Ellen Datlow - SciFiction Originals vol.1

SciFiction Originals

Vol. 1

Edited by Ellen Datlow

Table of Contents

Pat Cadigan and Chris Fowler: FREEING THE ANGELS ........................................... 3

James P. Blaylock: THE WAR OF THE WORLDS ................................................... 19

Jeffrey Ford: MALTHUSIAN’S ZOMBIE ................................................................ 28

Kristine Kathryn Rusch: CHIMERA ..................................................................... 40

Kim Newman: CASTLE IN THE DESERT ............................................................. 54

Severna Park: THE CURE FOR EVERYTHING ...................................................... 65

Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson: DUNE: NIGHTTIME SHADOWS ON OPEN SAND 74

Linda Nagata: GODDESSES .............................................................................. 84

Howard Waldrop: WINTER QUARTERS ............................................................. 132

Graham Joyce: PARTIAL ECLIPSE ................................................................... 140

A. R. Morlan: CINÉ RIMETTATO ...................................................................... 147

Dave Hutchinson: TIR-NA-NOG ....................................................................... 168

Steven Utley: THE REAL WORLD ..................................................................... 185

Richard Bowes: FROM THE FILES OF THE TIME RANGERS .................................. 200

Robert Reed: BIRDY GIRL .............................................................................. 227

About the Authors ......................................................................................... 237

About the Editor ............................................................................................ 242

SciFiction Originals 1

This edition was compiled by Ted, for #bookz on UnderNet/mIRC.

Pat Cadigan and Chris Fowler

FREEING THE ANGELS

He was standing on the sidewalk, idly flexing his brand-new arm while he waited to cross with the rest of the blowfish,

when he heard his mother's voice in his mind. Unbidden, unwished-for, apropos of nothing, it came to him: Carry on

the way you have been, Danny-boy, you be seein' angels a lot sooner than you want to. Or maybe devils. You sure

got some bad in you, boy. Watch it don't catch you out and take you down. When you go, you want to see them

angels waiting to take you in.

Danny smiled to himself sourly. Yeah, sure, Momma, thanks for the pointer. He thought of it as typical of

everything she'd given him, from the charity-shop clothes and cold junk food all the way down to the little stump and

four tiny fingers that grew out of his right shoulder, the legacy of her five years in a fertilizer production factory, now

completely covered by a brand-new arm from the Universal Prosthetics Clinic.

Maybe the sudden echo of her voice in his mind had been his simple acknowledgment that she wouldn't have

approved. Getting above yourself was one of the many deadly sins on the Momma-meter, along with whining. As in,

Stop whining about your goddamn stump, you're lucky that's all it was. I saw some of the things they took outta

women I worked with. And if you think you oughta get one of them fancy prosthetics like some jumped-up poster

child, you gettin' above yourself, boy. Way above yourself.

The sour smile deepened as the light changed. A desperate bike courier, legs pumping as if he were treading water

in a panic to keep from drowning, blew through the intersection close enough to flutter Danny's shirttail. He smoothed

it casually, enjoying the small fantasy that he'd worn completely normal and totally unremarkable shirts all his life, just

like anyone else. Not above myself, Momma-just above you. Like the man said about everyone being in the gutter and

some of us looking at the stars. It's called ambition.

He flexed the arm again. Realizing the smaller ambitions was the first step in getting the bigger ones taken care of.

Not that a new arm had been all that small to him. Two years of living on the cheap, saving the money he got from

playing errand boy and selling guidebooks and magazines to the tourists, no luxuries, not even a piss-quality beer on a

Saturday night, just so he'd have the cash for old Sibelius at the Universal Prosthesis Clinic. UPC did a cash-only

business-strictly used paper in a used brown envelope, don't want that old taxman coming around, do we? Nosir.

Straight cash got you the straight goods.

You wouldn't have thought so looking at UPC's shabby storefront. You wouldn't have even thought to ask, which

was just as well, since if you had to ask you'd never know. But if you were the right kind, someone more interested in

possibilities than what you could have right now-i.e., the stars rather than the gutter-and you were both willing to

work and open to suggestion, some of the right things could happen. Because you'd know the right way to make them

happen. You'd know that putting some extra in that brown envelope and staying awake through old lady Sibelius's

sales patter-Come on in, we fix you up cheap, just don't ask too many questions about where the parts are from. We do

arms, we do legs, we even do whole exoskeletons. Don't matter how you come in, you gonna be walking out, walking

tall and proud. Doctor Sibelius guarantees and that's for life, my man-meant you'd get something higher-grade than the

stuff Sibelius and her partners jury-rigged for the run-of-the-mill blowfish. One more good reason to get above

yourself.

