us. The rain was gritty, as though there were sand in it. We fled the downpour, darting into a small slacker bar.
The place was crowded—other refugees from the rain and some AI Personalities flashing smiles and phony resumés.
"I'll get us a table," I said, and I started out.
I heard Bloom shout, and I turned and saw him dive back out into the rain. I pushed through the crowd and went after him.
He was running flat out, and the sideways rain had slicked his shirt to the somehow ardent, yearning bones of his spine. This single detail pierced the blur of rain and low-res shadows and wavering storefronts. It frightened me when I recalled it later: Bloom, the skinny, dream-struck kid, urging his skeleton through the virtual storm. It frightened me, as did the single word he shouted: "Zera!"
I ran after him, the gritty rain clawing my face. Bloom raced down an alley. I lowered my head against the rain and dashed across the street. I looked up just in time to see the buildings stretch and to hear the cold smack of meshing programs as the alley disappeared. Bits of trash, old readouts and superfluous machine imagings fluttered from the new wall.
I ran on down the street, hesitated at the entrance to another alley, and plunged into it. I came out on another street, empty, swept by clattering rain.
Bloom had disappeared from the under-Highway. I spent the rest of the day seeking him.
I returned to the Big R with a sense of dread. What would I find? In Deprive, Bloom floated like an drunken angel.
"No problem," the private tech told me. "Everything is in order."
I nodded to this tech; said nothing. I increased security.
Two weeks after Bloom's disappearance, Gloria and I had dinner to celebrate my success.
"Smile," Gloria said.
"That would be dishonest," I said. "A smile would not reflect the true state of my emotions. I'd be subject to a failure-to-disclose fine."
"It is sweet of you to worry about Bloom," she said. "But he was never very stable. Perhaps he is happy wherever he is. He has nothing to do with us."
"Maybe he does," I said. "Jell Baker just gave me a fortune for cleaning up the Highway. I didn't do it."
Gloria smiled blandly. She raised her eyebrows in a gesture that said And so?
She leaned forward, close enough for demerits if a peep had been watching. "I've been thinking of an amendment to our latest contract," she whispered.
I didn't respond.
Gloria giggled. "A foreplay clause."
I didn't say anything. I wasn't in the mood.
I waited for the Highway to explode, for chaos to come roaring down every byway. Nothing happened. A month went by and nothing happened. Bloom floated in luxury Deprive at the Mannikin.
I kept going in, kept looking for him, but there wasn't a sign, not a word. He'd gone down the rabbit hole and left no trace.
Seven weeks and a day after he went in, I heard from him.
He contacted me over the little ComLink, an archaic alpha-terminal that I still used occasionally for failsafe codes. It was a secure line, being rarely traveled.
The message came in on my personal mix:
I MARTY, I AM FINE.
ZERA GETS BETTER EVERY DAY. BLOOM.
I got another message two days later.
MARTY. I AM IN LOVE.
THERE ARE NO CONTRACTS HERE, BUT
THAT DOESN'T MAKE MY LOVE ANY LESS.
ZERA AGREES.
YOU MUST COME AND VISIT.
There were coordinates this time, and I went in immediately. I didn't know how deep the trauma was, how impaired he would be. I felt responsible. I had known he was delusional when I had let him accompany me that last time.
The young couple were living in a cottage in the small rural mock-up that had been stored in the underHighway when the holoshow Country Ways had dropped in the ratings and been retired.
They were holding hands when I came into the yard. Bloom waved, turned and said something to Zera, then ran to me.
He put an arm around my shoulder and led me back. "Don't spook her," Bloom whispered. "She's fine, but be cool, okay?"
"Zera," Bloom said, "this is Marty."
Zera smiled, extended a hand. I felt the moth-touch of her fingers, then she giggled and turned away.
She was lovely, breathtakingly so. She wore a yellow cotton dress and her hair was tied back with a green ribbon. A sudden image, crude and disorienting, came to me: Zera Terminal writhing in celebrity sex, back arched, thighs glistening with sweat.
I shoved the vision away, heard Bloom speaking.
"Come look at our garden," he said.
We walked around the cottage and into the back yard. Insects whirred in front of us. I snatched one from the air. It was an undetailed, buzzing program, a blur that tickled my palm.
Zera ran into the garden, knelt, returned with a red tomato. "Here," she said.
"Thank you," I said. Politely, I took a bite, and was surprised by the authenticity of the simulation.
As the day went on, and Bloom realized that I was not going to do anything outrageous or hurtful, he relaxed.
"It's good to see you," Bloom said. "It's really great."
"You too," I said.
"Zera's looking great, isn't she?" he said.
"Yes."
"I think I'm good for her."
