Door

by Fred Warren -  

“Let me in!”

“No.”

“I need your help! Open up! Now!”

The narrow corridor that dead-ended at Carson’s room was deserted, a welcome relief after Melanie’s flight through the smoke and chaos of the ring sector beyond, choked with fleeing colonists and swarming spiders. She figured she had only a few minutes, at best, before the spiders decided to investigate this passage. Her palms were already fiery red from banging on the door. Why was he being so stubborn?

Her brother’s voice was maddeningly calm, a bored drone of indifference magnified by the commbox’s tinny vibration. “You know the rules, Sis. That door opens for nothing and no one. If you want to talk, log yourself into the game net or message me.”

There was a rumbling sound in the distance, followed by a long, warbling shriek that climbed slowly in both pitch and volume, then stopped, as if it had been cut off with a knife.

Melanie swallowed hard and fought to keep her voice steady. “Do you have any idea what’s happening out here?”

“Don’t know, don’t care. This is a really inconvenient time to pester me. My guild’s getting ready to run the Fathomless Catacombs in Wizard’s Realm, and I still have to equip.”

“Carson…I…am…in…trouble! The whole station’s gone haywire. Things are exploding, and there are spiders everywhere!”

“How do you expect me to help? Go back to your apartment, or call an Enforcer.”

“The corridors to my apartment are sealed off, and the only Enforcers I’ve seen are running as fast as they can in the opposite direction. These spiders are aggressive…the brown ones are attracted to motion, the gray ones move in packs, and the red ones go straight for the throat. I need a safe place to hide. You’re all I’ve got.”

“Don’t be such a baby. They’re bugs. One-shot kills.”

“This isn’t a game, idiot. I don’t have a gun.”

“Fine. Step on them. Hit ’em with…with a book or something.”

“Aaggh! Would you please link into the public cam server and actually look at what I’m dealing with here?”

“Will it shut you up?”

“No.”

“Oh, all right. Hold your water.”

The corridor was still empty. Melanie stared at the commbox, wishing she could pull words from it by sheer force of will. “Carson? Are you there? Do you see it?”

Silence, then a metallic hiss. “Yeah, yeah, I see it. What a mess. This is the sort of thing that started me gaming in the first place. I still don’t understand how you can bear living outside.”

Something tugged at the edge of her awareness, a faint crackling—or scratching. She checked the corridor again. It was clear, but a whiff of acrid smoke tickled her nostrils. “Understand it later. For now, just open the door and let me in.”

“I can’t do that.”

“I don’t believe this. You’re going to leave me out here to be eaten by…by who-knows-what, while you go scamper through some infantile fairyland with your pathetic friends?”

“Is that what you think of me?” The boredom was gone. Even through the commbox, his voice was soft, almost plaintive.

She stiffened. “No…I’m sorry…I didn’t mean…” The scratching sound was louder now, and her hands pounded a staccato drumbeat on the door. “Carson, this is not the moment for this particular argument! Let me in, and we can spend all the time you want debating the pros and cons of your lifestyle choices!”

“Stay where you are. You’ll be fine. I’ll watch you on the door camera. There’s nothing in this corridor that would interest a spider. Once the Enforcers get a handle on the situation, you can go home.”

The skittering of a million fingernails across aluminum plate preceded a fuzzy river of tiny grey spiders that surged into the corridor and flowed toward Melanie.

She flattened herself against the door’s cold, unyielding metal. “Carson!”

No answer.

Then something gave, and she tumbled backward into darkness. Her right foot barely cleared the threshold as the door cycled shut again, and myriad tiny nails clicked and scraped outside.

It took a few moments to figure out which way was up.  There was light—dim, but sufficient to begin making sense of her surroundings. She groaned and rubbed her shoulder, stifling a yelp as she found herself flanked by two tall, black-clad cyborgs, faces blank, eyes empty. They made no motion to assist her.

Carson’s voice whispered behind her, thin and reedy. “Stay there. Don’t look at me.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I visit Hamsa all the time. I know what the nutrient feeds do to you guys. It’s no big deal. I understand.”

Melanie turned, and her brother was there. Her hands flew of their own accord to cover her mouth, to stop the sharp intake of breath and the pungent, antiseptic tang that knifed into her lungs.