Of course, until you actually did get above yourself, until you were actually up and out of the gutter, it was best to

exercise discretion. Especially in this neighborhood, when it was starting to get dark.

j

SKIN MUSIC screamed the old-school neon sign on the front of the tattoo parlor. Just below, one of the artists was

hanging in the open doorway blowing garish-colored smoke rings. She was new; the ink in her face morphed from

Valkyrie-style enhancements to Snow Queen to Snow Beast. She eyed Danny with the bold,

I-can-take-you-in-a-fight-or-I-can-take-you-in-bed-your-call attitude endemic in those under the age of twenty. Or

maybe that was just the tune her skin music was playing, he thought, giving her a self-possessed smile in return. She

was staring at his face. Didn't even notice his arm except in passing, the way you never notice anyone's limbs if they

have all of them. He made a point of pausing to read the plain old painted sign on the shop next door (TRADER

VIC'S-YES WE R OPEN) by way of showing her that he was busy, thanks, some other time maybe. A prior commitment

was more palatable than outright rejection; he knew that one firsthand. In lieu of pulling a thorn out of a lion's paw, it

was the sort of extended courtesy that might come in handy. But even if it didn't, it wasn't like it cost you anything.

The tattoo artist crushed her homemade on the sidewalk as he went into Trader Vic's. As usual, Vic herself was

behind the high counter at the far end of the store, looking regal as she flicked a finger at the flatscreen in front of her.

She was dark-skinned and heavily-built, no little slip of a thing but solid and strong in a grey Athletic Club of Overland

Park sweatshirt. Trader Vic, as she styled herself, was the real deal because, unlike the restaurateur who had launched

a thousand mai tais, she made trades, not drinks. Need something, but suffering from financial embarrassment? Not to

worry, Trader Vic liked to say, she had a thousand thousand contacts reachable via a touch on her flatscreen, and

millions more reachable by two touches. Somewhere among them was the person who had what you wanted and might

be in the mood to make a deal for it, a trade between the two of you. Or it could turn into a three-way dance, or

four-way, or you might end up getting plugged into a complex network of give and take, something that would be an

impossible tangle for anyone but Trader Vic, who could keep it all straight in her mind no matter which angle she came

at it from. You might have thought it was just good software and record-keeping so meticulous as to be anal, but that

was just backup for the real trading machine, the one between Vic's ears.

"Hey yo," she said with a big smile. "Something new has been added."

He waved at her with the arm and did bodybuilder poses with it as he approached the counter. Today she had

rented some of her unneeded floor space to the tattoo parlor and some to the market on the other side-boxes of

animation inks faced crates of olive oil, fish paste, fortified wheat germ, and shell macaroni.

"Like they say on the late show, checkiddout, checkiddout." He stretched the arm high over his head and made a

buzzing noise as he lowered his hand onto the counter next to her monitor for a five-point landing on the fingers. "The

Eagle is in da house and things can only get better."

"Nostalgia sure ain't what it used to be." She tried a soul handshake on him, bumped his knuckles with her own,

slapped him high and low five, and then got him in an arm wrestling grip.

"No fair, I got no leverage," he complained grinning as he pushed her arm down on the counter effortlessly, careful

not to crush her fingers.

She grinned back at him and then gave him one upside the head; not too hard, though. "Don't get all misty just

because you beat the champ one time." She flexed her own hand, as if she had a mild cramp. "Feels good, like the real

thing. Only realer. How much were you holding back?"

"All of it. Sibelius came by some military stuff, surplus leftovers, she said."

Vic looked at her screen and tapped a finger on it. "So that's where that went. Anonymous auction, not that you

heard it from me."

Danny made an elaborate dismissive gesture with his right hand. "You know Sibelius-you don't ask her questions

and she doesn't have to tell you lies."

Vic leaned on the counter. "Well, if your arm really did come out of that lot, you may have gotten the deal of the

century, my man. It was an experimental batch. The mad scientist behind it got himself cooked in some kind of stupid

accident and the military warehoused everything. Sat for six months until the inventory database got scrambled and

ceased to officially exist."

"Gee, I wonder how that happened," Danny said, admiring his fingers.

"Happens all the time," Vic said serenely. "With no official existence, there was no official sale and no official

income lining any official's pocket. Not that I told you anything. What would I know anyway? I'm just a humble trader,

a go-between, a matchmaker for goods and services."

Danny looked at her with exaggerated puzzlement. "Huh? Whudja say?"

"I said, I'll have to thank Sibelius for this."

He blinked, the puzzlement becoming real. "You will?"

"Oh, yeah." Vic's smile was thoughtful. "How'd you like to make that new arm pay for itself?"

"Well, that is kinda what I had in mind," Danny said. "You know, doing jobs I couldn't before."

The trader nodded. "Good. Because it so happens I've got a vacancy for tonight. Does that fit in with your busy

social schedule?"

"Sure. What do I have to do? Bend some iron bars? Crush beer cans?" He snapped his fingers rhythmically. "Keep

the beat?"

