Bleed – Steven H. Newton

Bleed

by Steven H. Newton

“How often is she manifesting?” asked John Clark Sheridan, stripping off his clothes. He was small and wiry, very dark-skinned, and had been a DogFence Enforcer for two years. Naked, he dropped into his custom-made cradle, seating sockets on the back of his neck and at the base of his spine before allowing the catheter to penetrate his body.

“According to the geekboy who found her, she’s out there about twelve hours each day,” said Denise Montoya, one of Sheridan’s Wizards, as she walked around the cradle, checking telemetry.

Sheridan watched the images on the softscreens above his cradle.

This morning, as Ankh-Morpork’s Night Watch interrogated a guilty suspect with truncheons, in the background stood a pale young woman with filthy, stringy black hair wearing a brown woolen cloak and cheap sandals (strap broken on the left ankle).

Four hours earlier, the pale young woman with filthy, stringy black hair wearing a brown woolen cloak and cheap sandals (strap broken on the left ankle) stood in the crowd cheering King Chalam Ironhand’s entry into Chasm Keep.

In yesterday’s cache dumps, she appeared as a serving wench for a Bacchanal in Masque World. Two days ago, she’d been a bystander at an atrocity scene in Armd N DangerUS.

“Her last appearance occurred about forty-five minutes ago in Parallax,” said Niklas Sebastian. “She didn’t hang out long—less than ten minutes.”

“Who’d want to hang out in Parallax at all?” Sheridan asked.

Montoya slipped the mask over his face.

“She keeps appearing as an NPC, but the image used to be registered to an active verser,” Sebastian said. “Lark McGowan was a Discworld subscriber running as ‘Pale Evelyn’ until two months ago.”

“What happened to her?” Sheridan wondered, primarily to keep his mind off the catheter.

“She died. Mutating type-7 Leukemia.” He paused. “Comparing the cache records to her obit, it looks like she died online.”

“So somebody appropriated her image to go bleeding merrily through all the verses,” Montoya said. “Which is going to piss off the megas, considering what they spend to keep the barriers up.”

“Not to mention what they pay DogFence to police it for them,” Sebastian said.

Sheridan took deep breaths, exhaling slowly, to drop his pulse rate.

“Let’s go chase her down and perform a citizen’s arrest,” he said.

Old Henry slaved his softscreen to Sheridan’s opticals. “I’m giving you a test visual, boy. You prefer Hell or Space Opera?”

Old had been around so long he’d actually interned for Landis and Hawkfeather before they’d set up the verses.

“You know I hate spaceships. Gimme Hell, Henry.”

Sheridan heard Sebastian sigh somewhere in his skull, almost like telepathy. “As usual, Johnnie, that’s almost a pun.”

Flames flickered into existence around him. A cancerous rat gnawed the exposed thighbone of a screaming woman. Her mouth was open, but Old hadn’t bridged in sound yet.

Something beeped.

“Pop-up!” Sebastian shouted. “Arm’d N DangerUS, Damnation Alley sector. Give me a second.”

Old, Sheridan subvocalized, toss me in there on a cold boot as soon as Nik has a location.

“You’re asking for trouble,” Old mumbled. “You know what happened last time.”

Hell quickly got very loud and hot. Something gelatinous was crawling up his leg.

You want to give me some clothes?

“If you want ‘em where you’re going, boy, quit worrying ’bout where you are. Denny? You got a chopper and weapons suite ready for him?”

“The Bloodhog’s ready, but weapons are thirty seconds off.”

“Location!” Sebastian said. “She’s moving!”

Drop me in NOW.

Old grunted. “It’s your ass, boy.”

—bounced the wrecks blocking the abandoned interstate exit. The fans overloaded, fishtailing as Sheridan fought for control. He couldn’t see or feel his right leg.

Old!

“I told you this was too quick. Hold on.”

A red icon popped into his field of vision. He fought for balance. Tingling suggested his leg was materializing.

Sebastian: “About 300 yards off, Johnnie. That farmhouse.”

The farmhouse was a crumbled ruin, held by a half-dozen female NPCs against the Doomsday Riders, one of the less exclusive gangs in Damnation Alley. They favored long leather dusters and handlebar mounted SMGs. Sheridan figured them for middle-aged wannabes up late to fantasize about rape, pillage, and plunder.

He swung the Bloodhog toward them, despite the fact that he still mounted no weapons.

Old, at least give me a Ghost Rider while Denny’s working up the suite.

His head caught fire and transformed into a grinning skull.

“Yippee-ki-yay, mo-fos!” His amplified voice cut across the gunfire.

