GLASS CHRYSANTHEMUMS

© 1996 Ceri Jordan (Australia)

Print this one out? Approx 7 pages of A4 text

First time round, he couldn't work out what the hell Melyne was talking about.

'Link is like that. It's all very well being able to telephone straight into someone's mind. Instant communication, no answering service, no pretending you're not at home. It's just that no one's actually worked out how to wake you up before the incoming call starts.

" - four/two call, removal of vital integral structure, someone has stolen some Law - "

Swimming up from the deep warm depths of the bed, feeling Garrad shift uncomfortably and turn over, muttering obscure curses, Kiro focused enough to grasp -

" - four/two call, that's an outright emergency, Kiro, you lazy pox-eaten rifter - "

"Love you too, Melyne. What the hell's going down ?"

"It's eight in the morning, Kiro. You thinking about getting up today ?"

"I work unsociable hours, Mel. And I sure as hell need my beauty sleep." Grey light contaminated with neon seeped under the blinds. Garrad shuddered and reached out in the hazy innocence of sleep, clinging like a child. Neon played across the faint chemical burns marking his left profile, washing them flat and smooth. "So, are you gonna tell me what's underway, or is this just a social call ?"

"I told you. Some bastard freelance hacker has stolen some Law."

"Lore as in - "

"Law, Kiro. L-A-W." Melyne sighed; and somewhere at the back of Kiro's mind, hell froze over.

He was still doing up his jacket (old tatty thing, belying the hardware sewn into its lining, no point advertising for muggers) when he stumbled out into the street.

The thermo read 12 below; good for the season, and the bright clear sunlight had revitalised the neighbourhood. Tourists in armoured electric buggies gaped at children swapping software on street corners; studying the quick movements of wrist contact, the occasional crackle of sparks as worn transfer terminals bemoaned the arrival of yet more cheap shoot-'em-ups and brutal inaccurate porn.

Adults loitered on the frosted pavements too, holding out their wrists in entreaty, cold thin mouths forming old words for half-remembered things: jack-socket, simulations, sensor-suit.. Fogies. Overlay refusers, clinging obsessively to the frayed dreams of ancient VR implants and rusting feelie-units. Even the children, dreaming nightly of reaching legal age and signing onto the real thing, despised them.

After the first intersection, reasonably sure now that no one had marked down him for mugging or abduction or worse, Kiro sucked bitter air deep into his lungs and jacked into Overlay.

Tavistock Avenue shuddered and swam, and refocused full of dreams.

The empty sky over the respectable frontage of an ancient office block screamed with crimson neon, MAMA JO's 24 HOUR CASINO, and pointillist Jacks and Queens danced quadrilles in the blacked-out windows. Signs glittered and simulations formed contortions above the basement brothels of Ladybird Walk. Boys of barely sixteen, new to their circuitry, crowded uncertainly together on the traffic islands, gaping and nudging one another, exchanging lazy frightened dares.

The streets bustled. For every rambling derelict or domestic trudging home from an early shift, a glittering simulacron, ghost-image of someone walking these streets from the other side of the world. Walking not a VR representation, but the real thing, seeing and hearing events as they happened. Their false-colour cadavers able to converse with anyone on the street tuned to Overlay, select goods from the shops, shimmer through local riot, plague and revolution untouched.

No wonder TV had gone down the pan. Stuff the reportage: live the dream.

Waiting to cross at an intersection, bored with the endless rumble of identical trams and trolley-buses, Kiro glanced up at the thunderous horizon, and the vast tetrahedral silhouette of the old Grandstand headquarters, long since bankrupted like all Overlay's early rivals. As the traffic ground to a halt, the clouds parted and a shaft of gold played across it's black glass roof for a moment as if searching for signs of life. Finding none, the light faded, and the press of the crowd carried Kiro across the road and into the quieter streets around System Complex.

On the next corner, red light burned his eyes and he flinched, but the retinal-scan laser had dug out his identity already and blared it on the personalised advertising boards ahead: STEP INSIDE, KIROHITA HAZARD, FREELANCE DATA-GATHERER. WE HAVE SPECIAL OFFERS -

Clumsy, Kiro.. he reprimanded himself, and mumbled the verbal command for masking lenses. Plastic slithered across viscous fluids, and his eyes turned from bloodshot grey to vermillion streaked with gold.

"Took your time, Kiro. You could have sent a sim."

"Since when has a sim had the ability to touch ?"