"Later. First get down to Jeremy's and pick up some code for me. It's special, I don't want it getting intercepted or

scrambled."

He couldn't help showing his disappointment. Errand boy again.

"Hey, that's only the beginning," Vic said, reading his mind, or at least his expression. "I'm going to need a lot of

help from you tonight, and I don't mean I want you to sit the store while I'm out. I can't get this done without you."

Danny laughed a little, feeling both sheepish and relieved. Anyone else might have been patronizing him or

setting him up, but not Vic. "Okay. I'm on the case."

j

The blowfish, mainly of the tourist persuasion, were lined up for Eye in the Sky, which was just starting to jump. The

sumo wrestler on the door was making the usual big show of passing them through after a thorough visual inspection

of their clothes, their faces, their jewelry, and, presumably, their coolness quotients. The sumo wrestler's name was

Rakishi, and legend had it he really had been a sumo before bad knees had relegated him to ruling the ingress with

guest list and stun-stick.

Danny didn't look at any of the overdressed would-be clubbers, fearful he'd see some of the people he'd cajoled

into buying guidebooks or letting him run errands for them. All he'd need would be for one of them to call out Errand

boy! in front of that lard-ass on the door. Rakishi would never let him forget it.

Relax, he told himself as he trotted up the crystal steps to the entrance. The errand boy they knew was a gimp with

one arm. They weren't expecting to see him with two good arms. Nonetheless, he decided, tomorrow he'd get a new

haircut, and maybe a dye job just to make sure.

"Say hey." Rakishi tapped him on the chest with the stun-stick and then left it there. He made a business out of

counting Danny's arms and legs and pretending to think it over. "Sorry, I don't see your spare parts on the guest list,

and even if they were, you couldn't come in here dressed like that."

"Save it for the blowfish, Rakishi, you know I'm not here for the dancing. Jeremy's expecting me. Otherwise I

wouldn't get within a mile of this place."

Rakishi laughed. "You're telling me."

He winced at having inadvertently handed the man a straight line at his own expense and started to push past.

Rakishi blocked his way with the stun-stick, resting the point against his new arm, against the shoulder, where the

stump and the tiny fingers were now hidden away. The big man started to say something. Danny reached up, closed

his new fingers around the chubby wrist, and began slowly applying pressure, letting Rakishi feel it.

The look on the fat man's face went from surprise to unease and then to outright fear. Danny backed him up several

steps toward the entry foyer, still squeezing. He removed the stun-stick from the man's numbed fingers, and then, just

as slowly, released him.

"Don't worry, nobody saw," he said in a low voice, giving the stick back to him. "It'll be our little secret, that a gimp

with a spare part took your toy away from you. I mean, we wouldn't want the blowfish rushing the door and getting

you fired, would we?"

Rakishi stared at him, saying nothing. The expression on his face was supposed to be murderous, but Danny could

see a hint of the fear underneath.

"But no more, Rakishi, okay? No more gimp, no more spare parts, no more big-man-on-the-door crap. Not to me.

Got that?"

Still silent, Rakishi stepped back to let him pass.

"Thanks." Danny started to go in, then stuck his hand out.

"Shake on it?"

Rakishi drew back and jerked his head at the entry foyer.

"Oh, yeah," Danny said, "we already did that, didn't we?"

The big man turned away from him and Danny suddenly felt ashamed of himself. He hurried through the dimly-lit

foyer, pushing through the double doors marked STAFF ONLY to the left of the ticket-booth and going up the stairs

two at a time. Good show, Danny-boy, he thought, you just proved you can be as big a bully as anybody else.

He went halfway down the narrow corridor at the top of the stairs and stopped at a grimy-looking door, plain

except for a small card at eye level that said SERVICE MANAGER. Danny knocked and heard the answering come-in

grunt.

Jeremy was dressed in his usual multi-pocketed work pants, white T-shirt, and blue fisherman's jacket with even

more pockets. He was as thin as Rakishi was fat, which was some trick considering that Danny had never seen him

when he wasn't eating. Tonight he was having Chinese food, busy chopsticks clicking among an array of classic white

takeout cartons on his desk. They competed for space with the old, oversized but very sharp surveillance monitor. On

the screen, Rakishi was doing his sorry-not-cool-enough routine with three tourists who were trying to argue with him.

"Saw you throwing the fear of God into my big guy," Jeremy said, gesturing at the screen with a noodle caught in

the chopsticks. "New arm, eh?"

"Works pretty good," Danny said.

Jeremy made a prawn disappear. "I could see that."

"Hey, I wasn't really trying to start anything," Danny said. "He's just always pulling that crap on me when he

knows the only reason I come here is because Vic sends me to pick something up from you."

"She told me you were on the way over, and she told me you had a nice new part." Jeremy put down his

chopsticks. "Mind if I have a look?"