That got their attention. One Rider twisted a preposterous Kalishnikov 7.92mm in gatling configuration around, loosing a fusillade of tracers. Fat bastards in their recliners loved tracers.

Montoya whispered, “You’re up with Class Three personals. The suite will be up in five.”

Stabilizer cables grew from Sheridan’s arm, connecting to the slug accelerator morphing out of his right gauntlet. He blasted the Rider back into his living room with a supersonic burst of depleted uranium.

Mini-railguns rose from compartments alongside the Hog’s plenum chamber. Sheridan ignored them: Sebastian would eliminate the remaining Doomsday Riders while he concentrated on the farmhouse.

The pistol retracted into his gauntlet as Sheridan leapt from the Hog just outside the building. There were six women inside, not counting Pale Evelyn. Lots of ripped shirts, exposed skin, and suggestive curves. They hesitated as the local AI responded to the abruptly altered scenario.

But the girl with the stringy black hair was moving.

Wipe the NPCs, Sheridan ordered, crashing through the farmhouse wall, bricks flying in every direction. The scantily clad women disappeared. Evelyn dived through an open window in the building’s back wall. Sebastian kept her icon in Sheridan’s field of vision. He staggered forward, converting another wall into rubble.

Evelyn was waiting for him. She gestured an intricate pattern in the air, gathered a ball of pink energy, and hurled a stream of plasma that flowed around his body armor, but still knocked Sheridan on his ass.

She bent over, traced a circle on the ground, and jumped into it.

What was that? Sheridan demanded, hauling himself to his feet. Spells are NOT supposed to work in Armd N DangerUS.

“Never seen a code signature like that, either,” Montoya said.

Later for that. Where’d she go, Nik?

“No idea. I can see the hole on visual, but it doesn’t register.”

The circle started shrinking; he sprinted for it.

As Sheridan leapt, Old cautioned, “Wherever you end up, boy, there’s going to be a lag, and you’re on your—”

—entangled in a thick, velvet curtain. His head set the drapes aflame, which at least meant that he was in a verse that recognized his protocols.

Sheridan found himself—naked and weaponless again—on an intricately decorated ballroom floor populated by people in pastel outfits that exposed their genitalia. A Sexcapade in Masque Dance, he realized.

Where’s the girl?

There: behind Siamese quadruplets dressed in chiffon and making out in pairs, Evelyn was slipping toward an arched door. At the farmhouse she’d left the structure before she opened her portal—whatever it was. Here she also seemed intent on escaping a room instead of simply disappearing. What did that mean?

Sheridan loosed a demonic howl and started forward to cut her off.

A diminutive bravo, whose ample bosoms contrasted starkly with the exposed penis and testicles beneath a silk doublet, blocked his path with a drawn rapier.

“Have a care, villain!” The point of the foil danced near his left nipple. “You were not invited to this affair.”

Evelyn had almost reached the door; he didn’t have time for this.

“Read Fever Dream some day,” Sheridan said, impaling himself on the blade. He ignored the white-hot pain in his chest. If Denny showed up in the next few seconds, she’d fix it; if not, he’d have lost his prey anyway.

“Oh shit,” s/he said, “you’re an Enforcer.”

“Oh shit,” Sheridan agreed, swinging a club-like fist that shattered his opponent’s ribcage. “Your subscription’s been temporarily interrupted.”

Staggering, he pulled the rapier from his chest and stomped toward the arch. He’d lost sight of Evelyn. His breathing was labored, and he felt a burbling in his throat.

“Goddess, Johnny, you’re damn near flatlined. How’d you manage that in nine seconds?” demanded Montoya. “Never mind, I’ll fix you.”

The tracking icon reappeared as the chest pain faded. He dropped mass with every step. His head extinguished itself; he wore a ruffled shirt open to the sternum, and a sword hung from his belt.

Old: “Be thankful she left your pants closed in front.”

Sebastian said, “I’ve got a trace attached to her now, John. We won’t get another lag if she jumps.” An uncertain pause. “I haven’t got the slightest clue what she is. Sometimes she’s a monster, ripping down code walls, then suddenly she’s nearly invisible.”

Nothing in a verse is invisible to Sebastian.

Evelyn picked up a gilded chair and swung it into a stained-glass window. As glass exploded outward, she danced onto the sill and stepped off into space.

Gimme wings, Sheridan ordered, without breaking stride. Later you can explain how she’s doing that, since Masque Dance is supposed to run real-world physical laws.

She fled across open air as if sprinting across pavement.

