​
The brunette raised her eyes at him with a slight pang of guilt. She was clad in a nanolastene black and white dress with an open high collar. Sylene preferred to strut around the net in high fashion instead of tactical clothing. A cosmetic choice, irrelevant to her skills, but meant to catch you off-guard. A ruse, as dangerous to ignore as the puppy eyes she fluttered. “Are you mad at me?”
“No, why would I be mad?” Cord looked over the texture map of his hands. The new simstim code by the Bergos corporation could fool even the most experienced divers.
“Because I left you for a Bergos position?” She leaned on the steel railing of the industrial catwalk. A rusted metal door at the end led up to the construct. Or not. From the outside, the construct appeared as various facets of a factory building stacked up like a tower. The sky above it changed like a television stuck in a loop of flipping channels showing ads, pre-war movies, music videos, and other cyberdelic randomizations meant to dazzle and daze anyone trying to look out a window.
“So what? Our partnership had run its course.” Cord looked down the exterior of the construct. Computer code caused a gust of wind to rise from the myriad walkways crisscrossing below. The walkway area was merely a loading program.
“Our partnership ended when you chose to marry a deadplug.” Sylene mocked him.
“Careful. That’s my dead wife you’re talking about.”
Deadplug had become the preferred pejorative against people who were physically unable to synch with the synaptic interface of a simstim dive. Cord inched closer to Sylene. “Don’t piss me off, or I’ll be forced to disconnect you with extreme prejudice.”
She scoffed. “You’ve been out of the game too long, Cord. This construct is beyond anything you ever hacked in your glory days. You wouldn’t know where to start.”
“I’ll start by heading to that door. There’s always something these corporate stooges forget.” The solid steel mesh of the walkway echoed under his footsteps. Sylene slinked behind him like a cat. The inside of the construct was a disorienting mess of synthesizer music with rolling bass notes. Neon signs, holograms, and sweeping spotlights. Glass and polished metal cut through in various angles with thousands of people moving across rooms of gambling machines, bars, dance floors, gaming, and sex dungeons.
“What is this place?” Cord’s head swam with sensory overload.
“Welcome to Afterparty.” Sylene twirled with open arms and a smile. “The ultimate in quarantine entertainment. A fully immersive experience untouched by the fallout. A construct where time is as relative as your morals.” She snapped her fingers and a servebot hovered over with a silver tray. Sylene pressed her thumb to a scanpad on the bot’s round head. The tray materialized two electric blue martinis and a crystal bowl of pills and capsules. She snatched a handful of drugs and washed it down with the cocktail, gesturing Cord to follow her example.
“No thanks.” He waved off the servebot. “I don’t care for this nonsense. My boy is waiting for me outside.”
“Ah, yes, little Chase. How is he? Old enough for the synch test yet? A son of the great Cord Chartreuse, the man who brought down Polygon Hex. He would make a fantastic addition to the Bergos family.”
Cord shot her a warning glance. “He won’t be making my same mistakes.”
Sylene rolled her eyes dismissively. “You used to be fun. Did you forget our days after the Little Munich job?”
“All too well, and that life is over for me. I can’t be drooling in here while my kid starves in an empty apartment.”
“But that’s the beauty of it. Were you not listening?” Sylene clicked on her rubber wristband. Her avatar flickered for a millisecond, then reloaded. “See, stim reset. Sober again. Everything here is relative. Even time. We can have all the fun with zero consequences outside. Don’t you want to dive deeper, Cord. Like the old times.”
“No. I want to find an exit.” Cord hurried up and down escalators, shoving giggling people out of his way. He crossed crowded electro clubs, knife fight betting pits, and silent backrooms with people strapped to early virtual reality machines. VR pluggers inside a simulation. Useless nostalgia sniffers. “How did we even get here? I haven’t plugged in years.”
Sylene laughed. “What a waste… That’s why it took me so long to find you.”