Danny extended his arm, pulling his sleeve up. Jeremy ran his hands along the musculature with an expert touch,

nodding at the way it connected to his shoulder. He found the software load in Danny's armpit and palpated it the

same way Dr. Sibelius had after she'd put it in.

"Not tickling you, am I?" Jeremy asked.

"I was never ticklish on that side," Danny told him coolly.

Jeremy stood up to take a closer look at the crook of Danny's arm. "If I'm not mistaken," he said after a bit, "this is

from the lot that didn't exist out at the old Roswell Base."

"Jeez," Danny said, "does everybody know about this except me?"

"Maybe," Jeremy said. "I don't know, I haven't talked to everybody today."

Danny smiled, although the truth was that when Jeremy said something like that, you could never be certain he

was kidding. "So you can tell just by looking?"

"I know what to look for. You got yourself a lot more arm there than you know."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. The Roswell lot was mad scientist stuff, experimental."

"Oh, right-Roswell and UFOs and alien technology. You think this came from outer space?"

"Haven't you been paying attention? The aliens are up in Montana these days. Roswell is a plain old military base

now. Even the mad scientists are gone. After what's-his-name cooked himself, they moved the rest of them elsewhere.

The moon, maybe, I don't know. Those who do know say the guy was working with some kind of quantum crap and

that's what got him."

"Quantum crap?" Danny grimaced. "You mean, like, you go to the bathroom and it comes out in wavicles?"

Jeremy's expression never changed. "That's really very funny, Danny. Quantum stuff is highly weird. You ever hear

about Schrödinger's cat? Things can exist in any number of different states all at the same time, even if they contradict

each other."

"What does that mean?"

"It means you might be able to do some interesting magic tricks with that thing. Did you get an operator manual

with it?"

"It's in the software. Check this out." Danny shifted his shoulder slightly and then extended his arm again, turning

it to show Jeremy the underside of his forearm. Words faded in on the pale skinlike surface along a patch five inches

long and two inches wide and began to scroll upward.

"Now that takes me back," Jeremy said, watching the documentation. "Like crib notes in middle school, only

fancier. A skin animation of this kind'll run you, oh, hell, I don't know, I haven't priced any lately." He looked at Danny.

"Except this not really being skin, it's not really a tattoo, is it."

Danny grinned. "Close enough for government work."

"You really are a very funny guy," Jeremy told him solemnly. "I had no idea."

"Well, besides improving my piano playing, this thing has really put me in a good mood," Danny said. "Prosthetic

limb and antidepressant. Is that like the quantum states you were talking about?"

"Not even close." Jeremy felt around the pockets in his jacket, then his pants, and then his jacket again before he

found what he was looking for, a tiny blue disc in a clear plastic sleeve. "Anyway, this'll be what you came to get.

Vic's code. She doesn't make things very easy."

Danny reached for it with his new hand and Jeremy pulled it back slightly. "Don't crush it."

"I've got control," Danny said. "If I didn't, your big guy'd be on the way to the hospital with a compound fracture."

Jeremy dropped the disc into his palm and Danny made a show of carefully tucking it into the watch pocket of his

jeans. "Yeah, I guess."

"Hey, I didn't humiliate him in front of the blowfish, so it's not like I undermined his authority on the door," Danny

said.

"Bullying is about the only thing Rakishi knows how to do well," Jeremy said. "And like all bullies, it's always good

he gets a reminder now and then that he's not the top of the food chain, that there's always somebody tougher and it

might not be who you'd expect. Also, like you said, no harm done. But all the same, here's a tip for you, Dan-man: what

Rakishi does isn't personal. You shouldn't take it personally."

Danny glanced at the screen where some more tourists were arguing with Rakishi.

"Only blowfish take it personally."

"Oh." Danny dipped his head, feeling sheepish again. "Got it, Jeremy."

"Blowfish," Jeremy continued, almost talking over him, "take everything personally. They don't understand. They

think the world's out to get them when, actually, the world doesn't even know they're there." Pause. "Sorry. Quantum

stuff tends to bring out the philosopher in me. Maybe it has something to do with the butterfly effect. Can I see your

arm again?"

Danny obliged, letting him run his fingers all over it again before turning his attention to Danny's hand, palpating it

in a very thorough, pointed way, as if he were looking for something he knew was hidden inside.

"Now, you understand that when the military makes something like this, they always intend it as a weapon," he

said, holding Danny's hand a little closer to his face as he felt his palm. He suddenly bent Danny's fingers into an

imitation gun shape and aimed it at an antique paper shredder in the far corner of the room. "Try shooting that, see

what happens."

"Try shooting it how?" Danny said.

"It's your military grey-market arm. Think it, or say 'bang-bang,' or something. Didn't you look at that part of the

manual?"

