Cyberweb

CYBERWEB

Lisa Mason

This is an ebook adaptation of Lisa Mason’s cyberpunk classic, Cyberweb, first published in 1995 in hardcover by William Morrow, in trade paperback by Eos Books, and in mass market paperback by AvoNova Books.

Cyberweb is the sequel to Arachne,

Lisa Mason’s first novel published in hardcover in 1990, now an ebook.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2017 by Lisa Mason.

Cover collage, interior art, and logo copyright 2017 by Tom Robinson.

All rights reserved.

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Bast Books ebook edition published January, 2017.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Smashwords Edition

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting my hard work.

For information address:

Bast Books

bastbooks@aol.com

Thank you for your readership! Visit me at my Official Web Site for more about my books, screenplays, and stories. Enjoy!

Lisa Mason

Table of Contents

Praise for Arachne and Cyberweb

Praise for Books by Lisa Mason

Cyberweb

About Lisa Mason

Books by Lisa Mason

Praise for Arachne and Cyberweb

Locus Magazine Hardcover Bestsellers

Powerful . . . Entertaining . . . Imaginative.

—People Magazine

In humanity’s daring to enter the cybernetic heaven (and hell) of telespace, Lisa Mason reveals the lineaments of all that is tragic and transcendent in our evolution. Once the journey into this vivid and terrifying future has begun, there is no returning until the infinite has been faced and the last word read.

—David Zindell, Author of Neverness

Cybernetics, robotics, the aftermath of San Francisco’s Big Quake II, urban tribalism—Lisa Mason combines them all with such deftness and grace, they form a living world. Mason spins an entertaining tale . . . She allows Carly’s robotic allies a measure of personality and sophistication beyond the stock role of a chirping R2D2 or a blandly sinister Hal . . . Her characters and their world will stay with you long after you’ve finished this fine book.

—Locus, The Trade Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy

Lisa Mason stakes out, within the cyberpunk sub-genre, a territory all her own.

—The San Francisco Chronicle

Mason’s endearing characters and their absorbing adventures will hook even the most jaded SF fan.

—Booklist

Arachne is an impressive debut by a writer gifted with inventiveness, wit, and insight. The characters face choices well worth reading about. This is cyberpunk with a heart.

—Nancy Kress, Author of Brain Rose

There is a refreshing amount of energy associated with Lisa Mason’s writing. The good old values are there: fun, excitement, drama—but served up with new and original twists. Lisa Mason is definitely a writer to watch—and to read.

—Paul Preuss, Author of Core

Lisa Mason must be counted among science fiction’s most distinctive voices as we rush toward the new millennium.

—Ed Bryant

Praise for Books by Lisa Mason

Strange Ladies: 7 Stories

Offers everything you could possibly want, from more traditional science fiction and fantasy tropes to thought-provoking explorations of gender issues and pleasing postmodern humor…This is a must-read collection.

—The San Francisco Review of Books

Lisa Mason might just be the female Phillip K. Dick. Like Dick, Mason's stories are far more than just sci-fi tales, they are brimming with insight into human consciousness and the social condition….a sci-fi collection of excellent quality….you won't want to miss it.

—The Book Brothers Review Blog

Fantastic book of short stories….Recommended.

—Reader Review

"I’m quite impressed, not only by the writing, which gleams and sparkles, but also by [Lisa Mason’s] versatility . . . Mason is a wordsmith . . . her modern take on Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland is a hilarious gem! [This collection] sparkles, whirls, and fizzes. Mason is clearly a writer to follow!"

—Amazing Stories

Summer of Love

A San Francisco Chronicle Recommended Book of the Year

A Philip K. Dick Award Finalist

Remarkable. . . .a whole array of beautifully portrayed characters along the spectrum from outright heroism to villainy. . . .not what you expected of a book with flowers in its hair. . . the intellect on display within these psychedelically packaged pages is clear-sighted, witty, and wise.

—Locus Magazine

A fine novel packed with vivid detail, colorful characters, and genuine insight.

—The Washington Post Book World

Captures the moment perfectly and offers a tantalizing glimpse of its wonderful and terrible consequences.

—The San Francisco Chronicle

Brilliantly crafted. . . .An engrossing tale spun round a very clever concept.

