"God damn that boy!" Did he expect her to hack into a big commercial system? There were penalties for that, and some of them could involve jail time for trespassing. Not to mention what the Polytechnic would think if one of its instructors were caught in that kind of undergraduate foolery. But he had sounded so frightened. . . .
"Damn," she said again, then sighed and started working on her alias.
Everyone entering Inner District was required to wear a simuloid: no invisible lurkers were allowed to trouble the net's elite. Renie would have preferred to have appeared in the bare minimum—a faceless, sexless object like a pedestrian on a traffic sign—but a rudimentary sim bespoke poverty, and nothing would attract attention faster at the Inner District Gateway. She settled for an androgynous Efficiency sim that, she hoped, had just enough in the way of facial expression and body articulation to make her appear some rich net baron's errand-runner. The expense, filtered through several layers of accounting, should wind up in the backwaters of the Polytechnic's operating budget; if she could get in and out fast enough, the amount shouldn't attract anyone's attention.
She hated the risk, though, and hated the dishonesty even more. When she found Stephen and dragged him out again, she was going to give him a serious scorching.
But he had sounded so frightened. . . .
The Inner District Gateway was a glowing rectangle set in the base of what appeared to be a mile-high wall of white granite, daylit despite the lack of a visible sun anywhere in the bowl of simulated black sky. A swirl of figures were waiting to be processed, some wearing wild body shapes and bright colors—there was a particular type of lurker who stood around the Gateway despite having no hope of entry, as though the Inner District were a club that might suddenly decide the house wasn't interesting enough that night—but most were as functionally embodied as Renie, and all of them were constrained to approximately human dimensions. It was ironic that where the concentration of wealth and power on the net was greatest, things slowed down to something like the restrictive pace of the real world. In her library, or in the Poly's information net, she could jump with a single gesture to any place she wanted, or just as quickly construct whatever she needed, but the Inner District and other centers of influence forced users into sims, and then treated the sims just like real people, herding them into virtual offices and checkpoints, forcing them to idle for excruciatingly long periods of time while their connection costs mounted and mounted.
If politicians ever find a way to tax light, she thought sourly, they'll probably set up waiting rooms for sunbeam inspection, too. She took up a position in line behind a hunched gray thing, a lowest-order sim whose slumped shoulders suggested an expectation of refusal.
After what seemed an insufferable wait, the sim before her was duly rejected and she at last found herself standing before one of the most cartoonish-looking functionaries she had ever seen. He was small and rodent-faced, with a pair of old-fashioned glasses pinching the end of his nose and a pair of small, suspicious eyes peering over them. Surely he must be a Puppet, she thought—a program given the appearance of humanity. No one could look so much like a petty bureaucrat, or if they did, would perpetuate it on the net, where one could appear as anything he or she desired.
"Purpose in Inner District?" Even his voice was tight as kazoo music, as though he spoke through something other than the normal orifice.
"Delivery to Johanna Bundazi." The chancellor of the Polytechnic, as Renie knew, kept a small node in the Inner District.
The functionary looked at her balefully for a long moment. Somewhere processors processed. "Ms. Bundazi is not in residence."
"I know." She did know, too—she had been very careful. "I've been asked to hand-deliver something to her node."
"Why? She's not here. Surely it would be better to send it to the node she is currently accessing." Another brief moment. "She is not available at the moment on any node."
Renie tried to keep her temper. This must be a Puppet—the simulation of bureaucratic small-mindedness was too perfect "All I know is that I was asked to deliver it to her Inner District node. Why she wants to make sure it has been directly uploaded is her affair. Unless you have contrary instructions, let me do my job."
"Why does the sender need hand-delivery when she's not accessing there?"
"I don't know! And you don't need to know either. Shall I go back, then, and you can tell Ms. Bundazi you refused to allow her a delivery?"
