It went on like that, nearly half an hour during which poor Billings barely had room to get a word in edgewise. Perhaps when he offered Bane the interview time, he hadn't thought through what it would mean to offer virttime to a man with the aerobic advantages produced by spending hours every night screaming and singing nonstop on stages real or virtual all around the planet. Only once did Bane pause, when Billings managed to say, "And over your gates, where it says 'Abandon hope…. isn't that crime? Plagiarism?"
"Nope," Bane said cheerfully. "It was lying around in the public domain, and no one was using it. I trademarked it. My goal is to make Hell pay me royalties."
Having come to the soundbyte itself, the image froze on the confident, arrogant face, and Charlie sat there looking at it for a while, thinking.
The folks accusing this guy of being evil, he thought, are wrong. He's not, really. Or at least I don't think he is.
But still… something's going on at his site to cause it to act as a 'core' for these suicides.
Now all I want to know is: what?
Charlie stood there and brooded for a moment. The man himself might not mean anyone any harm, but there was always the possibility that someone in his organization did. That someone was either trying to sabotage Deathworld by causing these suicides… or was running some other agenda, something a lot more obscure.
After a moment Charlie sighed. If that was the case, the odds of him ever finding out about it were minuscule. Besides, he thought, remember `Occam's Razor.' Don't go introducing possibilities into the equation out of nowhere. Deal with the ones you have evidence for, before starting to make things up.
Charlie turned away from Joey Bane, frozen there in his chair, and frowned at the polished wood floor of the old operating theater as he walked among the "exhibits." And evidence is the problem. I don't have enough to come to any conclusions. For a good diagnosis, you need data clinical data on what happened to these people.
I could ask Captain Winters… But the information Charlie needed was medical. If it was in the Net Force files at all-which it might not be-it was almost certainly inaccessible under seal of confidentiality.
If there were some other way to get at it…
He thought about that. Violating confidentiality… But that's not what I would be doing if I just looked at data like that illegally, Charlie thought. If I told anyone else about what I found, yes, then it would be. But this isn't about spreading the information around. It's about finding out what really happened. Because I don't think anyone else has yet…
Charlie sat down on one of the "ringside" benches and looked across at the frozen image of Joey Bane. And if someone doesn't find out what did happen, it leaves us wide open for it to happen all over again…
He swallowed, thinking of Nick. Granted, Nick wasn't showing any signs of being suicidal that Charlie could detect…
But then neither were these other kids, he thought. He got up and walked over to the various windows shoWing the excerpted stories of the earlier suicides, hanging there in the air. He poked a finger into one window, then another, starting their text scrolling by. The second one had a history of depression. But all the rest of them seemed to take everybody by surprise…
"News alert."
Charlie glanced up at that. "Whatcha got?" he said to the workspace management system.
"You asked to be alerted of any news story containing the following term: Deathworld."
"Got something new? Yeah, play it."
Off to one side, in the few open spaces of floor left down in the "pit" at the moment, a newsman sitting behind a desk appeared, with his mouth open, frozen. "Playing content," the program said. "Source: FTNet nightly Net-business news bulletin, today, 1810 GMT-"
The clip started moving. "-ther news, Net host provider SourceStream today published weekly stats which are good news for shareholders, if a little on the macabre side," said the newsman. "Net access and revenue figures for the controversial Net environment `Deathworld,' which hosts at SourceStream, are up nearly twenty percent from the last half-month reporting period. SourceStream spokesperson Wik Nellis declined to speculate on the sudden leap in the site's popularity, but other industry sources suspect that the cause is the spate of recent suicides which have attracted unwelcome attention from Net-content watchdog groups and law-enforcement agencies in various jurisdictions. Walk-throughs at the `morbo-jazz' site are up sharply, with SourceStream again declining to confirm the exact numbers, but industry rivals suggest that the publicity may have attracted as many as five million new users to the site, with a potential revenue injection of as much as twenty million dollars in the past two weeks. Meanwhile, the merger of BBC with WOLTime has been-"
The clip froze again. Charlie stood there looking at it, slightly disgusted. "Sick," he said softly. That these people should be making more money off the fact that their users had been killing themselves-
Charlie made a face. Then he sighed. It probably wasn't their fault. But it annoyed him nonetheless.
"Save that," he said to the computer.
"Done," it said as he turned his back on the clip and looked at the other pieces of information littering the place, and strolled among them, trying to think. But a most paranoid idea occurred to Charlie suddenly, so awful that it stopped him dead in his tracks. Supposing that peo- ple at Deathworld were causing people to kill themselves in order to drive the user stats and revenue up?
He shivered. Oh, that's a sick idea. This is making me morbid.
Besides, you would need evidence that they were able to make people do something like that… and you don't have any.
Charlie sighed. Just paranoia, he thought, and walked among the "exhibits" for a few moments more. Too many clues… not enough hard data for a real theory. For any kind of theory.
I need harder data. I need those autopsy reports.
He sat down on one of the benches and looked out across the Pit.
But how am I going to get them?
He sat there thinking for a long time, while outside, eighteenth-century London started (finally) to go to bed, and the sky showing high up in the Royal Society's windows started to pale toward dawn.
And suddenly Charlie sat up straight. Mark!
"Time check," Charlie said.
"Twenty twenty-nine."
"I want to make a virtcall," he said. "Mark Gridley." "Trying that connection for you now…"
In another part of the virtual realm entirely, it was raining fire, and Nick was standing under an asbestos golf umbrella and wondering just where to go from here.
The patter of ash and live cinder on the umbrella over his head would have been strangely soothing had it not been for the brimstone smell in the air and the shrieks and wails of those in torment. All the cries were wordless, here. The Damned in this circle had been deprived of the only thing that had marked them as human while they lived on earth, the gift of speech. In all other ways that mattered they were judged to have abandoned their humanity, and so they ran forever under the fiery rain, with demons scourging them through the black, blasted, ash-strewn landscape. In the distance, on the lowering horizon, a volcano was erupting, belching ash and fumes and fountains of lava into the air, and the ground rumbled constantly, crevasses always ready to open up and swallow the Damned as they ran.