—Katharine Kerr, author of Days of Air and Darkness

"Just imagine The Terminator in love beads, set in the Haight-Ashbury ‘hood of 1967."

—Entertainment Weekly

Mason has an astonishing gift. Her characters almost walk off the page. And the story is as significant as anyone could wish. This book will surely be on the prize ballots.

—Analog

A priority purchase.

—Library Journal

The Gilded Age

A New York Times Notable Book

A New York Public Library Recommended Book

A winning mixture of intelligence and passion.

—The New York Times Book Review

Should both leave the reader wanting more and solidify Mason’s position as one of the most interesting writers in science fiction.

—Publishers Weekly

Rollicking. . .Dazzling. . .Mason’s characters are just as endearing as her world.

—Locus Magazine

Graceful prose. . . A complex and satisfying plot.

—Library Journal

Celestial Girl (A LilyModjeska Mystery)

Passionate Historical Romantic Suspense

5 Stars I really enjoyed the story and would love to read a sequel! I enjoy living in the 21st century, but this book made me want to visit the Victorian era. The characters were brought to life, a delight to read about. The tasteful sex scenes were very racy….Good Job!

—Reader Review

The Garden of Abracadabra

So refreshing! This is Stephanie Plum in the world of Harry Potter.

—Goodreads Reader

Fun and enjoyable urban fantasy….I want to read more!

—Reader Review

I love the writing style and am hungry for more!

—Goodreads Reader

Cyberweb

1

Street Tough

Carly Quester creeps through the crowd, winding her way around a hydroponic vegetable vendor whose brackish tomato tanks twitch with mottled olive crawdaddies. Her stomach rumbles at the sight of fresh food, but shellfish grilled in butter will have to wait for another day. A frumpy bank teller lingers in the gridlock, humming softly, waiting for the light at California Street to change.

Yeah, that’s right. Don’t freakin’ move.

Green light, and traffic plunges forward half a block. Red light, and traffic halts. Steaming with frustration. Spewing noxious fumes.

With a cautious hop, the bank teller ventures off the curb, navigating the squat stack of its main housing between a pickup truck packed with surly locomotors and a bus of screaming schoolchildren. The bank teller pauses in the crosswalk, twiddling its secondary cables.

Carly pounces, seizing the bank teller’s monitor. She jams a credit disk into the teller’s download drive, punching her code on its astonished keypad, together with a bootleg file extension overriding Data Control’s order freezing her assets.

The bank teller struggles and beeps, staggering and swinging about.

Carly slaps the monitor’s faceplace, holds snub-nosed pliers to its main cable. Spit it out, bot, she mutters to its audio. It’s my damn account. Eight grand or you’re chop-shop parts.

The bank teller sputters but commences downloading credits onto Carly’s disk. One thousand, two thousand, three. Four thousand softbucks.

A synthy voice suddenly murmurs through the bank teller’s audio. Hello, Quester space C colon fifty-three dash five point twenty-four paren AAA close paren. How are you today? We’ve got to talk.

Carly slaps the monitor again. Flat of the hand, no fingerprints. Talk, right. The synthy voice, the voice of a sengine, is reciting her former telespace access code. Talk? Don’t even breathe.

The bank teller’s alarm system clicks on, wailing through the downtown din. The red Cancel-Trans light blinks furiously. Carly joggles the main cable with the pliers till the cable is nearly free of the port.

Five thousand, six thousand softbucks.

Carly Quester! rattles Pr. Spinner’s rusty synthy voice. The perimeter prober stands next to a Recycling Bin on the opposite side of California Street. Her owlish faceplace puckers, her graspers clack, her spinnerets click. The prober’s foot rollers scoot back and forth with anxiety. By bot, it’s the heat!

She means scram, flesh-and-blood, squeaks Saint Download standing beside Spinner, waving its multitude of armlets. Its gender-neutral faceplace clicks through a dozen ambiguity sequences. Saint Download is the ugliest little bot Carly has ever seen. The bot doesn’t think much of her, either.

Six and a quarter, six and a half. The bank teller stalls at six thousand five hundred softbucks. Damn! Carly pounds Eject but the disk won’t come free.

A team of copbots careen down Sansome Street, weaving in and out of the gridlock. Sirens shriek.