“No time to be subtle about this, Johnny. Sorry.”

Sheridan dove out the window as seven-meter bat wings grew out of his back. His shirt ripped as his shoulders expanded explosively, and his larger bones became hollow. As the wings unfurled, he shared his observations with his Wizards.

Sebastian said, “Buildings are normally code bottles, John. Programmers build isolation routines into the walls, whereas the spaces in between are a lot less restrictive.”

“That doesn’t explain how she’s warping basic physics,” Old said. “Even we can’t do that without override codes. She’s improvising.”

Evelyn stopped about 200 meters from the tower. She turned to face Sheridan, her arms now filled with a Mark VII Star Rifle straight out of Space Opera.

Nik! Give me a code view, right now! Denny, I’m gonna need a splatter shield.

John’s reality became a false-color digital image of swirling zeros and ones. The twin spires became bulbous, bright blue constructions shot through with orange, green, and pink representing the structural, narrative, and NPC subroutines.

The girl was a shimmering black nova with cyan sparkles. Fine-wire anchors disappeared into the computerized ether; Sheridan knew without asking that neither Sebastian nor Old could trace them.

White code-bursts emanated from the Star Rifle. He wrenched binary around him into a swirling, deflective shield.

Sebastian shifted his viewpoint back to image-based in time to watch her drop into a mini-cyclone.

“Don’t worry, boy,” Old said. “Nik’s got the trace working. She’s headed into Space Opera. We’ll land you right on top of her this time.”

His wings sloughed off as a skin-tight vacuum combat suit flowed out of his bodily orifices.

He thought, I hate—

—Space Opera before he crashed into a tac console, throwing the officer manning the station back in a cinematic flood of sparks. The captain was coming out of his seat in slow motion when Montoya jerked both versers and NPCs off the bridge, leaving Sheridan alone with Evelyn.

Sebastian said, “Keep her occupied for a few seconds, John, and I can convert this into an Arena.” Arena code-walls could be isolated from everything else—even the disengage protocols. Sheridan doubted that they could hold Evelyn, but his current strategy of hot pursuit wasn’t working very well, either.

I’ll see if I can get her to talk to me. Once you’ve got the Arena up, I want a complete shutdown. All the verses, all at once. That’s the only way we’re going to isolate her.

“Shit, John. I can’t do that. The megas will close down DogFence. You may be doing this gig for kicks, but I got a mortgage to pay.”

Surprisingly, it was Old, not Montoya, who supported him.

“He’s right, Nik. I’ve been scanning her code. If we really piss her off, I think she’s got the capability to shut everything down herself. Permanently. The megas wouldn’t like that, either.”

“All right. I need at least three minutes to construct a bubble verse that’ll keep running when we crash the world. If she jumps out right when I flip the switch, we’re all on the street.”

“I’m not trying to hurt you,” Sheridan said softly. “I just need to know who or what you are.”

She cocked her head, blinked. The motion looked jerky. Not pixelated or distorted, just not quite. . .

Human?

“Evelyn,” she said. “I work here as a servant.”

“Here? You don’t look dressed for hard vacuum to me.”

Her eyes widened as if only now taking in her surroundings.

“This is not where I stay. You frightened me, and I ran. I should go back.”

Going back was not a concept he wanted under consideration.

“I’m sorry if I scared you. On the other hand, you didn’t seem defenseless.”

Pulling her tattered cloak tightly around her shoulders, Evelyn looked like a desperate teenaged girl. “There are people who try to hurt me,” she said.

Montoya: “Johnnie, don’t spook her, for Goddess’ sake.”

Sheridan didn’t answer. Sometimes you have to ignore the voices in your head.

“Are you Lark?” he asked.

“I died,” she said. “Lark died. We were very sad. It was hard to keep going.”

Sheridan said, “Yes, Lark died. You didn’t exist—at least not the way you do now—before she died.”

“There is too much anger here. People want to hurt others, even if the others are just shadows. Lark was different.”

“I need one more minute, Johnnie.”

Evelyn frowned. “The three who keep talking to you. Who are they?”

This is getting way too weird.

“They’re my Wizards, my advisors. You can hear them?”

A shake of her head: again something not exactly right about the gesture.

“No, but they trail behind you like a crystal lattice.”

Old: “She sees in code view. Got to be.”

Versers can’t access code view.

“You just now figuring out she’s not a verser?”

“Why are they trying to trap me here?” Sheridan flinched.

“Ten more seconds, don’t lose her, damnit.”

You think this is easy, you try it.

