Lady Death followed a dataline to the pulsating drumhead that was the icon of a nightclub known as Syber-space. The dull black octagonal sent out a steady rhythm that Lady Death could "feel" in her meat bod-a bone-thrumming bass that mimicked a syncopated heartbeat. A favorite nightclub of deckers, Syberspace was physically located in downtown Seattle. But the virtual nightclub was accessible to deckers around the world. And one of its nodes, seconds from now, would connect with the manga music fanbase.
Lady Death dove through the head of the drum, into the Syberspace construct itself. It looked like a nightclub, complete with a mirror-backed bar stocked with glowing bottles and a large dance floor. The icons of other deckers drifted through the room, occasionally touching a bottle to access a biofeedback program that would either stimulate or sedate their meat bods, as desired, or placing a palm on one of the many bar stools whose seats resembled trode rig interfaces.
Although the nightclub construct was realistic in the extreme, the deckers' icons gave the place a surrealistic feel. A somber-looking man in top hat and tails sat next to a gray and white cartoon rabbit with white gloves, big floppy ears, and a gleeful grin. A topless teenage girl with mohawk hair and baggy shorts rode a jet-propelled surfboard past a clown, a gigantic red cockroach, and an Asian woman in a stylish business suit. A sasquatch jived alone in the center of the bar, his massive, hairy hands moving in intricate patterns like those of a Balinese temple dancer, while in another corner a trio of personas whose faces and bodies were smooth metal ovoids stood silently, accessing the program that would induce in their minds a simsense recording of the live performance that was actually going on in the meat-world nightclub.
Lady Death bowed to the club's sysop-a portly man in bacchanalian toga and headband of gold grape leaves- and asked for her "drink" by name: Magical Mystery Tour. The bartender smiled and crooked a chubby finger, and a yellow bottle floated over to Lady Death. For just a moment, the bottle took on a new shape: long and cylindrical still, but with a periscope and portholes down the side. Hurriedly, before the vanishing node disappeared and the submarine became merely a bottle again, Lady Death touched it…
And found herself inside the manga music database.
After the high-resolution realism of the Syberspace system, it took her a moment to get used to the overly simplistic but crowded landscape of the fansite. Everything was outlined in heavy black lines and deliberately pixelated, so that individual dots of primary color could be seen within each icon. Cartoonish renderings of manga music singers and musicians capered and wailed across a landscape rocked by explosions, while rocket-propelled Battlebots roared unnoticed above the heads of adoring prepubescent fans whose overly large eyes slavishly followed the musicians' every move. Although music was being performed with furious abandon, no aural elements were included. The only "sounds" were the cartoon speech bubbles that hung above the musicians' heads and the musical notes that swarmed around them like bees.
To access one of the simsense recordings that had been posted here, the decker reached out and touched one of the cartoon speech bubbles. Their captions were sometimes cryptic and sometimes straightforward, but were always punctuated to the max: "Meta Madness rocks Orktown!!!" or "Chillwiz concert a SCREAMER. I yarfed my lunch!!!" or "Guess Hue?!?"
Lady Death searched for anything that looked like a Black Magic Orchestra concert upload. A total of three cartoonish icons of Shinanai materialized in front of her, making Lady Death gasp with longing. But the captions above their heads were already familiar; these were sim-sense recordings of concerts from a previous UCAS tour, from before the time when Shinanai went underground. Lady Death considered sampling them, then reluctantly realized that downloading them onto her cyberdeck would increase the chance of her foray into the manga music site being detected by her guardians. She dismissed them with a wave and set her browse utility scanning on a variety of keywords. But the titles to Black Magic Orchestra's hit singles came up dry, as did the names-both real and stage names-of the band members.
Lady Death paused, frustrated and disappointed. No new postings. Donzoko. She stamped a foot in frustration. How would she ever find Shinanai?
Then she remembered the lyrics to the song that the aidoru had been composing, back when they had been together in the hotel room in Seoul. To the best of Lady Death's knowledge, it had never been performed at a public concert. Based on a tanka, a traditional thirty-one-syllable poem, the song had compared a woman to a well in which water rose anew each spring, and from which her lover drank again and again. Lady Death now realized that it was a veiled reference to Shinanai's vampirism. At the time, she thought it was simply a metaphor for love.
She chose the title of the song as the keyword for her search: Shunga. In literal translation, Spring Pictures-a euphemism for erotic simsense. Within a nanosecond or two, a cartoonish image appeared before her: that of an androgynous singer with a sexy pout, clad only in a black velvet cape that was wrapped tight around his/her body. Bright pink cherry blossoms drifted down like snow as the singer crooned silently into the speech bubble that floated above. The icon was human, rather than elven, and did not look a thing like Shinanai. But the caption over the head of the figure fit the imagery of the song: "I wish you well. I wish you would. I bet you WILL!!!"
Lady Death touched the caption and began downloading the simsense recording into her cyberdeck, onto the optical storage chip that was deliberately not listed on any of the deck's directories. As the data flowed, she noted the date and time that the recording had been posted, and the jack-point of the decker who had uploaded it. It had been posted just yesterday, from Kobe, a suburb of the Osaka sprawl. If it really was a recording of an underground Black Magic Orchestra concert, recorded by one of the fans who had seen the show live and then immediately uploaded the recording after the show, that meant that Shinanai was barely a five-minute maglev ride away from Lady Death in the meat world.
After so many months of numbness, Lady Death felt a rush of emotion. Joy and happiness warred with caution and fear. She could barely contain her impatience during the few nanoseconds it took to download the simsense recording; she simply could not wait to log off the Matrix and scan it. Perhaps Shinanai had hidden a secret message in the song, a call for the school girl Hitomi to rejoin her lost love.
Lady Death checked her cyberdeck's time-keeping log. It was 9:46:59 PST in the meat world-2:46:59 in the morning in Osaka. She had been running the Matrix for a mere forty-four seconds. Hopefully, her guardians had not yet noticed that she had strayed into the forbidden territory of the manga music fansite. If they had, there was a possibility that Shiawase deckers had already erased the contraband simsense recording as it flowed through her family's private LTG and into her deck. But if all was still well and Lady Death's mirrors utility and masking program had done their work, in a second or two, when she jacked out, Lady Death would at last know where her beloved Shinanai was today…
09:46:18 PST
(12:46:18 EST)
Jackpoint: Toronto, United Canadian and American States
Dark Father stared at the creature that waited for him below, in the private conversation pit. The thing was a strange blend of two different paranormal creatures. It had the squat, heavily muscled body of a gargoyle, as well as that creature's large leathery wings, pointed ears, forehead horn, and jutting muzzle. But its flesh was covered in the green and black scales of a mimic snake, and a forked tongue slithered in and out of its hinged jaw. Its neck was just a little too long, and its beady eyes were serpentlike slits under heavy brows.