andmotion record consisting of snippets of various concert performances and interviews.
One of these, which appeared in the capsule only as a soundbyte over some stills-Bane's voice saying, 'My goal is to get Hell to pay me royalties'-caught Charlie's attention, if only because it was a quote he had heard several times recently, in the brief flow of news following the most recent double suicide, and never in context. He got up, went over to the window, and poked the still then showing with his finger. The computer said, 'Holding. What would you like me to do?'
'Expand that audio clip. Is there imagery to go with it?'
'Yes. Expanding-'
Shortly Charlie found himself looking at a full-virtual version of the infamous Josh Billings interview on CCNet. There Joey Bane sat, at ease and dressed all in black, in the well-known and instantly recognizable minimalist set, looking relaxed and amused as the famous interviewer tried, unsuccessfully, to get him to say something self- incriminating. Charlie stood a few feet away, his arms folded, and watched it.
'Look,' Bane was saying to Billings's shocked face, 'you should stop being so hypocritical about it. There's not a being on this planet who hasn't reflected on the cruelty and pain of life, the unfairness of it. Some of the greatest literature of every age has dwelt on the problem. But nowadays, if we give any consideration to it at all, we're so terrified of confronting the issue directly that we do it in secret. There's no consensus that it's all right to think these kind of thoughts anymore. In fact, nowadays if you talk about death or pain, people almost immediately start to think you're morbid, and if you talk about it frequently, they're likely to try to have you hospitalized. Is that fair? Is that sensible? These days we raise our kids on fairy tales from two centuries ago, for pity's sake, and suggest to them during the most impressionable part of their lives that the most they're going to have to worry about in life is wolves trying to steal their picnic baskets. When they come to you with their real concerns-that people suffer and die unfairly, and that the whole world is essentially cruel and unfair, and living in its hurts, we try to pretend it isn't so, we get uncomfortable, we turn away and do anything we can to avoid the subject. We don't have answers. Neither do our kids. If they're lucky they'll grow up and find some answers that we haven't seen… but not telling them the truth about the world, the Bad News, in my opinion predisposes them to the kind of despair that causes people to check out early. In my site, at least, kids get told the truth. Yes, the world stinks! What you do about it, that's your business. But at least there's a place for them to express their anger, which is a luxury a lot of them don't have anymore in our increasingly nicey-nice culture, where expressing an antisocial idea 'inappropriately,' or in front of the wrong people, can get you taken away from your parents indefinitely by some meddling social worker. In my place kids can see the truth, see the pain, and also see what happens to those who don't handle that anger right, who seal it over until it breaks out. You think I condone violence or crime or hatred? No way. But there's a lot of all those things out there, and pretending they're not isn't going to make them go away. I think we help kids by at least preparing them for the idea that the world stinks, so that when their folks finally let them out of the overprotected hothouse environment that the modern home has become, they're ready for what they're going to see when they're on their own when Mommy and Daddy aren't holding their hands anymore. And that's where a lot of the resistance to our site is coming from, from outraged mommies and daddies who're ticked because we're telling their little darlings the truth they never had the nerve or the brains to tell them themselves… '
It went on like that, nearly half an hour during which poor Billings barely had room to get a word in edgewise. Perhaps when he offered Bane the interview time, he hadn't thought through what it would mean to offer virttime to a man with the aerobic advantages produced by spending hours every night screaming and singing nonstop on stages real or virtual all around the planet. Only once did Bane pause, when Billings managed to say, 'And over your gates, where it says 'Abandon hope…. isn't that crime? Plagiarism?'
'Nope,' Bane said cheerfully. 'It was lying around in the public domain, and no one was using it. I trademarked it. My goal is to make Hell pay me royalties.'
Having come to the soundbyte itself, the image froze on the confident, arrogant face, and Charlie sat there looking at it for a while, thinking.
The folks accusing this guy of being evil, he thought, are wrong. He's not, really. Or at least I don't think he is.
