"Superlight, Part One" by Steve Stanton

Steve Stanton

Zakariah Davis surveyed the V-net booth from across a darkened, deserted boulevard, feeling a prickly unease like static electricity on the nape of his neck. The terminal was an early suburban model without the usual armaments, about a dozen years out of date but still fully functional. A technician had tested the electronics down to Sublevel Zero only a few days prior to rendezvous.

In a habitual gesture born of stress, Zakariah reached up and scratched his scalp where the network cable entered his skull just above and behind his left ear. The side of his cranium was permanently hairless in a semicircle around the cable, and his wavy brown hair was swept up in a wild and unkempt tangle. His V-net plug hung like a crystalline pendant from his left earlobe, blinking with life.

Zakariah's ice‑blue eyes and furrowed brow betrayed a grim determination, a street wisdom far beyond his thirty‑four years. He'd been a field runner his entire adult life since receiving the Eternal virus at twenty‑one, his only vacations spent underground when he was too hot to surface on the net, squirreled away with his young wife and baby boy in dark basement apartments in downtown free-zones. He reached up to his V-net plug and tapped out a simple binary code with a pointed fingernail. The correct time flashed briefly in the upper right‑hand corner of his field of vision. He had three more minutes until rendezvous.

Camouflaged in the standard green coveralls of a metro rep, Zakariah hurried across the street and keyed open the V-net booth with his brand new set of retinal prints. He surveyed the photoelectrics and deadbolts in search of tampering, then set up his doorstop and mirrors with care. Safe inside, his eyes strayed ritually over the ceiling in search of nerve gas ducts or any other modifications as he unclipped his plug and inserted it into the V-net console in front of him. A two‑way flatscreen monitor came to life with a menu of possible realities, but Zakariah was already diving to Main Street.

The city glowed with alien phosphorescence. The impossible architecture, unbounded by gravity, paid only passing homage to realtime mechanical conventions of depth and distance or light and shadow. Zakariah flew far above the horizon like a wary bird of prey as he rode the virtual datastream down to street level. He tasted burning semiconductors—a keen electric choke in his throat that reminded him of home. Home again. Sound rose up in a blended hum of babbled incoherence and dissonant music from the digital underground.

Zakariah was not interested in making a lot of ripples on Main Street; he was targeting a public conduit just inside the city perimeter. He landed and came to a full stop with clean grace and nary a vibration. He quickly scanned the datastream without making eye contact with any pedestrian or sensory node. He strode purposely to the conduit, stepped inside, and willed himself downlevel.

The fall to Sublevel Zero was much slower, experientially. He had time to peruse the steady string of advertisements scrolling on the walls, time to roleplay once again his scheduled meeting. His new avatar had made a flawlessly discreet entry to V-net. His tech team had provided a stable linkup, his presence solid and virtually free of feedback interference. He held his hand up in front of his face and could see only vague outlines through it. Bio-magnetic resonance detectors produced an exact duplicate in V-space, eliminating the need for cameras and bulky video apparatus, but Zakariah used illegal enhancements to disguise his avatar to suit the occasion. He was imaging electric-cool-blue coveralls, a working man's outfit that wouldn't stand out in a crowd.

Sublevel Zero swarmed with bodies—pimps and tourists, mostly, and hawkers pushing unlicensed nanotronic accessories. Zakariah brushed quickly past the street chatter, being careful not to touch anyone or anything. Some of the escorts had dirty, transparent holograms that betrayed cheap systems and promised nothing but trouble. A bad routine from one of them could fester in a system for weeks and ruin the best of implants. "Enhancement, turbo fantasy," one of them whispered, her face pockmarked with feedback. She reached out a ghostlike hand, offering a free tester in passing, but Zakariah ducked away from her shadow. No traces, no ripples.

Probably a graysuit undercover, Zakariah thought to himself. Half the users Sublevel were on Main Street payroll, he suspected, quietly stockpiling data for correlation and causality reports. He mentally reviewed the Survival Code that had served him so well these long years: no strings, no dancing, no loose ends, no existence. Zakariah found his appointed terminal and keyed in a private code known only by two users.

"You're fashionably late," said a large man sitting on a clear plastic floater as Zakariah coalesced before him.

"I don't like waiting in line," Zakariah answered with a social smile.

"I'm a busy man," he said.

"I'm sure the markup is worth your while."

The broker still refused to smile. He imaged a plastic credit board in front of him and read, "Nine piggyback transports of fresh grain, Grade A Canadian wheat."

"Any trouble at the border?"