Carson.

Oh, Carson.

No.

Tea

by Fred Warren -

“A cup of tea, miss?” 
 

“Yes…that would be nice. Thank you.”

Anya Sherikov maneuvered John Milton’s cyborg valet to the bar and filled a copper teakettle she found there with water. It was awkward, using this body like a puppet. The interface was anything but smooth, and it was more difficult to multitask. She felt as if she was swimming about in an ill-fitting suit. A portion of her awareness was racing through the Avenir databases, looking for information on this tense, mousy girl who knew far more about the Dreamers than she ought. It was fortunate she’d turned up at Milton’s door before Cromwell found out about her.

Perhaps I can manage to save her life, if she doesn’t know too much.

The valet’s hands trembled as Anya made him pour the tea leaves from a small canister into a mesh strainer. She had to pull her attention away from the database to avoid scattering them onto the floor. She was already tiring—this would have been difficult enough without the added burden of her illness draining her strength. Meanwhile, Melanie Hunt shifted in her chair, crossing her legs, then uncrossing them, her eyes darting around the room, like a caged animal searching for an exit but finding none.

“This…this is a nice room. Is that real wood paneling?”

“Yes. It is an extravagance, but Mr. Milton found it soothing.”

“Who gets his apartment now that he’s dead?” Melanie grimaced. “Oh…sorry, that’s a rude question, isn’t it?”

“Some business associate, I presume. I am not privy to the details of his will. There are no living relatives.”

The water began to burble within the kettle, and Anya found the data she’d been looking for. Interesting. This was no idle Gamer. Melanie was the daughter of third-tier Aristocrats, but she had opted for technical training, graduating near the top of her class and earning an assignment to Avenir Network Control, all without any discernible influence from her parents. She was skilled in computer programming, cybernetics, and simulation theory. Her graduation project…

Chyort. If she was half as good as her resumé, this was going to be trouble.

The teakettle whistled, and Anya managed to pour the tea through the strainer into Melanie’s cup without spilling a drop. She delivered it on a matching saucer with a curt bow, then seated the valet on a chair opposite the girl. “Now, tell me why you’re here.”

“Well, it’s mostly about my brother. He has this obsession with the Dreamers. He thinks they’re real and that they’re using a huge chunk of network server space to run their virtual heaven. One of his buddies died trying to hack through the firewall, and that scared everybody away for a long time. It left a crack that lit up a couple of days ago, and three of us went in to check it out.”

“Check it out? How?”

“I didn’t want anybody to risk their lives on this crazy beetle hunt, so I sent Audrey through the opening in the firewall to recon what was inside.”

“Audrey?”

Melanie grinned. “Flat Audrey. She’s an AI...a database worm. I created her for my tech school graduation project. She camouflages herself to infiltrate an operating system, then she soaks up every byte of formatted information she bumps into.”

She slipped that thing into Paradise and out again without leaving a trace? This girl was the most dangerous threat to the Dreamers’ security in a hundred Foundings.

No, not a threat. Deep within Avenir, inside her life-support pod, Anya was smiling. An opportunity.

She kept the valet’s expression carefully neutral. “Impressive. What did you learn?”

“Not much. Everything was military-encrypted except user data on the person who had interfaced with the network through the firewall…John Milton. That’s when I figured it out. The stuff behind the firewall was business data, maybe some of it on the gray side of legal, or worse. Everybody knows…knew…Milton was a wheeler-dealer. It makes more sense than a play world for brains in a vat, or whatever.”

“If you’re correct, I would expect Mr. Milton to be very unhappy that his confidential data had been compromised. Why did you come to see him? Did you intend blackmail?”

Melanie jolted upright, fluttering her hands. “Oh, nonono…nothing like that. I don’t care about shady business contracts and I'm not short on money, believe me. I just wanted confirmation. For my brother. If he knows there’s nothing interesting behind that wall, he’ll give up his insane quest to find the Dreamers and go back to gaming. His friend got roasted for breaking that firewall. I don’t want that to happen to Carson.”

“I understand. You must love your brother very much.”