Melyne's amber eyes glittered dangerously in the half-shadow. "And whom were you planning to touch, big boy ?"

Kiro snorted contempt and pushed past her into the hardware room.

He hadn't been near anything this big since he was a child. Mom had worked for Tsuru-Frieden for a while, and smuggled him in once under cover of some fictional school project. He wasn't even tall enough to reach the consoles then. The machinery towered over him, backlit by dull red emergency lights, clicking and clattering, spewing out paper and thin high squeals..

He'd had nightmares for months.

The lights were full on now, grey and cold, and the floor strewn with fragments of yellow glass that wedged into the soles of his boots and grated on the concrete. Cortägers, company security operatives, lounged against the walls, lazily contemptuous. Kiro strolled a complete circuit round the shattered console, pulling on his gloves, unsure what he was looking for.

Yes, it had been physically broken into. Unusual way to go about data theft, but Law wasn't exactly normal data. He engaged infra-red lenses, then UV, and found nothing except stale fast-freeze from a standard booby trap; breaking up now in the fresh cold air that had followed him in, weeping down the circuitry like opalescent tears.

"Guess you've checked for fingerprints and all the old-fashioned stuff."

Melyne nodded. "Nothing. Security cameras blank, no sign of forced entry.."

"Who's putting together a replacement ?"

"We can't replace it."

"Wha...?"

"If we could replace Law, Kiro, we'd never have called in help. Each segment of Law can only exist in one part of the System at a time. Stops anyone copying and rewriting, remoulding the System to their config's. It's still out there in the System somewhere; and as long it's online, we can't replace it."

Kiro looked down at the chrysanthemum pattern of broken glass on the pale stained concrete. "It's still operational, then ?"

"For now. Until they start to tamper with it. And if it does fail and we can't get the replacement up and running fast enough..."

Then the Overlaid sky will fall.

"How many people have you got on this case, Mel ?"

"Every freelancer on the books. Runs into thousands."

"All searching by simulacron, searching the System from the inside." Kiro stifled a yawn. "I'm gonna try to pick up a physical trail. Track down the hardware, not the software on it."

Melyne snorted, shaking her greying hair loose down her back. "Sometimes, Kiro, I think you're a fogie in disguise. I think you don't really like walking the System at all. Technophobe."

He grinned tightly, feeling the smile crack around the edges. "Who, me ?"

"Kirohita Hazard." The doorman on the rear entrance of Toni's smiled his death's-head smile. "Well, haven't you got some nerve ?"

Kiro grunted and reached for the doorhandle, shifting the plastic blade in his sleeve, ready to drop swiftly into his hand. "Government business, Krick. No time for petty grudges - "

Krick's smile broadened. "Nothing petty about thirty million, Kiro." His free hand locked under Kiro's chin, thumb caressing the line of his neck. "And you can guess how I'd like repaying."

In the doorway, shadows shifted: the other doormen and bodyguards, nudging one another and giggling, sizing him up like a piece of meat.

"I wouldn't advise that, Krick."

"What you gonna do, then, Kiro ? Bite my head off ?"

The other bodyguards roared.

"You and your metalheads here want to find out what an anal dentata does, step right up." Kiro's eyes locked to Krick's, soft, teasing. "I won't even struggle."

"Leave him be."

As usual on a Monday, Toni had a new suit on; powder grey, crimson accessories, slick and expensive in the Mafiosi tradition. The wind stirred his thinning hair as the bodyguards parted to allow him to the door. "Come inside, Kiro. I've been expecting you."

In the penumbral stillness of the tiny entrance hall, Toni produced a key for a side door and murmured, "You and Krick appear to have some kind of grievance."

"He got ripped off by an ex-lover of mine. Seems to hold me responsible."

The door opened in a glitter of coloured lights: automatically, Kiro set his lenses to filter hypnotic patterns, and then, seeing the child's kaleidoscope-projector on the low table, felt faintly ashamed of himself. Toni motioned him in. "And what does that marvellous device you mentioned do ?"

Kiro felt his face grow hot. "Last line of defence. Inserts into the, ah, vulnerable orifice, and anything penetrating it gets shot full of sedatives and tiny steel spikes. Tends to dampen an assailant's ardour."

Squeezing himself into the armchair across the room, Toni shrugged extravagantly. "Kirohita Hazard, you are a vile and vicious little man. I can't imagine why you're not working for me already."

"It's the suits, Toni. I just wouldn't look right in a suit."

