Deathworld Read online

  “You see the problem?” Winters said. “Let me whittle it down a little, since our viewpoint at the moment should probably stay strictly jurisdictional.” The number in the window changed, grew smaller. “On this continent alone, there are a hundred and eighty million people using the Net right this moment. So, consider the statistics. Do you know how often someone dies in North America? Whether they’re on the Net or not? From all causes.”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Nineteen per minute,” Winters said. “That’s an average, of course. You get statistical clusters when there are a lot more deaths than that, and statistical ‘dry spots’ when there are many fewer. On the same average about fifteen children are born per minute … with the same kind of ‘real-time’ variation on the average. But considering that at peak times maybe half the total population might be on the Net, when their particular moment to die comes along-” He raised his eyebrows. “You can see how we get small clusters of numbers that seem to mean something, but don’t necessarily. It tends to make us cautious about chasing patterns that almost inevitably turn out not to be patterns at all. And when you extend the statistical sampling to include the rest of the planet-you see how deceptive the numbers can become.”

  Charlie nodded.

  Winters sighed and leaned back again. “We only have so big a budget,” he said. “And there are a lot of people who watch very carefully how we use it. So Net Force has to be very careful of how we chase after data. Granted, we provide an important service. But no one likes a government agency that starts thinking itself too important to use its budget wisely. The day we stop producing results to match our output of funds …” He shrugged. “That day we, and the whole Net environment in our jurisdiction, are in big trouble.”

  “I see,” Charlie said.

  Winters paused as a small knocking sound came from the window, specifically, from the peanut feeder, where a small brown bird had just alighted. This in itself was nothing unusual, but the bird immediately picked up a peanut from the feeder, dropped it four stories, then picked up another one, and dropped that, and picked up another one, and dropped that …

  “Now, stop that,” Winters said. He turned, pulled up the venetian blinds, and tapped sharply on the window. “These guys, you give them all the food they can use, and what happens? They start to get picky. You! Yeah, it’s you I’m talking to! Cut it out!”

  He tapped on the window a few more times. The bird pointedly picked out two more peanuts, dropped them, and finally selected a third and flew away with it.

  “I swear,” Winters muttered, “they think I’m a charity.” He sighed and turned back to Charlie.

  “All right,” he said. “If you find anything worth our attention, you’ll let me know, of course. But you really should examine the possibility that your friend has something else going on in his life at this point which is making Deathworld look like an attractive alternative to physical reality. There are enough things on the Net that people find useful for that kind of purpose.”

  Charlie nodded. “I’m looking into it,” he said. “But I really don’t think that’s it.”

  Winters regarded him with an expression that was hard for Charlie to understand, until he spoke. “Certainty,” he said, and the tone was approving … in a way. “It’s a wonderful thing to be so sure of your results that you’ll discuss them with a superior before you produce the goods.”

  Charlie swallowed, and hoped it didn’t show. “I’m pretty sure,” Charlie said.

  Winters sat quiet for a moment. “Good,” he said. “Then go do some discovery, and report to me when you think you’ve found out everything you’re going to find. If nothing else, what you turn up, if it’s anything germane, can be appended to our master file. Data is always good, even if it’s just deep background.”

  “All right,” Charlie said. He got up.

  Winters stopped him in his tracks with a dark look. “And Charlie-one thing. Any evidence you find that suggests anything like conspiracy, or anything else obviously illegal-I want to hear about it pronto. Don’t get in over your head.”

  “Right, Mr. Winters,” Charlie said, sweating again.. “Right. So get out of here and get to class.”

  Charlie started to get.

  “Oh, and Charlie-”

  He stopped and looked over his shoulder. Winters was half turned to bang on the window glass again, for the brown bird was back, chucking peanuts out of it, four stories down, at about a peanut per second. “One of the better uses for calculus, I’m told, is in the design of custom in-bone surgical prostheses. Check it out.”

  Charlie grinned. Does that man read minds? Or just faces?.