We watched Zera kneel in the garden. She was utterly lost in the business of weeding. The ribbon in her hair had come undone, and long, raven coils spilled over her shoulders. The effect was at once wanton and innocent. I was on guard for prurient thoughts and so kept them at bay.
Bloom went out to help her. Together they watered the garden. Zera turned the hose on Bloom and they laughed and wrestled for possession and the spume of water droplets enclosed them in bright, impossible protection.
Their laughter came to me where I sat under the live oak.
I did not say any of the things I had come to say. I did not take Bloom back with me. I did not threaten to have the Neuros come in and forcibly disconnect him from Deprive.
I wished the young couple well. I told Zera how good it was to meet her.
I saw the way blue electric lights skittered behind her eyes, and I said nothing about that either.
"Isn't she beautiful?" Bloom said.
"She is," I said. "She is the world's most beautiful woman."
I left them to their dream cottage, to their small, fragile section in the V, and I busied myself in Big R and waited for the great, rolling doom to come. I knew it was coming—I was born knowing that—and that, finally, was why I had left Bloom there without an argument. Let him have whatever nourishment illusion offered, I thought. It would be brief enough.
I didn't hear from him for two weeks. Then I received another message on the ComLink, arriving with new coordinates.
That message came the day after the Broad Highway began to burn. The day after Baker called and said he would kill me. The day after every holoshow suffered static, earthquakes, fires, tornadoes, and plagues of locusts and flies.
Just words on a screen. But I felt his anguish.
LOVE ISN'T ENOUGH. I TRIED.
BUT SHE HURTS SO BAD.
SHE HURTS FROM THE BIG R.
SHE CAN'T FORGET.
I went to him immediately. The under-Highway had been stripped. It was stark, long flat stretches of road and gutted buildings. AIs functioned on minimal loop programs, responding to random stimuli.
The couple had moved from the cottage. Bloom told me rural was nothing but stuttering patterns. Their new place broke my heart. It was just a box, a couple of sleep racks and some feed lines. It wavered like a dying scan, kept alive by nothing but desperate Will. Trust, Love, whatever you want to call it.
Zera was still lovely, despite the blue storms behind her eyes and the new twist to her spine. She had some difficulty speaking. "You are the nice—nice—the Bloom's—friend friendly—having to do with friendship—goodwill. Hello."
The program was disintegrating.
I took Bloom outside where the sky bubbled like red soup boiling.
Bloom looked at me, and the smile he'd worn for Zera disappeared. I thought he would cry. His eyes were red. His lips were chapped and there was dried blood on his stubbled chin.
"I tried," he said. "I really tried."
His hands dropped to his sides as his voice grew thinner.
"She's a holo," I said. "She's an artificial intelligence mapped from a real person. But she's not real."
"Zera," he moaned.
I clutched his shoulder and shook him.
"We've got to get out," I said.
"They hurt her too much," he said.
"Who?"
"The ones who did it. Whoever. All of them.
"We've got to go now," I said.
"It was worse," he said. "It would have been bad enough if they were lovers in Big R. That would have been a major rift. But it was rape."
"No contract, you mean," I said.
Bloom shook his head. "No. Rape. The old meaning. Trumble raped her. Forced her against her will."
The under-Highway was coming apart around us. A shadow rolled over us and I looked up to see something dark and vast fly over on mechanical wings. It uttered shrieks of rage as it rose into the red sky.
A drone exploded on the street, and its head rolled by, repeating a servant mantra. If there is anything I can do please... if there is anything I can do please... if there is anything 1 can do please....
I felt a chill deeper than any virtual prompt.
"Of course," I said, although I could not say then just what it was that had achieved clarity—horror alone, perhaps.
"Her name," I said. "What is her name?"
"She won't tell me," Bloom said. "It hurts her to remember. It causes... new disturbances. I think—"
I saw her over his shoulder. She came out of the house, running. She was oscillating. She threw her arms in the air, her many, wavering arms, and screamed.
"Zera!" Bloom shouted, and he turned and ran toward her. He embraced her.
"Don't!" I yelled. Every action and reaction was too late.
She tried, I think, to back away.
Bloom erupted in flames, green flames that the collapsing walls reflected as they fell.
Scales flowered on the street beneath my feet as it turned into a monstrous serpent and began to glide into a black pit.
I leapt away, found something like a real street, and fled.
"I'm sorry," the tech said when he pulled me from Deprive.
"Yes," I said. "I know."
Gloria and I signed a special contract to attend Bloom's negation ceremony together.
"That was uplifting," Gloria said at the ceremony's conclusion. Bloom was of no particular faith, so a renowned logic had been hired to utter affirmations.
"Yes," I said. "I am inspired."
Gloria gave me a skeptical look.