“I do. And I feel responsible for him. I’m the only contact he has with the real world. It’s hard enough to know I could lose him to the Games. Death for real…I don’t think I could bear it.”

There was an insistent ringing in the part of Anya’s consciousness that wasn’t controlling the valet. An emergency summons. She turned her full attention to it, pushing herself into her virtual office space within Paradise.

#

The valet went slack, eyes glazed, head lolling to one side.

Melanie drained her teacup. “This is really good. Could I have another...” She stared quizzically at her host for a moment, then slowly leaned forward and waved a hand in front of his face. “Hello? Can you hear me? Are you okay?”

No response. She was pretty sure this wasn't normal operation, but there wasn't much  in the way of diagnosis she could do without her tool kit. “Soooo,” she said, standing up and edging backward toward the bar, “Maybe I'll just...go ahead and pour it myself.”

Flatworm

by Fred Warren

“Ninja outfits, Carson? Seriously?” Melanie wrestled with the black mask shrouding her head and face. The eye slit had somehow gotten turned around the wrong way and she couldn’t see anything. Virtual reality could be amazing, but she still didn’t see the point of the sort of realism that simulated clothes going askew.

“You said we have to be stealthy. And how many times do I have to tell you to call me Rhino?”

She gave the mask a final yank and glared at her brother. “This isn’t a game, Car…Rhino. We’re not going to sneak up on the firewall and stab it with a knife. I mean, look at it.”

The firewall manifested in the simulation as a towering range of obsidian mountains spanning the visible horizon--enormous, black, jagged teeth poised to devour the twilit sky. Melanie, Carson, and Hamsa crouched behind their rally point, a low hillock that felt profoundly inadequate to screen them from any observers watching from the heights.

“All right, fine! It makes me feel less…visible, okay?” Carson shoved the dagger he’d been fiddling with into the belt of his shozoku and turned away.

“Skitterbug.”

Hamsa chuckled. “You’re on point, Mouse. What now?” Even in ninja garb, his avatar looked more like a sumo wrestler than an assassin.

“Where’s Jumbo’s Folly?”

“It should be right in front of us,” said Carson. “Look for a glow at the base of the mountain. There should be a crack where Jumbo broke in.”

“There!” Hamsa pointed to an indentation in the obsidian wall, about 200 meters away and slightly to the right of their position.

Melanie squinted in that direction. “I don’t see…wait. You’re right. There it is...that hazy green patch. Good eye, Orca.”

“How are we going to get over there without anybody seeing us?”

“I don’t think there is anybody. From what you told me, Jumbo didn’t encounter any resistance until he started his hack. The defenses don’t kick in until they sense an intrusion.” Melanie stood up. “Follow me.”

Carson didn’t move. “Uh, Sis...how about Orca and I wait a few paces to make sure they don’t have some kind of death ray aimed at you?”

Hamsa grabbed Carson by the arm and hauled him to his feet. “C’mon, Rhino. Mouse is in charge. We have to follow her orders.”

They trotted in a loose column toward the green glow. She’d die before giving Carson the satisfaction of betraying her own fear, but Melanie found herself checking the mountainside every few seconds from the corner of her eye. There were no signs of life, yet she could feel a kind of pressure from it, a massive power, coiled and waiting.

But nothing happened. Nothing moved on the silent monolith of ebony glass. No alarms sounded; no death rays flashed out to meet them.

As they drew nearer, the glow coalesced into a zigzagging crack that traveled 10 meters diagonally upward from the mountain’s foot. There was a pile of rusty scrap metal with bits scattered across the ground, and something that looked like a huge, twisted drill bit wedged into the obsidian where the crack began.

The remains of Jumbo McLaren’s security hack, left behind by its incinerated creator.

Hamsa shook his head. “It’s too narrow. We’ll never fit into that.”

“We don’t have to.” Melanie fished around in a pocket of her shozoku and pulled out a short length of fabric, a few centimeters wide.

“What’s that?”

“Not what. Who. Gentlemen, meet Flat Audrey.”

“It looks like a piece of tape.” Hamsa bent down to take a closer look.

“Audrey is a sophisticated micro-AI, optimized for information collection. A flatworm. She was my tech school graduation project. Say hello, Audrey.”

