"Ah, sweetness, what have you been doing while Daddy was away?"
Dread stepped out of the shadow behind the loft door. He was wearing his white bathrobe, loosely tied. He walked past her, cat-silent on bare feet, and stood over the policewoman. Her eyes, Dulcie saw, were still open. A bubble of red spit was trembling at the corner of her mouth. Dread crouched down until he was only centimeters from the woman's face.
"I wish I had time to do you properly," he told her. "You must have worked hard to wind up at my door. But things are happening fast and I can't stop for games." He stood up, grinning, full of manic energy that lit him up like a Christmas tree. "And as for you, Dulcie, my pet, what have you been up to?" His gaze slid to her pad, still sitting on the chair, the screen flickering with violent motion, and his eyes opened just a little more—they were already as wide as someone on the downhill rush of a roller coaster. "Well, you have been a nosy little bitch, haven't you?"
Without realizing it she had been backing toward the small area of counter where she had set up the coffee makings. "I didn't . . . I don't . . . why. . . ?"
"Why? Well, that's the question, isn't it, sweetness? Why? Because I like to. Because I can."
She paused, her spine against the drawer, her fingers feeling for its handle. She had remembered what was in it. Something had finally jolted her back to life, a splash on her thoughts cold as ice water, and for the first time in an hour she could think. Oh, Jesus, keep him talking, she told herself. He's a monster, but he likes to talk.
"But why? You . . . you don't have to do it."
"Because I can get sex the legitimate way?" The smile lingered. He was high, high on something, high as the sky. "That's not what it's about. And sex—it's nothing. Not in comparison."
She was easing the drawer open, silently, slowly, afraid that her hammering pulse and trembling fingers would make her slip and pull it out too far, send it clattering to the floor. "What . . . what are you going to do to me?"
"Get rid of you. You know that I have to, love. But you've done good work for me so I'm going to make it quick. Terminations should be quick and humane, right? Isn't that what the business manuals all say? Besides, I'm very busy right now—very, very busy." He smiled; if she had not known now what was beneath the mask she would have sworn it was a true and kind thing. "And I can do without you now. I've got things under control. You should see what's going on with the network and your old friends! I hated to leave, even for a minute—things are very exciting there right now—but I believe in keeping an active relationship with my employees."
The drawer was open. She let out a little terrified sigh to mask the sound of her hand searching. There was no need to fake the terror, no need at all. He was watching her with mesmerizing intensity, his pupils big and black as the barrel of a. . . .
Gun. Where's the gun?
She swung around as quickly as she could, risking all, and pulled the drawer all the way out. It was empty.
"Looking for this?" he asked.
She turned back in time to see him pull it from the pocket of his bathrobe. The curling-iron barrel came up and pointed right between her eyes.
"I'm not an idiot, sweetness." Dread shook his head in mock-disappointment. "Oh, and you know what I said about quick. . . ?"
He let the barrel swing down from her face to her middle. Dulcie felt herself punched in the belly and flung backward even as she heard the loud, explosive crack. then she was on her side, trying to understand how so many things could stop working all at the same time. She wanted to make noise, to scream for help, but couldn't: something was crushing the air out of her, a huge fist squeezing her chest. Her hands had flown instinctively to her stomach. She looked down and saw blood welling between her fingers. When she lifted them away, it began to drip down to the floor where it formed a spreading pool. "I changed my mind," he said.
CHAPTER 41
Playing the Knight
NETFEED/NEWS: "Autostalking" Not Illegal, Court Rules
(visuaclass="underline" defendant Duncan's "Smiling Avenger" avatar)
VO: A UN regional court has ruled that there is nothing inherently illegal in a piece of gear that follows a user into virtual simulations and does harm to that user's simuloid unless it violates the laws pertaining to that node. Amanda Hoek, a seventeen-year-old South African schoolgirl, has been pursued online by a piece of code created by an ex-boyfriend and, in the words of her lawyer, "systematically stalked and assaulted numerous times."
(visuaclass="underline" Jens Verwoerd, Hoek's attorney)
VERWOERD: "This poor girl cannot use the net—vital to her schoolwork and her social life—without her online character being followed into every node by the defendant's avatar, a piece of code designed specifically to harass her. She has been insulted, attacked, and sexually assaulted numerous times, both verbally and through the tactors of the VR nodes, and yet this court seems to think this is nothing more than the horseplay of adolescents on the net. . . ."
Even as she swam and died in the glittering darkness Renie could not rid herself of the taste of fear—but it was someone else's fear.
Not someone, she thought, something. How can a thing, a machine made of code, be so frightened. . . !
The operating system had touched her and then pushed her away, had fled back into the recesses of itself, leaving her to drown in a sea of stars. It was a slow drowning—an ebbing away of consciousness, a fragmenting of the personality. She had felt something like it before when the system had been angry; then it had filled her with terror. Now she drifted, pulsing like a fading echo through the lonely lights, and knew that the operating system lived in a state of fear far worse than anything she could understand—a terror so complete and so alien that even its distant resonances could kill.
But does it make any difference? she wondered. Dying like this instead of dying from fright? She could feel herself letting go, coming apart, but it was all so gradual, so . . . unimportant. Freezing to death, they said, was a kind death. Body and mind disassociated, what had been painful chill came to seem like warmth, and at last sleep came like a friend. This must be a little like that.
But I don't want to go, she thought distantly, and even convinced herself a little. Even if it doesn't hurt. I don't want to cut the string.
Never to see Stephen again, or Martine and the others, Fredericks . . . and !Xabbu. . . . That was from his poem, wasn't it? Something about death—or was it just about string. . . ?
"There were people, some people
Who broke the string for me
And so
This place is now a sad place for me,
Because the string is broken."
She could almost hear him saying it, his soft voice, the slightly alien inflections hurrying the words at surprising moments, then slowing down to voice a single syllable like music. !Xabbu.