Toni looked him over - yellow silk shirt, synthetic snakeskin pants that moulded skin-tight on contact with bodily warmth - and, turning off the projector, spared him a sharp-toothed smile. "No. I guess you wouldn't. D'you like this ? It's for my grandson. Three on Wednesday."

"I'd invite myself to the party, Toni: but by Wednesday there may not be any System left for my sim to walk to Sicily."

"I see." Toni nodded at a nearby chair. "Tell me about it."

Kiro did.

Toni leant back in his chair and inhaled slowly through his teeth. The pale vertical blinds covering the mirror-glass window into the club shuddered as the heating kicked in again, flashing Kiro a brief glimpse of a passing waiter; dark-skinned, dark-suited, as rigid and bleakly obsequious as any simulation.

"Well." Toni admitted, reaching for the coffee percolator. "That's all very.. unfortunate. But-"

"Why have I come here ?"

"The question does spring to mind."

Kiro drew a deep breath, shifted the knife again in his sleeve.

"And don't keep playing with that pathetic blade." Toni murmured without even looking round. "Whoever told you it wouldn't show up on a body scan took you for a ride. And you really wouldn't want to make me nervous, now would you ?"

Cold sweat pooled in the hollow of Kiro's back.

"Thing is," he began, trying to keep his voice somewhere within it's normal range, "when Overlay was launched, you sank a lot of money into alternative systems. Universe. And Grandstand. Overlay took off. They didn't. But you still have all your hardware, don't you ? And if Overlay went down.."

Toni cocked his head thoughtfully to one side: and smiled.

"Nice deductions, Kiro. But you're a fraction behind the times. Six weeks ago, I was offered a considerable stake in the System at a fair price. I bought in. If the System does go down, I stand to lose almost half my personal fortune. That would be a very expensive blind, now wouldn't it ?"

"Yeah."

Toni flicked a rectangle of plastic from a rack on the desk and inserted it into a charger. "And that's why I'm going to forget those allegations you just made and offer you my full assistance. This is the ID I normally give to my.. personal representatives. Also offers access to a generous expenses account." He smiled at Kiro through the steam rising from his coffee cup. "And if you're slick enough to get away with charging your expenses to the Government as well as to me, well, that's your business.."

Kiro finally exhaled.

He passed through the breakfast lounge on his way out.

Quiet this morning. Old men at secluded tables talked furtively to simulacrons of a dozen different races; each curled into their own corner, hands chastely folded on the table top or fussing self-consciously at their own hair, never moving close, never risking touching lest the illusion should be shattered..

Dulled by disappointment, Kiro noticed only that the Persian carpet was wearing thin between tables, and the rose-tinted chandelier over the empty ballroom floor was heavy with dust.

Then he recognised the man at the far table.

The simulacron - a boy of thirteen, muscular and perfect - rolled tired eyes to the heavens in a disconcertingly adult gesture when Kiro slumped onto the cushioned bench beside him. Had to be older, anyway. No one under sixteen was wired for Overlay. Fat old man, sitting safe on another continent, getting his kicks by remote. Kiro would have spat at him, but he needed all his vitriol for the tall grey man lounging in the corner.

"Bun ziua, Gailunas." Kiro grinned at him over the remains of breakfast. "Long time, no see."

The old man regarded him with eyes like turquoise glass. "I cannot say I have regretted it."

"Funny, though. Because I was just talking to Toni about you."

A muscle at the corner of Gailunas' eye began to twitch convulsively.

"Well, no, not about you personally. About your VR/reality interface system. What was it called..? Grandstand."

"It's always nice to be fondly remembered, Hazard-san."

Kiro nodded gravely. "I remember a lot about you, Gailunas. You and your poor son Alyoshen."

Gailunas bowed his head, dry eyes blinking. "Alyoshen... would have been twenty-nine today."

"Really ?" Kiro managed, swallowing hard; making a mental note of the number, wondering which of them had lied to him, father or son. As if it really mattered at this point...

Gailunas stood up slowly, reaching for the silver-topped cane. "So, as you can imagine, I have things to attend to.."

Kiro's hand beat his to the cane - just - and their gazes locked. "Yes." Kiro breathed, hearing the distant muffled alarm summoning security to throw him out. "I'm sure you have. So let's be brief. Where is this missing fragment of System Law, Gailunas ?"

Beside him, the simulacron yawned bored distaste, faded into transparency and disappeared.

The old man spared him a thin cracked smile as the side doors opened and Krick and his meatboys began to glide in, all smiles. "In the System, Kiro. In the System. Where else would it be ?"