The man looked askance, artfully taken aback. "Really, Mr. Nelson. We run a professional outfit."

"I meant with the Eternal watch in such high gear these days."

A shiver of interference ran through the broker from top to bottom, and Zakariah knew instinctively that his new avatar was about to be sacrificed. He kept his own signal clear as a bell by utilizing techniques gained from decades of experience.

"Grain is on the list," the man said evenly, searching Zakariah's image with critical care.

Zakariah stood stolid.

"We wondered what you had in mind," the broker continued, "for so much grain."

"We're making bread," Zakariah said, and imaged his debit voucher. "This is Sublevel Zero, after all."

"Of course." The large man smiled finally and offered his palm up, fingers extended.

Zakariah hesitated. "I expect at least sixty minutes."

Another shiver of interference passed through the avatar before him. So, not even sixty minutes. Zakariah wondered if they could possibly be on a graysuit monitor in realtime.

"Those damn Eternals have got the whole net in an uproar," the man whined. "Not that I blame them for living," he added hastily with obvious discomfort. "It's just getting so hard to do business these days."

"Do you expect me to make nine transports disappear in less than sixty minutes?"

"They're only twenty miles from the interstate," the man whispered, his face tight with panic.

"We had a specific agreement."

"We've still got it. Don't you see I'm giving you everything I've got? Damn, it's your own hide you've got to worry about." The broker's image began to break up, his face a mask of tension, his outstretched palm glistening with sweat, with promise.

Zakariah could feel his body hum with electricity as he raised his hand to seal the deal. As their palms met, electronic assets were instantly transferred through a series of bank accounts in several countries, a paper trail virtually indecipherable. Zakariah recoiled like a launching missile and quickly backvaulted out of the room. A few hundred miles south of the Canadian border, nine green lights flashed on the dashboards of nine transport cabs, and nine nervous drivers gunned black smoke up dirty stacks.

On Sublevel Zero, Zakariah noted graysuits in both corners of his field of vision. He grabbed the nearest avatar and forcefully mixed energies to disguise himself. He ran down the street, diving and rolling through every hawker on the boulevard in an orgy of electronic exchange. Fleeting tastes of mindprobe experiments and dysfunctional sexuality assaulted him as he spread his signal over a hundred parameters, traceable and yet untraceable, everywhere and yet nowhere at all, in a desperate gambit for freedom. A handful of weaker avatars got snagged in his resonance field and trailed behind him like rag dolls, squawking and complaining about their civil rights, as he tumbled into a public zoomtube and punched in a panic abort.

A rocket-like feeling of momentum thrust him upward, inward, exploding, imploding, burning his brain with fire. A coarse vibration pulsed through him like black energy, like demon electronics. He felt that he must surely die, as time slowed, stopped, twisted and stabbed him in the forehead like a knife.

Zakariah peered through red fog at an angry V-net monitor. A blinking message, "DO NOT ATTEMPT TO MOVE. HELP IS ON THE WAY," glared at him in three official languages. His smoking V-net plug had melted into the console. He reached into a pocket of his coveralls, pulled out a pair of black pliers and clipped his cable clean behind his left ear.

Part of his brain seemed to shut down, his experience suddenly shallow, one‑dimensional. He struggled against a feeling of infinite loss as he pushed open a vault-like door with deadbolts stuck eight inches out into the air. He carefully collected the doorstop and mirrors that had saved him from lockdown and walked quickly away into the night, a burned runner again, a fugitive. Without a V-net plug he would eventually die of information drought like an addict without a fix. He was cut off from society, from his family, from all public and private systems of commerce. An ambulance siren sounded in the distance, a keen wail like an animal in heat. Suburbia was a bad place to hide in a manhunt. Zakariah glanced up at the gray skyline, quickly got his bearings and headed downtown.

Molly Davis stood with clenched fists at her side as she presented herself before the Eternal leader in her small community. The official summons had been terse and formal. She had guessed the worst and was blocking the possibility from her mind.

"Your husband's been burned again, Molly," Pastor Edward told her. "We think he got away unscathed, but there's no way to be certain at the moment. I'm sorry."

Pastor Edward sat behind a simulated wood grain desk that seemed too small for his bulky frame. His shiny gray hair rolled like ocean waves above his perspiring brow. His small nose and square jaw gave his face a block-like appearance. Behind him, a single line of hardcover books stood on a shelf against a background of unfinished gypsum board. The community had just relocated after an infiltration and kidnapping, and the good Pastor had little time for painting or decorating.