Carly pries the disk out with the pliers, denting the edges of the bank teller’s drive. Then she yanks the main cable before the bank teller can save a commcord of her face and voice. Cutting its power won’t void identification of the transaction, though, since Carly’s code was archived with Data Control as soon as the credits downloaded. Still. Any spybyte or telespace pirate could have pillaged her account, too. Data Control doesn’t have to know who.

Or what Carly looks like these days. No longer the polished professional telelinker. No longer a telespace mediator with the corrupt megafirm of Ava & Rice. That gig is gone. Her copper-gold hair spills down her back in a wild mane. Always slim, she’s gotten scrawny. If she can’t rustle food from the lockbox Bins before recyclers sell it to second-hand markets, she doesn’t eat. When the cuffs of her silk blouses fray, she cuts off the sleeves, layering on bits and pieces of patched clothes. She avoids her reflection most mornings because she doesn’t want to see the haunted expression in her own eyes.

Tweak it up, Carly! Spinner yells.

Saint Download’s armlets wriggle. One grasper pokes an electroneedle into the keyhole of the Bin’s lockbox, overriding the security code. The lid clicks open. Saint Download seizes a dipstick from the Bin’s corner, pries the Bin open.

Copbots screech around the corner at California Street, sideswiping the pickup truck. The locomotors jeer and rattle the chains cinching them to the truck’s flatbed. The copbots fan out, spit projectiles. The projectiles explode, ejecting a cyberweb, the steel strands of it gleaming in the cold morning sun. The cyberweb drops down around the bank teller’s shoulder ridges.

Green light again, and traffic races for a half-minute sprint. The school bus fender-butts a copbot, knocking it aside. The children cheer.

Carly crouches, rolls into oncoming traffic, which swerves around her without stopping. But the cyberweb catches her scuffed boot. Catches her, grips her. Damn! She struggles, kicking and twisting, The cyberweb pulls tighter, feeding her movements into its standalone software, countering every thrash by tightening the trap.

A copbot chugs up, synthy voice booming from its mouthplace. Hands up, you have five seconds to get your hands up . . .

Bye-bye boot.

Carly darts, leaping around a smart Harley-Davidson motorcycle that wolf-whistles through its tailpipe, a pedicab of gawking tourists drawn by the usual wizened peddler, a wind scooter with azure sails afloat in the sea breeze. She rolls to the opposite curb, crawls to Pr. Spinner and Saint Download.

In you go, cackles Saint Download, eyespots blinking in its pinball machine of a faceplace. Garbage in, garbage in.

Funny, Download, Carly says, sniffing at the ripe funk inside the Bin. Also, you’re buggy.

Do it, Carly Quester, Spinner urges. "And you shut your mouthpiece, Saint Download. She’s my flesh-and-blood."

The prober gives Carly a leg up, and she scrambles into the Bin. The lid clangs shut. She hears Saint Download’s electroneedle scrabble in the lockbox. Beep. She hears a click like doom sealing her fate, then hunkers down, crouching as still as she can.

The Bin smells of rotting vegetables and days-old fish, but contains no food bound for the fourth-hand markets. Only paper and wrappings, bound for end-product recyclers. Mega. What if the recyclers come, haul off the Bin, incinerate its contents without logging in types and quantities? It happens. Lockbox Bins are one way to dispose of all sorts of illicit things: corpses, toxic waste, criminal evidence. She fingers shredded paper. How loud will she have to scream before the recyclers hear her? Sometimes companies on the cheap take the audio chips out. The incinerators won’t hear a thing.

Yes, and what if Pr. Spinner deserts her, leaves the lid locked, and lumbers away, convinced by Saint Download that she’s better off without Carly, a flesh-and-blood on the run from Data Control? A renegade coordinate institutor, Saint Download is wanted by Data Control, too, for unspecified telespace crimes. Same as Carly and Pr. Spinner.

Spinner herself is hardly above suspicion. The perimeter prober is the last link in a long chain of AI entities that have ruined Carly’s career as a professional telelink mediator with Ava & Rice. The prober subjected Carly to the questionable and dangerous technique called probe therapy. Pr. Spinner has brought Carly to the brink of annihilation. To the brink of death.

Now the two AIs are spending way too much time together. It makes Carly nervous.