The fabric curled up into an S shape and warbled, *HELLO, AUDREY.*

“Oh, yes,” Carson sneered, “Very sophisticated. Does it tell jokes, or does it just sit there, being a joke?”

*I GATHER INFORMATION. I DO NOT TELL JOKES.*

Melanie swatted Carson’s head. “Pay attention. Audrey will go into the crack, follow the data leak, merge with the network inside the firewall, and camouflage herself as a diagnostic subroutine. She’ll collect information for a couple of days, then return to us. She’s got 20 teras of storage.  I’ve instructed her to pinpoint weaknesses in the security protocols, analyze their encryption scheme, and collect access keys. With that information, we can find our own way in.”

“You’re an impressive little bug, Audrey,” said Hamsa, nudging Audrey with a finger.

*I AM NOT A BUG. I AM A FLATWORM, BUT I AM IMPRESSIVE. THANK YOU.*

Melanie smiled inside her ninja mask. “Audrey also enjoys compliments.”

She drew a katana from the sheath strapped to her back and gently placed Audrey on its tip. “All right…if we get any reaction at all from this, everybody logs out immediately. Understood?”

“Understood.” Hamsa took a step back.

Carson hesitated a moment. “Be careful, Mel.”

Melanie extended her arms, slowly pushing the katana’s blade toward the crack in the mountain. She inhaled sharply as it entered the aurora of green mist surrounding the crevice, but there was no change in the glow, or any other sign of trouble. She positioned the blade’s point as close to the opening as she could without touching the obsidian. “Audrey, deploy. Recovery in 48 hours.”

*DEPLOYING.* The flatworm extended itself and slid into the gap like a tiny snake, its skin instantly matching the color and texture of the volcanic glass, and vanished.

Melanie pulled back and returned her katana to its sheath with a sigh. “She’s in. Now, we wait.”

Orca

by Fred Warren

Melanie closed the maintenance access panel on the contoured platform that supported Hamsa El-Hashem's--Orca's--swollen body. Swathed in a black simsuit and matching helmet, the nickname was apt. He looked like a baby whale strapped to a slab in some deranged zoologist's lab, awaiting dissection. The two cyborgs keeping silent vigil at the foot of the table only reinforced the mental image. Even the air in the narrow compartment smelled faintly of formaldehyde.

She shuddered as she moved to the control console on the opposite wall and toggled the comm circuit. “All done. You now have industrial-strength surge protection between the network and your sim interface. Nothing short of a lightning bolt is gonna get through that.”

The reply was deep and raspy--and it came from the blob on the table, not the console. Orca reached out toward Melanie with one hand. “Thanks, Mouse. I hope it's enough.”

It took both of Melanie's hands to enfold his. “Enough? Weren't you listening, Hamsa? I told you, nothing short of...”

“You never saw the vids of what happened to Jumbo, did you?”

“No. I didn't. You guys said he took some electrical feedback when he cracked the firewall, and it killed him.”

“It didn't just kill him, Mouse. It cooked him. His simsuit melted into his skin.”

“Don't worry. This mod will give you enough time to bail before anything gets through.” Melanie hoped her voice carried more conviction than she was feeling now. Shells. What's hiding behind that firewall?

He pulled his hand back, giving one of hers a squeeze as they separated. “You better go suit up. Rhino's getting itchy. The Folly's been hot 30 minutes now, and it's never stayed active more than an hour.”

“Keep him on a short leash until I log in. I'm on point for this op. You both promised.”

“Yeah, and we both still think you're crazy. This plan of yours better be something special.”

“It is. Count on it.” Melanie gathered up her tools and moved toward the door of Orca's apartment, taking care not to touch the cyborgs as she passed them. It was totally irrational, but they made her skin crawl.

Orca called out after her. “Hey, Mouse, how's Rhino looking? I mean, for real?”

She didn't turn around. “I don't know. Carson...wouldn't let me in. I had to pass the parts through a slot in his door and upload instructions to his Franks over the net. I'm praying they didn't screw up.”

“That's too bad, but I can understand why he wouldn't want you to see him like this. Like me.”

