Streets of blood

25

Serrin found the place easily enough. The house looked like an architectural impossibility; narrow, seeming to lean a little on one side, its five stories looking like almost too many to stand upright. The ground-level floor was a florist’s shop, but it was closed now. Didn’t find too many fresh flowers in Manhattan these days. There wasn’t much to indicate what went on in the floors above the shop. Serrin rang the ancient intercom by the side door. It buzzed into life.

“I’m here to see the Lady. Name’s Serrin Shamandar. She doesn’t know me personally, but I need some information and I can pay.”

There was a long pause. “Just a minute,” the distorted voice boomed. “I’ll have to confer with Her Ladyship. She don’t take many visitors.”

The link clicked into silence.

It was ten minutes before the voice was back again.

“You may come in to discuss the possibility of an appointment, but be warned that we take serious precautions against any form of magical assensing or spell use. Any action suggesting active spell use will be construed as a hostile act and you will be dealt with accordingly.”

Well, of course I know there are countermeasures, Serrin thought. Think I didn’t try assensing already? He was about to voice a curt rejoinder when he realized he’d been listening to a pre-recorded message. The door swung open before him, and an array of cameras tracked his long and painful passage up the five flights to the top floor. Spirits, hadn’t these people ever heard of elevators?

When he finally dragged himself up the last set, he was breathing hard. Before him was a heavy steel door; he touched the detector panel to trigger it into scanning mode and stood back. Within seconds, the door opened.

Most serious runners in Manhattan knew of Her Ladyship, but few had ever seen her or set foot inside her domain. She never left this place, existing as an information sponge, soaking up everything and anything. Even top corporations came to her when desperate for a lead from her deranged mind. Her information was so vast and so valuable that no one dared harm her, for fear of what tidbit she might have stored away only to be revealed if she were killed. The place was said to be the weirdest cybercomplex outside of the really heavy corps. In Manhattan that had to be very weird indeed. Serrin was braced for the expected, but not to encounter anything like the troll.

Looking upward from the metahuman’s enormous feet, which had to be at least size eighteen, Serrin didn’t register anything too odd about the steel-reinforced boots or the heavy olive-green pants. It was only when the troll took a step forward that he heard the hiss of the hydraulics. Across his chest, looking for all the world like a row of military medals, a row of sensor panels and lights blinked a neon mantra.

Heaven only knows what’s chipped into his autonomics and respiratory systems, the elf thought. The troll’s arms looked as if they were made of liquid chrome, shiny and unbelievably flexible metal. It was a touch of absurdity that he had one fleshy hand and one of the same flowing metal.

But it was the metahuman’s head that really startled Serrin, It wasn’t the cybereyes that were strange, but the filamentous network of fine, intermeshed metallic strands and what looked like monofilament optical fibers radiating out from them and flowing around the troll’s facial musculature and forehead, His mouth gleamed with metallic lips and his voice betrayed the existence of a fine voxsynth at work in his throat. The troll had no external ears, but concentric rings of carbonized steel and mono-filament that suggested a level of chipping and cyberware that Serrin would never have dreamed existed.

All that was enough to startle the image. What really scared him, though, was the gun in the metal hand. It looked like a taser, but was linked to a pack bulging with chiptech on the troll’s hip. Once those hooks were in you, who knew what they might do to your body? Serrin was so scared he began to put his hands up.

“Just a standard precaution,” the troll said in a husky voice. “If you have any weapons, please hand them over now” Serrin gave up his little hold-out, apologizing that he felt safer on the streets with it. The troll ignored him as he took the pistol away. It was a comical moment, a thin elf handing over a puny little hold-out to this gigantic troll arrayed in armor and defenses, but Serrin wouldn’t see the humor in it for many hours.

“Please sit down.”

Now that he had edged through the doorway Serrin could see a little more of his surroundings. The decor was a bizarre clash: oil paintings behind security glass-a Rembrandt, if he wasn’t mistaken-and more anonymous Dutch landscape works, a cabinet stuffed with elven crystal work from Tir Tairngire, and a Ming vase on a pedestal. Truth be told Serrin didn’t know whether it was a Ming vase or not. He’d tagged it that mentally because Ming was the only dynasty name he could remember. Interspersed with the art were surveillance vidcameras, sensor systems, sprinkler systems, and a pair of wall-mounted autofire crossbow pistols that swiveled to face his chest as he sat down in the rooms only chair. None of it made him feel very safe and secure.

