Read Online Psychotrope by Lisa Smedman - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Lisa Smedman
Tags: Science-Fiction
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wandered to the kitten-shaped Playpet that lay on the futon next to him. As he stroked its soft synthetic fur it began to emit a rumbling purr. Servos inside the toy responded to the faint electromagnetic field given out by Ansen's hand, causing the toy to roll over and offer its belly for scratching. He tickled its purple tummy with his fingertips, giving the memory plastic the daily stimulation it required to "grow" from kitten into life-sized cat over the next six months. The kitten responded by widening its already oversized eyes and staring adoringly in Ansen's general direction.
Most of Auburn's blue collar workers were just starting their working day. Ansen had just ended his—an eight-hour shift at the Diamond Deckers plant. The ache in his shoulders came from hunching over an assembly table all night long, slotting chips into computers that were cheap knock-offs of more expensive cyberdecks. The decks had the look and feel of the high-end Fuchi models, with their clear plastic cases and sleek gold-on-black keyboards. But they were made from bargain-basement chips and inferior materials.
The work was tedious and brain-numbing. And the pay was drek: just minimum wage. But it was the best a seventeen-year-old high school dropout could do for a job in this city. And it had its fringe benefits . . .
Ansen turned to the cyberdeck he'd liberated from a back room of the Diamond Deckers warehouse. Big and boxy, the CDT-3000 Vista clone was an antique, older even than Ansen himself. It was one of a dozen that had sat without ever being used, just gathering dust, until Ansen discovered them. He had upgraded this deck as far as it would go, but it still had only ten megapulses of active memory and a two-meg MPCP. And its interfaces were primitive in the extreme. Instead of a DNI jack or even a trade rig, the computer relied on old-fashioned VR goggles and data gloves.
While other computers allowed their operators to run them at the speed of thought, this "tortoise" of a deck relied on gross eye and hand movements to execute its commands.
Still, it was better than nothing at all. And it was the window onto the world Ansen loved—if only a narrow one.
Ansen pulled nylon data gloves onto his hands and flexed so that the hair-thin webbing of sensors woven into the blue fabric shaped to his hands. He made sure the fiber-optic cables that led from the deck to the goggles were snug in their ports, plugged the deck into the comm jack in the wall, then pulled the goggles over his eyes.
Holding his hands over the deck's illuminated sensor board, he flicked his fingers to activate it. The wrap-around peripheral-image screen inside the VR goggles flickered to life and the speakers next to his ears began to hum.
He entered the Matrix.
A door-shaped rectangle of glowing yellow appeared directly in front of him—a system access node in the local telecommunications grid that served this area of Auburn. Ansen touched the SAN and watched as a blue stain spread outward from the point his hand had touched, a halo of green encircling it. After a moment, the blue faded, leaving a green-tinged hole in the middle of the door. Ansen pointed his finger, moved it forward—and was sucked into the hole. The SAN disappeared behind him.
He hung suspended over the multicolored checkerboard of light that was Seattle's regional telecommunications grid. He knew all of its familiar landmarks by heart: the golden stepped pyramid of Aztechnology; the nucleus with swirling red electrons that was the Gaeatronics power company; the forbidding black slab of Renraku; and the multifaceted, crystalline silver star of Fuchi Industrial Electronics. A host of other system constructs also dotted the cyberscape—cubes, spheres, and more complex shapes, each representing a different corporation or public agency.
He looked "down" at his Matrix body—a gender-neutral silver humanoid with glowing blue hands. This had been the standard non-customized persona since
Most of Auburn's blue collar workers were just starting their working day. Ansen had just ended his—an eight-hour shift at the Diamond Deckers plant. The ache in his shoulders came from hunching over an assembly table all night long, slotting chips into computers that were cheap knock-offs of more expensive cyberdecks. The decks had the look and feel of the high-end Fuchi models, with their clear plastic cases and sleek gold-on-black keyboards. But they were made from bargain-basement chips and inferior materials.
The work was tedious and brain-numbing. And the pay was drek: just minimum wage. But it was the best a seventeen-year-old high school dropout could do for a job in this city. And it had its fringe benefits . . .
Ansen turned to the cyberdeck he'd liberated from a back room of the Diamond Deckers warehouse. Big and boxy, the CDT-3000 Vista clone was an antique, older even than Ansen himself. It was one of a dozen that had sat without ever being used, just gathering dust, until Ansen discovered them. He had upgraded this deck as far as it would go, but it still had only ten megapulses of active memory and a two-meg MPCP. And its interfaces were primitive in the extreme. Instead of a DNI jack or even a trade rig, the computer relied on old-fashioned VR goggles and data gloves.
While other computers allowed their operators to run them at the speed of thought, this "tortoise" of a deck relied on gross eye and hand movements to execute its commands.
Still, it was better than nothing at all. And it was the window onto the world Ansen loved—if only a narrow one.
Ansen pulled nylon data gloves onto his hands and flexed so that the hair-thin webbing of sensors woven into the blue fabric shaped to his hands. He made sure the fiber-optic cables that led from the deck to the goggles were snug in their ports, plugged the deck into the comm jack in the wall, then pulled the goggles over his eyes.
Holding his hands over the deck's illuminated sensor board, he flicked his fingers to activate it. The wrap-around peripheral-image screen inside the VR goggles flickered to life and the speakers next to his ears began to hum.
He entered the Matrix.
A door-shaped rectangle of glowing yellow appeared directly in front of him—a system access node in the local telecommunications grid that served this area of Auburn. Ansen touched the SAN and watched as a blue stain spread outward from the point his hand had touched, a halo of green encircling it. After a moment, the blue faded, leaving a green-tinged hole in the middle of the door. Ansen pointed his finger, moved it forward—and was sucked into the hole. The SAN disappeared behind him.
He hung suspended over the multicolored checkerboard of light that was Seattle's regional telecommunications grid. He knew all of its familiar landmarks by heart: the golden stepped pyramid of Aztechnology; the nucleus with swirling red electrons that was the Gaeatronics power company; the forbidding black slab of Renraku; and the multifaceted, crystalline silver star of Fuchi Industrial Electronics. A host of other system constructs also dotted the cyberscape—cubes, spheres, and more complex shapes, each representing a different corporation or public agency.
He looked "down" at his Matrix body—a gender-neutral silver humanoid with glowing blue hands. This had been the standard non-customized persona since
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