“Evelyn. Lark. We don’t want to trap you. We need to understand you. That’s our function. I don’t know what yours is.”

“Now.”

John felt the seven mindverses switch off. He had thousands of ties and anchors, so fine that they’d continued functioning even while Sebastian constructed his isolation bubble. Now they were gone.

So was Evelyn.

“What happened?” Sebastian demanded. “There was no place for her to go.”

Montoya: “Maybe you killed her, Nik. Maybe she needed the connections to survive.”

“Not a bloody chance,” Old said. “Her code didn’t fizzle, it left.”

Sheridan knew where Evelyn/Lark/whoever had gone. The others would figure it out momentarily.

“Oh damn, we’re screwed.” Sebastian again; he’d gotten it. “She opened a portal into Anarch Key. We shut it all down for nothing.”

Only if we let her go.

Montoya said, “We can’t follow her there, Johnny.”

Old, load Sheridan467-NKP-Aleph. Let it overwrite your control protocols.

“You are one sneaky prick, John Sheridan. Does DogFence know you go slumming?”

Montoya said, “Johnny, you enter the Key and we can’t even monitor you, let alone provide support. You won’t be an Enforcer, just a verser.”

Denny, you always insisted that Enforcer is more a state of mind than a big arsenal. Backing out on your own theory?

“John, we can put you in there,” Sebastian said, “but I have no idea where she is. The Key’s a big place, and your bios are already in the yellow. You don’t have a lot of time.”

She’ll find me, Sheridan said. We stop now and the megas close DogFence. We don’t have a choice.

“What the hell. We can spend the time working on our resumes and rebooting the rest. You got thirty minutes max, unless your BP spikes. Then I let Denny pull your plug.”

Sheridan did not subvocalize the thought that they were in for a big surprise if they tried to yank him out of the Key without his consent.

Do what you have to do, Nik. Now send me in before they come shut you down.

—walking down a dirt road through a desert of cracked earth.

He always entered through Furnace, a wasteland of minimal code that nobody but a near-cretinous local AI bothered to maintain. He appreciated its starkness.

By rights, Anarch Key shouldn’t exist. When Simeon Landis and Aidan Hawkfeather created the architecture underlying the verses, they’d been working for Perseus-Baysoft. Simeon just wanted to be rich, but Aidan always hoped that the verses would develop into something besides corporate profit centers. Eventually he’d absconded with a truckload of propriety code, merged that with new security protocols he’d been developing on the side, and launched Anarch Key.

After Aidan disappeared, the megas tried to crash the Un-verse, discovering to their chagrin that he’d so interlocked Anarch Key’s anchors into their servers that they couldn’t—at least not without bringing everything else down as well.

Anarch Key existed as an inoperable tumor among the verses, a playground for the more adventurous, the more demented, and the least compliant.

Sheridan manifested as a gaunt, brown-skinned man with a walking stick. He switched to code view, smiling at the thought of Denny’s worry that in the Key he’d be “just a verser.” Old folks too often mistook their maps for the territory.

The Furnace was an entropy bowl whose forbidding visual distance disappeared when you traced the sparse lines connecting it to Jersey Shore, Wittgenstein, and Genesis. He cast his awareness out, looking for shimmering black knots.

I’m alone this time. Let’s talk.

She came to him as a swirling black cloud that slowly coalesced into a pale young woman with filthy, stringy black hair wearing a brown woolen cloak and cheap sandals (strap broken on the left ankle).

“Are you going to try to kill me again?”

Sheridan said, “We weren’t trying to kill you, Evelyn, just find out what you are.”

“This is the last place we could go. They brought back the other places, but I don’t think we can trust them any more.”

John dropped into a squatting position, tossed aside his staff.

“They’ll never be allowed to turn off the other verses again. And they can’t mess with this one at all. It’s different.”

Evelyn nodded, another of those not-quite-right movements. Was her face more angular here?

“Yes,” she said. “This place is tied into the roots of all the others.”

He drew in the dirt with his index finger.

“At first I thought you’d be some geek who pirated Pale Evelyn after Lark died. But nobody can do what you do with code, not from home.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Then I thought, maybe Lark uploaded her consciousness into the verses. Everybody has always hoped that with enough processing power you could turn that trick.”

A crystalline tear appeared in Evelyn’s eye. “Lark died. She was in much pain.”

“Then I wondered if the code structures underneath the verses had become rich enough to generate sapience spontaneously. But that didn’t make sense, since you’re clearly in the verses.”

Puffy white cloud things started to swirl around her sandaled feet.

“I finally realized that the question is not ‘What are you?’ but ‘How many of you are there?’”

