"You think a lot of things!" the boy shouted suddenly.
"I don't-"
"I'll show you!"
The boy vanished. In his place stood a tentacled, green-skinned monster. Its bloodshot eyes were set into its torso above a gaping mouth that drooled foul-smelling slime and its tripod legs were hairy and warted.
Dark Father pressed himself against the cold cement wall.
"You think I'm an alien from outer space," the creature said in a deep, bubbling voice that sounded like a cross between someone talking and retching. "You think I want my children to conquer the Earth. That's why we cut the brake line of your car."
"Not me," Dark Father protested. He had no idea what the creature was talking about. "I didn't think anything of the-"
The space alien vanished. In its place was a shimmering being of light, filled with multi-colored sparkles. "You think I'm a great spirit that managed to manifest within the Matrix," it said in a soft whisper. "But what do elves know? They're just empty-headed daisy eaters-right?"
"I read about an experiment where they tried to force a spirit into the Matrix once," Dark Father answered carefully. "Back in 2054. I think it was some kind of light spirit, though I never heard of one of those before. I remember, because one of those pirate propaganda stations made a big fuss about how only an ork girl could-"
"A non-human," the being of light said, echoing Dark Father's tone of polite disgust. The other decker had shifted his persona back into the shape of a young boy-a young ork boy. Dark Father suddenly realized that he had better keep his opinions to himself. Especially if this decker knew his real name.
The boy disappeared again. In his place was a miniature replica of a Matrix system-a series of hexagonal purple GPU and SPU nodes, linked by beams of ruby laser light.
"You think I'm an artificial intelligence," a heavily reverberating, electronic-sounding voice said. "That's what you put in your report to the Aztechnology board of directors. But my children discredited you. Your suicide confirmed that yours were the ravings of a madwoman. Als don't exist."
"You sound like Red Wraith," Dark Father muttered.
The boy reappeared-in human form, this time. He sat on the upper bunk with his back to Dark Father and his arms wrapped around his knees. He hummed tunelessly to himself and rocked back and forth, staring at the wall.
"Uh…" Dark Father realized that the other decker hadn't revealed his name. "Sysop?"
The boy just kept humming. He looked like one of the kids on the hospital's psych ward-the ones who had been orphaned during the Euro-Wars. Raised in automated nurseries without ever having had the benefit of human contact, many of them had suffered irreversible psychological damage. They displayed behaviors like the one the boy was exhibiting now-rocking, repetitive motions that had been their only form of physical stimulation when they were infants, nervous habits that they carried through into adult life.
Dark Father had a chilling thought. Was the programmer who had created this system mad?
He tried again to catch the boy's attention: "God?"
"Go away."
Dark Father had a sudden realization. "Your 'children'-are they the otaku!"
"Frag off! They don't love me any more. That's why I won't let them in. Now shut up. I don't want to hear about them anymore!" The boy rocked more violently. Back and forth. Back and forth.
"Then you must know what deep resonance is," Dark Father continued, heedless of the fact that the boy had jammed his hands over his ears. "You're the one behind the experiment. You can tell me what's going on-"
"You!" The boy spun around on the bunk to stare at Dark Father. "You're the one! You're the one who tried to kill me. I hate you! I HATE YOU!"
Twin beams of rippling force shot out of the boy's palms. They struck Dark Father's chest, propelling him violently backward. He slammed into the cell's cement wall with such force that he heard his bones cracking. Then the wall behind him gave way in a shower of concrete and dust and he flew through the air. Another shift…
He landed on his back, stunned, and saw Lady Death looking down at him, a surprised expression on her makeup-white face.
"Konnichiwa" she said, extending a slim hand to help him up. "Where did you come from?"
09:52:49 PST
Lady Death held the spotlight in her hands and swept its beam around the room that represented the datastore that she and Dark Father had accessed. Dust hung in the air, scattering and softening the light.
The room was small and cramped, filled with gigantic, old-fashioned metal filing cabinets. Back in the days be fore virtual offices became the norm, cabinets like these had been used to hold hardcopy documents. Each was twice as high as Lady Death was tall, had four oversized drawers, and was a dark, dull green in color. A thick layer of dust covered them.
The winged microphones of Lady Death's browse utility bumped gently against the drawers of several of the cabinets, their wings buzzing. As she swung the spotlight toward them, what had appeared to be unlocked drawers suddenly changed. As the light hit, enormous bombs sprang into view. Made of sticks of red dynamite taped together with a digital readout that read ACTIVATED, the bombs were stuck fast to the drawer fronts. As the beam of light swept away, the bombs disappeared, becoming invisible once more.
"Data bombs." Lady Death spoke in a whisper, as if her voice would trigger them. She turned to Dark Father. "Do you have a defuse utility?"
The skeleton beside her nodded. Dark Father's black bones and clothes made him almost invisible against the darkness, but his white teeth gleamed in a perpetual death's-head grin. His finger bones clicked together as he mimed a scissor-like cutting motion, and a pair of oversized wire cutters appeared in his hand. "Which one holds the most data?"
Lady Death listened to the buzzing of the microphones. "That one," she said, pointing her searchlight at the icon that was buzzing the most insistently. The winged microphone nudged against the lowermost drawer next to the sticks of dynamite.
Dark Father knelt before the filing cabinet. He gently guided the wire cutters forward, then released them and let the icon do its work. The wire cutters drifted first to one side of the data bomb, then the other, rotating gently as the defuse utility decided which string of programming to interrupt. Then the tool positioned its blades over a striped black-and-red wire and snipped.
The readout changed from ACTIVATED to DEACTIVATED.
"Good," Dark Father said in a satisfied voice. "That was easy enough."
Tape unraveled with a hissing noise as the data bomb broke apart into six individual sticks of dynamite. At first, Lady Death thought that this was what was supposed to happen. But then each of the red cylinders elongated and expanded into a red snake several meters long and twice as thick as Lady Death's arm. Bands of gold light strobed down their bodies and green targeting lasers projected from their eyes. Two pairs of finger-thin beams of light locked on Lady Death, and two of the snakes surged toward her, streaking through the air like sinuous arrows.
"Ki o tsukete!" she cried. "Attack IC!"
Dropping the searchlight, she activated the jets in her sandals. The evade utility allowed her to spring up onto one of the filing cabinets in an enormous leap, but the snakes were quicker. One of them opened its wide mouth and engulfed one of Lady Death's legs, swallowing it to the knee. It yanked, and she crashed to the floor. The second snake surged for her head, mouth open. Lady Death threw her right arm up to fend it off-and her hand and forearm disappeared into the snake's gaping maw.