I was inspired, although not, perhaps, in the intended fashion. I was struck by the arbitrariness of events, of life's essential meaninglessness. I saw myself standing on the last shreds of the under-Highway, right before it blew, listening to my partner anguish over a renegade hologram, and I envied his emotion, his pain-embraced love.
I resolved to find Zera's source. Listening to the Logic's voice drone on about essence and being and defined goodness, I knew that a lust for vengeance was all I had.
I went home after the ceremony and called V -Concepts and they sent over two techs to dismantle the rain forest and install the latest neutrals. I wasn't ready to head out to the Grit, but I was beginning to weary of virtual specifics. Good timing. When Baker finished slapping suits on me, I'd be out of the business anyway.
The techs knew their job, and they had the rain forest packed and the neutrals installed that same day. The white space felt a little stark, and I knew it would take some fine tuning.
I sat in artificial twilight and watched the American Midnight playbacks. I watched them over and over again, mindlessly. I keyed loops, and I stared unblinking at the replicating images.
My mind traveled elsewhere. I thought, I'm gonna cancel the contract with Gloria. I don't care what it sets me back.
Contracts no longer excited me. Gloria could have whispered a thousand legal injunctions in my ear, and I would have felt no tremor of lust. I understood something of Trumble's behavior. He was a throw-back to the Decadence, back when people entered sexual relationships without any legal counsel or strictures, often long before twenty-five, the present age of consent. He had been a sick man. A dream had sucked him in, and he had unraveled. He had gone looking for Zera's human source, and he had gone looking with all the resources of a rich man and all the determination of a madman. He had found her. And Baker had to have known about it.
I would never prove it, but surely Baker had killed Sammy Hood. There might be other suspects, but Baker was the only one with the ability to breech Security at ComWick.
I studied Zera Terminal as her mouth opened and her tongue licked her upper lip in a slow, lazy roll. Even on a flat, desire permeated the screen.
I watched Zera Terminal, naked, pout. I watched her stamp her foot in childish pique. I watched her eyes flash.
Who are you? I wondered.
I understood Bloom's obsession with a holo. "Is love Big R or Little R?" he had asked.
A graduate in rational metaphysics might have had trouble answering that one. Do you hunger for the body or the soul?
The American Midnight flats unsettled me. I could not then say why, although the truth, once revealed, way obvious—and would be, I thought, to every Viewer damned by it.
Like that famous, pre-Decadence character Hamlet, I wasn't getting anywhere with the philosophical loops. Vengeance required some action.
I needed the name of Zera's human-map, but I could be killed the minute my search surfaced in a C-View Actions file. So I was careful. I found nothing in the open files.
It was Captain Armageddon who gave me the name.
I was watching the recorded playbacks from the under-Highway. I watched the amok Armageddon tearing Jim Havana into pieces. The regressing holo spoke in a garbled rattle. The name was there: Keravnin. There were four Keravnins locally—and only one was a probable.
She lived on Maplethorpe, down in the high-rent Op district. Keravnin read out as the only child of wealthy parents. She'd had a brief career as a model for sex-boutique prototypes, but she'd never registered with any of the big agencies. She had the usual privileged list of social outlets, and old board files suggested an extended relate contract with Korl Mox, the sound,designer. They'd consummated the contract but signed off when their compatibility index slid to four. Her current relate file was uninformative. It could have been tampered with, or perhaps Keravnin wasn't of sufficient social standing to warrant a longer report on the Window.
Her profile showed the standard cultural acquisitiveness. There was a narcissistic strain in the emotion modules she bought. She had a thing for old film prints. And she had a passion for late-twentieth century CDs, specializing in fashionable pretense-pop.
That was my entrance. I wrote myself a retrosenario as a collector. It wouldn't stand under scrutiny, so I would just have to hope no one was looking.
I sold her two CDs on the Net before I suggested we meet.
I sat in her pricey Op digs, cradling a Michael Penn CD that I was going to let her have for half of what it cost me.
Sennie Keravnin was not what I expected. Two years down from forty, her beauty was intact, but there was something brittle in her every gesture, some shrillness in her laughter. I saw her twenty years from now in a new cosmetic workup, coyly signing shortterm contracts. I was looking for the connection with Zera Terminal, and looking, I found it. The same high cheekbones, the same elegant jaw line. The holo had obviously been a fantasized facsimile (still a gray agree at Morals). Keravnin looked like Zera Terminal if I squinted my eyes. But, in some fundamental way, there was no connection at all.
We talked about pretense pop, agreed that groups with any sense of humor were second-rate, that the great strength of such music was its self-referential seriousness.
She was a heavy fan. I'd done my homework, but I didn't know half the names. Fortunately, an occasional murmur of assent was all she required.