"There was a whole bunch of stuff on how to hurt, torture, or kill someone with one bare hand so I kinda skipped

it." Jeremy glanced at him. "Pacifist?"

"Actually, it was just grossing me out," Danny confessed, feeling slightly embarrassed.

"In the future, you should try not to turn down free knowledge, no matter what kind it is," Jeremy said, aiming his

hand at the shredder again and experimentally pressing his knuckles. "Most stuff you want to find out ends up being

pretty expensive. Whatever you can get for free could come in handy later, you know?"

Danny disengaged his hand and flexed the fingers. "Don't you think fooling with a possibly loaded weapon you

have no idea about could be a real expensive free shooting lesson?"

Jeremy's smile was unexpectedly sunny. "You're learning." The smile vanished just as suddenly, leaving his bony,

wizened face so deadpan that Danny wondered if he had just hallucinated. "Be careful out there tonight. Tell Vic I said

be careful."

"I will," Danny said. "Anything else?"

Jeremy seemed mildly surprised by the question. "No," he said and sat down to pick up where he'd left off with the

Chinese food.

j

The street outside Vic's had gotten busier, more populated with the usual mix of urban survivors, suburban pretenders,

and a few tourists who thought they could handle some adventure. Maybe they could. In any case, they could afford

it, and there was no shortage of people to sell it to them. The suburban geeks, though, they were all looking a little

nervous. It was past time for them to head for the old all-day indoor parking garage, fire up that sport utility vehicle,

and hurry back to the 'burbs before something actually happened, Danny thought, amused. One of them, a tall, plump

young guy who looked like a college student, seemed to be trying to get up the nerve to approach the tattoo artist

having a smoke in the doorway of Skin Music. Same woman as before. Her gaze met Danny's and he saw her mouth

twitch in a brief, secret display of amusement. She knew Joe College was there and what he was up to and she was

having a great time making him even more nervous by being so completely oblivious to him. And now she had Danny

to share the joke with her. He pressed his lips together so hard they hurt. What would she think, he wondered, if he

told her no one had ever shared the joke with him before, at least, not like this? That instead of meeting his gaze,

women always looked away casually but very quickly, so that he might be fooled into thinking they hadn't looked at

him in the first place and so weren't looking away from his deformity. What would she think if, instead of just smiling

secretly back at her, he told her that?

He suddenly heard Jeremy's voice in his head, so distinctly he nearly turned around to see if the man was

somehow actually there. She'd probably think you took the world way too personally, Dan-man.

The ink in her face moved smoothly through its changes.

She managed to contrive to track him as he went into Vic's. He thought of pausing at the door to give her a wink

and then decided not to press his luck. Besides, now that he thought of it, winking was a pretty corny thing to do. The

woman had animated facial tattoos, for god's sake; get a grip, he told himself.

j

"You look like a man with a code," Vic said, smiling around the monitor at him.

"I am," Danny said and put the disc on the counter.

Vic picked it up and held it between thumb and forefinger.

"Would you mind changing the sign and locking up for me? And then come on in the back so I can give you the

whole story."

Danny flipped the handwritten sign over to the side that said, TRADING FROM A 2 Z-CURRENTLY TRADING IN

Zs, SEE YOU TOMORROW. Trader Vic whimsy-he'd always found it strangely poignant, though he would never have

told Vic that. He locked the door, tested it, wondered briefly when Skin Music or the grocer were going to pick up their

goods, and then joined Vic in the back room.

As far as he was concerned, Vic's back room was one of the top ten rooms in the world. She had a big, overstuffed

sofa in some kind of soft fabric that was not quite velour and not quite corduroy but combined the better features of

both. It was the color of an expensive red wine and sitting on it was the next best thing to having someone pour you a

glass. The coffee table in front of it was just an old block of plastic, okay to put your feet on. The big video screen in

the antique box had a resolution that most blowfish could only dream about; almost too good for some of the older

movies Vic had. Like when she'd shown him that old space opera movie.

Vic picked up the remote and aimed it at the screen. The familiar city skyline faded in; then the perspective zoomed

in on the top half of a glass-and-steel monster, one of several built during the last glass-and-steel revival in urban

architecture.

"Is that-?" Danny turned to look at Vic.

"La Belle Ciel. Or, as we like to call it around here, C L."

Dan wiped his left hand over his face. "As I recall, it's le ciel, which would make it Le Beau Ciel."

"Yes, but that doesn't rhyme in English. Where are your priorities, man? Anyway, we have a date in that building

tonight." She glanced at him sideways. "Unless you're losing your nerve?"

Danny took a breath. "So, you say this gig pays well?" He wiggled his new fingers at her.

"How long did it take you to save up for that arm?"

"That good?" He gave a small laugh. "For money that good, I got all the nerve in the world."

