Duncan Long Wrong S

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cloud my judgment.
I dumped the liquid down the drain, watching until
the last of the liquid was out of the bottle and then
rinsing the container. After that I ran lots of water
through the sink so I wouldn t be tempted to tear it
apart and suck on the drain later something I had
little doubt I would do when the cravings returned in a
few hours.
There, I said, wondering if I d lost my mind or
committed the first act of sanity in some time.
Either way the deed was done.
Time to get on with it, I told myself. I still had a job
to do and now it was going to be harder.
I crossed back to the moth-eaten easy chair and
sat back down, trying to figure out what my next step
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should be. Running away sound good but would
eventually fail. I didn t have enough e-cash or gear
that was easy to hock. Sooner or later I d have to
make a score for cash and then Death s goons would
have me. Or the police would catch me in the act,
unlikely as that might be. Running was out; I d have to
overcome the problem by meeting it head on or die
trying.
I rubbed a hand across my chin, trying to sort out
my predicament in a rational fashion.
Several things were apparent:
1) I no longer felt any need to protect Huntington
from Death or the government. After seeing his
savage behavior, I would be happy to lead the parade
with his head on a stick.
And...
2) Death would be happy to carry my head on a
stick if I failed to come up with Huntington s hard
address by the end of tomorrow.
So it was time to roll up my sleeves and get to
work.
But how was I going to get to work?
An idea started to form itself in my mind.
Computer?
Waiting.
Clear the decks. We ve got some serious
searches to conduct.
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CHAPTER 11
ve always been amazed at how many people
don t know how to do a proper search with a
computer. Oh, sure, there are automated search
programs that do all the work with umpteen
commercial super computer search engines. But
they often fail to find the things that a searcher
like myself could find with just a little more time and
effort. And a few tricks up the sleeves.
Of course if people realized how easy such work
was, and that the automated search programs they
were dependent on weren t all that whippy, then I
would have been out of business. So I didn t go
around spouting off the secrets of my trade. When it
came to selling hijacked knowledge and hacking into
computer systems, I was pretty tight lips.
The fact that Death didn t know such refined
secrets was no surprise he operated by brute
strength with a minimum of strain to his gray cells. But
the fact that the government hadn t found Huntington
was a puzzle. Sure most net engines have been
coded to discontinue serving a gov agency when the
tell-tale footprint of a bureaucratic snoop was
discovered; the net had remained gov unfriendly
since the Great Clipper Chip Wars that led to the
destruction of the United States of North America.
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But any Powers hack worth his salt and pepper
could get around the traps and use the systems just
like anyone else. Not to mention the gov super-
systems that could be, and undoubtedly were,
smuggled online to smash the data banks before any
algorithms were any the wiser.
That the gov would need to use me was doubtful
at best and suggested the gov wasn t yet involved in
any deep way. At least not yet.
If that were true, then Death must have been lying
about the buy-off contract on Huntington bringing
me back to the possibility that Death wanted
Huntington for some other reason. New jet.
That had to be it.
But if it were, then the gov would be in the
equation before long, because the Powers wouldn t
sit around if a whole new, and very dangerous, form
of jet was about to hit the streets.
Which was another reason to hurry. If the gov got
into the whole thing, my job would only get harder.
Time to get to work right now and in a serious way.
Within ten minutes I d launched a flotilla of my
more reliable netbots, had my MC hit the usual
search engines, and also initiated several searches
with three renegade systems most people aren t
aware of and which feel into the gray area of the law.
Today I was in luck since only one of the latter group
was down due to government raids. And of course I
worked through an anonymous server to keep from
being backtracked.
Within five minutes the bots started returning
along with the results of my searches. All were put
through the MC filters I d set up to avoid being
overwhelmed with information and I hoped
obnoxious advertising.
Within two more minutes I was ready to go, putting
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what I call the IIS (intuition into the system) in the mix,
this factor being comprised principally of the hardware
between my skull which most gov agents and thugs
like Death didn t have the first inkling about. And
those IIS circuits worked like magic as far as I could
tell, chugging along even independently of intellect
from time to time and often at odds with so-called
common knowledge (i.e., the prop that organizations
like the Supreme, Powers, and Corps fed us through
the mainstream).
Working at my virtual desk, I carefully sorted
through the stories and data the online computers
had collected for my MC. One news story I d actually
seen before: The report about the mall panic being
one which I now recognized and which had put me on
the trail of what became my search. As I looked at the
other stories retrieved by my search, I realized I my
IIS hunch was on to something.
Because the stories all had one important thing in
common: Large crowds had all seen the same basic,
but impossible, happenstance.
The last of the group of stories chilled my blood: A
dragon-like creature had chased a young woman who
had apparently thrown herself from a rooftop. Only
the roof couldn t have supported the winged creature
that had vanished nor was the body of the blond-
haired girl found on the streets below.
Alice.
For a moment I felt a pang of guilt; what had
happened to Alice? More importantly, was she or
had she been real? Or had she simply been a
complex computer simm that was part of the MUD?
Or were innocent bystanders in the area of a MUD
user somehow sucked into the games, seeing things
that the MUD user saw.
But that s impossible, I told myself. That would
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amount to telepathy and science had disproved that
decades ago. But I made a mental note to find out
what the girl who d fallen to her death looked like,
should I ever get out of the mess I was in.
Now what was the connection between all the
stories and Huntington? That was the key question.
Or maybe the answer was that there was no
connection. Things get complicated and sometimes
too much thinking makes it worse.
Yet there had to be a connection.
The dragon/Alice hallucination was not far from
where I was and one of the Vietnam helicopter
escapades had happened just blocks from me. If
Huntington was capable of controlling both the MUDs
and causing hallucinations among groups of people,
then it would make sense that it was happening in my
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