  He headed back to his workspace in a hurry to get ready for school … though school was now the last thing on his mind.

  Chapter 4

  That afternoon at Bradford Academy, Charlie saw Nick at lunch, long enough to sit down next to him and spend twenty minutes or so there, but not long enough to have any decent conversation with him, for Nick was surrounded at his table by other kids who knew him, all of them plying him with questions about Deathworld and the Seventh Circle. Nick was positively smirking with glee, telling them about it in hints and riddles, mostly, and pausing to play the occasional scrap of a legally “lifted” audio track from the virtual experience on his pocket HardB ard.

  Charlie wasn’t all that interested in the music. It sounded too much like unadulterated screaming to him, the vocals shrieking so relentlessly that it was hard even to make out the instrumentals, mostly blaring stuff in electrohorn and amplified lute so riddled with feedback that you could hardly tell what key it was in. What did concern him was Nick. His buddy was absolutely holding center court, and plainly enjoying it. A lot of the other students had heard about the suicides, and many of their parents had told them to stay out of Deathworld. A few, whose parents hadn’t been concerned, had ventured in and then become seriously frustrated by the challenges of just the first level. All of them were pumping Nick for information about level one, or asking him if he knew any of the kids who’d killed themselves, or if he wasn’t worried about getting in more trouble-but Nick was laughing it all off as if it was minor stuff.

  Finally the crowd thinned briefly, and Charlie, who had actually had to stand and wait with his lunch tray until a seat opened up a few spaces down the table, was finally able to lean over and say, “Nick, you okay?”

  “Huh?” Nick looked at him strangely. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Your folks just yanked your circuitry,” Charlie said. “Most of us might find that a little annoying.”

  Nick frowned. “It won’t last forever,” he said. “Besides, I’m getting a job lined up for over the summer… . I’ll be able to pay for my own access time, and they won’t be able to stand over me and say what I should do and what I shouldn’t.”

  This made Charlie blink slightly. Nick was not exactly someone he would have categorized as the rebellious type … but all of a sudden all kinds of personality quirks that Charlie hadn’t noticed before seemed to be popping out. Could it just be some developmental thing? Charlie wondered. Kind of a stage? People get those… .

  “Besides,” Nick said to him, looking a little ways across the room, “there’s no point in assuming my folks are going to just let this drop, even after I’ve paid the bill off.” And abruptly he looked depressed. His whole face sagged out of shape. “They stink, just like everything else, and if they don’t give me trouble about this, they’ll find something else pretty quick. About time I started pulling back a little, letting them realize that they don’t get to say what kinds of things I enjoy, or get to run my whole life until there’s none of it that feels worth living. Soon enough they won’t be able to run any of my life, anyhow.”

  Charlie opened his mouth to start to say that whatever Nick’s folks did, they didn’t particularly stink. They were certainly no worse than his. And there was something slightly unnerving about the phrasing of that last line, when it came out of som
ebody wearing that profoundly depressed expression. But then Nick’s face brightened up again, just as if someone had thrown a switch, and he said, “Anyway, did you hear the lifts I got?”

  “Uh, it was hard not to hear them. The guy’s voice is, uh-”

  “Staggering, isn’t it? Wait till you hear the stuff I bring back later in the week. I’m gonna make Seventh in a matter of hours, and there’s a whole bunch of new stuff down there, really hard-edged.” Nick grinned, a rather feral look. “And I already got a hint about some of it.” He nudged Charlie conspiratorially with one elbow. “You know what the theme is down there?”

  “No.”

  ” ‘Strung Out.’ “

  Nick laughed, a laugh that almost sounded like his usual self. “Charlie, you’re so deadpan sometimes, they could make coffins out of you. `Strung-‘ get it?” And he made a gesture above his head like someone pulling a noose tight, and crossed his eyes and stuck his tongue out, and made a “gack” noise.

  Charlie blinked.

