‘We’ve not come here for this,’ was the best I could manage.
‘I can pay,’ Morag said.
‘With what?’ I asked.
‘The money Vicar gave me.’
‘Oh, gave you now, is it?’ I asked. ‘I thought it was so we could deliver this.’ I nodded at the cube.
‘Why do you think he gave me the ware?’ she asked me.
‘Look, you don’t understand…’ I began, sounding just like I was about to give Morag the same kind of pompous adult lecture that pissed me off when I was her age. On the other hand, if I had to be honest I should’ve listened to a few of them, especially the ones about draft dodging.
‘It’s not your decision. It’s not your business. In fact it’s got nothing to do with you.’ And once again I could see the resolve in this quiet, apparently shy girl. Pagan was looking between the two of us nervously. He actually cleared his throat before he spoke.
‘She’s not the only one who should see the doc,’ he said, looking at me. I reached up to touch the burnt ruin of my face. I’d kind of forgotten about it.
‘I’ve got a wound in my leg as well and I need my transponder removed,’ I said, searching for the aching reminder of the Grey Lady’s playful warning among the other aches and pains.
Pagan was smiling. ‘We’ve become quite good at removing transponders.’
‘Look, whatever we do we’re going to have to do quickly,’ I said, conscious of how little time we had.
‘We’re a poor community. You’re going to have to pay your way,’ Pagan said.
‘Speak to my accountant,’ I said nodding towards Morag, who glared at me. Pagan held up the cube. ‘Do whatever you want,’ I said.
‘What’re you going to do after this?’ Pagan asked. And that was a good question. What were we going to do? Run until they caught us? Find a place to die? Kill ourselves in such a way to avoid pre-and post-mortem interrogation? I glanced at Morag; again I felt the urge to protect her. The last thing I wanted was for her to fall into Rolleston’s hands.
‘Run,’ I heard Morag say.
Pagan looked at the pair of us thoughtfully.
10
Morag went under the knife, or more likely the laser. She was kind enough to pay for someone to clean and knit new flesh to my face. They also sprayed on new skin and saw to my leg wound better than I’d been able to back at Vicar’s place. While we were doing this Pagan had an audience with Ambassador.
The ware doc worked from what looked to me to be a stainless-steel cube assembled in a larger room on the ground floor of one of the terraced houses. It was watertight and you entered it through a hatch in the ceiling. You could hear the Humber lapping against the side of it. When I opened my eyes and felt my new tender flesh, Morag was lying on the other operating chair next to me, still under the anaesthetic. Her head was shaved and covered in a network of fresh scar tissue. I could just make out a couple of new plugs in the back of her neck. It was the girl’s down payment on her humanity as she tried to become something more than she was. It seemed a waste as we were probably both dead soon anyway.
The ware doc loomed over me. He had ancillary arms sprouting out of his shoulders that ended in various surgical tools. It made him look like a surgical-steel preying mantis.
‘Pagan wants to speak to you,’ he told me.
I hated the net. Maybe that’s strange coming from someone who spent so much of their time in the sense booths. The technology was similar, total sensory immersion hard-wired through a neural connection, called a sense link, directly into the brain. This made the sensory input seem real to the extent that you could die from neural feedback, and thousands of hackers did every year. As did other users who got caught in the crossfire.
The vast majority of people at one time or another accessed the net, either through education or if you didn’t get education then through military training. If you wanted to communicate with anyone who didn’t live within walking distance then one way or another you used the net. You also had to access it for much of your entertainment.
I could see its uses but I still didn’t like it. In terms of virtual geography you could interact with through your icon, the net was supposed to be potentially infinite. To me it always looked so crowded and jumbled. Maybe it was because as a casual user I’d only ever been to the popular bits. Virtual architects didn’t have to conform to the laws of physics, so sites could look like anything from a normal building to a giant mushroom to a huge, constantly galloping alien horse. The highways, the equivalent of their city streets, ran at all angles to each other. Often you would look up and see a highway with its sites inverted above you or shooting away at a disorienting angle, and of course, because its main users were hackers there was a huge amount of garish religious iconography. Maybe it just offended my almost ordered atheist mind, but I never wondered why hackers were so weird. What really got me was that the net was our dream world. It had the potential to be an uplifting counter to the painful realities of humanity’s ongoing conflict, but instead it was just as garish, crowded, unpleasant and mercenary as the real world.
Dinas Emrys almost made me rethink my views. I’d found Pagan in an immersed trance, a note scrawled on sub-paper asking me to join him; it was taped around a plug attached to an independent CPU/ modem unit. With some reluctance I plugged myself in.
It took a while for me to enter the site; I assumed that this was due to the heavily encrypted transport program that took me to my destination. I appeared in a curved stone corridor that looked like something out of a medieval sense program or media, except it had the trademark net look of well-rendered animation rather than being completely naturalistic. The corridor had a low ceiling and was lit by atmospherically flickering burning brands. I looked down and found myself in the bland mannequin icon of the casual net browser, an androgynous vaguely human form with the most basic of facial features.
At the end of the corridor was a thick wooden door reinforced with iron bands. To the right of the door was a set of stone steps leading up. Behind me the corridor went on endlessly. I could see other doors but I guessed I had been brought to where I was for a reason. I headed towards the door, trying to come to terms with the initial disassociated strangeness of mentally moving my icon until my mind accepted the new reality of the sense link. The icon was nowhere near advanced enough for smell and touch but this site looked like it was pretty well written.
I reached the door and was slightly irritated to find that it was locked. At the top of the stairs I could see what looked like some kind of gallery. Moving up the stairs I found myself looking through arches down on to a large, circular stone chamber with a domed ceiling. Burning brands also illuminated the chamber. As I reached the top of the stairs I was suddenly aware of chanting in a language that was both strange and somehow familiar.
In the centre of the chamber was a strange, constantly moving amorphous black blob. It seethed and roiled, reaching out with pseudo-pods that grew. It was probing some kind of barrier that seemed to hold it in the centre of the chamber before disappearing again. Around this information form was some kind of intricate circle pattern containing strange symbols inscribed on the stone floor. Presumably this was the source of the barrier and some kind of quarantine or isolation program.
Around the circle stood a number of figures, all of them wearing hooded robes of various hues from black to a constantly moving paisley. The robes disguised their wearer’s icons. I tried to count them but something kept on playing with my perception, moving them around, presumably another high-end security function of the site. They stood completely motionless. The only sign of any movement was an occasional transparent scroll appearing and unrolling in front of them, unreadable symbols scrolling across it as they received information.