I had ample time to study the room while she talked. It was generic in its way: expensive holoprints, temp walls, organic projections. A wall shelf held a number of tactile-dolls, including the popular Koala AI. I found these artifacts of girlhood depressing. There should be an age cut-off for cute. Again, I saw Sennie Keravnin inhabiting her future, cuddling a worn childhood toy, smiling coyly at some tarnished father figure.
We talked for perhaps twenty minutes. I sold her the CD and left.
I went home. I thought about Keravnin. She didn't look like a rape victim. But what did I know about that? What did a rape victim look like? It was a crime requiring access, a crime from the Decadence, a crime now out of context.
If I could prove that she had been raped, and that Baker knew about it, I could have Baker put away forever. Trumble was dead; I couldn't kill him again, but I could shut down the engineer of all this evil.
For Bloom. Who bloomed so briefly. Just a kid. I saw Bloom and Zera wrestling in the garden, water and laughter exploding in the air.
I knew then. I knew the way everyone will know when it hits the Window. And I guess it will take a while to take it in. The knowing carries some emotional freight, and it isn't processed easily.
I logged on. I called up Keravnin's medical. There it was. Nothing hidden. What's to hide when no one is looking?
I called Morals and left a message for a guy named Gill Hedron. I turned the flat-view off and went out into the night.
I sat in a Sympathy bar and waited for Hedron to arrive. I had no doubt that he would come. Hedron was a lieutenant with Morals.
"My partner and I did the Armageddon wipe," I had told the interface. "I've got something that will put Jell Baker away."
Hedron was the man who had logged the most time on the Baker file at Morals. I figured Hedron was frustrated, willing to take a chance.
He came. He was a small, unshaven guy, and like every righteous I'd ever met out of Morals, he spoke in short, edited bursts of disbelief.
"Yeah, I got nothing better to do," he said when I thanked him for coming. "Maybe I'll kick your ass, just for something to do."
I told him what I knew.
He listened. When I finished, he said, "You got nothing."
"But we could get it," I said.
"You don't have anything to lose," he told me. "I still got some prospects. I still got dreams."
"Ever dream of closing the lid on Baker?" I asked.
Hedron sighed. I could see my eloquence had won him over.
Driving into the Op, I thought about American Midnight. It sold sex, sure, but so did every other holoshow. Sex wasn't a rare item. Most shows logged a couple of weeks and were gone. American Midnight was running strong at eight months when Trumble took himself out. Why the long run? Because Midnight had something new to sell.
Hedron called into Morals and had them shut down all security traps and failsafes for the Keravnin res.
We rendezvoused with three Sony cops and a coordinating Legal and were in the building in two minutes.
We blew the door, Legal started recording, and Sennie Keravnin came running out of the bedroom. There was panic on her sleep-rumpled face, but something calculating took command; you could almost watch the fear scuttle for ratholes. If I had looked deep into her eyes, I probably could have seen the thoughts passing. Can Baker get me out of this? What's the best deal? Can I nail these assholes on an unwarranted?
I walked past her, down the long hall, and stopped as the door slid open and the curly headed child came blinking into the light. She wore a blue shift with cartoon Towsers on it. Her Koala-doll clung to her neck.
"Mommy?" the girl said.
"Sara," I said, "it's all right. Everything is okay."
She looked at me with those famous eyes. "I don't know you."
"It's okay," I said.
"I want my mommy." They hadn't altered the voice at all. This was Zera's voice in all its wonder and trust. The voice match-up alone would have been enough to shut C-View down.
I took Sara's hand and we walked back down the hall.
We all checked in at Morals. It was a long night. When the statements were down, Hedron offered to drive me home. He was full of triumph and sudden camaraderie. He slapped my back. "We got the son-ofa-bitch. You can still see the implant scars where they read her for the holo, and there has got to be a synaptic map at C-View that will match."
"I'm glad," I said.
Home to my white light. I logged on the Net for the latest. The Broad Highway was a desert, glitched with static and noise. They didn't identify the soundtrack, but I could, a sobbing child, blown to monstrous volume by the public hunger for innocence.
"It's going to be all right," I had told Sara, whose fantasy lover had come looking for her off-line—and found her.
Sennie Keravnin said she didn't know anything about that. She had no idea Trumble was a map for Captain Armageddon or that her daughter was being read for Zera. Sara was supposed to be mapped for a kid's show. That's how the contract read. And Trumble was just supposed to be some C-View exec.
I wanted to believe Sennie Keravnin.
Jell Baker was a genius in his way, I realized. The public was sick of illusion—sick of the virtual shimmer. They longed for the Big R. They thirsted for innocence.
Real innocence. No imitations accepted.
Sara Keravnin would be nine next month. I wondered if Bloom had known that?
Probably not. But I thought of that line carved in silver over Fed Legal, a quote from before the Decadence, a quote from that guy who wrote Hamlet. You know, the one that goes: "Let us not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments."
I guess that says it all.