“Well, I don't understand. He's my brother. I don't care what he looks like. I want to hold his hand. I want to feel him breathing. For all I know, he's already dead, and I've been talking to some souped-up A.I. the past two months.”

Orca chuckled--a metallic, rattling sound. “No, you'd know the difference, Mouse. Better than anybody.”

Folly

by Fred Warren -

Melanie swayed as her equilibrium adjusted to the sudden transition from prehistoric jungle to corporate briefing room. Carson was standing beside a tri-D map of the Avenir cyberspace projected in midair, arguing with his buddy, Orca. He hadn’t even changed out of his camouflage battlesuit.

Wow, this must be important.

Orca was stabbing at the diagram with an index finger. “Don’t do it, Rhino. It’s a really bad idea. There’s a reason we call that place Jumbo’s Folly.”

“Jumbo was my friend. I have to follow through on this for him, or his death won’t mean anything.”

Death?

Melanie staggered around one arm of the U-shaped conference table and grabbed her brother’s arm. “What are you talking about, Carson? What’s Jumbo’s Folly?”

“It’s the big one, Mouse. The ultimate access…the door to Paradise.” His eyes were shining with an excitement she hadn’t seen for a long time.

“Paradise. You mean that storybook land where the Dreamers are supposed to live?”

“It’s real. Here, look at the map.” He flicked at the image with two fingers and it spun slowly clockwise. Nodes and connections illuminated. “Avenir is only using 40% of its server capacity, but we keep bumping up against storage limits. Where’s the other 60% going? The network addresses are indexed, but we can’t access them.” He pulled the image to a halt and waved a hand across it. A thick, black line lifted up, encircling a large sector of space. “They’re protected by the thickest firewall anyone’s ever seen, right here. Jumbo tried to hack his way in, and he almost made it.” Carson pointed at a red dot glowing at an edge of the black circle. “That’s it. Jumbo’s Folly…and it’s active again.”

“He died there?” Her brother’s lean, chiseled avatar towered over her. It bore little resemblance to the genuine article. She wondered if his real body could still stand at all.

“That’s what I’ve been trying to pound through this idiot’s thick skull,” said Orca, who must have jumped in from a sports simulation. He was wearing a blue uniform with thick shoulder pads and a silver helmet with bars across its face. There was a blue lion stenciled on the helmet, and the number 74 was emblazoned in white on his jersey. “Whatever lives behind that firewall caught Jumbo when he broke through, and it fried his brain.”

Carson slapped Orca’s helmet. “But the point is, he broke through. And if what’s behind that firewall is important enough to defend, it’s important enough to investigate.”

“I think Orca’s right,” Melanie said. “I don’t want you going anywhere near that place.”

“Listen, guys…I loved Jumbo like a brother, but he only played the games one way: full power, straight ahead. I don’t intend to go pounding on that wall where he left off. I’ll take a look, assess the break in the firewall, and if it looks promising, we’ll come up with a plan to exploit it without killing ourselves.”

Orca took a step back. “Hold on a minute. Who’s this ‘we,’ Rhino?”

“You, me, and Mouse. She can rig our hardware to give us more protection against power surges. We still don’t know what’s behind the wall, so can’t risk taking an army in there. Not yet.”

“No way, Carson.” Melanie shook her head. “Mom would never forgive me if I let you do this.”

“I’ll go in with or without you, Mel, but I’d rather have you watching my back. Come on, Sis.” He gently squeezed her shoulders. “This is important. If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t ask you. Please. For me.”

She squirmed and pushed her brother’s hands away. “All right, already. But we do the recon together, and I take point.”

“You? Why?”

She grinned. “Because I have an idea how to poke the beast without waking him up.”

Gamer

by Fred Warren -

The velociraptor tore Melanie’s leg from her body, showering her in blood, heedless of her screams. Her finger convulsed on the trigger of her submachine gun, but the bullets found no purchase on the dino’s armored hide.

“Should have loaded AP rounds, Mouse. Maybe next time you’ll listen to your big brother.”

“Shut up, Carson. And quit calling me Mouse.”

“That’s Rhino to you, Mouse. Would you please hurry up and die so we can restart the level? Man, I hate team survival criteria. I could have plowed solo through this lame scenario in five minutes, tops.”