But in the end, Pr. Spinner didn’t betray Carly. Not since she and the prober discovered an archetype—the Arachne—in Carly’s telelink, shattered her perimeters, and pieced her back together again.

She hears their synthy voices chatting outside the Bin, can’t help but shiver. The authoritative copbot interrogates Pr. Spinner. A flesh-and-blood, officer? Grease my wheels, look around you, officer. The street is rotten with ‘em. Good ol’ Spin. Crackling with bafflement, the copbot questions Saint Download, who twitters and clicks like a tech-mech parrot. Well, all right. Carly gives the nasty little bot a couple of points for good behavior.

A knock on the lid, and the lid pops open. Fresh air, laced with gridlock fumes.

Teh! They’re gone, Carly Quester, Spinner says, fidgeting with her graspers. Her eyespots pulse. Saint Download cocks its faceplace at her curiously.

Carly climbs out of the Bin, drops down to the pavement. No fourth-hand food in there, you bucket of rust, just paper, she says to the coordinate institutor. The bot holds out her boot in one of its armlets. Thanks, Carly says, snapping the boot away, stepping into it. They take the bank teller? she asks Spinner.

Yes, indeed, they did.

Carly sighs. Hello, six thousand five, bye-bye fifteen hundred softbucks she worked long and hard for. No hope she’ll see the rest. She pockets the credit disk. Her last six thousand five hundred softbucks, if she can find any vendors who will trade bootleg credits at double and a half. She looks at the cars, bumper-to-bumper, radiators steaming, batteries shorting out. Human drivers faceless, anonymous, behind the windshields. I hate the freakin’ gridlock, she says. Let’s get out of here.

* * *

Carly trudges up Kearney Street, heading for the neighborhood called North Beach, with its fancy bars and grungy shock galleries, world-class eateries and sleazy strip joints, elegant condos and squat-a-week hotels. The scene is warming up, along with the morning sun stretching golden beams toward noon. Ten different styles of music blare, intoxicated people guffaw in the bars, cooking smells and marijuana smoke waft through the gridlock fumes. The mood of tinselly gaiety, of carefree sensuality nearly makes her sick. What right does anyone these days have to have fun?

The AI entities grind along the pavement behind her, wheels and foot rollers toiling up the hill. What a pair of rattletraps! She’s glad they keep their distance. She’s not sure she wants to be seen in public with either of them.

These days, they are everywhere. AI entities housed in standalone, fully mobile, robotic bodies. They’re as common as cars. Was there ever a time when there were no cars? When did people notice there were cars everywhere? Was there a moment when people realized there were too many cars. That cars dominated the landscape, blighted it? Or had no one noticed?

It’s like that with AIs, and within Carly’s short lifetime. Once artificial intelligence entities were confined to telespace. The sengines and traffic controllers, perimeter probers and monitors for access codes, coordinate institutors and industrialbots did their work in telespace. Maintaining the great comm systems, their synthy voices humming in the wires. Processing vast banks of data, invisibly. Now they stride across the real world everywhere. New generations of them—sleeker, smarter, faster, more humanoid—show up on the streets every day.

Carly turns west at the corner of Broadway. An old Chinese woman clad in the padded jacket, black pajamas, and rubber thongs her peasant ancestors generations ago would have worn, jabbers obscenities at an immaculate traffic controller who is keying in statistics onto its polished chrome chestboard. The traffic controller starts, turns its precise triangular faceplace, and beeps with polite modulation, Excuse me, madam.

Carly glances back. Pr. Spinner is bitching and moaning as usual about her lousy housing, Saint Download twitters and pings at the prober. For the thousandth time, Carly wonders whether she should dump Spinner, strike out on her own. And for the thousandth time, she decides no. For every deficiency she can name in the prober, she can think of a virtue, sometimes two. She needs good old Spin. At least for a little while longer.

She pauses, dizzy. Everything suddenly whirling. Sickness in her gut. She needs Spinner to see her through her recovery from cram.

Cram, cocaine, knockerblocker, barbiturates, blue moon, whiskey, marijuana, nicotine, caffeine, heroine—drugs are everywhere, too, like mobile AI entities and automobiles. Most drugs are legal and registered. You have to declare your habits, submit to regulations, pay steep user taxes. And cram? Cram isn’t on the registered list, but anyone can score it. A lot of pro linkers do. Cram gives link the edge, makes hypertime bearable, tweaks telespace. Till it hooks you and reels you in, flopping and gasping, and flings you out again to drown.