The functionary squinted as though he were searching a real human face for signs of duplicity or dangerous tendencies. Renie was glad to be shielded by the sim mask. Yeah, go ahead and try to read me, you officious bastard.
"Very well," he said at last. "You have twenty minutes." Which, Renie knew, was the absolute minimum access time—a deliberate bit of unpleasantness.
"What if there are return instructions? What if she's left a message dealing with this, and I need to take something else to somewhere in the District?" Renie suddenly wished this were a game and she could lift a laser gun and blast the Puppet to shards.
"Twenty minutes." He raised a short-fingered hand to stifle further protest. "Nineteen minutes, fifty . . . six seconds, now—and counting. If you need more, you'll have to reapply."
She began to move away, then turned back to the rat-faced man, occasioning a grunt of protest from the next supplicant, who had finally reached the Holy Land. "Are you a Puppet?" Renie demanded. Some of the others in line muttered in surprise. It was a very rude question, but one that law mandated must be answered.
The functionary squared his narrow shoulders, indignant "I am a Citizen. Do you want my number?"
Jesus Mercy. He was a real person after all. "No," she said. "Just curious."
She cursed herself for pushing things, but a woman could only take so much.
Unlike the careful mimicry of real life elsewhere in the Inner District, there was no illusion of passing through the gate: a few moments after her admission was confirmed Renie was simply deposited in Gateway Plaza, a huge and depressingly Neofascist mass of simulated stone, a flat expanse which appeared to be the size of a small country, surrounded by towering arches from which spoke-roads radiated into the distance in a deceptively straightforward-seeming way. It was an illusion, of course. A few minutes' walk down one would get you somewhere, but it wouldn't necessarily be anywhere you could see from the Plaza, and it wouldn't necessarily be a broad straight avenue, or even a street at all.
Despite its immense size, the Plaza was more crowded and more rambunctious than the waiting area beyond the Gateway. People here were inside, even if only temporarily, and it lent a certain air of purpose and pride to their movements. And if they had the leisure to travel through the Plaza at all, to imitate real life to that extent, they probably had good reason to feel proud: the lowest-level admittees like herself weren't given the time for anything but instantaneous travel to and from their destinations.
It was a place worth lingering in. The actual citizens of the Inner District, those who had the money and power to commandeer their own private space in this elite section of the net, did not have the same restraints on their sims as visitors. In the distance Renie could see a pair of naked men with incredibly bulging muscles who also both happened to be bright candy-apple red and thirty feet tall. She wondered what the upkeep on those must have been, just in taxes and connection costs alone—it was much costlier to move a nonstandard body through the simulations.
New rich, she decided.
On the few other occasions she had managed to get into Inner District—usually hacking in as a student netgirl, but twice as someone's legitimate guest—she had been delighted just to sightsee. Inner District was, of course, unique: the first true World City, its population (simulated though it might be) was made up of planet Earth's ten million or so most influential citizens . . . or so the District's clientele clearly believed, and they went to great lengths to justify that contention.
The things they built for them
selves were wonderful. In a place without gravity or even the necessity of normal geometry, and with highly flexible zoning laws in the private sectors, human creative ingenuity had flowered in most spectacular ways. Structures that would have been buildings in the real world, and thus subject to mundane laws, could here dispense with such irrelevant considerations as up-and-down and size-to-weight ratios. They needed only to serve as nodes, and so blazing displays of computer design appeared overnight and often disappeared as quickly, wild and colorful as jungle flowers. Even now she paused for a moment to admire an impossibly thin, translucent green skyscraper rising high into the sky beyond the arches. She thought it quite beautiful and unusually restrained, a knitting needle of solid jade.