Molly closed her eyes in frustration. She rubbed her pale forehead with slender fingers, her pointed nails long and sparkling pink. Her bristly blonde hair gleamed lustrous in the harsh office light, her smooth white skin showing a blush of hot blood on her high cheekbones.

"It was his first run with this new wetware," she said finally. "He should have been squeaky clean."

Pastor Edward sighed, a quiet man behind a desk, a man with responsibility on his shoulders and decades etched on his face. "I know. Something went wrong. We're checking everything. Did he say anything to you?"

Molly looked up angrily, her eyes haughty with defiance. "You think I'd burn my own husband, the father of my child?' Quickly ashamed of her outburst, she turned away and added quietly, "Zakariah never talks. That's why he's the best."

"He'll be okay, Molly. We both know it in our hearts."

"How long will he be exiled?"

"We think ninety days will be enough to lose all tracers. We can't risk the community for one man."

"Have you ever been away from home for ninety days, away from your wife and children?"

"I have," Pastor Edward answered soberly, "at times."

"I'm sorry," she said. "It's not your fault."

"Molly, we've been through this before. I know it's not an easy life. I've tried talking to Zakariah myself."

"Sure. What was it this time?" Molly demanded. "More chips and trinkets for the brain wizards? We're no better than the world if we've got to have the same hardware."

"Bread, Molly. Just food, that's all."

Molly winced and composed herself, chastised again. "Did it get through?"

"All of it. People are rejoicing in the camps tonight." A smile flickered briefly on his face and faded to grim granite. "Some people."

"I'd better go tell Rix before he hears it on the street."

"As soon as Zakariah gets to a safe enclave, we'll drop a wetware team to rewire him. Try not to worry. He's the best there is."

Molly rose from her chair, unfolding long slender limbs like a grasshopper standing erect for the first time. She stepped carefully across the threadbare gray carpet, stopped just short of the door, and turned.

"Can you be straight with me in my time of trouble, Pastor?"

Pastor Edward rose from his chair. "I can try."

"Has he been fitted with a mindwipe circuit?"

Pastor Edward cringed. "What do you know about mindwipe?"

Molly shrugged muscular shoulders. "Any attempt at mindprobe sets off a permanent memory erasure program," she stated flatly. "It's for our protection."

"I really couldn't say, Molly."

"I thought not. Will he remember me, Pastor?"

She bit her lip until it hurt. She would hold her tears for a few more hours.

Pastor Edward sighed with a show of resignation. "He may remember some things, memories with strong emotive content particularly. Love never dies, Molly."

She nodded. "Am I allowed to go after him?"

"You?"

"He may need me."

"It really wouldn't be feasible. You don't have the training to be a field agent. Any Eternal is at risk outside the compound."

"I could learn quickly if someone would help. You can't expect me to sit around waiting like a war bride. There must be something I can do. Rix is a teenager now. I could drop out for awhile."

Pastor Edward clenched his jaw and sat down. He picked up a pencil and tapped it on his desk a few times. The sound seemed amplified in the sterile little room, a heartbeat, a judge's gavel. "I'll look into it," he said.

A wooden door creaked on rusty hinges as Zakariah pushed it open and stepped from a dirty back alley into an antique computer-repair shop. Flourescent tubes overhead glimmered dimly with the last dregs of ballast energy. A couple of dead monitors stood on the scratched and chipped countertop before him, with colored wires hanging out the back like ponytails. Coils of white fiber optic cable hung on the wall on short metal poles.

The trip downtown had been uneventful. Zakariah had talked to no one and avoided public transit. The city streets were relatively quiet after the six-o'clock curfew on combustible fuel, the pedestrian traffic minimal and the trolley-bikes sporadic. Night was advancing quickly over the city, the moon rising full and beautiful like an orange spotlight above the smog.

"Jimmy?" he asked the shadows down the hallway.

"Saints from the grave!" cried a familiar voice, and a bald gnome of a man shuffled into view, his smile wide on a plump, rounded face.

"Jimmy."

"Zakariah! You out slummin' again after all these years?"

"I've been down south."

"Travelin' without a plug, too," noted Jimmy with a mischievous smile. "You on a breakout?"

"I went straight years ago, Jimmy... Sort of."

"Yeah, me too." He winked with a smirk. "You look older now, all grown up."

"You lost your hair. Why don't you get a transplant?"

"Hey, the little chickies love the dome, zero. All the young sliders are shavin' every day to keep up." He grinned playfully.

"You still chasing teenagers, Jimmy?" Zakariah replied in kind. "I thought you would've moved on to better things by now."

