Lisa Smedman - Psychotrope

"Don't die!" he screamed. "Don't you fraggin' die!"

As his feet churned the flesh to stinking mush, two more moths fluttered out of the morass. Angrily, he batted them away with one hand. Then he froze as he realized what they must be. He stood, utterly still, in the mess he'd made of the chest. And laughed.

"Bugs!" he shouted. His laugh became frantic, almost hysterical. "Bugs!"

Back when he was a chiphead, Bloodyguts had dossed down for a time with Hannah, a fellow addict who'd been a history teacher before she lost her job, pawned everything she owned to buy more and more BTL, and at last wound up on the streets. She'd been one smart lady in her day, and even after her wetware got glitched by BTL, she was still full of weird trivia. One night, she told him about the first-ever computer glitch.

On a hot summer day in 1945, an experimental computer known as the Mark I had come to a sudden, shuddering halt. The computer had been a primitive monster, measuring an unbelievable two and a half meters wide by seventeen meters long, and was made of steel and glass and filled with moving parts. When the programmers and technicians at the International Business Machines corporation opened it up to find the problem, they discovered a moth jammed inside the machine.

From that day on, whenever something went wrong, the programmers joked that the machine had developed yet another "bug."

The slang word, Hannah explained, had spread into common usage. From then on, anyone with messed up wetware was labeled "buggy."

Hannah herself had been as buggy as they came. She'd been straight-not even slotting-on the day she'd stepped off the roof of the abandoned building where she and Bloodyguts had been dossed down. Whether it was suicide or whether Hannah was experiencing a BTL flashback and thought she could fly, Bloodyguts never knew.

He looked down at the body on which he stood. In the real world, corpses were infested with maggots. And maggots turned into flies, which fit with this system's central metaphor. But the insects that were rising out of the body that represented the Al's operating system were moths, not flies. Just like the bug the programmers had found in 1945.

The iconography had to have been intentional-someone's twisted idea of a joke. Just as BTL had done to Hannah, the moths had driven the Al buggy.

They had to be the virus.

And that virus had to be concentrated in the brain.

Active memory deactivated. Commencing shutdown of main storage memory. Shutdown will be complete in ten seconds… nine…

Bloodyguts snagged one of the moths out of the air. Holding the fluttering insect in one cupped hand, he activated his disinfect utility. A bottle filled with red liquid- iodine-appeared in his other hand. Yanking the cork off with his teeth, he jammed the moth inside the bottle, then rapidly recorked it, sealing the virus sample inside. He glanced at it just long enough to confirm his suspicions. On the back of the moth, embossed on its wings in a delicate pattern, was the emblem of the former United States: the sugar coating that covered this bitter viral pill, making it palatable to the Al. Slowly, the emblem on the moth's wings began to fade as the "iodine" dissolved it. The moth's wings filled with holes, began to tatter as this piece of virus coding lost its integrity.

Eight… seven…

He ran back to the neck and began to climb. His feet dug into soft flesh, finding little purchase as it churned into slime. He could only use one hand; the other was clenched tight around the utility. Cursing, he struggled, at last finding a foothold on the Adam's apple and boosting himself up onto the corpse's chin.

Six… five…

The "ground" trembled underfoot. The head was shrinking! The skull seemed to be crumpling in on itself, the flesh following it with a loud sucking noise. Bloody guts staggered, making his way along the chin.

Four… three…

The lips were turning blue as the body became starved of oxygen. Bloodyguts wedged himself into the mouth, bracing his back on one set of teeth, his feet on the other. He pushed, opening the mouth wide…

Two…

And hurled the disinfect utility inside.

One…

And then he prayed to whatever spirits might be persuaded to have mercy on a former chippie like him.

09:56:37 PST

INTRUDER ALERT

CODE RED RESPONSE

EXECUTE OPERATION: ANALYZE ICON

ICON ATTEMPTING TO UPLOAD FILES

SCAN FOR VIRUSES

NO VIRUSES DETECTED

UPLOAD DATA

Timea stared at the fixer, her eyes wide with disbelief.

"What do you mean, the doc's not in? When will he be back?"

The fixer-an elf with pasty white skin and the point of one ear missing-shrugged his narrow shoulders. "Dunno." He slouched in the doorway of the squat, staring out over Timea's head. His eyes widened and narrowed as he focused first on the ork gangers who were stripping parts from an abandoned Ford Americar across the street, and then at the simsense "reality" of the chip he was slotting.

"Gimme back my deck," Timea said. "I'll go to some other street doc."

"Can't," the elf said. "Sold it."

"Then gimme the nuyen you got for it."

"Can't."

"What the frag you mean, 'can't'?" Timea asked angrily. She shifted from one foot to the other, wishing there was a clean bathroom nearby. Being pregnant meant always having to pee-and although the smell coming from the nearby alley suggested that it was used as an outdoor toilet, the odds were that she wouldn't make it out of its dark canyon alive.

"Spent it."

Timea's eyes narrowed. Frag. She should have known better than to trust a chiphead. He'd probably blown her nuyen on whatever it was he was slotting.

"I'll give you cred," the elf said. "Come back in a month or two, when the doc's back."

Timea's heart sank. "I can't," she said. "I'm already past my first trimester. If I wait any longer…" She looked up at the elf. "Can't you fix me up with some other doc?"

"Not without collateral."

"Frag you!" Timea shouted. "I gave you the only valuable thing I own. You stupid, null-brained-"

"Frag you too," the elf said. "Now get outta my face, or I may think twice about extending your cred with the doc."

Timea was too street smart to allow the ache inside her to turn into tears. "Fine," she gritted. She turned on her heel and strode away, kicking angrily at the fast-food wrappers and decaying plastic bottles that littered the street.

Drek, she thought, kicking at a bottle and sending it skidding into traffic. Drek, drek, drek. She'd hosed the only chance she had of getting outta this mess. She didn't want to bring a kid into this fragged up world. Her two younger sisters would be no help at all, and her mother was too old and too sick to take care of a kid. Timea wouldn't be able to work, and no work meant no food on the table. And now that her deck was gone, she couldn't run the Matrix any more. She was trapped here, between a rock and a heartache…

What was the point of trying so hard to better herself, of scrimping and saving to buy a computer terminal and teaching herself decking? What was the point of anything? Her boyfriend had done a fast fade when he found out she was pregnant, she was losing her younger sisters to gangers and drugs, and now her deck was gone, sacrificed for nothing.

There was no point in trying. Frag. There was no point in anything.

She lay on her back in the bathtub. Her sleeve was rolled up; her left arm throbbed from the deep cuts she'd made to the inside of her wrist. The left side of her shirt and pants were soaked in blood. But the pain was fading…

The pain stopped as she left her body. She floated gently above it, staring serenely down at her blood as it flowed down the grimy surface of the tub and into the drain. That's where her hopes had gone, too. Down the fraggin' drain.