“Wait…” Cord looked down at his own wrist. He wore a blue rubber band like Sylene’s. A wider button in the middle sported an @ logo for the Afterparty construct. He held the button until a holo menu popped out. He scrolled up the selections.
​
Settings. Troubleshooting.
Code source—Blocked—Admin access only.
IP Origins. Time stamp. Entrypoint [504.003.196.347]
​
“You pulled me in here. How?”
“New tech.” She winked. “You were not plugging into the wider networks. You refused to answer my messages. I had to get creative.”
“The Mugshot invite spam.” He realized. “I thought I blocked those.”
“You’re good, Cord. But like I said, you’ve been out of the game too long. Nobody logs into Mugshot anymore. Nobody takes it seriously. That’s why I spliced a redirecting ghost protocol in the block sequence. All you needed to do was click on it and swoop, here we are!”
They walked past the Cannibal Burger franchise, onto a moving walkway suspended over acres of exterior hot springs surrounded by arctic plains, and back into a room of people having sex with produce for a Japanese game show. Cord dodged a flying grapefruit that slipped out of a contestant’s eager grip. “Look at the kind of shit you pull.” He shook his head. “Everything’s a game to you. And you wonder why I chose Mina.”
“Mina the Deadplug.” She laughed as she snatched a bright orange cocktail in a crystal stem oozing with carbon dioxide gas. “What did you ever see in her?”
Cord stopped in a crossway lobby, deciding the construct was too massive to continue on foot, he browsed the holo menu. “Mina lived in the real world. She appreciated the beauty of it. Good or bad. She had a passion for life. None of this is real...” He finished more to himself than to his companion, then quickly scanned for a classic casino room. He needed slot machines.
“Oh, please. Don’t give me that.” Sylene rolled her eyes. “Of course all deadplugs love the real world. It’s all they have. They’re not better or wiser. They’re just dead weight trapped in a dead world.”
“It wasn’t always a dead world, and the air scrubbers are fully operational. We’ll have the city back up in a year.”
“Hah! They said a year five years ago, and I’m not spending my days watching the Bergos ticker in my penthouse. If I wanted stock results, I would hack them.”
“Your own damn fault.” Cord stopped scrolling. Zoomed in.
​
Developer tools. Inspect code source. Show hidden.
​
He copied the casino room’s IP address into his personal avatar coordinates, zoomed out of the menu, and hit Enter. “You thought Bergos would be thrilling? You sold your soul to become a glorified bean counter.” He zapped out of the lobby and into the K-Ching Slots casino.
Sylene tapped on her holo menu and jumped right behind him. “Do you really think there’s a place where I can’t follow you?”
Cord shook his head in frustration. “Wishful thinking, I suppose. You were always quick on the take.”
An escalator crossed the slots room and through the liquid glass ceiling. The space above currently held a massive upside-down orgy. Oiled bodies slapped against each other on a burgundy shag carpet. All participants wore cartoon character heads and moaned like wounded farm animals.
“Is this the best Bergos could come up with to entertain these casual pluggers?” Cord walked over to the saddest-looking gambler in the row of slot machines. His coin bucket remained empty. Cord spun the man out of the stool. “Machine’s broken, pal. Move it.” The sad coin-chucker complained but quickly moved on to the next thing. Cord pushed the machine away from the wall. Nobody else seemed to notice his actions. They stared at their rolling screens, pulling their levers to a constant jingle of video game sound effects and clashing coins.
Sylene patted the machine with pride. “It’s theta wave simstim tech. The construct builds itself out of the collective images in the subconscious of everyone connected.”
“Dream tech?” Cord looked up from behind the slot machine. “I thought they outlawed that after the Straszynski incident.”
She shrugged. “A world in quarantine made the senate reconsider. It was either this or a wave of murder-suicides.”
“No wonder these idiots seemed asleep.”
“True. It might feel like a dream to the casuals, but divers like us can manage to keep our heads in place. Don’t you see? We could rule this entire network.”