The troll wasn’t saying anything. Serrin began to ask timidly about an appointment, but the troll put a hand up for silence and the elf obeyed. Time ticked by and Serrin began to squirm in his chair as an eyeball-shaped sensor swiveled smoothly out from the wall beside him on a long, flexible metal arm. It scanned his face and thorax and, despite his best leg-crossing efforts, showed a definite interest in the more private areas of his anatomy. It scanned down, then up at his face, before finally returning to its wall socket.

When nearly half an hour had elapsed. Serrin began to get up, very slowly, and addressed the troll, who had remained motionless the whole time.

“Um, it’s getting very late and I really would be very grateful if-”

What happened next was utterly bizarre and confusing. The troll broke into an operatic aria, then got up, twirled a pirouette, and spread his hands wide, grinning with steel teeth. He flicked out a disturbingly large tongue and pointed to the other door in the room, which opened slowly. Serrin had no idea what the troll had been singing, but he thought it might have been Italian. Flipping his tongue back like a frog, the troll clicked his teeth when Serrin entered the darkened corridor beyond. This is good luck, he thought. They say she rarely agrees to see anyone, let alone lets them walk right in out of the blue like this.

Coming to four doors, he decided to knock at the one with a red light glowing above it. At his touch it swung motionlessly open, inviting him into Her Ladyship’s sanctum. With a mixture of hope and trepidation. Serrin walked through.

He gawked at the sight that greeted him on the other side of that door. Wall to wall, endless viewscreens, trideo, telecom, and satellite links, all downloading everything imaginable. He saw commodity price lists, air travel schedules and passenger IDs, corporate accountancy reports, a chat show with a nude female psychiatrist as host, a wildlife documentary, a cartoon squirrel smashing a cartoon dog on the head with a baseball bat, a film on Inuit society, slo-mo replays of football touchdowns, gruesome surgical operations in living color, shots from space satellites, everything in humanity’s full range of information flow. He had to shield his eyes from the constant flicker and glare.

The other elf was alone in the room, a ghastly figure in the center of a great netted web of fiber cabling, pumps, pipes, feeders, and inputs of every imaginable type. A multi-stranded feeder cable pumped an endless supply of data into the middle of her forebrain. Meanwhile, fluids pulsed and pumped into myriad tubes, pipes, and filters of an I/O port complex into her hindbrain. The elf herself had only the vestiges of a body, shrunken and virtually embalmed alive. Her muscles were wasted, fingers hopelessly knotted and shriveled, but the eyes were alive, and they were real eyes. It was perhaps the only part of Her Ladyship that betrayed any functioning vestiges of her original body.

Very slowly she lowered her eyelids, with their inch-long, heavily-mascaraed eyelashes, and the flow of information through the forebrain diminished just slightly. The screens in the room dimmed.

“Ah, one of my people. An elf come to see me.” The voice was utterly flat and devoid of expression, so Serrin couldn’t tell if it was mockery or an honest expression of welcome. The face gave nothing away because it did not move; the vocal synthesizer was in sensurround, so it couldn’t be localized either. Between Her Ladyship’s lifeless arms appeared a little green and blue hologram of Serrin, dancing a jerky, mannequin-like round. Spiraling about the figure was a four-colored double helix, his DNA code, and to one side of that a continuously scrolling update on his vital signs and physical parameters. To the other side the output of a quarkspin tomographic brain scan throbbed in vivid color. He felt very frightened now, completely in the power of this obscene creature. The DNA helix was seriously spooky; someone could use that for ritual sorcery against him. He wondered where she’d gotten the code.

“Serrin Shamandar. This will substantially add to my file on you, little elf mage.” The hint of a smile seemed to play around those white lips. The eyes were unblinking, taking in his discomfort and enjoying it.

“You have a file on me?’

“I have a file, a pretty little file, on everything and everyone. We are all information. Look at you sparkle and shine.”

The DNA helix sparked into a fireworks display of crackling energy. It had a peculiar beauty, with the blue and silver and radiant purple of the bondings. “Oh, you are a pretty one. Look at your Power,” the voice said, as a stretch of the scrolling helix began to glow golden before his face. The figure before him began a slow, smooth. almost peristaltic rocking movement, to and fro. The eyes never left him.

“It is an honor, your Ladyship,” Serrin said, beginning to feel that this creature was quite insane. He needed to tread very carefully.