It was her old mentor, D. Wolfe, who showed how cram gave link the edge. Cram had killed Wolfe. Cram had nearly killed her.

Carly and cram are through. She doesn’t need cram for the edge anymore. She has something superior now. She has hyperlink capability.

She has the Arachne.

* * *

Things are jumping at the YinYang Club, but then things usually are. Above the purple-painted door, a holoid-threaded neoplastic bas-relief metamorphoses through all the positions of the Kama Sutra. Plum incense infused with opium smoke wafts through the air. Cambodian bells gong, while the latest trash rock blares over the sound system. Juiceheads shriek in the shock gallery in back. The noontime regulars are getting rowdy. The house bimbobot is hustling, dressed in a shabby tuxedo, a bowler hat, an elaborately curled mustache pasted on his/her faceplace.

You never been no pro-link mediator, sneers the drunk at the bar. He’s guzzling uncooked blue moon, straight up. His breath smells like a dirty drain.

Carly shrugs, sipping house wine. Sashi, the star stripper of the YinYang Club, is tending bar before her set. Her face sparkles with aquamarine jewel-powders. Sashi doesn’t take bootleg softbucks, but she gives Carly wine when the boss isn’t around and puts her tab on an unmarked account when he is. Sashi’s only problem is that she hates tending bar. Sashi would rather dance.

Can’t back it up, huh? persists the drunk, If you’re some kinda hotshot pro linker, where’s your neckjack, huh?

Carly smiles, but her eyes are cold. When she was a pro linker, she would have never spoken to a creep like this, let alone sat next to him at a bar. But his expensive, if ill-cut, suit cabled with biofeed and leather shoes humming with air cushions means he may have a credit disk or two in his pockets. Maybe registered drugs, unthreaded money. Loot and trade with no identification tracing the user every time value changes hands. That’s one trick to surviving on the street without Data Control finding her and rounding her up before she can get her hyperlink in shape. Not an easy trick. The exchange of any legal value is accounted for, traced, and regulated down to the last obsessive softbuck.

Wanna see?she whispers. The drunk practically drools. Sashi rolls her eyes. Carly winks. Help yourself, she says to the drunk. Take a look.

She scoops her hair aside, bends over his lap, bares her neck. The cortical wiring and the housing are clean, her flesh chiseled like carved marble.

The drunk gawks. Sashi points out features of the morphing, an anatomical tour guide. See, that’s the hardware goes right into her skull, innit purty? An’ that’s the wetware that goes down her spine.

Carly slides a slim hand into his pocket. Finds a credit disk, a billfold, some other things she can’t identify. She leaves the tiny cube containing his travel plans, but palms the rest into her own pocket.

I’ll be gob-swapped, says the drunk, flinging another shot of blue moon into the back of his throat. Carly doesn’t know if Sashi spiked it or if the drunk has reached his limit—which isn’t hard with uncooked blue moon—but he slumps over the bar and passes out.

A bouncer chatting with Pr. Spinner and Saint Download slides over, dumps the drunk in its cart, navigates him out the door of the YinYang Club. The bouncer piles him into a smart taxi on Broadway. The taxi scans his travel plans, speeds away.

Sashi shakes her head. You crazy, girl. Lucky he’s mooned. Won’t remember a thing. Wake up at his next hotel, blame the taxi.

Carly pulls out five hundred in unthreaded bills, three credit disks, five joints of Acapulco Gold, a smart Cross pen, and a baggie of chocolate-covered Columbian coffee beans. Shame strikes her. Guilt tugs at her conscience. Humiliation washes over her. Carly Quester, the fast-track kid, remorphed at five years old, schooled and trained for twenty years. On her way to a legitimate telespace career, a professional position, prospective wealth neatly accounted for. Prestige. Privilege. All that.

And she’s picking pockets of drunks in a Broadway bar?

What would her father, Sam Quester, think? A vision of him, long dead, a sight still painful to her, rises up before her eyes. His telelink stolen in a recreational link. He’d wanted the best for her. Sacrificed for her.

She tosses a credit disk at Sashi. Good citizen that I am. Tosses a hundred-dollar bill over the bar, too.