Lisa Smedman - Psychotrope

UPLOAD FILE TO STORAGE MEMORY OF ICON DARK FATHER

ACTIVATE MEMORY

SCAN ICON

Dark Father reeled as the text of the e-mail flooded into his mind. Chester was on the streets and in trouble? Chester had composed that message eleven months ago. Eleven months ago. Anything could have happened since then. Chester could be hurt, or in jail, or dead at the hands of a bounty hunter by now.

Spirits curse Serpens in Machina. That bleeding-heart meta lover had cost Dark Father his only son. If only the shadowrunner hadn't stolen Chester's message…

No. If only Winston hadn't been so ashamed of his own son. He loved the boy, despite what he was. Despite what they both were.

Dark Father felt a tear trickle down his bony cheek. He was crying? Without the aid of tear ducts? He supposed he must be crying, in the real world. Ghouls did cry-just like everyone else. They were only… human… after all.

"Why?" he whispered. "Oh, Chester."

Yes, Daddy?

The toddler that stood in front of Dark Father shifted form, his claws reshaping themselves into blunt fingernails and his ears rounding down from sharp points. The jagged teeth in his mouth softened and flattened into the baby teeth of a human and its skin lost its mottling, darkening into a rich, uniform brown.

Chester had become human.

No. The Al that was using Chester's image as a persona had reshaped it into human form. Dark Father felt his heart soften. The boy looked so much like Anne…

Knowing that this wasn't really Chester, feeling slightly foolish, Dark Father spoke: "I love you, Chester. Just the way you are. You don't have to be human to be my son."

Humans are perfect.

Dark Father laughed out loud. "No, they're not. Although my-friends-in the Human Nation would like me to think so."

He sighed and shook his head. "I've been so wrong. About so many things."

We must all become perfect.

"No," Dark Father corrected. "We just have to be the best we can."

Imperfect copies must be deleted.

"That's what the bounty hunter thought. But he was wrong."

I am imperfect. I must be deleted. YOU are imperfect…

Dark Father shuddered, remembering that the virus that had infected the Al was designed to trick it into crashing itself. And now it looked as though the thing would deliberately take Dark Father with it when it went.

He suddenly wished he hadn't decided to confront the artificial intelligence on his own. He wasn't doing a very good job of convincing it not to crash. And-he looked around the duplicate of his living room, wondering which elements were icons and which were just window dressing-he didn't have the first idea how to repair the damage done by the virus.

As if on cue, Lady Death appeared. "Dark Father! The others never showed up, and I had trouble finding you. Did you find the trap door-"

Dark Father didn't think it was possible for Lady Death's face to change color. But somehow, as she looked at the icon that represented the Al, it did.

"Oh," she said in a small voice, blushing furiously. "Shinanai."

09:55:33 PST

INTRUDER ALERT

CODE GREEN RESPONSE

EXECUTE OPERATION: UPLOAD DATA

MEMORY BLOCK ENCOUNTERED

EXECUTE OPERATION: SWAP MEMORY

DATA UPLOADED TO ACTIVE MEMORY

SCAN UPLOAD

Hitomi was still pretty shaky on her feet, but she was tired of lying in the hospital bed. They wouldn't even let her play simsense to pass the time. As if she could log onto the Matrix from a clunky old playback unit like the one in her hospital room.

Well, she could, she thought smugly. But not as easily as she could with the nova-hot cyberdeck that was hidden in her room at home.

Instead she had to rely on the cyberterminal that her tutor had smuggled in to her, the one that she'd hidden under the hospital bed. It was a tortoise-a child's toy that accessed the Matrix only via keyboard and monitor screen. With a computer like that, the only workable jackpoint was the telecom connection in the lounge.

Hitomi walked down the hallway of her family's private medical clinic, supporting herself by hanging onto the railing on the wall, her illicit cyberterminal tucked under one arm. Legs trembling, she made her way to the lounge at the end of the hall. Father would be coming to visit her there in an hour or so, and he was always pleased by signs of her progress-especially since it was taking her so much longer to recover than the doctors expected. Today she'd make him proud of her by revealing to him the fact that she could walk to the lounge on her own, without the aid of attendants. And while she was waiting for him, she'd use this as an opportunity to access the Matrix.

So far, so good. Nobody was in the lounge. She'd only need a few seconds, at most. And then she would hide the terminal away again.

Hitomi plugged the terminal into the telecom's connection, then began using its old-fashioned interface. Like her body after its loss of blood, the computer was irritatingly slow. But it did the job, even if it took several long seconds to log on.

Accessing the local RTG, she scanned the telecom channels, looking for the address of the aidoru's private cell phone. The fact that the number was unlisted did not pose a problem-Hitomi had memorized it. But the fact that Shinanai only activated the phone for a brief period of time each day to check her messages and return calls did. So far, Hitomi had struck out each time she'd tried to call her beloved aidoru. But she hoped that today, her luck would change.

It did. The cell phone was active! But the line was busy.

No bother. Hitomi had taken care to load the terminal with a copy of the commlink utility. It wasn't anything fancy-not even a customized program, since she had to make do with whatever software her tutor was willing to smuggle in to her. But it would do the job, allowing her to tap the telecom call and interrupt the conversation to let Shinanai know that all would soon be well. That she still loved and adored her, and that she wasn't mad at Shinanai for accidentally drinking too much of her blood during their night of rapturous passion. Nor did she bear a grudge for Shinanai's fleeing from the hotel room when the shadow-runners arrived.

As the commlink utility did its work, the aidoru 's face appeared on the monitor screen.

Shinanai! Hitomi felt a flutter in her throat and nearly swooned. She touched her fingertips to the screen. Shinanai had changed her hair in the month since Hitomi had seen her. Now the blonde strands were spiked straight up, forming a pale halo around her slender elven face with its blue-painted cheeks. But Shinanai's voice was just as Hitomi remembered it, even though the audio of the cyber-terminal was turned down so low that she could barely hear it. Soft as a velvet-gloved caress.

Hitomi closed her eyes and listened adoringly to that murmuring voice. She remembered the aidoru's kisses* caresses. Her skin warmed in all of the places Shinanai had touched her, and the wound on her leg began to throb…

Then she opened her eyes and noticed the picture-in-picture inset, which held a tiny image of the person Shinanai was talking to. Enlarging it until it filled half the screen, Hitomi nearly fainted a second time as she recognized her father. Still in shock, she increased the volume of the terminal's speakers. Shinanai and her father seemed to be in the middle of a heated argument.

"You will continue to adhere to the terms of our original agreement," Hitomi's father was saying. "In return, you will be amply compensated. My accountant will see to it that the nuyen are transf-"

"The attack by the shadowrunners was not part of the agreement," Shinanai answered. "She was to be recovered by a medical team only. Did you really think your mercenaries could capture me? Or perhaps that I would willingly submit to becoming your guinea pig?"