“So you come to learn something, my pretty little mage. Why come to me? Not many do. Or many do and few are allowed within. Your scans amused me. You are damaged. pretty one. I like that.”

“I was given your name by a friend. He told me you might know something about a corporation I am trying to investigate.”

The screens blazed into life again. “You come for something as boring as that? A runner come for information on a corporation? You waste my time. I only dispense information, just a tiny little tidbit perhaps. if I am asked something interesting. Look!”

The sensory overload was impossible. The screens ran riot with fast strobing, and the sensurround amplification assaulted his mind. He was forced to his knees with the pain of it, desperately trying to shut it out. The avalanche subsided.

“It is interesting. Lady. Please hear me,” he managed to force out between clamped teeth. He began to explain, telling her of the murders and the coincidences between lives drawn apart for many years, She liked that, and the voxsynth purred at him.

“Oh yes, oh yes, pretty one. Your friend was right. Years ago, little one, BTL chips. Jack the Ripper, oh yes. I so enjoyed that.”

Better-than-life chips; someone had chipped up a version of the killer. Of course.

But they didn’t get it right, no, no.” She created a dancing hologram of her images, putting his imagery behind her where it continued to dance in silence. “Pretty Little whores, slash! slash! slash! Hee hee hee hee…”

The voice trailed into psychotic laughter, and then, most horribly, into a song, a child’s lullaby.

Serrin didn’t think even the word madness was adequate here. Not even schizophrenic could have fulfilled the task of describing this one. He didn’t even want to Look at the hologram, with its mutilated bodies in lace and chiffon.

“So he’s back, he’s back! Jack's back! Hee hee hee!” Again the high-pitched laughter reverberated around him. “Well, little one, is it pretty now? Have they done it well this time?”

Serrin nodded grimly. He wanted desperately to find out who had made a Ripper BTL chip, and he decided to risk her ire by asking outright.

“Oh, well,” she sounded fussy and mildly irritated. “Little people with big money in the shadows. Global Technologies made the chips. Little people used them. Hollywood people. Never know what they’re doing. Hollywood people, always so self-absorbed, never attend to details. We’re not stylish and we’re not pretty,” she half-sang in mockery.

For a split-second the withered form seemed to rock just a little further forward toward him. She gazed right though him with eyes the frequency of lasers. “Hollywood Simsense, little mage.’ she said simply. ‘Corporate warfare. But who was behind the Hollywood people? Who’s bigger than all of the Global world?”

“Go now.” The voice changed very abruptly. “I am bored now. I think I shall have a soiree.” Abruptly the screens as one flipped channels to show an endless array of celebrities. Politicians, artists, simsense stars, religious leaders, writers, sportsmen and women; Serrin recognized almost all of them. Almost all were silent, but to Serrin’s amazement the Russian president began reciting an old and especially obscene joke about a New York mayor and an actress. He looked quizzically at the expressionless elf.”

“They shall say what it pleases me to have them say. You will go now. But, oh, before you go, pretty one, you shall dance for us all. We shall applaud most politely. Dance for us.”

It felt as if he were being pushed and pulled throughout his body, and he lost all voluntary control. His mind went spinning across the possibilities; low-wave EM. quarkspin modulators, subliminals, photic driving… they couldn’t do this to him. But he had no choice as he skipped and swayed across the nightmarish room.

Afterward, though, Serrin did not remember anything of that nightmare dance. When the troll dumped him outside the door, he had a mechanism and some names. Better-than-life chips. Global Technologies continued for him, and Hollywood Simsense. It was far more than he’d hoped for. Walking dazedly along the sidewalk, he realized that he hadn’t had to part with a single nuyen, and he smiled. He even skipped a few steps, until his leg hurt him and he settled for an ordinary walking pace.

Thank you, Lady.

It was after midnight when he got back to the Hyatt. He just couldn’t resist the home-grown taste of some snacks from the Stuffer Shack on the way back. Real synthetics. He had eaten too much good food back at Geraint’s in London and it had begun to upset his system.

There was only one message on the telecom. It was one of his New York contacts getting back to him for a meet at eight the following evening. Of all the people he knew in this town, this was the one he’d hoped would come through. If anyone could tell him who might be the brains behind the BTL scene at Global Technologies and Hollywood Simsense, it was Shrapenter.

Serrin made his return flight arrangements. What he’d gotten was more than enough to take back with him.