If the things they built for themselves were spectacular, these denizens of the innermost circle of humanity, the things they made of themselves were no less so. In a place where the only absolute requirement was to exist, and only budget, good taste, and common courtesy limited invention (and some District habitués were notoriously long on the first and short on the other two), just the passersby promenading along the major thoroughfares made for an endless and endlessly varied show. From the extremes of current fashion—elongated heads and limbs seemed to be a current trend—to the replication of real things and people—Renie had seen three different Hitlers on her first trip to the District, one of them wearing a ballgown made of blue orchids—on out to the realms of design where the fact of a body was only a starting point, the District was a nonstop parade. In the early days, tourists who had bought their way in with a holiday package had often sat at sidewalk cafés gawping for hours until, like the most junior of netboys, their real meat bodies collapsed from hunger and thirst and their simulations froze solid or winked out. It was easy to understand why. There was always one more thing to see, one more fabulous oddity appearing in the distance.
But she was here today for only one purpose: to find Stephen. Meanwhile, she was running up a bill on the Poly's account, and she had now incurred the wrath of a nasty little man at the Gateway. Thinking of this, she programmed Chancellor Bundazi's delivery for Entry plus 19 minutes, since she knew Mister "I am a Citizen" would be checking up. The delivery was actually a piece of department mail addressed to the Chancellor, one of no import. She had swapped its bill of lading with something actually addressed for hand-delivery to one of Ms. Bundazi's other nodes, and she hoped the resultant confusion would be blamed on the mail room—actually a two decades out-of-date electronic mail system—which certainly could never be blamed too much. Trying to get something through the Poly's internal delivery system was like trying to push butter through stone.
After a moment's examination of Stephen's message coordinates, Renie jumped to Lullaby Lane, the main thoroughfare of Toytown, a backwater sector which housed the smaller and less successful creative firms and merchants, as well as the residential nodes of those clinging to Inner District status by their fingernails. A subscription to the Inner District net was very expensive, and so were the creative fashions necessary to retain one's place among the elite, but even if you couldn't afford a new and exotic sim every day, even if you couldn't afford to redesign your business or personal node every week, just keeping Inner District residency was still major social cachet in the real world. These days, it was often the last pretension that the downwardly mobile would relinquish—and they did not give it up easily.
Renie could not immediately locate the signal source, so she slowed herself down to what would have been a walking pace, except her stripped-down sim did nothing as expensively, uselessly complicated as walking. Toytown's fringe status was apparent everywhere around her. Most of the nodes were functional in the extreme—white, black, or gray boxes that served no other purpose than to separate one struggling Citizen's enterprise from another's. Some of the other nodes had been quite grand once, but now their styles were hopelessly outdated. Some were even beginning to disappear, the more expensive visual functions sacrificed so the owner could cling to the space. She passed one large node, built to resemble something out of Fritz Lang's Metropolis—ancient Science Fiction had been a District fad almost a decade ago—which was now entirely transparent, the great dome a polyhedral skeleton, all its detail work gone, its once-magnificent colors and textures switched off.
There was only one node on Lullaby Lane that looked both contemporary and expensive, and it was very near the source-point of Stephen's message. The virtual structure was a huge Gothic mansion covering an area the size of a couple of real-world city blocks, spiky with turrets and as labyrinthine as a termite nest. Colored lights flashed from the windows: deep red; dull chalky purple; and seizure-inducing white. A thick rumble of music advertised that this was some kind of club, as did the shifting letters that moved along the facade like gleaming snakes, spelling out in English—and apparently also in Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, and a few other alphabets—"MISTER J'S." In the midst of the writhing letters, appearing and then immediately vanishing as though the Cheshire Cat were having an indecisive day, was a vast, toothy, disembodied grin.
She remembered the name of the place—Stephen had mentioned it. This was what had drawn them into the Inner District, or at least into this part of it. She stared, appalled and fascinated. It was easy to see its allure—every carefully shadowed angle, every light-leaking window screamed out that here was escape, here was freedom, especially freedom from disapproval. Here was a haven where everything was permitted. The thought of her eleven-year-old brother in such a place sent a cold bolt of fear up her spine. But if that was where he was, that was where she would go. . . .