  “Hey, Nicky,” one of the other kids said from the group gathered around his HardBard, “the thing’s stopped playing.”

  “Huh? Oh, that’s the copy-defeat, it wants me touching it every so often-”

  He scrambled up from the table and went over to them, leaving Charlie staring, somewhat bemused, at a cold cheeseburger. Then the “tone” sounded, a siren-bleat that was a five-minute warning of the approach of the next class period, and soon Nick had vanished, with everyone else. Charlie got up and ditched his tray in the recycler, and went off to his physics class. He got 97 percent on the physics paper he had turned in that morning, an occurrence that normally would have caused him either to do handstands or call the media. But by then, and even several hours later as he waited for the light-rail tram home from school, Charlie was feeling rather grim.

  There was no sign of Nick at the school tram stop, at the time they usually met there to share the first part of their respective rides home. He might have caught an earlier one, Charlie thought. Or else he’s gone a different way. Maybe caught the bus around the corner, up to the Square, where his new access is.

  Doesn’t mean anything’s really wrong.

  But Charlie was finding that hard to believe.

  And what if the problem’s actually at my end? Charlie thought, as the tram swung around the corner toward the little plaza that was nearest his house. It wasn’t a pleasant idea. Could it be that I just don’t know my best friend as well as I thought I did?

  Charlie got off the tram at his stop and plodded down the street, for once completely unmoved by the scents drifting out of the neighborhood pizzeria, and turned the corner into his street. And maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe it’s nothing. He’s been stressed. I’ve been real busy… .

  But that sudden look of depression that had taken possession of Nick’s face was like nothing Charlie had seen before. He couldn’t get it out of his head, nor could he stop thinking about the way it had come and gone like something turned on and off with a switch. As Charlie went up the front steps and let himself in, he realized he was more worried now than he had been before he talked to Winters.

  His folks were out, as he’d known they would be. His mom was going to be coming in later than usual because of her in-service, and his dad was still at the slipped-disk seminar. Charlie rooted around in the freezer for a burrito, put it in the oven, waited thirty seconds for the “ding,”

  put the thing on a plate, and ingested it at high speed, thinking. You need to get a handle on this, he told himself sternly. You need to put Nick aside and concentrate on your research.

  Yeah, sure.

  Nonetheless, Charlie sat down at the table, where the “newspaper” still sat, and pulled over a pencil and a scratchpad. “Whether you’re going to crack someone’s chest or paint a wall,” his father always said-the last time, ruefully scraping the last teaspoonful out of a container of spackle-“always make a plan. It saves you time, it breeds more useful ideas, and it keeps you from looking stupid later.”

  Charlie scribbled on the pad for a few minutes. Having filled one page of it, Charlie paused, wondering one more time if all this was overreaction. Might be able to get through to him now-

  He dropped his pencil and trotted upstairs to the den, sat down in the implant chair, lined up his implant with the server, and closed his eyes. A little shiver down the nerves, like a shiver of cold, but without having anything to do with temperature, and Charlie was standing in his workspace. Gaslights were lit around the walls of the oval room, producing the usual faint smoky/chemical smell. It was ten in the evening in London, and outside he could hear people making their way to the opera through the crowded eighteenth-century streets.

  Charlie stood there looking around him. There were e-mails hanging there in the air over the worktable, bobbing gently up and down, but none of them were vibrating or bouncing around in the way Charlie had programmed his system to use when a message was urgent. He went over to the worktable, touched one of the e-mails. The air lit with its transmission information and source. TAAJ GREEN-Nice to hear from her, but it could wait. He touched another of the little spheres floating there, and it lit from within with a blue glow. Next to it a man appeared, saying, “Tired of fast food? Looking for something better in regional cuisine? Come to Georgetown’s newest-”

  Charlie grimaced, grabbed the spammy little mail-sphere out of the air, dropped it on the floor, and stepped on it. It vanished with a satisfying crunch, and the man vanished as well, making a digitally strangled noise.

