His system was more than enough to handle the range. His skin came equipped with the latest Lorenz-levitation haptics, their formless magnetic fingers both sensing his movements and responding to them. The ad specs boasted you could feel a virtual ant crawling up your back. They weren't lying. The only way you'd get a better ride was to go with a direct neural interface, but Desjardins wasn't about to go that far; it wasn't widely known, but there were creatures in Maelstrom that were learning to penetrate wetware. The last thing he needed was some sourced shark hijacking his spinal cord.
And there were other dangers if you went with a wet link, dangers especially relevant to those with Desjardins's tastes. There were still people out there who refused to recognize the difference between reality and simulation, between fantasy and assault. Some of them were savvy enough to hack the things they found politically objectionable.
Take the present scenario. It was a pretty sweet set-up, all told. He had two girls strapped face-down on the table in front of him. One of them was hooked up to a DC power supply by alligator clips on her nipples and clit. The other had to be content with lower-tech forms of punishment, which Desjardins was currently administering with an unfinished broom handle. Three others hung inverted against the far wall, passing time until their own numbers came up.
It was exactly this sort of environment that certain disagreeable types took pleasure in messing with. Desjardins knew of more than one occasion in which the victims of similar scenarios had miraculously freed themselves from their restraints, coming after the user with steak knives and hedge-clippers. Incompetent but enthusiastic neutering generally followed; in at least one case the emergency interrupt had been overridden, keeping the player on the board right up to the final curtain call. Such things were more than enough of a damper in a feedback skin. If you got nailed through a neural link, you could end up impotent for life.
Which was, of course, the whole idea.
Achilles Desjardins was more cognizant of the risks than most. He took, therefore, more precautions than most. His sensorium was strictly standalone, with no physical connection to any kind of network. He'd lobotomized the graphics circuitry to reduce its vulnerability to wildlife; it could only present chunky, low-rez images that would drive any normal connoisseur crazy, but Desjardins's own wetware more than made up the difference. (The pattern-matching enhancements in his visual cortex interpolated those crude pixels into a subjective panorama crisp enough to leave the most jaded wirehead drooling.) The scenarios themselves were scrubbed and disinfected right down to the texture maps. Desjardins carried way more than his weight in this cesspool of a world; no way was some TwenCen puritan going to mess up any of his well-deserved moments with Mr. Bone.
Which made the sudden and complete failure of his system extremely disquieting. There was a brief sharp prick in his neck and the whole environment just disappeared.
He floated there a moment, a stunned and disembodied being in an imperceptible void. No sounds, no smells or tactile feedback, no vision—not even blackness, really. Not like a window gone dark, not like closing your eyes. More like not having any eyes to begin with. You don't see blackness out of the back of your skull, after all, you don't—
Fuck, he thought. They got in. Any second now everything's going to come back online and they'll be spit-roasting me on a pole or something.
He tried to flex his fingers around the interrupt. He didn't seem to have any fingers. All his senses remained offline. For a moment, he thought he might get off easy; maybe they hadn't infected his program, maybe they'd just crashed it. It made sense—it was always easier to kill a system than subvert it.
Bit they shouldn't have been able to do either, for fuck's sake…and why can't I feelanything…?
"Hello? Hello? Is this thing on?"
What—
"Sorry. Small attempt at humor. I'm going to ask you a few questions, Achilles. I want you to think long and hard about the answers."
The voice hung there in the void with him, sexless and innocent of ambience; no reverb, no quiet hum of nearby appliances, no background noise at all. It was almost like a Haven voice, but even that seemed wrong.
"I want you to think about the ocean. The very deep ocean. Think about some of the things that live down there. The microbes, especially. Think about them."
He tried to speak. No vocal cords.
"Good. Now I want you to listen to some names. You may recognize some of them. Abigail McHugh."
He'd never heard of her.
"Donald Lertzman."
Lertzman? How's he involved?
"Wolfgang Schmidt. Judy Caraco."
Is this some kind of Corpse loyalty te—oh Jesus. That Haven contact. Pickering's Pile. It saidit could find me…
"André Breault. Patrician Rowan. Lenie Clarke."
Rowan! She behind this?
"Ken Lubin. Leo Hin Tan the Third. Mark Showell. Michael Brander."
Yeah. Rowan. Maybe Alice isn't so paranoid after all.
"Good. Now I want you to think about biochemistry. Proteins. Sulfur-containing amino acids."
??!?!?!..
"I can tell you're confused. Let's narrow it down some. Cysteine. Methionine. Think about those when you hear the following words…"
It's a mind-reading trick of some kind, Desjardins thought.
"Retrovirus. Stereoisomer. Sarcomere."
A quantum computer?
They didn't exist. Of course, that was the official story on most banned technology, but in this case Desjardins was inclined to believe it. Nobody in their right mind would be caught dead around a telepathic AI. That had been one side-effect the Q-boosters hadn't seen coming: the whole quantum-consciousness debate had been resolved overnight. Who'd ever choose to build something that could sift through their minds like a chess grandmaster noodling around in a game of Xs and Os?
Nobody, as far as Desjardins had been able to tell.
"Ion pump. Thermophile."
But if not a quantum computer, then—
"Archaea. Phenylindole."
Ganzfeld.
Not a computer, except for the interrogation interface. Not telepathy either; not quite. Cruder. The faint quantum signals of human consciousness, cut away from the noise and sensory static that usually swamped them. Properly insulated from such interference, you had a better-than-average chance of guessing what your subject was looking at, or listening to. You could feel the vicarious echo of distant emotions. With the right insulation, and the right stimuli, you could learn a lot.
So Desjardins had been told. He'd never actually experienced it before.
"Good. Now, think about the assignments you've had at CSIRA over the past month."
Mange de la marde. Just because some disembodied voice told him to think about something, didn't mean he had to leap up and—
"Ah. There's a familiar pattern. Here's an exercise for you, Achilles: whatever you do, do not think of a red-eyed baboon with hemorrhoids."
Oh, shit.
"You see? Nothing's more doomed to failure than trying really hard not to think about something. Shall we continue? Think about your CSIRA assignments for the past six months."
A red-eyed baboon with-
"Think of earthquakes and tidal waves. Think of any possible connections."
Isn't this a security breach? Shouldn't Guilt Trip be doing something?