“Stupid lizard’s still chewing on my leg. Aaagh, why does it have to hurt so much? If you’d laid down some covering fire, genius, I might have made it across the clearing. Using your teammates as bait…Ouch! Ouch, ouch, ouch…doesn’t inspire confidence in your leadership.”

“Not a scratch on me. Maybe if you could learn to follow orders, you’d live longer.”

“There’s no ‘I’ in ‘team,’ Carson. Ohmigosh…here it comes again.”

“Heh. Nope, no ‘I,’ just ‘meat.’”

The raptor’s jagged teeth ripped into Melanie’s torso, causing her simsuit to generate a convincing impression of her body being chewed in half. Her vision went full red, then black. “All right, that’s it. I’m logging, if only to reassure myself that all my parts are where they belong.”

“Aw, c’mon, Sis! One more run, please! I promise I’ll watch your back this time, and I’ll let you have your pick of the loot.”

“50-50 split.”

“70-30.”

“60-40.”

“Okay, okay. 60-40, you harpy. I should have locked you out of my circle when I had the chance.”

“Yeah, right. Who else would get your hardware upgrades for half-price and install them for free? Well, mostly free.”

“Chiseler.”

“I love you too, big brother. Give me five minutes…it still feels like my guts are hanging out somewhere.”

“Your guts are right where they belong, Mel. See you in five.”

Melanie smiled. He was a jerk, but he could be so sweet, when he wanted to.

She groped around with her right hand, found the bailout switch, and slapped it. After her visor cleared to pink translucence, she pulled off the tri-D helmet and ran her fingers through her hair. She hurt all over. The games were fun—when she wasn’t getting stabbed, shot, torched, or eaten—but she didn’t share her brother’s obsession. There were too many interesting things to do in the real world, and there was no way she’d ever let her body degenerate into a flabby sack of lard like Carson and his pals. Slugs, everyone called them. Carson wore the name like a badge of honor.

She sighed, levered herself up from the gaming couch, and staggered to a basin set into the wall where she could take a drink and splash water on her face.

Carson was the only reason she played at all. She’d promised their mother she’d look after him the day he’d filed his Writ of Independence, after he’d locked himself into a gaming suite with two caretaker cyborgs. Now, she was his only contact with the world beyond the game servers. It helped being a computer tech. She understood the games and could do depot-level maintenance on his simsuit and interface hardware. He couldn’t dismiss her along with the rest of Avenir Eclectia as an irrelevant distraction from the virtual world he loved.

So he wasn’t lost to her. Not yet.

Melanie stretched her cramped muscles, luxuriating in the relief it granted from the ache and burn of the simsuit’s lingering effects. She owed herself a hot bath later, and that thought was incentive enough to hop back on the couch and don her helmet one last time for the day. She checked her chronograph and swore—eight minutes since she’d logged out. She swatted the login switch, steeling herself for a lecture.

Her vision tunneled, expanded, and refocused, and a flood of sensations from the simsuit rushed through her body. She was back at the rally point for Chrono Marines, surrounded by leafy, steamy jungle, the air alive with the calls of exotic wildlife and insects. A dino roared in the distance—probably a tyrannosaur. She gripped her weapon tightly and scanned the undergrowth. She was safe from attack here, but the sensory immersion was so complete, she couldn’t help feeling as if something might pounce on her at any moment.

She checked her ammo, then swapped the default magazine for a clip of armor-piercing bullets. It stung her pride, but she wasn’t going to be some overgrown lizard’s chew toy twice in one day.

Where was Carson? By now, he should have been giving her an earful for being late. Melanie keyed her mic. “Car…Rhino, this is Mouse, in position at the rally point. Do you copy? Over.”

There was no response, just a faint static crackle in her headset. “Rhino, Mouse. I’m at the rally point, awaiting orders. Please respond.”

There were two short beeps, indicating a connection from outside the game. “Mel, something’s come up. Log out of CM and jump to Conference Room Seven.” Carson’s voice was strained and shaky.

“What’s the matter? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Better than fine. I got a call from Orca a couple of minutes ago. Jumbo’s Folly just went hot.”