aSG: Chalandra Harkness: The Bloodchip Matrix #1 (1/1)

[Gary W. Olson]

                         CHALANDRA HARKNESS:
                        THE BLOODCHIP MATRIX
                 (a tale from altiverse 998SUPERGUY)
                              Episode 1
                          "Memory On-Line"
                                 by
                            Gary W. Olson

                                 +++

     The first thing Chalandra Harkness noticed was that she was
bleeding.  She couldn't find the cut, but the blood was trickling
down, around her eyes, weighting her eyelashes.  There was no pain.
She wondered if someone had suspended a container of blood above her,
and was allowing it to drip down upon her, but when she looked up, all
she could see was the night sky.
     There were stars.  That was the other odd thing, though she
couldn't place why.
     Around her, machinery hummed, a constant sound that penetrated
every cell in her body.  She was in something that lived, that
dreamed.  Something had consumed her, and was trying to digest her.
Strange that it felt so peaceful.
     The blood trickled down her chin, dripping to the floor.  She
looked up at the stars again.
     "The stars are crying tears of blood," she whispered.
     Something was approaching, something that was a part of this
place that had consumed her so completely.  There were no doors.
There was only the sky, and the machine.
     There was a feeling of pattern in the sky.  Chalandra felt the
recognition, knew that she had seen that pattern once before.  Seen
those stars before.
     Now she understood why it had seemed so strange.  The stars in
the sky were a sight long banished to memory.  There was no sky
anymore.  There were no stars.
     The blood seemed to get thicker, yet she refused to wipe it from
her eyes.  Someone was coming.  Someone she feared.  Yet there were no
doors in the ground, and nothing in the sky but the stars.
     Someone arrived.

                                 +++

     Chalandra opened her eyes, and saw only the darkness.  A final
tremble of fear swept across her, dying in her toes.  She was in her
pressure chamber, of course.  It had been a dream.
     She pressed a button, and the airtight lid opened, lifting away
as Chalandra slowly sat up.  The sun, just past the horizon, suffused
her basement window with a rosy tint.  As the tint fainted, she felt
the strength rising within her.
     The dream had been coming to her for two weeks now.  It was
always the same.  The someone never got closer, and she never woke up
before the someone arrived.  She could not imagine who it was, as
there was no one, mortal or immortal, whom she feared.  Six hundred
years of life and death had given her that much, at least.
     Rising, she slipped to the floor and glided silently to the
stairs.  Tonight was a night which, on the whole, she would have
preferred staying in, to meditate, or enjoy a relaxing bath.  But
meditation and bathing did not pay the rent.
     "On-line," Chalandra said, as she reached the top of the stairs.
Dim light-strips lit above her desk, and her Red Sky compstation
flared to life, suffusing the room with the red glow of its opening
screen.
     "By your command," the mellow voice of the system prompted.
Chalandra scowled at the voice, and considered changing the prompt.
     "System jack," she said instead, settling into her chair.
     "Please engage hookup," the computer prompted.
     She picked up the free end of the platwire that was coiled
haphazardly next to her compstation proper.  The other end was already
jacked into the compstation, and awaited contact with a dataport for
instantaneous information transfer.
     Lifting her chin, Chalandra inserted the jack in the side of her
neck, an inch below her right jawbone socket.  She wondered if the
designers knew what they were doing, when they developed this system
of direct cybernetic interface.  It was as though the machine was a
vampire, drawing data from her mind, instead of the other way around,
as the concept was typically sold.
     Given that most cybernetic design of the twenty first century was
attributable to vampires, she had little doubt that they did indeed
know.
     Liquid blue rushed over her, as the stream of data from the
DarkNET overrode her physical senses.  She watched the icy blue
streams without wonder, as she slid through several security gates.
With a twist of her mind, she could change the forms she saw into
something else, like the lane from her youth, so many centuries ago,
or a flying carpet, soaring above ancient Persia.  But Chalandra had
little patience with illusions tonight.
     Had she had physical form, there, Chalandra might have snarled,
when she saw that a message was waiting for her.  She activated it,
expecting a complicated image to scroll before her eyes, explaining to
her for the nth time that Sweden was an absolutely wonderful place to
visit, with the lowest pollutant to counter-pollutant ratio in
Pan-Europa.
     Instead, there was a simple message - letters suspended in the
icy blue panorama she perceived.

     Ms. Harkness,

          I seek to hire your services.  It is most urgent that
     you meet me in the Cafe Sangria tonight, at midnight.  Will
     pay three times your standard recovery fee, half up front.
     Table seventeen.

