This Alien Shore (27 page)

T
HE MEDS were there within an hour, but it wasn't soon enough. Phoenix had waited too long to call.

He'd known it, too. That was the part that burned worst of all. He'd known there was something seriously wrong with Torch, and he hadn't done anything about it. The guy had started twitching in that spastic kind of way, and that should have been warning enough. But when you walked the firewalls in your spare time, that kind of thing happened, you know? Something crummy would get into your circuits and then from there it would shunt into your brain, and before you knew it your grayware had gone into virus-alert and shut down everything it didn't need, to focus all its efforts on cleaning you out. Sometimes that meant a few body parts went offline for a while, which was pretty spooky, but who in his crowd hadn't experienced it at least once?

So that's what he'd thought it was. Torch was working right next to him when the shit hit, and all of a sudden his arm had started twitching, and it was pretty spooky, but not out of line with the kind of thing that happened sometimes. You didn't really need things like arms and legs when you were ‘netting, so if the grayware needed a little extra space to run things, it might preempt the circuits that ran extraneous systems. Not for enough time to do serious damage—the wellseeker made sure of that—but even a nano was enough time to scramble a few neurons here and there. Hell, they'd all been through it. Phoenix remembered one time he'd gotten really deep into the security system of Hellsgate and run into trouble. He'd been playing a war of nerves and speed with the megacomp there and every nano counted, so his 'ware had switched over a whole part of his cerebral net to data processing, which screwed the lower half of his body for well over an hour. Man, how he'd had to pee when that was over! If it wasn't for the contraband 'ware that ran a flesh-check and told him everything was okay, he might have panicked and called the meds ... but like they said, shit happened. The minute you stuck that first contraband circuit inside your skull and let it hook up to your brain, you'd damn well better know there was trouble coming.

That's what he'd thought it was. The twitching. He'd glanced over once or twice to make sure nothing worse had happened, but Torch looked alert enough. As alert as anyone could when their eyes were shut and they were kind of snoring, but Phoenix knew that was how the guy worked, so it didn't fool him. Torch was so into what he was doing he would kind of let his body go on vacation while his mind soared free through the datalines. At least that was how it seemed to him. Sometimes when you were hacking you had to remind yourself that your mind wasn't really going anywhere, it was just the whole outernet dumping shit into your brain so fast that the only way you could deal with it was with all these bizarre fantasy trappings, dreamlike settings that the brain created to give you some illusion of control. Phoenix hated them. He had a master program whose only job was to clean them out of his head as soon as they appeared, so that he could hack clean and sane. Torch got off on it, though. He'd had these theories about how those supposedly random images were actually visual access codes to deeper levels of consciousness, and he regularly recorded his own in the hopes of decrypting them later. Never did, though. The code key, whatever it was, had eluded him.

And now it was too late.

The med standing next to Torch's body stood up at last. There was all sorts of electronic crap scattered around Torch, things they'd tried to use to get him started up again. No dice. You could tell by the look on the guy's face that he was dead and gone, his brain having opted out for some data-fantasy far sweeter than real life ever was.

Then the med turned to Phoenix and said, “This guy a moddie?”

For a moment Phoenix could only just stare. What did he expect, this idiot med? That anyone would answer yes to such a question? Late-life modifications were as illegal as it got, and if they knew the half of what was in Torch's brain, they'd start asking all the wrong questions, in all the wrong places.

Then the med put up his hands in a gesture of innocence, and said, “Just trying to help, man.”

“Don't know,” Phoenix said warily. “Why? You think something fried him?”

“I think his wellseeker's a scrambled mess. We tried to download a mort log, and all we're getting is nonsense.” There was another med present, a girl, and she began to pack up all the electronic 'ware they'd used on Torch. Coiling cords neatly, so neatly, as if one coil out of place might cause some vital control not to work. In the middle of Phoenix's hyper-cluttered abode, it seemed almost a ludicrous effort. “Can you shed any light on that?”

He spread his hands in a matching gesture of innocence. “Hey, he was just a friend. Whatever he was into ... he didn't share it with me.” Then he took in a deep breath, tried to choose the tone of voice that would sound the least confrontational, and dared, “Can I get a copy of the mort log?”

The med's eyes narrowed. The girl looked up. “You kin?”

He hesitated only a nano. “Yeah. Only living.” When the med didn't say anything he added, “Cousin.”

“What's your name?”

“Randol. Randol G. Harrington. Like his name. Father's side.” He figured by now they had run Torch's ID, so that wasn't giving away anything they didn't already know. When they stared at him in what was clearly a disbelieving manner, he added, “Honest.”

“Well, Mr. Harrington. I'll tell you what.” The med tapped a button on his jacket collar and the door slid open; two white-garbed assistants appeared with a stretcher rolling between them. The med glanced down at the body, assured them, “It's clean,” and then looked back at Phoenix. “We're going to take him back to the station lab and outload everything we can, to see if we can isolate the cause of this fellow's demise.” The two men gathered up the body and placed it on the stretcher, strapping it into place. “When that's done with, if indeed you are legitimate kin of his, I'll see you get a copy of all the logs. Mort included.”