Vic gazed at his arm for a moment. "You may not realize how true that is. Yet." She turned her attention back to the

monitor and pointed the remote at it again. The image vanished and was replaced by the word loading....

"This is intercepted security surveillance from a special area on the ninety-first floor, and the only reason I'm not

going to tell you how I came by it is because detailing all the connections between me and it would take most of the

night. Well, I'm also never supposed to say some of the names out loud, too, but you knew that, right? Anyway, just

watch this."

The image on the monitor faded in slowly, and it seemed to be a plain old cam-shot of an office anteroom, the sort

you might sit in while waiting for your appointment with the important personage in the inner office, as expensively

furnished as you'd expect in a building like that. But not quite: it lacked not only a receptionist's desk but the

customary multi-screen wall showing all of Ciel's channels of entertainment, edutainment, documentary, docu-dramas,

sports, sports entertainment, news, and cooking (it was said one of the higher-ups in the organization had fixated on

old footage of someone named Julia Child).

What it did have was... something else.

After a while, Danny realized he had moved from the couch to the floor directly in front of the monitor and he was

probably blocking Vic's view. But Vic didn't seem to mind-at least she hadn't said anything-and it was important that

he keep watching closely and try to understand what he was seeing. It kept shifting, the way certain things sensitive

to changes in light and air will do, but he was sure he could understand if he had just a few seconds more.

Abruptly, the screen went dark.

"Hey!" he yelled and turned to look at Vic.

"Not me," she said, putting both hands up to show she hadn't touched the remote. "The transmission cut off. It

has to every so often-otherwise the security cam'll register the presence of an extra and very unauthorized eye."

"Oh." He glanced back at the dark screen and then went back to sit on the couch next to Vic, feeling sad and

deflated. "How long-how long did we get to watch?"

"Five minutes," Vic said.

Danny laughed incredulously. "That's a joke, right?"

"Feels more like half an hour?"

"Or even longer."

Vic smiled. "So tell me-what were you watching?"

Danny thought carefully, tapping an index finger against his lower lip. The new index finger.

"Try not to think too long about it," Vic added. When he still didn't answer, she went upside his head, just hard

enough to rouse him. "Quick-what did you see?"

The answer burst out of him almost against his will. "I saw four little girls about nine years old. They were building

something in the middle of the floor!" He looked at Vic, startled. "No, that's wrong. That's not what I saw. I saw-"

Vic put up a hand. "You saw what we're going to go and get tonight. Never mind what it looks like. We don't have

to describe it. We just have to get it."

"But-"

"We know where it is, and we know what room it's in. And you know just as well as I do that we'll know it when we

see it. No matter what we see when we get there."

"Yes, but-"

"But what, Danny?" Vic sat forward and looked into his face. "What's on your mind-stealing's wrong? You're afraid

of getting rich? You want to get rich but you fear Ciel more?"

He fumbled for a few moments. "You know what the problem is. You saw that screen. Aren't you even a little

bit-well, freaked out?"

Vic sat back. "I was, yes. I'm sorry, Danny, I've had a lot more time to get used to the idea of it. Several days, if you

want to know the truth, while you were off having Sibelius fit your arm. I've gone from freaked out to accepting it.

Maybe I'm asking too much of you to get used to it in such a short period of time."

Danny put his head in his hands, registering absently that he really liked the feeling when he did that. "I'll try, Vic, I

really will. I just-this is like, I don't know, dreaming or something. If you can't describe it, can you at least tell me what it

is?"

Vic took a long slow breath. "Software." Pause. "Maybe. Or aliens. Alien software. Aliens turned into software.

People turned into software by aliens. The bastard offspring of aliens and people, turned into software. A little

something Ciel's resident engineers whipped up while they were on drugs. Or while they weren't on drugs. The ghost

of Christmas past. The Second Coming."

"Well, that really narrows it down."

"In any case, I'm not as concerned with what it is so much as I am with what Ciel is going to do with it."

Danny opened his mouth to say something and then couldn't speak at all.

"Right," Vic said, smiling grimly. "That was my reaction." She sat all the way back on the couch and grabbed one

of the throw pillows, hugging it to herself in comfort mode. "Imagine what it would mean for a telecommunications

empire like Ciel to have something that would make you watch any and all of their channels the way you were just

watching that surveillance."

He waited for the wave of nausea sweeping through him to subside. "We don't know that they're going to use

whatever that is for that reason-" He cut off again. "Yeah, okay. The question is actually, how stupid am I?"

"Naïve," Vic corrected him. "Big difference. Naïveté is curable. Stupid is forever. No global corporation should

ever, ever, ever have access to anything with that kind of-of-like that. And if there were one that should, it sure

wouldn't be Ciel. There's a limit to how much power any company should have. And anyone who knows about a

potential for abuse of what could be unlimited power, or something just as good, and does nothing is just as culpable

as anyone who perpetrates it. And you just have to know when you have to do something. And..." Danny's voice

was quiet. "And you've got a buyer."