  He sighed, looked around him. “Nick?” Charlie said.

  “Making that connection for you now,” Charlie’s system said. “Access is open.”

  “All right-” He went over to the doorway that he used for access, and stuck his head through. But on the other side was nothing but the plain glowing whiteness he had seen before. There, sitting in the midst of it, was the Eames chair, and some mail-solids spinning unanswered in the air, but no sign of Nick.

  He went back into his own space and said to his workspace, “Conditional instruction.”

  “Ready,” the workspace maintenance program said. “State the conditions.”

  “If Nick Melchior calls, e-mails, or shouts for me,” Charlie said, “call the house comms number until 2300 hours. Implement immediately.”

  “Conditional instruction saved. Implementing now.” “Thanks.” Charlie closed his eyes and told his link through the

  implant to undo itself. With that slight shiver, he was back in afternoon light, in the den again.

  With a frown, Charlie went downstairs, sat down at the table, and once more started making notes on the scratch-pad. Soon he’d filled a page, and then another. He was more worried about Nick than he had been on the way home. Afternoon was shading toward dusk when he looked up again at a sound from down the hall.

  “Charlie?”

  “Down here, Mom,” he said, looking with surprise at the pages of notes. His mom-small and dark and petite in her “formal” whites, which she didn’t normally wear at work when doing psych-came strolling in, dropped some textbooks and her computer/workpad on the table, and draped her pink sweater over the chair at the table’s other end. “You have anything to eat, sweetheart?” she said.

  “Uh, yeah.”

  She opened the fridge and rooted around for a moment, coming up with a jug of iced tea. “I wish,” his mother said, sloshing it thoughtfully, “that someone would explain to me why this always goes cloudy in here.”

  He thought about that. “Microparticulate matter?” Charlie said. “Tea’s not really an infusion when you make it out of tea bags. It’s a suspension. The characteristics of the suspension change when you chill it.”

  His mom shut the fridge and went to the cupboard for a glass, then came back to get some ice out of the freezer. “Sounds good to me.”

  “It’s a theory,” Charlie said. “I’ll ask my physics teacher tomorrow.”

  “Why? Sounds like you’re on t
he right track.” She sat down at the table on his right, glancing idly at the newspaper.

  As she did, her eye fell on the headline about the two suicides. Charlie saw her look, and he sighed and pushed away the notes he was making. “Mom-” He glanced up, trying to find a way to begin to explain it all to her.

  “Charlie,” she said, “what is it? You look like you’ve lost your best friend.”

  “Uh, not quite.” And he found himself wondering whether the phrase, as she was using it, was intended simply as a cliche. It could be a slightly unnerving experience, having a psychiatric nurse as a mother. Not that she could read your mind or anything-in fact, her normal disclaimer was “I don’t have to read minds. Faces are more than enough.” Maybe in my case, Charlie thought, it’s more than usually true. She sees my face every day. “Suicide-” Charlie said.

  “Hmm,” she said. “Are we coming at this as a general subject, or for a specific reason?”

  He swallowed. “I’m worried about somebody.” “Who?”

  Charlie shook his head. “Uh, I want to be clear about my facts first. How do you tell for sure if someone’s going to kill themselves?”

  “For sure?” his mother said, raising her eyebrows as she sat down. “You don’t ever, for sure. I wish … Oh, there are various signs. Personality changes … changes in behavior, inability to concentrate or do business or schoolwork, for example … changes in the way someone sleeps or eats, feelings of worthlessness or hopelessness. Also, a lot of talk about suicide coming up suddenly can be significant. Or gestures like suddenly giving prized possessions away… .” She turned her glass around on the table. “You have to look to see how many of these signs are there at once, how serious. they seem … and look hard to make sure that the person isn’t doing these things for some other reason.”

  Charlie sat back in his chair. “Did you hear about these suicides in the Deathworld virtual environment?”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Matter of fact, I have. There was a mention of them in an article in one of the psychiatric journals last month.”