The portal parted like a ripe banana, splitting down the middle.
Jacking out was not an option. It was too late for that. In the time it would take her flesh and blood fingers to hit the Disconnect key or to wrench the datajack from her temple, she would be caught, traced, and brain-fried by nanosecond-swift IC.
In the next System Access Node waited a red and yellow clown. The icon for a smartframe or perhaps a Fuchi decker. Piper had met the clown icon before. The big sunflower on its chest fired acid IC. The big white custard pie in its hand worked like a trace and burn program. Piper hurled a handful of marbles. In mid-flight, the marbles swelled into silvery globes. As the clown moved to evade, the globes flew into orbit around it, immobilizing the icon with a dazzling storm of red and green program code.
The clown's blazing orange hair stood up on end.
I Piper slammed through the node and streaked out across the Manhattan telecommunications grid, free of the Fuchi cluster. The cluster's icon dominated the grid representing lower Manhattan, its form that of an enormous, five-pointed black star, slowly rotating, surmounted by a gigantic tower with five distinct facets, like the facets of a diamond. There was no more dangerous icon in the grid.
She fired herself into the electron-gridded darkness above, seeking the SAN to the regional grid. That led her to the Newark grid and back to where she had begun, and to her original fears and doubts.
Going up against Fuchi, even a subsidiary like Multitronics, was madness. It would make the run against Maas Intertech seem like a stroll through a sunlit meadow. Only a ramjamming neophyte would even consider it, and only because little baby deckers had no conception of the power contained in the Fuchi cluster. They thought sheer enthusiasm, combined with a knack for program code, would see them through anything. It didn't work that way. Piper knew. She had seen with her own electron-surrogate eyes what happened inside the Black Towers. She had heard the screams of deckers who tried to sleaze one too many Watchers or play smoke and mirrors with killer IC one too many times. She had breathed the malodorous fumes from a Mona Lisa jammer hit by so much lethal feedback that the decker's brain began to boil and pour out through her eyes.
If not for Rico, Piper wouldn't even have considered going up against Fuchi. Her lover left her no choice.
They had to do right, never mind that it might get them all killed. It wasn't enough to just turn and walk away, let Surikov do as he would. They had taken "responsibility" for Surikov. They had to see him safely to whatever corporate home he wanted. They had to make contact with the appropriate corporate agent. They had to cut a deal. And even that wasn't enough. They had to get Surikov's wife, too, or the man would remain a pawn of the megacorps.
A man with Rico's convictions didn't belong in the Sixth World. Piper only wished there was some finer' place where they could go, a place where doing right wouldn't get them killed.
Fuchi had developed the first desktop cyberdeck, the first neural interface. The corp had all but written the matrix out of whole code. Fuchi's advances in intrusion countermeasures had few rivals, and no real equals. Sleazing anything out of its cluster of mainframe computers was going to take miracle work. Surviving the run would require intervention by the gods.
A direct confrontation with the cluster's awesome mainframes would only get her killed. She had to find another way.
She shot herself into Saganville, the heart of the Newark grid. Here, the gleaming white pyramids of system constructs, thousands upon thousands of them, crammed the datalines and rose a thousand levels into the electron night. Amid this megalopolis of constructs, Piper found a particular network address and pushed her signal inside.
Her iconic self stepped into silent darkness. Scents like sulfur and methane wafted past her. A voice, immeasurably deep and resonant, like the. voice of a god, demanded, "WHO ARE YOU?"
Piper replied, "I am Arielle of Avalon."
"WHAT DO YOU WANT?"
"I want information."
"YOU WON" T GET IT!"
"By hook or by crook, I shall."
"Oh, really? Well, maybe you will. Then again, maybe you woo-OOOONNNNNNNTTTttttt!!!"
The final word rose suddenly into a cry, then a long, drawn-out scream that faded slowly away. As the scream faded, the voices of a thousand crows arose chattering, rasping, and ranting, raucously laughing.
The darkness before her resolved into a rickety bridge of vines and wooden slats just wide enough for one person to cross alone. The bridge spanned an immense crevasse, infinitely deep and filled with a boiling sea of fire. Piper took hold of the viny guide-ropes at waist-height and began walking across the bridge. Abruptly, the vines parted and the bridge swung downward toward the roaring flames. Piper pulled a knotted cord from around her waist and hurled one end toward the far side of the crevasse. The hook on the end of the cord caught on a rocky prominence. Hand over hand, Piper pulled herself up.
Beyond the cliff-edge of the crevasse was a forest, shining darkly with menace. From the stunted, twisted trees, gnarled like monstrous creatures, hung the skeletal remains of those who had come before her, the persona icons of the doomed. Immense black birds chittered from the tree limbs and pecked at the tattered remains of the skeletons. A hideous smell like corruption hung heavy in the air. A thick grayish fog flowed slowly along the ground. Piper considered how to proceed.
Many paths led into this horrific electron forest. Danger lurked everywhere, in the trunk of a tree, in the stagnant waters of a malignant bubbling pool, in the huge black figures that loomed everywhere in the darkness, in things unseen, rustling softly through the undergrowth. Disease and death seemed to flow through the air and along the ground just as tangibly as the fog.
Piper found her way to a small thatched hut with a single rounded opening. She ducked her head down and stepped inside. The interior of the hut was gloomy. A small fire flickered at the center of the hard-packed floor. Smoke curled through the air. On the far side of the fire sat a dark figure wrapped in a ragged cloak and hood. This, Piper knew, was the icon of a decker known as Azrael. No one knew his real name.
Back in 2029, a virus of unprecedented power had swept through the world's computer systems, scrambling data and frying hardware. To fight the plague, the government of what was then called the United States created a special top-secret group known as Echo Mirage. The team did eventually beat the virus, but few of the special cadre survived with their sanity intact. They were deckers at a time when a direct neural interface produced sensory overload, and, often, incurable psychosis.
Azrael was reputed to be one of the few to survive Echo Mirage. If that was so, if he really had been with the project, he had not survived the ordeal unscathed. No program he wrote was without eccentricities, and he had a maniacal hatred of governments and corps that often seemed to surpass Piper's own.
"What is your quest?" he rasped.
"I seek information."
Azrael laughed and laughed, breathlessly and harsh, as raucously as the crows, then suddenly blurted, "I know this, woman. You said it once already. Am I deaf? Do you think I'm deaf? What is it you really want?"
"Personnel and security data from Fuchi Multitronics."
"You quest the Black Towers?" Azrael laughed again, uproariously, hysterically. He laughed till he wheezed for breath, then he leaned toward the fire, peering at Piper from under the black shadow of his hood. "You will die."
"I think not."
Azrael shouted, "No one has ever penetrated the Black Towers' security processor and LIVED to TELL the TALE!"