“Not interested.” He pried the back panel off the machine and looked over the circuit board.
“Whatever you’re doing to that machine, I hope you bought it dinner first?” Sylene tipped back her cocktail and hailed the servebot for another. “Are you fishing for coins? You can’t buy your way out of here. They’re just phrenic devices for the punters.”
“I know.” Cord’s bracelet dinged with a green glow that echoed the switch lights on the machine’s motherboard.
​
Device Synched.
​
“Everything here’s a phrenic device.” He tapped back into the holo menu.
​
Code source—Blocked—Admin access only.
​
“But every device in here is made from a code out there. This machine is a losers’ spot. It will always identify a winning combination and push for the opposite. It panders to the masochist gamblers who wish to transfer blame to chance instead of their own lives. Used correctly, its particular algorithm can crack codes at lightning speed. Developers don’t protect these codes as they do the more obvious ones on our wrists. We find the algorithm, inverse the designation, patch it through the bracelet, and let it run wild. It should crack the admin access code as easily as it would run a winning streak for the slots.”
Characters rolled across the holo display in a series of rapid clicks.
Code source—Admin access granted.
“Simple. If you know what you’re looking for.” Cord winked while tapping on the construct’s code source. Annexing an exit code line to his position within the dreamware.
Code Break—patched. Synaptic Clamps—Disconnected. Exit Routine—Assigned.
“Enjoy your afterparty, Sylene.”
“You bastard... I’ll get you back in here before you know it!” The woman threw a cocktail glass at Cord’s flickering avatar. It shattered against the wall with nobody even batting an eyelash.
The simstim world pinched to black and swooped back up around him. Cord could see the standard ceiling lights in his bedroom. White Glowlit rectangular plates issued to all residential buildings of Sectors Two through Four. The sliding blinds opened to reveal the endless expanse of buildings outside. Most of them were rain-blackened concrete with opaque ballistic windows common to the lower sectors of the city. Far beyond the labyrinth of concrete, brownstone, and Kanji neon signs, the morning sun reflected off the shiny metal and glass spires of Sector One, where Sylene would be logging off the construct in frustration.
“Good morning, Cord.” the apartment’s AI chirped before rolling out the daily readings for time and weather.
Cord’s head was still swimming with the construct’s neural hangover. It had been a while since he dove into anything that complex. The world felt blurry and his motor functions had taken a hit. He struggled to move from the bed. His cries for help came out in mumbles and his body flopped like a trout. Wild beeps filled the room from a machine next to his bed. What’s that? What’s going on? he tried to say. Chase, where are you?
A man rushed into the room. Obvious worry on his face as he checked on Cord. “He seems to have come back out again. But the fits are stronger than before,” he called out.
The room’s holo screen came on with a call from the Sector Three medcenter. “His mind is fighting the synaptic hold, Mr. Chartreuse. But our readings indicate this is the same as before. We’ll continue monitoring from here. In the meanwhile, check his spinal plug’s functionality, then keep his meds and muscle shockstims as usual.”
“Yes. Thank you, Dr. Kikuchi.” The holo screen went off.
The man hovered over Cord’s face, adjusting settings on the bedside computer. Besides having a more modern hairstyle, he seemed to be Cord’s own reflection. Except for the eyes, those were brown, the same as Mina’s. “Don’t worry, Dad. I’ll get you out of there. Whatever it takes.”
Chase. My boy? Cord tried to speak. How long has it been? But the words remained in his head which had already started to swoon. His son’s voice kept getting farther away as the room around him faded to black.
​
User—Cord Chartreuse.
ID—Masked [IP 504.003.196.347]
Status—Online.
Bioscan—Nominal.
​
Cord was on his knees with a pounding headache. The dive had been more than he expected. He helped himself up with the aluminum railing of the suspended industrial walkway. A rusted metal door on the far end led straight into the construct. The area was merely a loading program.
A familiar voice, sweet as poison, greeted him from behind. “Welcome back.”