"Well, that is how I found out about it in the first place," Vic said reasonably.

j

The code Jeremy had written for her, Vic explained as they drove over to the Ciel building in an all-purpose white van

borrowed for the evening, was a passkey-cum-security clearance-i.e., it would decrypt locks and order security

programs to validate their identification.

"That sounds almost too good to be true," Danny said, looking at her skeptically.

"It almost is," Vic said, "in that it's good for tonight only, between the hours of eight-thirty P.M. and midnight, give

or take fifteen minutes. And it's almost nine-thirty now, so we've lost an hour. Not that it could really be helped."

"Why the time limit?" he asked her.

"Shifting security codes. The program works on data from a tap on whatever system it is you want to breach. It

makes a model of the system and plays statistics off against chaos. The result gives the program enough latitude to

guess how to give the system only stuff it wants to see. So to speak. If you don't understand that, don't ask me to

explain it. At least, not until tomorrow night, when I'll have more time. Anyway, there's only about three and a half

hours' worth of room on the disc for that kind of data in the necessary amounts. So it's work smooth, work fast, and

keep an eye on the time."

"And then spend the rest our lives on the run," Danny said with mock joyfulness as they stopped at a red light.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, getting in and out of there is no problem, I guess, but after we leave, all they have to do is run a matching

program on our faces from their surveillance footage, track us down, and crush us like bugs."

"O ye of little imagination," Vic said, laughing. It was starting to rain and she put on the windshield wipers. The

resulting smears completely obscured their view of the street. "Now, see what happens when you put the wipers on

too soon?"

"So I've been told," Danny said. "By you, about a million times."

"It has to do with conditions being wrong. Or right, depending on your point of view. This is the sort of thing you

can create on, say, a digital level. Like, if you can somehow persuade a cam the conditions are wrong for the current

settings. Like, say, telling it the ambient light is ten times brighter than it is. The resulting under-exposure leaves you

with a screen you can't see anything on." Vic grinned at him. "Until you clear it." She pressed the washer button and

nothing happened. "Dammit."

"I guess you can't forget the time limit," Danny said. "Like, you only get so many years before the available washer

fluid evaporates and you have to refill."

She gave him a look. "And sometimes you end up calling on a higher power for help." She stuck her head out her

window and looked up at the sky. "Hey, a little help here? I'd appreciate it." She had just pulled her head back in,

ready to explain that higher powers had better things to do, when the clouds opened and rain gushed down in what

Danny's momma would have called a genu-wine frog-strangler.

The two of them sat stunned as the rain drummed on the hood, sheeted down the windshield, and turned the

gutters into small, turbulent rivers. Danny reached over and flipped the wipers back on; Vic made no objection,

although normally even minor trespasses into driver-space, as she called it, were dealt with harshly. "Now, that," he

said, "is one mother of a coincidence."

Vic turned to look at him, her gaze flicking to his arm. "Certain scientists believe there's no such thing as a

coincidence."

He gave a small laugh. "Yeah, well, they're in labs all the time, what would they know?"

Now she looked pointedly at his arm.

"Oh, come on," he said. "You don't think that was some kind of quantum..." He searched for a word.

"Phenomenon."

She didn't answer and he felt peeved, as if he were being forced to make a promise he already knew he couldn't

keep.

"Vic, if I did that, I didn't know it, and I don't know how to do it again. The light's green."

She put the van in gear.

j

Getting into the Ciel building went so easily that Danny felt a little bit spooked. Vic drove past the service entrance

with its pair of security guards sitting in the observation deck-twins, for all Danny could see of them-and pulled the

van directly into the delivery lot, stopping at an automated gate-barrier. The ten-second wait felt more like ten minutes

to Danny, who tried not to fidget. Vic was amused. "Security in this area is all automated," she told him. "It's like the

tollbooths that read your paid-up tax sticker. Except this system is reading the disc you got from Jeremy."

"I don't know," he said, looking back at the observation deck on the other side of the enormous parking lot. He

couldn't tell if the guards were paying any attention to the van or not. "Seems like pretty flimsy security."

"When you know how to get around it, yes, it is," Vic said, chuckling. The gate opened and she drove through,

heading for the loading docks. "The trick is knowing the right stuff at the right time. This area isn't always automated,

just at night. And it isn't automated every night."

"How long have you been planning this?" Danny asked her. "I thought you said you found out while I was

getting my arm."

"Oh, I had all this information in reserve when the, uh, opportunity came up," she said, turning the van around and

backing it carefully into an unoccupied space between two other, slightly larger vans. Just as she cut the motor, the

vans on either side flashed their lights for a split second, making Danny jump.