He felt Crick's fist displacing air at his back and spun to his feet, weight on one heel, the knife jumping to his hand. The needle on Krick's signet ring glanced harmlessly off his armoured collar; Krick buckled with a squeal as a red line marked the knife's encounter with his crotch, and Kiro ran.

They'd closed the gates, and he gashed his hands to ribbons climbing the blunt, ancient barbed wire out into the street. A group of simulcrons, brilliant in traditional African robes, stopped at the end of the alley to gape.

"Goddamn tourists !" Kiro yelled as he barged through them, etiquette forgotten.

Glancing back from the corner, noting that all the Overlay street signs were down and they were probably lost, he had the small satisfaction of watching them dive pointlessly for cover as the machine gun on the roof of Toni's opened up.

He was back on Ladybird Avenue before he dared catch his breath. Trade had picked up now, flashy corporate programmers and stockbrokers taking time off to stroll the crisp pavements and stare; always passing methodically up one side of the avenue and back down the other, comparing value for money, before choosing their pleasures for the morning.

Slowing to a walk, Kiro surreptitiously wiped his hands, and then the blade, with a paper tissue from one of his voluminous pockets, tossed the bloodied scrap into a bin, paused to stare at an Overlaid list of obscure pleasures outside a girlie-bar. His hands were shaking.

Toni wasn't exactly going to be pleased.

Neither was Melyne.

It's in the System, Kiro. It's in the System. Where else would it be ?

Behind the glass of the girlie-bar window, a simulation kicked in, sensing his continuing presence on the pavement outside, offering his presumed nervousness further enticement. A girl with eyes like sapphires wriggled and squirmed on a dark mattress. The man mounting her looked like Garrad.

That would be the sensible thing to do. Go home, drag Garrad away from his latest software commission, pack, and run. He'd stashed most of his money in gemstones, always the best mobile currency. Enough to buy them both new identities in the North African Republic; or maybe Greater Friesland, Garrad wasn't going to pass for any kind of African..

The prismatic background behind the increasingly overdramatised simulation flowered suddenly into a chrysanthemum formed from shards of yellow glass.

In the System, Kiro. It's in the goddamn System -

The heaving simulations dissolved into powder and drifted away just seconds before the whole bar crashed into blackout.

Passing the silent grounds of Grandstand HQ, where untended borders sprayed the wind with dandelion seeds and aphids, Kiro broke into a run.

The police were shuffling around the yard outside System Complex, waving old-fashioned scanners vaguely at unmarked windows and undamaged doors. None of them seemed to understand why they were bothering. Outclassed and despised for decades by corporate security firms, they had finally lost faith in themselves. Kiro walked through them unchallenged, and even the receptionist at the door barely glanced up from her sim-mag before waving him through.

Passing, he glanced over her shoulder. The news headline on the screen was just being updated from a minor political scandal in Neo-China to screaming capitals SOFTWARE THEFT CAUSES OVERLAY FAILURE: SOME AREAS OF NORTHERN BLOCK ALREADY DOWN.

The receptionist tutted through clenched teeth and called up the show-biz gossip pages.

The lights were off in the main hardware room, and it took Kiro a moment's fumbling in the furnace-glow of warning lights to find the panel. Nothing appeared to have been touched yet. Picking a careful path over the flower of shattered glass, he crouched slightly to peer inside the wrecked monitor.

He'd spent most of the wild dash back here trying to access a schematic for the System: four times he'd been refused clearance, and only as he turned, panting, into the main yard had he thought to use the card Toni had given him. Grudgingly, the security barriers parted, showering him with warnings about the misuse of classified information, and downloaded the diagrams with such speed that his vision still hadn't cleared properly. Who said computers didn't have personalities...?

Wind screamed in the filter vents, but he barely registered it.

He was so surprised to find he was right that he made himself check again; slowly this time, aligning the Overlaid schematic with the exploded monitor and matching each charred molten component against it. Which was his excuse for not hearing the door, or the Cortäger, or the safety catch coming off the stunner, until it was far too late.

He saw the Cortäger's shadow, in the end, and tried to turn: still faintly sticky, the blade caught in his sleeve lining, gashing his forearm, and the room flashed briefly into negative as raw white light exploded against the base of his skull and his feet went out from under him, skidding on yellow glass.

"Dunno what that was you dosed me with - " Kiro husked when Melyne finally came down to the interrogation room, "but you could make a fortune on the open market."