"Hah, that's about as funny as yesterday's strong crypto."

They chuckled together. It was an old joke, but it bound them together across the years.

"Yeah, I heard you went gaming big time," Jimmy said. "Saw your shadow sublevel a coupla-three times. They finally burned ya?"

"Not the first time. Can you help me out?"

"You always were a cheeky slider. What, a dozen years go by and you come in dirty with tracers in the middle of the night and 'spect me to bake you a birthday cake?" Jimmy hunkered low and stared up at Zakariah, daring him to answer. His gray coveralls were dirty and spotted with tiny burn holes from hot solder.

"Well, Jimmy," said Zakariah carefully. "I was in the area."

Jimmy looked in wonder at Zakariah, waiting for an explanation. When none came, he burst out with a laugh. He held his gut and roared, shaking his head in disbelief. He stepped around from behind the counter, locked the old wooden door with a triple bolt and walked away into the shadows, jibbering and laughing, signaling with his arm for Zakariah to follow.

A custom implant was far beyond the expertise of a back alley bootlegger, but bastard plugs floated regularly through the underground, some stolen from corpses, some completely unregistered. In an old terminal one could get to Main Street at least, but not to any Prime levels. Nothing hot, Zakariah instructed, nothing that could be traced back downtown.

Jimmy sat with a monocular lens on his right eye, reading serial numbers on components and checking them against an in-house computer.

"You've got a goldmine here, Jimmy," Zakariah stated as he surveyed some of the plunder.

"This ain't the half of it. I got thirty‑to‑life in detox, is what I got stashed," said Jimmy grimly. "You can't move this junk like in the old days. You should see some of the new hybrid circuitry coming out of the black labs, piggyback architecture. Chips that speed each other up, that learn to go faster." He signaled with an upraised index finger. "Now, that's the PH-phat future, my friend. If I could sell out, I'd go clean and rest my weary backside in a Prime Three gameroom forever."

"I could dump the lot for you, Jimmy, for sure. How much do you need?"

Jimmy stopped and whistled a slow exclamation. "You scare me, mister."

Zakariah caught his left eye with a solemn stare. "I've got hardware-hungry connections. I've got resources. I need maybe three weeks to re-wire an avatar."

"If the graysuits don't crash me in the morning. I knew you were either heaven or hell when you walked in the door."

"You could have scammed me out the alley, Jimmy. It was your decision."

"Maybe I shoulda." He turned back to his work and picked up another trinket.

"Maybe."

"You were different than all the other sliders on the move back in the day. You played with fire but never turned on a buddy. We had a good thing goin', you and me, before you zoomed uptown for fame and fortune."

"A lot has happened, Jimmy." Zakariah paused and swallowed a crack in his self-confidence.

"I'm Eternal now," he declared softly to Jimmy's back.

The monocular lens hit the table and rolled noisily away. Jimmy's old face turned white except for angry red spots at his temples. "Holy ghost," he whispered. "You've brought the demons down on me."

"It's a fraud, Jimmy—everything you've heard."

Jimmy turned slowly, grimly, his eyes wide. "You've got the virus?" he asked.

"I've got it."

Jimmy licked dry lips. He closed his eyes and sent up a quick prayer to the ever-silent gods of his youth. "Sure," he said finally, and grinned. "Sure. It had to happen." He chuckled at this new revelation. "You were headin' right for the top, I could tell, reaching for the big ticket. Sure, I'll sell out to the Eternals, if you can make it happen. I got no choice now."

"I'm sorry, Jimmy. I figured you should know, of all people."

"Yeah, I guess you don't blab it to every hussy in the night."

Zakariah held up his hands as though to ward off the thought. "No street stuff for me, Jimmy. I've got a wife now. And a son, Rix. He's already wired to hack V-space, just like his Dad."

"The whole nine yards, eh? You're all gonna live happily ever after. Kinda poetic, ain't it?"

A mask of pain slid over Zakariah's face as his throat constricted with emotion. "My boy isn't Eternal," he croaked past thin, white lips. "Not yet."

"No?"

Zakariah shook his head grimly as he struggled with his private devil.

Jimmy squinted up at him and recognized agony in his old friend. "They make you watch your own kid die?" he asked quietly.

Zakariah looked away with vacant eyes, his face cold and gray like a whitewashed tombstone.

"I hope not, Jimmy."

Steve Stanton is the founding editor of Dreams & Visions magazine and the Sky Songs anthology series. His short stories and articles have been published in Canada, Australia, England, and the USA.

Cover: "Jupiter Rising"

Superlight, Part One

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