But still… something's going on at his site to cause it to act as a 'core' for these suicides.
Now all I want to know is: what?
Charlie stood there and brooded for a moment. The man himself might not mean anyone any harm, but there was always the possibility that someone in his organization did. That someone was either trying to sabotage Deathworld by causing these suicides… or was running some other agenda, something a lot more obscure.
After a moment Charlie sighed. If that was the case, the odds of him ever finding out about it were minuscule. Besides, he thought, remember `Occam's Razor.' Don't go introducing possibilities into the equation out of nowhere. Deal with the ones you have evidence for, before starting to make things up.
Charlie turned away from Joey Bane, frozen there in his chair, and frowned at the polished wood floor of the old operating theater as he walked among the 'exhibits.' And evidence is the problem. I don't have enough to come to any conclusions. For a good diagnosis, you need data clinical data on what happened to these people.
I could ask Captain Winters… But the information Charlie needed was medical. If it was in the Net Force files at all-which it might not be-it was almost certainly inaccessible under seal of confidentiality.
If there were some other way to get at it…
He thought about that. Violating confidentiality… But that's not what I would be doing if I just looked at data like that illegally, Charlie thought. If I told anyone else about what I found, yes, then it would be. But this isn't about spreading the information around. It's about finding out what really happened. Because I don't think anyone else has yet…
Charlie sat down on one of the 'ringside' benches and looked across at the frozen image of Joey Bane. And if someone doesn't find out what did happen, it leaves us wide open for it to happen all over again…
He swallowed, thinking of Nick. Granted, Nick wasn't showing any signs of being suicidal that Charlie could detect…
But then neither were these other kids, he thought. He got up and walked over to the various windows shoWing the excerpted stories of the earlier suicides, hanging there in the air. He poked a finger into one window, then another, starting their text scrolling by. The second one had a history of depression. But all the rest of them seemed to take everybody by surprise…
'News alert.'
Charlie glanced up at that. 'Whatcha got?' he said to the workspace management system.
'You asked to be alerted of any news story containing the following term: Deathworld.'
'Got something new? Yeah, play it.'
Off to one side, in the few open spaces of floor left down in the 'pit' at the moment, a newsman sitting behind a desk appeared, with his mouth open, frozen. 'Playing content,' the program said. 'Source: FTNet nightly Net-business news bulletin, today, 1810 GMT-'
The clip started moving. '-ther news, Net host provider SourceStream today published weekly stats which are good news for shareholders, if a little on the macabre side,' said the newsman. 'Net access and revenue figures for the controversial Net environment `Deathworld,' which hosts at SourceStream, are up nearly twenty percent from the last half-month reporting period. SourceStream spokesperson Wik Nellis declined to speculate on the sudden leap in the site's popularity, but other industry sources suspect that the cause is the spate of recent suicides which have attracted unwelcome attention from Net-content watchdog groups and law-enforcement agencies in various jurisdictions. Walk-throughs at the `morbo-jazz' site are up sharply, with SourceStream again declining to confirm the exact numbers, but industry rivals suggest that the publicity may have attracted as many as five million new users to the site, with a potential revenue injection of as much as twenty million dollars in the past two weeks. Meanwhile, the merger of BBC with WOLTime has been-'
The clip froze again. Charlie stood there looking at it, slightly disgusted. 'Sick,' he said softly. That these people should be making more money off the fact that their users had been killing themselves-
Charlie made a face. Then he sighed. It probably wasn't their fault. But it annoyed him nonetheless.
'Save that,' he said to the computer.
'Done,' it said as he turned his back on the clip and looked at the other pieces of information littering the place, and strolled among them, trying to think. But a most paranoid idea occurred to Charlie suddenly, so awful that it stopped him dead in his tracks. Supposing that peo- ple at Deathworld were causing people to kill themselves in order to drive the user stats and revenue up?