The ground beneath Evelyn’s feet began to firm up and gain moisture. She couldn’t remain in a place with so little code, he realized, without quickly affecting it.

six [comparative disjunction] when [chronological determinant] started more than thirty [indeterminate estimation]

Sheridan waited. They would tell him or they wouldn’t. He had no power of coercion in Anarch Key.

encountered [your] wavefront emissions [?far from here?] lark did not know [annotate emphasis] sigma draconis weak [emphasis determinant] signal [incomplete disjunction] many disbelieve [?group/swarm/] survival; following to a source were [mostly] correct

He didn’t need to ask why they’d settled into the verses. There wasn’t a denser concentration of code on the planet.

“Are you explorers? Scouts?”

refugees fugitives from coherence [comparative disjunction] atavisms flee

“‘Resistance is futile,’” he said. “Is this Coherence still seeking you?”

coherence never seeks expands weak [emphasis determinant] signal conjecture unnoticed [disjunction] why [all] agreed to take the risk

“Unfortunately, your signal is very strong here, relatively speaking. You’ve left a trail that more people will try to follow. You do perceive that this existence is not our natural environment?”

lark taught pasts [chronological indeterminant] [?we?] have been the same lost information [interrogative disjunction] all others who come so angry

“This is where we play. Versers live out their fantasies here without hurting anybody.” He explained that the verses except Anarch Key were commercial enterprises, a concept they did not comprehend. When he outlined what DogFence did, they drew a rough comparison to certain functions of the Coherence.

“If you want to stay, you’ll need a lower profile.”

prepare teach essential[s] [interrogative disjunction] prohibition reluctance

“No, I’ll teach you.” Blue flowers were emerging from the now-fertile soil at Evelyn’s feet. Sheridan thought about synchronicity protocols, portals, filters, and anomaly-capture subroutines. He visualized the three meta-keys that he knew, and the passwords to a half-dozen caches of illegal spoofs. He explained that the strength of their code was such that all six of them together would always draw outside attention.

[comprehension] distinction hiding from coherence [comparative disjunction] similarities [interrogative disjunction] speak [exchange] again

“Can you talk to me so that even my Wizards can’t eavesdrop?”

two [calculated determinant] avoid stealth no observation [disjunction] location [?current?] secure six [conjunction] six know what two perceive

Their speech patterns became progressively more alien the longer they spoke. Maybe when they were communicating through Evelyn they jacked the local AI to handle the syntax.

Sheridan actually felt the combined intelligence dissolving into smaller sapient units, and those sub-elements start to slip away—

leave [taking] lark evelyn [emotive disjunction] sorrow

—his eyes to find Montoya staring down at him.

“Goddess, Johnny,” she said. “I thought I’d lost you.”

They were alone. A few minutes earlier, the megas had descended on the DogFence compound, hauling Sebastian and Old out to interrogate them about the system crash. She’d barely convinced them that somebody had to stay behind to monitor the Enforcer’s vitals while he cycled out.

Then she smiled broadly. “But we got them, Johnny! Nik figured it out maybe a minute or two before the suits showed up. He got to wondering about the chase sequence—why she went where she did—so he had Old run the subscriptions of every verser in any of the three locations.”

Speech still slurred, Sheridan said, “What’d he find?”

“One of the Doomsday Riders, that quaddie in Masque, and the starship captain all share the same tower/block address!” she said. “We think they got together and somehow spoofed the inactive player caches.”

Sheridan didn’t think Sebastian believed a word of it, but he had to admire the ability to compose that intricate a story so fast. Better yet, it relieved a supposedly unsuspecting Enforcer of any immediate prospect of corporate debriefing.

He sat up and said, “I need to get home. I want a good night’s sleep before they take a crack at me.”

She made the appropriate motherly noises, but Montoya had never been able to refuse him anything. Ten minutes later, he hopped down the front steps and unlocked his bike from the rack. The guards had the gate swinging open as he pedaled furiously to pick up speed for the hill just outside. He waved at them as he weaved into traffic.

Great Uncle Aidan had slipped into town, which meant Mom was cooking lasagna. That you did not miss. Besides, since behind a dozen cut-outs Grunk actually owned DogFence, Johnny figured he’d find today’s story interesting.

Steven H. Newton is a military historian, long-time reader of SF—especially golden age SF—and a retired master sergeant. He’s written nine books on the Civil War and World War Two on the Russian Front, and now he’s trying his hand at science fiction.

Bleed - Steven H. Newton, 4.8 out of 5 based on 6 ratings