                                                     Sincerely,
                                                     Percy McFae

     The message disappeared.  Chalandra considered the proposition.
Three times her standard recovery fee was a hefty chunk of credit.
Either this McFae was desperate, or the find would be dangerous.  More
likely, both.
     "What the hell," she said silently, to the formless blue.  "I
should get a couple drinks out of the deal, even if I do turn it
down."  She uploaded the message into the processing buffers in her
neck, which seconds later transmitted the information to the twenty
gigabyte memory bank she had installed in her cerebral cortex.  She
accessed the Cafe Sangria's location from the DarkNET's public
database, and jacked out.
     Her office rematerialized around her, and she detached the jack
from her neck.  With a thought, she indexed through her memory bank,
and filed the uploaded data.   She resisted the urge to call up a
memory.
     Memory used to be a problem for vampires, in the days before
cybernetic implants and direct mind-to-machine interface with vast
computer networks.  Time corroded even the most powerful images,
ground them into the dust.  There was only so much that could be
absorbed and kept fresh, only so much that one could select to keep.
The rest had to be forgotten, or written in chronicles.  She used to
do that, she remembered.  Every day, for two and a half centuries,
following her awakening as a dark immortal at the hands of a rough,
hirsute vampire, she had recorded what had happened to her, where she
had gone, what she had done.
     Eventually, she had stopped.  Not for any reason that she could
recall.  It had just ceased being important.  She kept the chronicles
she had written, though, and they had been the first thing she had
transcribed into her new virtual memory after the operation that had
implanted the memory bank.  It occupied less than a hundredth of one
percent of the unitís total capacity.
     It was only the beginning.  Beyond the memory bank, she had her
DarkNET account, which she could access from any public cyberport.
Memory could be infinite, now.  The technomagic of the twenty-first
century was merging with the ancient magic of the undead.  Blood and
machine in synergy.
     "Off-line," Chalandra said, standing.  The compstation powered
down, and the light strips quietly faded.  She stood, heading
downstairs to dress.

                                 +++

     When Chalandra stepped into the smoky, neon-scarred cafe, she
felt the preying eyes upon her.  It was the pitch black leather
outfit, she knew.  It moved with her, silently, contrasting with her
dirtwater blonde hair and the ghostly pallor of her skin.  Her eyes
were masked behind black shades, though she had no trouble seeing.
     No one would touch her here, she knew.  The punked-out vampboys
at the bar stepped aside wordlessly as she glided by, not even daring
to make a lewd comment.  They could sense she was the real thing,
something that they, despite their bio-implanted teeth and pallor from
lack of sunlight and too many nameless narcotics, were not.
     She found table seventeen, and sat down.  Calmly, aware that some
eyes were still on her, she pulled a cigar from her jacket, and lit
it.  The eyes slid from her, as though she had given a sign that she
did not seek prey that evening.  It wasn't true - she was.  But she
knew her prey, and he had not yet arrived.
     Chalandra slipped a credit chit into the slot and punched up
number five.  A mug rose from a hidden chamber in the center of the
table, filled to the rim with a reddish-amber beverage.  The menu had
called it a 'Sangria Sunset'.  She sipped it, and decided that 'Sewage
Sunset' would have violated fewer truth-in-advertising laws.  A
favorite of the vampboys who hung out in this and a hundred similar
cafes in San Francisco, it was a mix of human blood, tequila, cider,
and, from the taste of it, battery acid.
     When Percy McFae arrived, Chalandra spotted him instantly.  He
seemed like someone who would have been more at home at an accountancy
convention than a seedy punk hangout in the roughest quarter of the
city.  Inwardly, she warned herself not to judge him by sight - for
him even to show here was a strong message that he was more than he
seemed.
     He moved without hesitation into the seething throng of bodies
who were coming, going, dancing, drinking, and eating.  Some reached
out to stop him, to draw them into their dark web.  He slipped away
without hurrying his pace, seeming completely unconcerned.  The arms
fell away as he approached Chalandra's table.
     "Ms. Harkness," he said, tipping his hat.  "You're early."
     "I was thirsty," Chalandra responded, letting the smoke from her
cigar drift lazily into his face.  He appeared to take no notice.
"You're McFae."
     "Yes," he said, taking the seat opposite her.
     "Three times my standard finder's fee, eh?" Chalandra asked.
"That's quite a hefty chunk for a little girl like myself.  You lose a
city or something?"
     "Something much more valuable," McFae said, his voice never
rising above blandness.
     "I'm listening."
     "What has been lost is the future, Ms. Harkness," McFae
responded.  "You must find it for us."
     "Tall order," Chalandra said, after taking a long sip of her
drink.  "What's this lost future look like?"
     "It's quite small," McFae said.  "Paper thin and red.  It has a
vast treasure locked inside."  He leaned forward.  "We need you to
locate the Bloodchip."

(to be continued...)
--
Copyright (c) 1993-2010 by Gary W. Olson.  All Rights Reserved.
--
Gary W. Olson
swede at novitious dot com
Superguy LiveJournal: http://community.livejournal.com/superguy_list/
Superguy DreamWidth: http://superguy.dreamwidth.org/
Superguy Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=47273370926