One of Us by Michael Marshall Smith Page B
Authors: Michael Marshall Smith
Tags: Recovered Memory, Memory transfer
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and Quat came through for me, chances were I would be okay. Which left only one question, irrelevant but still curious.
What was a ranking cop doing with property in wasteland LA?
Eventually the sky started to darken and my speed picked back up as I approached the adult area. A Net Nanny peered at me at the intersection and let me pass, correctly judging I was of adult age, if not necessarily an adult. The adult zone's not a homey place—perpetual night, gas stations and twenty-four-hour mini-marts, bus shelters with no one standing at them and solitary figures trudging down roads—but I had to drive through it to get to where the wild folks live. Competing banner signs kept pace with the car as I shot through, shouting about the wares of sex sites along the way. Gradually the signs got sidetracked into punching each other out, and started to fall behind. At one point an entirely naked and silicone-enhanced female appeared in my passenger seat, cooing about the things I could see for just $19.95 an hour, but I kept my foot down and got out the other side before it got out of hand. The image pouted and dissolved as I crossed the line into hacker territory, leaving me with the sound of a kiss.
It's individual domains again out there, but the houses are of more baroque design and have Fuckoff Dogs sleeping out front. As you drive past in the twilight, each opens one eye and growls to let you know they're there. The Fuckoff Dogs are basically hack detectors, and can deal with anything short of a supervirus. There was a period when you'd see lions, dragons, and eternal vortexes of death-knives keeping guard, but then the hackers all moved on to some other fad and dogs slowly took over again.
Time tends to seem to slow in the hackers' zone because of the processing requirements of all their little tweaks and hacks. Roads seldom lead where you expect, and unless you know where you're going—and have forward clearance—you'll find yourself burped out somewhere on the other side of the Net.
Eventually I got to Quat's street, and drove up to his gate. His Fuckoff hauled itself to its feet and squinted irritably at me as I approached. He's an old version and getting tired, but Quat's too sentimental to upgrade. I held my hand out and let the dog sniff it, half expecting, as always, to lose my fingers, but he recognized my Preferences File and let me in. It tried to send a cookie back down the link as I passed, and I blocked it, as usual. One of Quat's milder cookies will localize your operating system into Amish, and one time he turned my avatar into a serial killer. I'd whacked fourteen virtual people in cyburbia before the sysCops caught up with me, but luckily Quat had included an Undo function and no lasting harm was done.
I parked in front of the house and ran up the path to the front door. As the buzzer played what sounded like an entire symphony deep in the bowels of the house, I nervously hopped from foot to foot and peered through the window into Quat's living room. It was very tidy. It always is. Quat's so house-proud, rumor has it that even in the real world when he has a party, he insists that everyone is modeled in code and spends the evening in a virtual-reality version of his apartment: Then, when they leave, he can just restore it from a backup, without the wine stains and piles of vomit. I'd never actually met Quat in the flesh, but I could believe it.
"Yo," he said when he opened his door. "You got my message."
"Nice suit, Quatty," I replied. Quat always dresses like a particularly straitlaced FBI agent from the 1950s, which I guess is an ironic statement of some kind. His virtual face, likewise, is a picture of stern respectability—whereas I expect in the real world he looks the usual hacker mess and doesn't spend enough money on clothes.
"Can't stay," I said, and he nodded.
"I guessed a call at three in the morning was unlikely to have been purely social. What do you need?"
"A machine."
"What kind of
What was a ranking cop doing with property in wasteland LA?
Eventually the sky started to darken and my speed picked back up as I approached the adult area. A Net Nanny peered at me at the intersection and let me pass, correctly judging I was of adult age, if not necessarily an adult. The adult zone's not a homey place—perpetual night, gas stations and twenty-four-hour mini-marts, bus shelters with no one standing at them and solitary figures trudging down roads—but I had to drive through it to get to where the wild folks live. Competing banner signs kept pace with the car as I shot through, shouting about the wares of sex sites along the way. Gradually the signs got sidetracked into punching each other out, and started to fall behind. At one point an entirely naked and silicone-enhanced female appeared in my passenger seat, cooing about the things I could see for just $19.95 an hour, but I kept my foot down and got out the other side before it got out of hand. The image pouted and dissolved as I crossed the line into hacker territory, leaving me with the sound of a kiss.
It's individual domains again out there, but the houses are of more baroque design and have Fuckoff Dogs sleeping out front. As you drive past in the twilight, each opens one eye and growls to let you know they're there. The Fuckoff Dogs are basically hack detectors, and can deal with anything short of a supervirus. There was a period when you'd see lions, dragons, and eternal vortexes of death-knives keeping guard, but then the hackers all moved on to some other fad and dogs slowly took over again.
Time tends to seem to slow in the hackers' zone because of the processing requirements of all their little tweaks and hacks. Roads seldom lead where you expect, and unless you know where you're going—and have forward clearance—you'll find yourself burped out somewhere on the other side of the Net.
Eventually I got to Quat's street, and drove up to his gate. His Fuckoff hauled itself to its feet and squinted irritably at me as I approached. He's an old version and getting tired, but Quat's too sentimental to upgrade. I held my hand out and let the dog sniff it, half expecting, as always, to lose my fingers, but he recognized my Preferences File and let me in. It tried to send a cookie back down the link as I passed, and I blocked it, as usual. One of Quat's milder cookies will localize your operating system into Amish, and one time he turned my avatar into a serial killer. I'd whacked fourteen virtual people in cyburbia before the sysCops caught up with me, but luckily Quat had included an Undo function and no lasting harm was done.
I parked in front of the house and ran up the path to the front door. As the buzzer played what sounded like an entire symphony deep in the bowels of the house, I nervously hopped from foot to foot and peered through the window into Quat's living room. It was very tidy. It always is. Quat's so house-proud, rumor has it that even in the real world when he has a party, he insists that everyone is modeled in code and spends the evening in a virtual-reality version of his apartment: Then, when they leave, he can just restore it from a backup, without the wine stains and piles of vomit. I'd never actually met Quat in the flesh, but I could believe it.
"Yo," he said when he opened his door. "You got my message."
"Nice suit, Quatty," I replied. Quat always dresses like a particularly straitlaced FBI agent from the 1950s, which I guess is an ironic statement of some kind. His virtual face, likewise, is a picture of stern respectability—whereas I expect in the real world he looks the usual hacker mess and doesn't spend enough money on clothes.
"Can't stay," I said, and he nodded.
"I guessed a call at three in the morning was unlikely to have been purely social. What do you need?"
"A machine."
"What kind of
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