"Renie! Up here!"
It was a quiet cry, as though from somewhere close. Stephen was trying to narrowcast, but he didn't realize there was no such thing as narrowcasting in the District, unless you could pay for privacy. If someone wanted to hear, they'd hear, so speed was the only thing that mattered now.
"Where are you? Are you in this . . . club?"
"No! Across the street! In the building with the cloth thing on the front."
She turned to look. Some distance down, on the opposite side of Lullaby Lane from Mister J's, was what looked like the shell of an old Toytown hotel—a soothing simulation of a real-world resting place designed for District tourists, a spot to receive messages and plan day trips. They had been more popular in the early days, when VR was a slightly intimidating novelty. This one's heyday was obviously long over. The walls had lost color definition and were actually erased in some spots. Over its wide front door hung an awning, unmoving when it should have undulated in a simulated breeze, dulled like the rest of the structure to a state of minimal existence.
Renie moved to the doorway, then, after a brief survey suggested there was no longer anything in the way of security, moved inside. The interior was even more forsaken than the exterior, time and neglect having reduced it to a warehouse of phantom cubes stacked like discarded toy blocks. A few better-manufactured sim objects had maintained their integrity, and stood out in eerie contrast. The front desk was one of these, a shimmering block of neon blue marble. She found Stephen and his friend Eddie behind it.
"What the hell are you playing at?"
Both of them were wearing SchoolNet sims, scarcely even as detailed as hers, but she could still tell from Stephen's face that he was terrified. He scrambled up and grabbed her around the waist. Only the hands of her sim were wired for force-feedback, but she knew he was squeezing hard. "They're after us," Stephen said breathlessly. "People from the club. Eddie has a blanket shield and we've been using that to hide, but it's just a cheap one and they're going to find us soon."
"Since you told me you were in here, anyone who cares around here knows it, too." She turned to Eddie. "And where in God's name did you get a blanket? No, don't tell me. Not now." She reached down and carefully dislodged Stephen. It was strange to feel his slender arm between her fingers when she knew that their true bodies were on opposite sides of town in the real world, but it was that sort
of miracle that had led her to the VR field in the first place. "We'll talk later—and I've got lots of questions. But for now we'll get you out of here before you get us all sent before a magistrate."
Eddie finally spoke. "But . . . Soki. . . ."
"Soki what?" Renie said impatiently. "Is he here, too?"
"He's still in Mister J's. Sort of." Eddie appeared to have run out of nerve. Stephen finished for him.
"Soki . . . he fell into a hole. Kind of a hole. When we tried to get him out, these men came. I think they were Puppets." His voice trembled. "They were real scary."
Renie shook her head. "I can't do anything about Soki. I'm running out of time and I'm not going to trespass in a private club. If he gets caught, he gets caught. If he tells who was with him, then you'll have to face the music. Netboy lesson number one: you get what you deserve."
"But . . . but they might hurt him."
"Hurt him? Scare him, maybe—and that's no more than you lot deserve. But no one's going to hurt him." She grabbed Eddie, so she now held both boys by the arm; back in the Poly's processors, her escape algorithm added two. "And we're going to. . . ."
There was a thunderous crash nearly as loud as the bomb at the Poly, so loud that at the apex of its roar Renie's hearplugs could not deliver it and went mercifully silent for an instant The front of the hotel dissolved into swirling motes of netstuff. A huge shadow loomed between them and the Toytown street, something far bigger than most normal sims. That was about all she could tell: there was something about it, something dark and arrhythmically wavery in its display pattern, that made it almost impossible to look at.
"Jesus." Renie's ears were ringing. That would teach her to leave the gain up on her plugs. "Jesus!" For a moment she stood frozen as the shape loomed over her, a brilliantly realized abstract expression of the concepts Big and Dangerous. Then she squeezed the boys tightly and exited the system.
"We . . . we got into Mister J's. Everybody does it at school."