"Settle, settle," Vic said, putting a hand on his shoulder. "No one's coming, it's just an intranet security check

among vehicles."

"A what?"

"It's their fool-proof backup security system," Vic told him, patting his chest. "Breathe slowly, I need you cool and

collected. When a strange vehicle parks next to an authorized vehicle in a secure area, the authorized vehicle checks

the security clearance of the strange vehicle. In other words, those vans just asked our van for the password, and our

van gave it to them."

"Thanks to Jeremy's disc."

"Got it in one."

"But now we're about to take Jeremy's disc inside with us, aren't we? What if they ask again?"

"If they ask again, the information they got from Jeremy's disc will tell them they already got the right answer."

Danny sighed, feeling his heartbeat begin to slow down to a more normal rate. The rain had let up some but it was

still coming down hard enough to be more than a mere shower.

"I know, it's weird," Vic said. "Welcome to the world of big business."

They slipped out of the van and Vic led him to the freight elevator at the end of the dock. She waved a white plastic

card at the call-plate and the elevator came to life, the doors opening from the middle but up and down rather than

sideways, which Danny thought made it look too much like an open mouth.

"Now what?" he whispered to Vic as the doors closed.

Definitely too much like a mouth.

"Now the elevator is delivering what our nice code told it is crates of really lousy instant coffee for the vending

machines," Vic told him. "And you don't have to whisper unless it makes you feel more secure, because this thing has

no ears. Ergo, no voice prints."

"Okay," Danny said, still keeping his voice low. "So, what, this thing actually goes to the ninety-first floor?"

"No, it goes to the twentieth floor, where edible consumables are checked in. We tell it to wait until someone comes

to unload the really lousy instant coffee."

"Which won't happen."

"You're a quick study, Dan, and don't let anyone tell you different. From the twentieth floor storage area, we simply

take the elevator to the ninety-first floor and, as my Great-Aunt Stella used to say, viola."

"Won't the elevator activity attract somebody's attention?"

"Maybe, but when they see it's just lubing itself, they'll lose interest." The freight elevator came to a halt and the

door-jaws opened on an empty, dark room, lit only by the exit sign over the door. "You got to keep the elevator

mechanisms properly lubed, or the best computer control system in the world won't make a bit of difference, especially

in buildings this tall."

"I never heard of that before," Danny said, a little suspiciously as they went silently to the exit door.

"When did you ever need to know it?" She put a finger to his lips and then opened the door a crack.

There was a bank of elevators directly opposite. Vic waited for a moment, holding the plastic card out in front of

herself before moving to the elevators, pulling Danny after her by his new hand. "That tells the surveillance cams the

light exposure isn't right here, readjust."

"But won't they notice that down in security?"

"They don't have a single screen for each cam-the screens switch between several cams. Every time the screen

tries to switch to a cam our code has fooled with, the cam will tell it to go away, it's readjusting. When someone in

security finally notices that they haven't seen anything from one of the affected cams for a while-if they notice-they'll

just figure it's a software glitch." An elevator arrived without chiming and opened its doors for them. The inside was

nicer than Danny's apartment. "Now can we just get the job done and I'll answer your questions later?"

She pressed for the thirty-fifth floor, the thirty-ninth, the sixty-third, the seventy-seventh, and the ninety-first.

"If I know at least a little of how things work, I'm not as likely to screw up," Danny said.

Vic gave him an affectionate sock on the new arm. "You won't screw up, Dan-man."

As the elevator ascended, Danny decided he could live with Dan-man as a nickname a whole lot more happily than

he had with Danny-boy.

j

The passage leading from the elevator bank to the rest of the ninety-first floor had been blocked off with a new entry

portal, a chamber designed to let in only one or two people at a time, accessible within a transparent wall that, the

warning sign said, was electrified.

Vic stopped short. Danny felt his stomach attempt to drop ninety-one floors without him.

"Your piggy-back surveillance cam never picked this up?" he guessed after a long moment.

"This is new," she said slowly. "It wasn't here before. Hell, it wasn't even here this morning."

"Maybe they had a feeling company might drop in?"

Vic muttered something about gently, with a chainsaw. Then she looked at Danny. "Did you happen to bring the

manual for that thing?" she asked.

Danny shrugged his shoulder and showed her the words beginning to scroll on his forearm. Vic seized his arm and

put it under the slightly brighter light above the elevator bank.

"Does this thing have hyperlinks or go-tos, or do you have to read all the way through it every time?" she asked

him.

He snapped his fingers and produced the table of contents.

"Touch your subject of interest. Just like your screen."

"Show-off." She poked his arm.

"Ow. I said touch, not impale."

"What should I look for, information on disarming booby traps or electrified fences or what?"

"I don't know, this is my first combat situation."

"Sarcasm isn't what we need here."

Ellen Datlow - SciFiction Originals vol.1

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