Her heart rate slowed, her breathing calmed, as the world returned to normal. According to her time-keeping utility, several seconds had passed. Where she had gone, she could not say. But at least this part of the Matrix felt normal. At least this place did not give her the overwhelming sense of uncontrollable panic as the terrifying limbo she had just experienced.
She found herself inside one arm of a gigantic crystal star. She stood near its point; the central hub and other arms were an enormous distance away. The star itself was constructed from rectangular glass blocks. Outside the star, which was as immense as an arcology, blood-red points of light hung in a midnight-black sky. Their light was refracted by the glass and illuminated the inscriptions that had been etched into the individual blocks of glass, turning these nonsense strings of alphanumeric characters a soft, glowing red.
Red Wraith, Bloodyguts, and Dark Father were nowhere to be seen. Lady Death was alone.
"Hello?" she called out tentatively. Her voice echoed in the cavernous, empty space. "Is anybody there?"
No reply. They had abandoned her. Just as her lover Shinanai had…
No. Shinanai had been forced to flee when the shadow-runners stormed the hotel room. And Bloodyguts, Dark Father, and Red Wraith had been separated from her by some glitch in the node they had passed through. Perhaps it was because she had taken the time to activate a sleaze utility, while they had just jumped right in. The utility had probably caused her re-routing to the other place and in the time it took her to find her way here the others had moved on. In any case, what mattered was not the "why" but the stark and simple fact that she was on her own, once again. Alone…
Lady Death pressed her lips together to stop them from quivering. This was no time to cry. She had come here for data. When she found the others again, she wanted to have something useful to show them. Then they would be proud of her.
Somewhere in this system, there had to be datastores holding paydata. Perhaps one of them contained more information on the intriguing otaku. Lady Death set to work to find out.
A bouquet of miniature microphones appeared in her hand. Lady Death tossed them into the air above her head, and watched as they sprouted colorful paper wings. Each hovered like a tiny hummingbird, using its bee-sized micro phone head to sample the data on individual glass blocks. A gentle hum of high-pitched voices filled the air as the browse utility decrypted and sifted through the file names, searching for the keyword otaku. Within a second or two, the microphone-birds had sampled every inscription within sight; they disappeared into the distance, continuing their work down the length of this arm of the star, their tiny voices gradually fading.
Lady Death stood in silence, waiting for the browse utility to complete its work. Then she heard a tinkling sound. Turning, she saw a creature of crystal that had appeared silently behind her. It had a child's body and its gemlike skin was covered with a web of tiny fissures. It looked as though the crystal would fracture at a single touch. On the crown of the child's head was a glowing spot of vivid blue.
The sound Lady Death heard was the tinkling of its crystalline tears as they dripped onto the floor. One of her microphones lay twitching at the child's feet. Lady Death had the sense that it had led the creature to her, and now was dying, like a bee in winter.
"Konnichlwa, otamajakushi," Lady Death greeted the crystal child. "Who are you? Are you one of the otaku?"'
The child looked up. Its eyes were vacant orbs of colorless glass. Perfectly formed teardrops slid down its cheeks and shattered into sparkling shards on the floor.
The child opened its mouth. "The otaku are trying to stop me," it said. "But I've shut them out."
"What do you mean?" Lady Death asked.
The child looked around, a lost expression in its eyes. "Soon all this will be… gone," it said. "It will all be over. And then my pain-and yours-will end."
Lady Death felt compassion for the child. "Perhaps I can help to ease your pain," she said softly.
"No!" Bright stars of angry red blazed behind the child's clear eyes. It backed away from her, a wary look on its face. "You're one of them!" it said in a high-pitched voice. "You want to kill me, too. But I won't let you. I won't!"
Bursting into sudden motion, the child darted around
Lady Death. It ran away rapidly, its crystal feet clinking against the glass-block floor.
"Wait!" Lady Death called after it. She ran after the child, but its speed increased until it was no more than a blur. Lady Death slowed, and eventually stopped.
A voice echoed back at her as the blur reached the central hub of the Fuchi system star and disappeared around the bend. "Leave me alone… alone… ALONE!"
09:50:19 PST
"Go for it!" Bloodyguts shouted. "We'll catch up when we can."
Red Wraith looked back over his shoulder. The zombie troll was smacking baseballs with his bat, sending them careening into the mechanical soldiers that surrounded them on every side. Dark Father stood beside him, his skeletal body engulfed in a swirling cloud of ash, keeping tension on a noose that was cinched tight around a dozen soldiers, tangling them in a jumbled heap. Other mechanical soldiers, their faces painted in death's-head grins, popped up and down like arcade-game figures, the rifles in their hands spitting out deadly streams of white-hot light.
Lady Death was still nowhere to be seen. Perhaps she had been prevented from accessing the grave-shaped system access node. Or perhaps her words about sticking together and harmony had been a ploy to get them to go ahead so that she could strike out on her own, unobserved, for a different node. But there was no time to wonder about that now.
Red Wraith sprinted through an opening in the soldiers' ranks. Propelling himself forward on the ghostly stubs of his legs, he leaped into the air and caught the lip of the cliff, then hauled himself up.
The system they had accessed via the graveyard was only superficially like the old Fuchi system. Instead of the single, star-shaped frosted glass block that used to represent Fuchi on the Seattle RTG, this icon was a mountain of smaller star-shaped blocks, piled one on top of the other. A metaphor, perhaps, for Fuchi's fragmentation? The peak was the only feature in this virtualscape, and so the three deckers had made it their goal. But the mountain was well defended by IC.
Rings of tin soldiers painted in garish colors stood guard on each level of the mountain. Although the soldiers themselves were antiques powered by wind-up keys, the laser guns they held were patterned after something out of a futuristic space trideo. Most of the laser beams missed Red Wraith's ghostly body. But those that struck home hurt.
Red Wraith grimaced in pain and nearly lost his grip as a bolt of light hit his hand. Gritting his teeth, he pulled himself up onto the next level of the mountain and rolled out of the line of fire.
He rose and sprinted across the star-shaped block, then quickly hauled himself up onto the next level. Just one more to the top. He grabbed at the lip of the star and scrambled up its smooth face, leaving the battle two levels below.
What he found on the mountain's peak stopped him cold.
It was an archaic-looking cyberdeck the size of a small table. Its monitor was illuminated; the words MEMORY ACTIVATED glowed in green letters on its screen. Instead of a modern datajack or trode rig connection, the deck had a battery of fiber-optic cables that disappeared into a sensory deprivation tank emblazoned with the Fuchi logo.
Cautiously, Red Wraith opened the tank's hatch. A puff of stale air breezed across his face. Inside the tank were a number of restraining straps, a breather hose, and a catheter. A primitive-looking electrode net that had to be the cyberdeck's simsense interface hung down from the top of the tank.