but a triple set of locks did. The arrangement was secure enough to let the decker escape should anyone try to force his way through.
'Good afternoon, Neko,' a pleasant but androgynous voice said from the monitor. 'Your sidecar's ready.''
Neko turned and found the screen still dark, but he spoke to the device anyway. 'Good afternoon, Chromium.'
'Hey, if we're riding together, you may as well call me Jenny. That Chromium stuff is just for the shifty suits.' 'Very well then, Jenny.' Chromium might be a name she used with the suits, but she still didn't trust him enough to meet him face to face. She was just being prudent. He didn't mind: most deckers weren't much to look at anyway. 'Is everything ready?'
'Hot-wired and revved. Lay your bottom on the seat, pop on the top, and we'll fly.' 'A moment, please.'
He prowled around the room, placing sensors in advantageous positions. The helmet would blind him to the room, and the sounds transmitted through it might overwhelm his natural hearing. Since he did not wish to be surprised, the sensors were necessary to warn him of any intrusion. Jenny would be watching his precautions through a concealed video pickup, but that didn't matter. She would have to understand that he also had to exercise prudence. Satisfied that he would have notice of anyone entering the room, he settled into the chair and lifted the helmet.
It was light for its size, all plastic and composite material. The smooth outer shell covered a tangle of tiny wires and circuitry chips. Before trying it on Neko adjusted the inner headband, but then he had to take it off again and adjust it once more before it sat properly on his head. He felt the pinpricks of the neuro-sensor rods and saw the green LED register proper contact. Light leaked up from beneath the eyeshield, causing the innards of the helmet to glimmer.
'Ready,' he announced, then was swirled away into blackness, to be blown at hurricane speed through a ring of lights and blasted into a galaxy of stars. Below him, the Matrix unfolded in all its neon glory. His viewpoint hung suspended over a nighttime city, the like of which had never been seen on the earth. Giant icons in a bewildering variety of shapes and colors marked the cyberspace locations of the megacorps, and towered over the lesser images representing the computer systems of smaller companies. Flitting pulses of
light whipped across the dark space, cars of data on benighted datapath roads. His ears roared with the rushing wind of the silence.
'Want to see what you look like?' Curious as always, Neko replied, 'Can you do that?'
'Sure. I'll switch the feed to your screen over to the image monitor.'
The sparkling glory of the Matrix winked out, replaced by a plain gray field. In the middle of the endless gray stood a curvaceous chrome biker girl in shiny black leathers. A chrome cat sat on her right shoulder like a modern-age familiar. 'You like?'
'Appropriate,' Neko murmured. The Matrix returned, and Neko's viewpoint now included the biker girl's spun- silver hair. He tried looking down to see his own chrome paws, but found that he could not. His viewpoint was slaved to that of the decker. Her hair remained as a visual reminder that he was there only as an observer. 'Where to?' Jenny asked.
'Let's start with double-checking some of the earlier data.'
'Don't trust me?'
'It's not that. There are some ramifications in the Laverty files that I'd like to investigate.' 'Chilled enough. Let's fly.' They did, soaring above the Seattle Matrix construct. With a dizzying shift in perspective, they dove, pulling out to whip along a datapath. They screamed along for barely a second before the Matrix winked off and then on again. As they rose up from the datapath, Neko could see that the Matrix landscape had changed. The Aztechnology pyramid, so prominent a moment before, was nowhere to be seen. Some of the others were still there, but seemed changed in size.
New icons had appeared, among them a cluster of crystalline structures that looked like glittering snow- flakes.
'They look like ice.'
'And ice they are,' Jenny confirmed. 'IC-type ice, intrusion countermeasures. The kind of ice that'll burn you if you touch it the wrong way.''
'But it's so beautiful.'
'Sure is.'. 'We're moving toward them.'
'That's were you wanted to go. Second one to the right is Laverty's.'
'Then these are the council's data systems.'
'Fast boy.'
They slid around the edges of the first iceflake and dropped down toward the second. Their point of view continued down, sliding around the major axes and gliding past the interwoven sub-branches, until the multifaceted arms of the structure stretched over them. Neko expected to slip into shadow until he remembered that the only shadows in the Matrix were the ones that had been designed into someone's interface. They halted before one of the lowest arms. It was plain compared to most they had passed.
'Laverty's public office system,' Jenny said.
Then they were inside. It seemed like they were standing inside a glacier, but no earthly glacier had ever been composed of lattice walls. A pair of black-gloved hands appeared before Neko. The hands stripped off their gloves and flexed long, tapered fingers of chrome.
'Pick and choose, Neko. The files look clean.'
'Let's start with a correlation of multiple locations for public activities by anyone named Laverty.'
'You ain't got the bucks and I ain't got the time for that.'
'Can you confine it to the last hundred years and weed out anyone with no connection to the old United States or the Tir?'
'Sure. That narrows it down some, but it's still big.'
Neko frowned. 'So ka. Then start with Scan Laverty himself. Where does he spend most of his public time? Only pull locations he's visited more than once in a year or where he has a business interest.' 'Null perspiration.'
A scrolling list of locations superimposed itself over Neko's view of the crystalline lattice. With only a few exceptions, all of Laverty's public appearances were in Australia, England, Ireland, the former United States of America, and the former Dominion of Canada. 'What about the business interests?' 'Doesn't have any direct connections,' Jenny said. 'Supports a lot of charity organizations, though.' 'Same places?'
After a moment, Jenny said, 'Yeah.' 'What kinds of charities?' 'See and learn, curious cat.' Flashes of news reports replaced the Matrix imagery. They flew by too fast to absorb, but Neko got a sense of Laverty's involvements. Disaster relief, medical charities, work with the underprivileged, relief for the SINless. It all had a curious ring. The man had seemed too wise to the ways of the shadows to be a squeaky-clean philanthropist.
'Jenny?' The images stopped. 'This Xavier Foundation shows up a lot. Let's look into that.' 'It's guarded.'
Instantly suspicious. Neko asked, 'Black ice?' 'Naw, just shades of gray.' 'Then let's start with the public stuff.' 'Okay. I'll patch through to the public base.' She was as good as her word, and soon Neko was able to scan whatever he wanted to see in the public records of the Foundation. And what he saw was most interesting. The organization had been founded in the late twentieth century by a man of unknown age, but described as being in his twenties. That man would be in his eighties today. He was something of a recluse, understandable for one described as the heir to an unspecified fortune. There was one picture, taken in connection with the opening of a hospital in Portland, Oregon, sometime around the turn of the century. Though originally a photograph, the image had long since been rendered into a datapic. The most curious thing was that this young man, also named Laverty, looked exactly like the red-haired elf Neko had met. No older, no younger. Of course, the man in the picture didn't have pointed ears; or rather, those ears didn't show, being covered by beautifully coifed hair. The resemblance was too close to be father and son, unless the son had had reconstructive surgery. An unlikely possibility.
Answers always led to more questions. Neko smiled. That was how he liked it. Before the Awakening, this Laverty had run an operation that had sponsored many 'special children.'
'Jenny, I think we have to look deeper into this operation.'
'You think you got something?'
'Let's see, shall we?'