They'd chained his ankles to the bedframe, but left his hands free to reach the water flask and nausea- suppressants. So that was alright. He was shaky and feverous with the after-effects of the drug, and he'd rambled friendly and ridiculously comprehensive answers to all of their questions, even told them what Garrad's real name was, and he'd promised never to do that, but his nerves still vibrated with raw pleasure and his mind floated numbly far above the pain, and it was all alright...

Melyne grunted and rammed the hypo into his arm, ignoring his yelp: only the government, in the interests of economy, used real needles now, and Kiro, who generally got his kicks for free, from regular overdoses of adrenaline and paranoia, wasn't used to them.

As the drug wore off, he began to remember why.

When he'd finally finished throwing up, Melyne forced his mouth open and cracked a couple of the nausea capsules into his saliva before hustling him to his feet. "I thought you were one of the bright ones, Kiro. I really did." she murmured, her mouth tight with pity. "And then you go and do this."

"I told them, I didn't do anything." Kiro said vaguely, concentrating on stopping his knees from buckling. "Toni and Gailunas. They're in partnership again."

"They were in the same building, granted. But what does that prove ?"

"Toni bought into the System. Wants a controlling share. Has to bring the share price down first; so he sabotages it. Sets a bomb in a minor terminal. Check the pattern of the glass. It wasn't smashed in, by a blow. Out, from an explosion."

Melyne peeled back his upper eyelid and frowned. "You're still pretty jimmied up, Kiro. You shouldn't get too excited."

Shaking her off, Kiro staggered, clutched at the bedstead for support. Warmth welled at the base of his spine, flowered into his shoulder-blades, melted his cerebral cortex. The room swam. "There was no stolen hardware. It's all still there. Melted, but there. And so is that fragment of Law. Just transferred to another terminal. There's a procedure to do that, if a terminal needs to be overhauled or replaced. A procedure bought from the Grandstand system."

Catching his arm, Melyne shoved him roughly back onto the bed: springs growled muffled protests under the damp mattress. "Right. Let me tell you how it really is, Kirohita Hazard. You tried to draw a weapon on a Cortäger. You have an ID that proves you're working for Toni. An ID that was used last night to access the System mainframe in an attempted act of sabotage."

"I only got that this morning."

"Prove it."

Kiro gagged weakly and, fumbling for the water flask, knocked it to the bare concrete in a shower of shattered glass.

"I had your arrest warrant delayed by 36 hours. And I rang Garrad, told him to start packing. That's the best I can do, Kiro." Melyne held out his jacket, pockets torn and empty. "I suggest Neo-China. Always openings for good freelancers. You can see yourself out."

"Sure you trust me to ?"

Melyne looked at him with eyes of ice. "I'm kinda busy. I have to go and sweep up some glass."

On the front steps, high from the final rush of the pacifier shot, Kiro turned to look up at her empty office window and yelled: "Guess this means I don't get a job reference, right ?"

And laughed so much he fell down the steps and had to pick himself up, bruised and dusty, under the steady reproving stares of the Cortägers guarding the gates.

It was almost sunset.

He took a trolley-car by the long route, along the river, watching sponsored Overlay displays of cartoon characters and forgotten national heroes splutter and wink out one by one. The shares table displayed over the financial district just had time to register SYSTEM SHARES IN FREEFALL: BOARD RESIGN before disintegrating into a random cloud of emeralds and swirling realistically on the breeze until the darkness claimed it.

As low black cloud swept in from the east, even the stars seemed to being going out.

Someone was destroying his world.

Toni hadn't known that the transfer process was temporary. That the data had to be back in its designated terminal within ten hours, or it would be quietly devoured by the anti-viral system. So he couldn't have told System controllers when he sold them the software to ease his debts, even had he wanted to.

Gailunas knew. But he had an aircraft hangar full of old Grandstand hardware, and not one cent invested in the System.

Alyoshen Gailunas, who would have been twenty-nine today if he had lived, knew. But his father had arranged a lethal accident in a chemical factory ten years ago, to protect Grandstand's secrets.

List of suspects was getting kind of small, Kiro reflected, as the trolley-car juddered to a halt at East Bridge and disgorged thin frightened people into a darkening world.

Small and very close to home.

Next stop was his. He'd have to think of something else to buy Garrad, if they were leaving. The antique manuscripts would just be too bulky to take with them. Damn. Birthdays were a nuisance.

And he had so many questions to ask.

Chrysanthemums, perhaps...?

FINI

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