It was the best he was going to get, so he put a fake smile on his face and nodded. “Thanks. I really appreciate that.”

Such service didn't come free, of course. He flashed up an icon that gave him access to his most legitimate-looking debit account and bundled up a nice bit of cash as baksheesh. The med didn't bat an eye when his grayware informed him of its delivery—he was so very smooth—but Phoenix knew from his own program that the offer had been accepted. He stuck a piggyback on the next message the med sent out, figuring that it was headed to his bank. Just in case the ass-hole didn't come through as he promised, Phoenix would have his financial passcodes to play with. It never hurt to be prepared.

Torch is gone.
It hit him suddenly like a blow to the gut. Watching them bundle up his friend's body onto the auto-stretcher, watching it wheel itself out, he felt a stabbing grief, and a sense of total dislocation. Was this the guy who had broken into Dormia Station's penitentiary databank by his side, changing the code heading of each inmate's file so that the system was totally mucked? Was this the guy who had broken into the secret archives of the Sons of Perdition, committing a blasphemy for which (the Sons claimed) they would burn in hell forever? Was this the guy who'd hacked into Phoenix's own files on Hellsgate, the fourth or fifth time he'd been arrested, so that by the time they got him printed and booked, there was no complaint left on the books to keep him? God, they'd had fun. He couldn't even imagine what it would be like without Torch. First Chaos had been downed by a virus, then Deth Warrior went down, now this guy ... the last of his little pack was on his way out the door, and Phoenix couldn't even bring himself to look at Torch's face. There were tears in his eyes—real emotional stuff, not the faux shit his bioprograms churned out when diplomacy demanded it—and it was pretty hard to focus.

He had to get hold of those logs. He had to see what had taken out his friend. If it was the same virus that had screwed up Chaos, and then Deth ... well, there'd be hell to pay. And if it really
was
a government plot to take out the moddies, as Deth had claimed ... well, then that hell would shake the known universe to its roots! He had lost too many friends too fast, and no longer cared what the hell the establishment thought of his methods.

The door whisked closed behind the meds and their burden, leaving him alone in the dark and cluttered apartment. With a sigh he forced his attention back online, to the task of the moment. By the time Mr. Baksheesh got back to his station there would have to be records proving that Bent Harrington really did have a cousin named Randol, and that meant breaking into the Census files and MedCom and whatever other systems Torch's family tree was logged on, and adding himself to one of its branches. It wouldn't hurt if he could whip up a will really fast and get it into the databanks, too, just in case someone was stupid enough to try to claim the guy's possessions. That would take an hour, maybe, a bit more if there was trouble.

He wondered, as he started to work, if they would let him claim Torch's modware.

“One last time, for the record
...
” The med's hand goes somewhere out of sight, and there's the soft click of something being turned on. “You understand the risk involved? It's not just a question of whether or not there will be damage. There will be damage. It's only a question of which cells get damaged, and how badly. I can't access your current brainware without going through gray matter, and that means risk. You understand that?”

“You're going to have internal pressure for a while. That can't be helped. It's going to take a while for your body to figure out that it doesn't have room for as much ventricular fluid as it used to
...
if it ever does. An infant's brain adapts as it grows, an adult's ... sometimes doesn't. ”

Oh, yeah. He knows the truth of that one, better than this med does. He's already seen a friend taken to the morgue because of bioware run amok. You stick the stuff in your head and then you wait with fingers crossed to see if it stops growing when it should, and if
your
brain figures out it's there and adjusts for it, and what kind of damage the meds did putting it there in the first place. Not to mention whether it will prove compatible with the rest of the junk in your head, and hook up to it like it's supposed to. Hardware proper is even worse, that has to be imbedded in its finished form, which means gray matter from somewhere has to make space for it. And the brain isn't all so nicely labeled that a med knows for sure what he's cutting.

But what's the alternative? Go through life with an outdated piece of shit in your skull? Hell, maybe the rich folk liked what they got in the birthing center enough to be happy with it all their lives, but they were a whole different story. State-of-the-art wiring from the get-go, happy little babies hooked up to special monitors to make sure every biocircuit which grew was just where it should be. Little wonder they thought the stuff in their heads was perfect. It probably was. But what about the rest of the population? Node law guaranteed that every child was implanted with brainware upon birth, at state expense if necessary, but that didn't say anything about the quality of what they were given, or how careful the meds were about placing it. Shit, he knew one guy whose processor seed had been placed in a crease in the ventricular lining, it grew about a micrometer and then hit the wall and figured it had no more room to expand
.
Intellectually the guy was okay, but his inner circuits couldn't process much more than a cheap viddie. What was someone like that supposed to do, just smile and live with it?