Read Online Psychotrope by Lisa Smedman - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Lisa Smedman
Tags: Science-Fiction
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the 2030s, back when the Vista was SOTA—state of the art. Ansen could have re-cooked the chips in his MPCP to customize his persona, but that would burn memory that he couldn't spare.
Besides, the persona's archaic look was part of his image.
Although the goggles gave Ansen the illusion of floating in space, he could feel the futon underneath him, could smell his unwashed T-shirts in the corner, could hear the sounds of feet in the apartment above him. He hadn't quite escaped the real world.
But someday he'd be able to afford to go under the knife and have a datajack implanted in his temple. And the SOTA deck he'd been building from parts scrounged off the assembly line would be complete. Then Retro would show the other deckers who was wiz.
In the meantime, Retro left his mark on the Matrix, tagging datastores at random with his graffiti. His trademark was changing the iconography of the nodes he visited, leaving behind icons that were "retro" in the extreme.
Old-fashioned paper file folders, galvanized metal garbage cans, non-digital wind-up alarm clocks, and brightly colored suitcases—all icons that were standardized in the previous century by a long-since defunct corp by the name of Macintosh. Ansen's other favorite tag was an image of that corp's logo: a rainbow-colored apple with a sign inviting deckers to "take a byte." Woe betide the decker who took the bait and found the worm virus inside!
Ansen knew the prank was childish, but, hey, he didn't claim to be anything else. He seemed to just have a knack with computers, and he'd been slotting people off with his decking ever since he was a kid. Back when he was eleven, the first time he'd run away from home, he'd hacked his way into the computer system that operated his uncle's hotel and checked himself into one of the "coffin" cubicles. Using the thumbprint scan of another guest, he'd ordered a drekload of fast food, keeping him in growlies for a whole week. And he'd done it with his sister's MatrixPal, a null-value chunk of chip if ever there was one.
Just wait until he had some real hardware in his hands . . .
For now, although the Vista was slow, it had one important advantage. Like the tortoise that gave antiquated decks their derogatory nickname, the Vista's primitive interfaces offered a "shell" that protected the deck's user from harm.
While more modern computers offered direct neural interface with the Matrix, that connection was a two-way street. If the decker trespassed on an IC-protected node and hosed up, lethal biofeedback could flow back along the DNI conduit, frying his brain.
Ansen didn't have to worry about any of that. At worst, any intrusion countermeasures could only fry the chips in his deck. If that happened—and it hadn't yet—there were still eleven other Vistas back at the warehouse as backup.
And optical chips had a way of "falling" into Ansen's pockets when the boss wasn't looking . . .
So the only question was where to go today. Ansen circled his right index finger clockwise (it had taken him a while to figure that command out; the manual that came with the Vista assumed that the user knew what "dialing" was) and a punchpad of glowing letters and numbers appeared in the air ahead of him. He keyed in NA/UCAS-SEA, then chose the four-digit LTG code that would connect him with the
University
of
Washington
. He'd heard they'd been developing some nova-hot sculpted systems and wanted to give them a browse. And leave his mark.
A system access node appeared before him: a fairly standard "office door" icon bearing the U-dub logo. Ansen reached for the knob . . .
And felt a moment of dizzying disorientation as the viewscreen image projected by his goggles zoomed forward, jerked back and forth in an epileptic frenzy, and then lurched drunkenly away from him. Instead of the door, Ansen now faced a dark tunnel draped with moss and fanged with dripping stalactites. Misty vapors wafted out of it like panting breath. Ansen was willing to
Besides, the persona's archaic look was part of his image.
Although the goggles gave Ansen the illusion of floating in space, he could feel the futon underneath him, could smell his unwashed T-shirts in the corner, could hear the sounds of feet in the apartment above him. He hadn't quite escaped the real world.
But someday he'd be able to afford to go under the knife and have a datajack implanted in his temple. And the SOTA deck he'd been building from parts scrounged off the assembly line would be complete. Then Retro would show the other deckers who was wiz.
In the meantime, Retro left his mark on the Matrix, tagging datastores at random with his graffiti. His trademark was changing the iconography of the nodes he visited, leaving behind icons that were "retro" in the extreme.
Old-fashioned paper file folders, galvanized metal garbage cans, non-digital wind-up alarm clocks, and brightly colored suitcases—all icons that were standardized in the previous century by a long-since defunct corp by the name of Macintosh. Ansen's other favorite tag was an image of that corp's logo: a rainbow-colored apple with a sign inviting deckers to "take a byte." Woe betide the decker who took the bait and found the worm virus inside!
Ansen knew the prank was childish, but, hey, he didn't claim to be anything else. He seemed to just have a knack with computers, and he'd been slotting people off with his decking ever since he was a kid. Back when he was eleven, the first time he'd run away from home, he'd hacked his way into the computer system that operated his uncle's hotel and checked himself into one of the "coffin" cubicles. Using the thumbprint scan of another guest, he'd ordered a drekload of fast food, keeping him in growlies for a whole week. And he'd done it with his sister's MatrixPal, a null-value chunk of chip if ever there was one.
Just wait until he had some real hardware in his hands . . .
For now, although the Vista was slow, it had one important advantage. Like the tortoise that gave antiquated decks their derogatory nickname, the Vista's primitive interfaces offered a "shell" that protected the deck's user from harm.
While more modern computers offered direct neural interface with the Matrix, that connection was a two-way street. If the decker trespassed on an IC-protected node and hosed up, lethal biofeedback could flow back along the DNI conduit, frying his brain.
Ansen didn't have to worry about any of that. At worst, any intrusion countermeasures could only fry the chips in his deck. If that happened—and it hadn't yet—there were still eleven other Vistas back at the warehouse as backup.
And optical chips had a way of "falling" into Ansen's pockets when the boss wasn't looking . . .
So the only question was where to go today. Ansen circled his right index finger clockwise (it had taken him a while to figure that command out; the manual that came with the Vista assumed that the user knew what "dialing" was) and a punchpad of glowing letters and numbers appeared in the air ahead of him. He keyed in NA/UCAS-SEA, then chose the four-digit LTG code that would connect him with the
University
of
Washington
. He'd heard they'd been developing some nova-hot sculpted systems and wanted to give them a browse. And leave his mark.
A system access node appeared before him: a fairly standard "office door" icon bearing the U-dub logo. Ansen reached for the knob . . .
And felt a moment of dizzying disorientation as the viewscreen image projected by his goggles zoomed forward, jerked back and forth in an epileptic frenzy, and then lurched drunkenly away from him. Instead of the door, Ansen now faced a dark tunnel draped with moss and fanged with dripping stalactites. Misty vapors wafted out of it like panting breath. Ansen was willing to
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