K Jeter: Farewell Horizontal

“Impartial, huh?” She sneered. “They weren’t so impartial in this case, were they? What they told you led you right into that thing’s ugly face.”

Once you accepted this one possibility, you had to follow it through. The lie Ask & Receive had told him had worked only for the benefit of the Havoc Mass; it had handed him right over to the agent of their implacable vengeance. The megassassin hadn’t had to waste any time snooping around for him. He’d walked blithely into its clutches, looking over his shoulder for no more than Sai and the other Dead Centers. All of which, the lie and his reliance on it, his faith in the info agency, would mean that Ask & Receive had somehow been contaminated by the Havoc Mass. If the info agency wasn’t impartial, it wasn’t on his side, either; it was on their side. The people who wanted to kill him.

“Then I’m screwed.” He looked up at Felony and announced the result of the equation. “I’m fucked all the way. If I can’t trust them, then I’ve got no source of information that I can rely on. I never did; nobody ever has. For all I know, Ask & Receive’s been feeding shit to people for years. Handing poor suckers like me right over to the Mass. Only nobody’s ever found out, because the only way you could find out – getting the info from Ask & Receive – is screwed up the same way.”

She seemed unconcerned. “So? That’s what you get for believing everything they told you in the first place. You should’ve been going and finding things out for yourself, about what was true and what wasn’t.”

“About the whole world? Everything inside or outside the building? You can’t do that; nobody can. There’s just too much stuff.”

“Maybe. But you could’ve checked out the parts that concerned you a little better.”

A bleak, formless hole was growing in his gut. “I trusted them…”

Felony shook her head, pityingly. “So you die – trusting ’em. That’s the way it goes.”

It was the way it went for everybody, though; Axxter didn’t know whether to regard that as some sort of comfort, or as an even more chilling consideration. If everybody in or on Cylinder was relying on Ask & Receive’s tainted information – and that information was tainted to the Havoc Mass’s advantage – then that meant the Mass ruled Cylinder without anybody else even being aware of it. Or was about to rule the building; perhaps the corruption of the information agency was a fairly recent event, and the Mass was still setting up all its pieces on one great chessboard, encircling its old doddering rival, the Grievous Amalgam. No matter; however far along the process was, the Havoc Mass was the most powerful force on Cylinder. They had a direct pipeline, via Ask & Receive, into everyone’s brain. The part that dealt with facts and real things. The Mass had managed to usurp reality.

“Hey, cheer up.” Felony smiled at him “At least you’re better off than you were a little while ago. Now you know how you were getting screwed around with.”

“Yeah, great.” Axxter stared glumly at the tiny space’s wall. “Fat lot of good that does me. I won’t die ignorant, I suppose.” Of the big picture; there were still a lot of the small details that kept niggling at the far corners of his brain. Like why the megassassin had had a different death ikon graffed on it, instead of the one he had worked up for General Cripplemaker’s commission. Even if they had all taken out this great blood oath on his head – and the vigor with which they were pursuing it, the lengths to which the Mass was going in order to kill him, was also somewhat puzzling – it still didn’t seem likely that they would miss the chance to rub his face in it. Make his own work be the last thing he saw before he had his arms and legs plucked off, one by one. That went against everything he thought he knew about warrior psychology: they loved cheap, effective irony like that.

“So get off your dead butt and do something about it.”

“Yeah?” The puzzle of the ikon faded against more practical concerns. “Like what? I’m stuck out here a million or so miles from where I need to get to – and from where the information I’d need to get there is kept. I can’t just go calling up for the info I need; not anymore.”

“No big deal. I can get you what you need.”

Axxter tilted his head, studying her. “What do you mean? Are you saying you can go on-line and crack open Ask & Receive’s restricted-access, high-security archives, and just haul out whatever info you want?”

She looked back at him, wide-eyed. “Of course not – why do you think they call those archives high security? It’s because people can’t get into them. They wouldn’t be high security otherwise, would they?”

“Oh.” Disappointed. “I thought you circuit riders and hackers and all were supposed to be able to do that kind of stuff.”

Felony sighed and shook her head. “What a load of shit you’ve got between your ears. Of course we can’t do that. Some little assholes, like that D:Fex crowd, they like to talk as if they can. But it’s all just talk. They can only screw around on open lines, unshielded ones, or networks that nobody else is using or that nobody cares enough about to boot them off of. All the valuable stuff – like the Ask & Receive archives – that’s all locked away tight. Nobody can get in there without permission, bullshitting hackers to the contrary.”

“Then what’re you talking about? About me being able to get info I could use?”

“Simmer down, will ya? I’m talking about going down to the dumps and picking up some stuff. You see, these little wiseacre hackers can’t really get in anyplace where they’re not wanted, but they can still make nuisances out of themselves – static on the line, prank calls, shit like that. So to keep them all romping around somewhere out of everybody’s hair, for years now Ask & Receive has been dumping outtake footage of any real good violent event that they’ve gotten tape of, all into an open-access file. What they sell as entertainment is the edited-down, hyped-up, and glamorous version that really snaps along, keeps people’s attention. But the circuit riders can go rummaging through the dumped footage and come up with all the little nuggets they want, incorporate them into their little on-line war games. They love playing war.”

“What good does that do me? A bunch of raw footage of warrior skirmishes?”

She nodded sagely. “Well – I’ve done a little checking around of my own. Just because I’m interested in your… unusual situation. And it seems to me that all the shit you’re in started after you came across that sector over on the other side, where some heavy action had just happened. If I were you, I’d want to know all I could about that little scene.”

He shook his head. “There wouldn’t be footage of that in there. That didn’t have anything to do with any of the warrior tribes, so there wasn’t any coverage prearranged for it.”

“Oh?” She leaned back, smiling “You’re sure about that?”

“Don’t get all mysterious with me. Not now. Just tell me what you’re talking about.”

“Hey – like I said – the time’s come for you to check some things out on your own.”

† † †

He watched as she hooked one alligator clip onto a length of bare wire, the other clip pinching the end of his finger.

“What I’m going to do -” Felony licked the end of her own finger and dabbed spit on the connections. “I’m going to go on-line myself, and then patch you in. That way, anything that’s looking for you – like Mr. Big-and-Ugly out there – won’t know it’s you on the line and come stomping in here. At least not right away.”

“How am I going to find what I’m looking for?” He was starting to get cramps in his legs from squatting so long in the tiny space.