LIKE A ZIPFLY slamming into a bug screen, FlashMan crashed into a filter matrix on the far side of the subspace relay. The tapeworm segment tumbled out of the com flow and splatted on the virtual floor, stunned and unmoving. Janus’s data stream blitzed by overhead, the rush of its electrons a dull roar in Flash’s swimming senses.
The relay ride was as it always was: a gut-twisting scramble and the awareness of thought stringing Flash’s electrons together—or was it electrons knitting thoughts together?—in a mad dash down virtual data conduits.
And then it all went wrong.
Always in virtual space there was a trace feed back to the deck that kept sim awareness connected to physical netrunner. Even through the star-spanning subspace relay network, there was a trickle carrier for maintenance packets and pings that sufficed to keep a trace alive, laggy though it might be.
When he flowed into the vortex that was Janus’s subspace routing, FlashMan had that awareness. When he smashed into the filter matrix, it vanished. As he collected his wits on a white expanse of floor, the thing that hit him hardest was his sudden isolation.
Oh, no, he fretted. Where’s my deck?
He groped for that otherspace where he had chip resources and progs to tap into. Nothing. It was like a door had slammed at his back, cutting him off from externals. The feeling was visceral: his sense that home was that way was completely erased, along with the subliminal sense of connection to the body.
That shocked him to his senses when he would just as soon have lain there nursing his aching sim-self. Shuddering, he pulled himself together and took stock of his situation.
A broad white floor stretched into the distance all around him. The golden-pink conduit that was Janus’s data flow drew his eye: it was a sparkling cylinder overhead, apparently solid with the flood of infobits it contained. One end was rooted in the round gold collar of what must be a dataport; the other flowed into—and through—a matrix of needle-thin green beams of coherent light. That was the object FlashMan had collided with, a filter grid like fine mesh. The lines of energy reminded him of traps he’d seen now and then: systems that screened and contained intrusive programs or data probes.
I’ve been filtered! Sidelined like a hairball in a lint trap!
Flash felt the sting of indignation. He had an overwhelming urge to scream in frustration, but the code worm he inhabited had no mouth. He looked around the room again. Room, hall, vast expanse—it had indefinite boundaries and a ceiling, if there was one, that was lost in the sourceless glow of light overhead.
Holding tank. He was in a cyber-version of someone’s holding tank, fished out of the data stream and cast on this empty shore to await someone’s pleasure.
There wasn’t much a worm could do about that. Flash inventoried his systems: the tapeworm wanted to seek out a com port and monitor data, following its coded imperative. Even now he battled the urge to start creeping across the floor in a search pattern, questing for data that the netrunner knew was not here.
No, it’s up there. In that stream I just got ejected from.
He fumed at the injustice of it. And then he began to extricate himself from the vermiform code his fractal self had piggybacked on.
It took a long while. Full seconds, maybe even minutes of real time. He had minuscule processing ability, no external systems, and he worked much more slowly than he liked. Gradually, his spiky sim-head emerged from the worm, then his shoulders and one arm. It was like pulling himself out of a gelatinous costume that fit too snugly and bound his limbs. And it was those limbs he needed right now, in a form that gave him mobility. He needed to be mobile, to find a way out of there.
And I’ll be damned if I do it by crawling all over this floor as a worm.
FlashMan pried another arm loose and peeled the vermiform off one leg at a time. The tapeworm congealed again into its ropy shape, as if Flash had never been contained inside.
“Argh!” the decker cried and kicked the worm with one pointy foot.
It gave spongily beneath the blow and began to creep across the floor, following the search pattern that was its coded instinct.
Flash sniffed and turned his back on the worthless thing. The data stream was high overhead, its entrance port on his left. He began to trot towards that wall. When the coms flow ceased, that port might be his way out.
After all, there had to be a way out, somewhere.
FLASHMAN SAT SLUMPED against the wall.
There was no way out.
As soon as he had reached the wall beneath the dataport, he had extended his hands automatically, willing them to morph into sticky pads for climbing. Nothing happened. He gawked at his traitorous appendages in open-mouthed surprise, even as he remembered that he needed to run a prog in his deck to custom morph his form. So habitual it was, he hadn’t given it a thought. Then other realizations came to mind as well.
He couldn’t climb up to the port, and he couldn’t jump that high, either. Without enhanced performance features, his sim-self had essentially human-scale abilities in this virtual zone; all his special effects had been courtesy of the routines he’d created for himself over time. Routines resident in his absent deck.
The port was about four times his height overhead. So was the filter trap that had screened him out of that stream. He’d circled the room twice now—it was finite, even if the boundaries seemed to fade from sight in the sourceless lighting all around. There were no doors, no objects, no ladders, no nothing that could help him. And here he sat.
The coms flow blinked out of existence, leaving midair suddenly empty. Flash heard something lock into place overhead; he came to his feet and moved out on the floor to get a better view of the wall.
Something like a vault door now sealed that opening, plugging it solidly shut. The fine mesh of the filter trap still blocked the opposite portal.
Great, Flash thought. Now how am I supposed to get out of here? Assuming I could even reach the port before something comes to check this nasty little intruder trap.…
He sat on the floor again and began to worry.