From: gdg019@cck.coventry.ac.uk (Ridley McIntyre)
Subject: STORY: MONKEYTRICK [revised] (3/6)
Keywords: Rat 2.3
Organization: Fifth Column, Coventry, UK
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 1993 16:44:46 GMT

                  	MONKEYTRICK - by Ridley McIntyre

                              3. Witch-Hole

"So you say he wants to patch things up?"

 Dev Lung is a short, stocky man in his mid-twenties, who sits behind his steel
desk in the Paddington warehouse and looks down at everyone through thick,
square-framed glasses. His hands resting on the blotting pad on the desk, stubby
fingers interlocked and thumbs habitually dancing around each other while he
thinks. Motorhead sees him as one of those small people with a lot of power.

 Motorhead nervously squeezes a squash ball in his hands. Everyone knows that
Dev Lung has an evil spirit in him, and that that spirit waits for the one time
when no one will expect him to take control. Motorhead has seen the spirit
and survived, albeit by the skin of his teeth. He has mastered a way of getting
around the man by being brutally honest with him. A trick that the Camden Town
Boy taught him before the roughrider wars. Back then the Boy was Dev Lung's
decker, on call to the man whenever he needed to know things; and Dev Lung
is a man who needs to know everything.

 Now Motorhead holds that position. The young decker nods to the man and
throws the squash ball at the wall, catching it in one hand.

 "He says he's making a start again in London and he doesn't need any enemies."

 "Is that how he really feels? I mean, I don't know, I want us to be friends
again, but I can't take him on with Sodha because you're here now. But I'd
rather he was on my side than Kistna, you know? What do you think? Is he for
real?"

 Motorhead screws his face up and sighs. "Dunno," he says. "He's changed a lot,
but I don't know if that's him, or something that Vijayanta did to him. He's
really cold and single-minded. I took him out to the Blue Cross last night and
he just stood there and watched us all charging, slowly getting shit-faced. I
know he ain't a steamer, but that man never used to miss a party, no matter
what the style. His whole story was that he could fit in anywhere. Now it seems
like he doesn't fit in anywhere."

 Dev Lung shrugs. "If he's making an effort to patch it up, then I can't really
say no to him. But if he tries to go against me again, he's mincemeat."

 "Hate to say it, boss, but he's been killed once already, I really don't
think he cares what happens to him now."

 Dev Lung puts his thinking face on and Motorhead waits, bouncing the ball
against the wall. He knows that the Boy is back at his place waiting for the
Recon program to map out Vijayanta Core 274, Rhea's home. They are both being 
extra careful about this affair. Neither of them has ever done this kind of 
job before. It's hard enough to find something that exists, but when it has 
broken ranks and could be anywhere in the world... Motorhead finds himself 
covering his face with a bony hand.

 "Get him to see me. Tell him I'm prepared to forget the whole thing as long as
he does. How does that sound?"

 Six Sodha roughriders escort him to his flat on fast electric bikes. Their
long hair drags in the wind. This is what he joined for, Motorhead remembers,
the feel of the wind on his face. Now the Grid has hold of him and refuses
to let go. The feeling is similar, a powered rush through empty space, but
riding a bike is a damn sight safer. Even with the Kistna boys around. 

 Saying namaste to his escort, his gives the plastic fairings on his bike a 
quick wipe over with the inside of his baseball jacket and forces himself up 
thirty flights of concrete stairs in pitch darkness.

                                ***

"How's it looking?"

 "None too good."

 Dex is slumped in a fluffy brown armchair with a collection of broken pistachio
shells around his feet. A fly buzzes around the shells, feeding on what's left.

 "So what happened? You can tell me, I'm a doctor." Motorhead takes the jacket 
off and hangs it on the handle of his bedroom door. He clears a space for 
himself by kicking a few cider bottles to the walls of the living room.

 "Recon program mapped the core, and there's a huge hole in the node where
Rhea should be. Want to see?"

 Motorhead switches on the Fednet PC and calls up the image. "Well, that's a
surprise," he says.

 Dex snorts a cynical laugh. "What's strange is that it *is* a surprise. Look
at the shape of the hole."

 Motorhead looks carefully, then fiddles with the perspective to get a better
look, panning around to see it from a better angle. The hole in the core's
opaque glow is a giant dodecahedron, but their seems to be more missing, some
kind of shadow within the hole that disappears in the fog of the core.

 "Rhea destroyed some of the system when it went. I called Sarah and she said
that checks out, they're running a diagnostic now, and they'll make some 
repairs. But it all means that it wasn't stolen, it sort of clawed its way
out of the core. And it didn't go through the core, either. It sort of caved 
in on itself."

 Motorhead shakes his head at the screen, coming to the same conclusion, a look
of awestruck confusion on his lean face. "How the fuck did it do that?"

 Dex makes a face at him. "Beats the hell out of me."

                                ***

They drew wires and the Boy lost. Now he's here, a floating decimal point in the
Grid. A meaningful nothing in a vast sensorium of something that doesn't
really exist. A ghost in the machine.

 He pushes himself through the Grid, a simulated sense that rushes through
his nervous system, his body feels like he's swimming through a sea of
powdered milk. Some sort of electronic hyper-rush, and the Grid is still, yet
he can feel it's constant data flow all around him. Vijayanta Core 274 is
alive with paradox and irony, and the Boy's senses are having no trouble 
getting the joke.

 There. The hole. He moves around the outside of it, utterly scared of it's
intention. In the five years that he's spent running the Grid, he's never
gone into a witch-hole before, and he knows of no one else who has ever dared.

                                ***

"Don't take your eyes off that screen. If I lose it, pull me out immediately,"
he said.

 Motorhead watches the screen. His own Demon program sits in the Grid, holding
the stringy end of a Trace Strand that follows the Boy through the Core. The
short-haired steamer can see Dex's position on the three-dimensional vector
map he made. The witch-hole is there, and the Boy circles it as slowly as
possible.

 Motorhead takes a quick glance to see if the real life Boy, attached to the
cyberdeck by a primitive cyber helmet that trails a score of microthin leads
between the two, is still breathing steady. Satisfied, he returns his vision
to the brown Fednet PC screen.

 When Dex slides into the witch-hole. Motorhead panics.

                                ***

No feeling. That's what he notices at first. Like the sensory deprivation
tanks his father used to turn into shower units in the Pancras Dustzone.
He said floating in one of those took away all feeling, so you you could reach
a perfect thoughtlessness for meditation. The whole concept is outdated even
by New Churcher standards, and the Boy isn't quite sure if he likes it at all.

 Though he soon comes to realise that this isn't the same. He *can* feel
something. A rushing sensation, a dream of falling that he used to have as a
kid on continuous playback, and no way to wake up. Falling further, spinning
madly and flailing, so that all notion of orientation is lost completely.

 Then stops. Landing on his feet in a living room in Paddington, with Japanese
cartoons on the colour TV and his hand passing through the hand of a beautiful, 
small Bangladeshi woman with long dark hair. A woman he knows by the name of 
Pain.

(c) COPYRIGHT 1993 BY RIDLEY MCINTYRE
-- 
 ____ @     |  | Ridley McIntyre  -  gdg019@cck.cov.ac.uk | EARTH      CALLING |
|         __|  | Piglet 8@) -  On a  Flowery Space  Trip! | ANGELA: "Her black |
|     |  |  |  | "NAPOLEON!!!"    -         "AAAAAIIEE!!" | hair flowing  like |
|     |  |__|  |       - a rather visual Tank Police joke | an   acid   river" |