Farewell Horizontal

nightmares, where there was no sign of motion at all. He filled his lungs, nostrils stinging with the chill air, and reached out for another handhold.

He heard the whistle of the cable reeling out before it hit him. Across the shoulderblades, knocking him flat up against the wall – then he was jerked back by an arm around his throat.

“Don’t move, sucker.” The voice snarled at his ear. A woman’s voice; he’d heard it before. Something pointed dug through his jacket toward his ribs. The sensation ended, simultaneous with the appearance of a shining knifeblade close to his face. “Get the picture? Be smart.”

The woman shifted her weight off his back. He turned his head to look at her.

She sat in a loop knotted in the cable, dangling alongside him. A kid, younger than he, with dark hair cropped short. She looked him over, her level gaze traveling from his boots upward.

“You’re not a circuit rider.” She used the point of the knife to scratch the side of her face. “I can tell. You should be over on the other side. What’re you doing here?”

The voice that had broken in on his hollow-time call; now confronting him in the flesh. “You know, you don’t need to wave that thing around.” The blade annoyed him. “You want to know something, you can just ask.”

She smiled and tucked the knife into her belt. “I thought you were one of that D:Fex bunch. I’ve got it in for ’em.” She leaned back against the wall. “So what’s the deal – you trying to get back over to the morningside? Is that it?”

“You’ve heard about me?”

The woman shook her head. “What you people do is no concern of mine. I’ve got other business to take care of. I wouldn’t’ve come around here at all if you hadn’t been using part of my network.”

“Your network?” He remembered some of the things she’d said before, when she’d just been a voice on the line. “Was that that M something or other?”

“M:Pulse. Yeah, that’s it.”

“So you’re, uh, Felonious.”

“Felony. Sometimes; most of the time, actually. When I’m not something else.”

Axxter glanced up the wall, along the length of the cable. He could see where it emerged from a peeled-back section of the wall, just large enough for someone to wriggle through. Work on this one – anybody who had working knowledge of things like that was worth cultivating.

“You’re a line-ghost?”

“‘Line-ghost’ – give me a break.” She looked at him disgustedly. “Line-ghosts are just phenomena, like static or something. They’re just echoes on the wire. You should be able to tell the difference between a ghost and a circuit rider.”

“Oh.” He nodded. “So, uh, what’s a circuit rider?”

A pitying smile. “Circuit riders are people like me, people who can do things. Do things with the wires, man. We’re into the systems. People like you, you make a call, you go over the wire, through the grid, little dot-dot-dots moving along. But you’re like a rat that’s got its way through the maze memorized; all you see are the little walls in front of your rat nose. The trick is to get above the maze, get your hands on it, make it do what you want.”

“I get you.” He couldn’t hide his disappointment. “You mean phone phreaking. Hacking and stuff.”

“Hey, fuck you, man.” Felony seemed genuinely offended. “Don’t give me that. That’s ancient stuff – people were doing that shit before the War. Those punks, that D:Fex bunch and the other network families, they can waste their time that way if they want to; gaming each other and breaking into restricted access files and kid shit like that. I’ve got more important business to take care of. I’ve got territory.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Keep her talking.

“I’ll tell you what it means. It means I don’t have to band together with a bunch of other circuit riders, just to have somebody to watch my ass while I’m out working the wires. M:Pulse is a lone-wolf network, fella; it’s nobody but me.” A broad smile accompanied the swagger in her voice. “I got circuits that nobody can get on except me. That was why I got so pissed when I found you on that line, making your call. I don’t handle encroachment well, it just burns me up, man. Those wires are mine.”

He figured she was referring to some part of the phone grid running through the building. Out here, in the middle of nowhere. “So what makes them yours? Just because nobody else uses them?”

Felony shook her head, still smiling. “No, man, it’s more than that; a lot more. I’ve cracked the interface; I was born able to do it, I just had to learn how much I could do. And I can do anything on the wires. I mean, anybody can get into the wires – that’s what having a terminal inside your head is all about. The trick is to get back out and come up inside somebody else’s head. When you can do that, there ain’t shit that can stop you.”

She really was just a kid, he realized. Easy enough to bait her into bragging about stuff like that. That was what living on ‘the wires,’ as she put it, spending your whole existence messing about inside a maze of electronic circuits, did to you. Nothing but games, a sealed Peter Pan existence. Everybody, on the vertical or the horizontal, knew of that little world just on the other side of the phone. You could dabble your toe in it easily enough – there was always a standing invitation to ‘come in and play,’ more kid mentality – with the accompanying risk of getting your whole head sucked in. And spending the rest of your life there, your body a vestigial organ in reality, the real you stripped down to the infantile wiggle on the circuits, looking for fun among the electrons.

“That’s the trick, huh?” It sounded like some nutball thing; she might be crazy. “How do you do something like that?” He had to find out what he could from her – like her access under the building’s surface, and other handy stuff – and get moving again.

She looked smug, pleased with herself. “I just do it. The trick is to get somebody up close enough to a jack I’ve got exclusive control of, so I can catch ’em. Like this body.” She pressed her thumb against her breastbone. “This ain’t mine. Well, it is now, but it’s not the one I started out with. I got several of ’em, about a dozen, all stashed in various places around the building. It keeps me hopping, making the rounds and taking care of them all; they gotta be fed and stuff. This one’s the only eveningsider I got. It took a long time to catch her; I used some old pre-War music I got out of an archive I broke open. I looped it and kept it playing from a jack I found over here that had an audio output; must’ve been part of some old public-address system. I just hung around for days, lurking in the wire, waiting for one of ’em to come along, hear the music, and lean up close to the jack. I’d just about given up, when this one wandered by. Soon as she had her head up close, I made the jump, and zap, she was mine.”

Weird shit, whether it was true or not. Talking about the leap from being a cold signal on a wire into warm, living flesh. If she could do that… Good thing it was impossible. He didn’t want to let on that that was what he thought. “What happened to her? The person who used to be inside the body?”

Felony shrugged. “Died, I guess. You take over somebody else’s body, you gotta spend a little time getting control, rooting ’em out. Then they just aren’t there anymore.”

“Yeah, but a dozen of them? What do you need so many for?”

“I told you – I’m a loner. I don’t need a bunch of other circuit riders tagging along, cramping my action. This way, I got physical control of the jacks I use, plus some great big sections of the wire itself, whole subnets. I can cut ’em in and out of the grid whenever I want, so none of those little jerks can get into ’em when I’m not looking. If I tried to do that with just one body, I’d be hiking my ass all over this damn building. Twelve bodies, in twelve locations, I can just zip from one to the other, pop in as long as I need to do my housekeeping, and split to the next one. Cuts the travel time down to nothing, so I got more time to do what I want.” Her smile went wicked.

“Yeah, I bet.” The surreal nature of the conversation finally seeped in. Hanging on the wall a million miles from home, with all sorts of bad news hot on his tail, having a chat with some loony girl with the notion that she could pop in and out of bodies like changing her clothes. The world had assumed this quality since he’d fallen through the clouds. Maybe I never came back up. The usual comforting notion, assumed when things got too strange: Maybe I’m still falling, dreaming in the bed of air. He opened his eyes and the woman was still there.

“I suppose… you’re going to take me over now. Add my body to your collection. Is that it?”

She looked at him scornfully. “Why would I want you? Don’t flatter yourself. I already got one body, this one, right here in this locale. Another one would be just something else I’d have to look after. Besides, I got my standards. If they aren’t young and in good shape – better than you – and female, then I’m not much interested.