She studied the icons. If the symbols used related to the type of intrusion countermeasure they represented, the poison and corrosive symbols were probably crippler or ripper IC, and the flammable symbol blaster IC. The radioactive symbol was likely a tar baby or tar pit program; since both radioactivity and tar were near-impossible to get rid of.
Timea considered her options. Which was the lesser evil?
Tar IC was the most destructive-once it locked onto a decker it started trashing utility programs. The more virulent version of the program-tar pit-wiped them permanently from the memory of the deck by corrupting all copies of the program with a virus. And once it attacked, it stuck like glue. Utilities just kept falling into the pit and disappearing, one after the other. Blaster IC was easier…
But Timea couldn't bring herself to face blaster IC again, not after her agonizingly painful encounter with the stuff in the last teaching program. She'd risk her deck and
PSYCHOTROPE 205
not her meat bod, this time. And she had a utility that just might give her an edge…
Timea activated her steamroller utility. The standard version of this program matched its name-a rumbling piece of construction equipment with a huge roller out front. But Timea had customized her copy of the utility to match her persona. As she finished uploading it from active memory, a gigantic block of granite appeared in the air beside her. The heavy cube was encircled by a thick rope that was pulled by a team of straining laborers. The dozen "slaves" were all dressed alike in simple loin cloths, Egyptian head wraps, and sandals. But Timea had given each a distinctive face. One looked like the go-ganger who'd fire-balled Nate, another was the creep who'd tried to deal BTL to the kids at her clinic a year ago. One had the face of the elf woman whose gang had jumped Timea because she'd had the nerve to kiss the elf's boyfriend, while another had the narrow, pinched face of the condescending social worker who had threatened to take Lennon away from her. The rest… well, all were deserving of the virtual death they were about to experience, yet again.
Timea set the utility in motion. The workers strained against the rope, hauling the block toward the radiation symbol. The sound of stone scraping against stone and the faint shouts of an invisible overseer filled the air. And then the first of the slaves-the one with the face of the go-ganger who had killed her brother-reached the IC.
As he passed the radiation symbol, Timea heard a loud cracking noise. A crisscrossing of sharp red whip marks appeared on his back. The slave with the ganger's face cried out in agony, then shimmered and disappeared. But still the line of laborers strained forward.
Timea watched as the radiation symbol chewed its way through the slaves, gradually infecting the steamroller utility. Six of the slaves had already "died," their backs lacerated and bleeding before they disappeared. Now a seventh-the smug-faced social worker-crumpled under an invisible lash. And now the eighth, and ninth…
Timea crossed her fingers as the tenth and eleventh laborer screamed in agony and shimmered into non-existence. Unless the block of stone itself passed across the radiation symbol, the tar IC would remain intact. And having crashed one utility, it would move on to the next in Timea's deck. ‹
Her steamroller utility was moving at a painfully slow pace. The only remaining laborer was straining for all she was worth, barely able to budge the stone. She had made it past the radiation symbol itself, but whip marks were appearing on her back, one by one, as the viruses contained in the tar IC degraded her.
Then the rope snapped. The block of granite stopped, its leading edge just touching the symbol that represented the IC. The tar program seemed to be trapped underneath it; the edge of one "petal" of the radiation symbol lay under the block. But Timea knew that the IC was still active. The block itself was starting to degrade, chunks of stone falling away from it like plaster from a rotting wall. Soon the tar would start munching on her other utilities…
She was well and truly fragged now. Unless…
Timea groped frantically in her mind, trying to remember the sequence of thoughts and emotions she had experienced after she'd looked up and seen Bloodyguts falling out of the sky, about to land on her head. She'd felt a surge of adrenaline, a combination of fear that kept her rooted to the spot and an overwhelming urge to escape. She'd pictured the funhouse, with its rotating tunnel. She'd imagined the floor tilting wildly beneath her feet like this…
Gravity shifted. Instead of standing on a horizontal plane, Timea found herself skidding down a sharply angled slope. She grabbed at the deflated ball beside her and managed to check her forward momentum just a little. Then the ball too began to move, its rubber squeaking as it edged its way down the slope in a series of sliding jerks. Timea, clinging to it, slid toward the doll house and the IC icons that could slag her…
But even as the danger neared, she smiled. The granite block was also moving, and much more quickly. With a grinding rumble the steamroller utility surged forward, crushing the tar IC beneath it. The radiation icon splintered apart, and as the block of stone passed over it nothing was left in its wake but shattered fragments of glowing green, which dissolved even as Timea watched.
Enough. With milliseconds to go before she hit and activated the first IC icon, Timea pressed against the tilting floor with all of her mental might. With a sudden lurch that left a queasy feeling in her stomach, the ground rotated rapidly, flipping more than 360 degrees in a tight circle. Then it steadied in a more or less horizontal plane.
Timea rose, shaking, to her feet. Then quickly, before another intrusion countermeasures program could move into the void left by the defeated tar IC, she entered the room where the doll lay sprawled on the meat couch.
She stood just in front of the icon. The doll stared at her with its flat glass eye. The program frame was inactive, performing a null operation.
"Time to wake up," Timea told it. "Your star pupil is here."
She lifted the doll's arm, but it simply remained in the position she'd moved it to. Rotating the head from side to side had the same effect: nada. No matter what position she placed it in, the icon remained frozen there.
Normally, the FrameWerks teaching program sprang into action as soon as one of its icons was manipulated. A cartoon beaver in a construction worker's hard hat appeared, asked the student to choose from the tools that hung from its belt, and then oversaw the deconstruction and reconstruction of the smart frame. But it seemed that Build-It Beaver had been edited out of this particular version of FrameWerks.
Timea would have to cook this smart frame on her own.
She ran her analyze utility over the icon, this time paying particular attention to how it had been constructed. The frame appeared simple on the surface: each limb represented a different utility that had been used in its construction. But the utilities themselves were real kick-hoop stuff. One leg was a tracking utility that was linked with a sleaze program in the other leg. The arms and hands packed a one/two punch: a killjoy utility that would stun a decker, plus a black hammer utility that would finish the job by killing the decker outright, just like lethal black IC. The head…
Now that was interesting. The head contained copies of datafiles that were linked with the track utility in the doll's leg. If Timea was scanning the data right, the smart frame had been programmed to slag any decker who logged onto a particular research project in the Mitsuhama "pagoda" system in Los Angeles-a project from which the files in the doll's head had been copied. The frame was programmed to ignore shadowrunners who simply knew the system's password and were in for an illicit browse- instead it targeted the researchers themselves, waiting for someone to actually add new information to the database or to tweak the code of one of the simulation programs used in the research itself.