Carl Sargent - Black Madonna

00:00 A.M.

The world was about to fall apart, but he could hardly have expected that to happen. Some things don’t exactly happen every day.

Sam Kryzinski expected another boring, normal day at the office. Renraku had been paying him a comfortable salary as Coordinator of Matrix Security in their Chiba offices for four years. and that was as long as most good deckers lasted. Sam had stayed the course. It was a day just like any other; April 20, 2057, gray clouds and sixty-one degrees in the late afternoon, very comfortable for the time of year. There were no new wars of any significance on the globe, and no fool decker had tried anything more than flirt with the fortress-thick IC around the peripherals of the central Renraku system for weeks. It was also another day closer to his retirement and a good pension. Sam was thirty-four years old, already balding and slightly overweight, an American with the elevated coronary risk normal for someone of his age and profession. He divested himself of the jacket of his cut-price, Taiwanese rip-off Italian suit and dumped himself down on the titanium-chrome frame of the ergonomically designed chair in his office. Just another day.

Until midnight.

He was already looking forward to the company limo calling to take him home to his standard-issue, mousy, uninterested wife and two mildly hyperactive brats, with their range of behavioral problems resolutely average for American children of their age, when the brown stuff hit the fan with a vengeance. A real five-alarm frag up.

There was absolutely no warning at all. No IC activation, no alerts from the system’s patrol of deckers. One second the system was operating perfectly and the next instant everything was shot to hell. Sam was idly checking some data on a laptop wired into the mainframe when the screen went blank with a soft clicking sound. He cussed and fiddled with the power cable. Then he realized something was seriously wrong. If his planner diary hadn’t just crashed along with the rest of the system, he might have noticed his incipient coronary leaping forward a few months.

The blackout lasted fifteen seconds. Before the screen of his laptop flickered back into life he was already out of his chair, through the door and yelling bloody murder down the corridor even as the phones started ringing furiously on his desk. A white-faced technician almost ran smack into him, escaping from the computer labs and running around in a fair impression of beheaded poultry.

“What the frag is going on?” Sam yelled, clutching the man’s arm. Any reply beyond the man’s initial stammering was drowned out by a chaotic swirl of yells and shouts as Renraku’s finest tried to figure out just what the mother-rubbing hell had fragging happened to their megabillion-nuyen Matrix systems.

By the time some kind of calm had finally descended again, Sam was back in his office with his heartbeat still an unhealthy 105 and a gaggle of ashen scientists clucking around him. Feedback came mainlining back up on to his laptop and the larger displays in his office. He tried to take in the mass of data streaming into his senses.

“It wasn’t a power failure,” one of the whitecoats said helpfully.

“Brilliant, that was fragging obvious. That’s what the quadruple backup systems are for,” Sam snarled. “Frag, we’ve even got our own generators in the basement and more power stabilizers than you’ve had therapy sessions with your shrink. Surprise me more: tell me they worked too. Come on, come on. Tell me something I don’t know yet!”

Nearly tripping over a wad of printout that cascaded down his legs as he struggled in with it through the half-open door of the office, Dmitar Radev finally arrived, and Sam thought he might at last get a sensible response out of somebody. Sam had a high regard for the Bulgarian, one of the top computer minds at Chiba. The Japanese made the best and cheapest hardware, but they’d never had the minds for programming and decking. Whether the incomers were from Europe, America, or elsewhere, fully seventy per cent of Renraku’s best systems analysts and deckers were non-Oriental. The black-haired, fat-fingered, stooping Bulgarian with the vodka-rotted teeth and nicotine-stained hands was maybe the best of them.

“Massive system invasion and shutdown,” Radev growled in his fifty-a-day rasp. “Someone got into the core CPU instantly. I mean instantly. No activation response.”

“Im-fragging-possible,” Sam stuttered.

“Sure. Unfortunately, when you’ve eliminated the improbable, all you’re left with is the impossible. That’s what happened. I’m telling you.” Radev sat on the edge of Sam’s huge desk and demanded some coffee from one of the lackeys.

“What are you telling me? We’ve spent four billion nuyen upgrading the IC in the last year and some fragger waltzed through it like it wasn’t there?”

“You’ve got it,” Radev said flatly, tapping the filter of a cigarette on the teak of the desktop. Sam threw a glance at the No Smoking sign on the nearest window, sighed with feeling and pulled an ashtray out from a desk drawer.

“Thought you gave it up,” Radev said laconically, extending the pack to him.

“Picked the wrong time to do that,” Sam replied with a grin, sensuously removing a cigarette from the proffered pack and accepting a light from the sweaty, saturnine Bulgarian. Then he had one of the smartest ideas of his life.

“Was this just us?”

Radev shrugged his shoulders as he inhaled, breathing out what was almost a neat smoke ring.

“What the frag does this guy want?”

“I think we may find out before long,” Radev said slowly.

“Try Fuchi,” Sam said urgently, his demand spraying out to cover his whole team. People started moving fast. “Get on it! I want to know if we’re the only ones who got hit. And get me damage reports. And a full update on peripheral status throughout the system. Damn it, get me everything and get it now.”

1:59 A.M.

It isn’t the done thing to deck the frag out of another megacorp’s central Matrix systems. It’s virtually tantamount to a declaration of corporate war. But there are times when a little skirting around the edges is acceptable, especially if you’ve got reason to think something very strange is going down.

And when Kryzinski's deckers checked out the Fuchi system, they found proof that something way beyond merely “strange” had gone down. The entirety of the central CPU systems of Fuchi Tokyo had gone AWOL at midnight for exactly fifteen seconds. Having accessed the revealing data, the Renraku team got the hell out of the Fuchi system. The only casualty was a single decker who simply didn’t get away from the trace and burn fast enough-a completely acceptable resource loss as far as Sam Kryzinski was concerned. It could be made to look like an accident of some sort. And even if it couldn’t, Renraku could afford the few hundred thousand to buy off the guy’s wife from making any claim. The data his team brought back told him instantly that the stakes were much higher than that.

“Fuchi?” Sam was incredulous. “At the same time?”

“Not even a millisecond later. Instantly, at midnight,” Radev confirmed for him. “Just like us. Now, isn’t that interesting?”

“Do we know if they’ve been decking into our system in return?”

“No, but they will,” the Bulgarian said with a harsh grin. “We’re on full system alert, of course. But then so Were they.”

The second hand on the old-fashioned clock across the office clicked one step closer to the hour. Sam had bought it on a trip to England, paying some ridiculous sum for a Victorian grandfather clock that was almost certainly a late twentieth-century forgery worth a fraction of what he’d paid, but the thing’s bronze pendulums and its metronomic ticking could be soothing at those times when his stress levels shot through the roof. Hands folded on top of a huge pile of status reports on systems around the globe, Sam sat in reverie for a few seconds as the silver metal swept relentlessly to its zenith. Two A.M.