Free Psychotrope by Lisa Smedman

bet that, had his deck contained an artificial sensory induction system, they would have chilled his skin. The speakers in his goggles broadcast a low, moaning sound that sent a shiver through him.
    "Frosty," Ansen said out loud.
    And then he frowned. What had happened? His data glove hadn't connected with the door icon; he should have still been outside the SAN leading to the university's system. Was his deck glitching out? Or had some virus scrambled an access code, sending him here?
    And where was here?
    The SAN in front of him looked like it might be stacked with some pretty hard-hooped IC, but Ansen was willing to give it a try. He touched his fingertips together in the complex pattern that would load and launch a deception utility.
    The universal icon associated with the Fuchi-designed program appeared: a black, lozenge-shaped mask materialized a few centimeters away from Ansen's face, then settled in place over his eyes.
    Ansen took a deep breath, then sent his persona gliding into the tunnel by focusing his eyes on its center point and jabbing a pointed index finger forward over his sensor board. The tunnel rushed forward to meet him, enveloped him in its stygian darkness . . .
    And then that darkness was replaced by the utter blank of a dead viewscreen.
    "What the frag . . . ?"
    Ansen tore the goggles from his eyes. The light had gone out in his sensor board, and the deck's tiny flatscreen display was also dead. But the power switch glowed cherry red, indicating that juice was still flowing into the deck.
    And the speakers in the goggles were emitting a faint static hiss.
    Ansen peeled the data gloves from his hands. Something had dumped him out of the Matrix.
    He hit a button on the side of the deck and watched as the flatscreen came to life. He scrolled quickly through the text that appeared on the screen: a log of his run. It was pretty brief. He'd logged onto the Matrix at 09:46:51 PST through his LTG, then emerged into the Seattle grid four seconds later. Keying in the LTG code for the university's computer system had taken him five long seconds—no wonder they called his deck a tortoise—and that's when the log went funny. At 09:47:00 exactly, the codes recorded in the log became scrambled. Instead of the usual letter-and-number combination that represented an RTG or LTG, the code became a meaningless string of symbols.
    Ansen had no idea which of the communications grids the weird tunnel icon had been in.
    According to the log, he'd spent a full ten seconds just staring at the tunnel icon, and another three seconds getting his deception utility up and running. Then he'd tried to access the weird-looking SAN—and been dumped.
    He didn't think it was IC that had crashed his deck, since the LTG codes had started going funny a full thirteen seconds earlier, back when he was trying to access the university's system. The fault was more likely to be a simple failure of one of the deck's routing sub-systems, perhaps caused by a faulty peripheral or I/O connector.
    Cursing, Ansen crawled across his futon and began rummaging in a packing case for his spare VR goggles and sensor board.

09:46:38 PST
    (10:46:38 MST) Cheyenne, Sioux Nation
    Kimi laughed and ran after the other children as they chased the "rubber ball" that bounced from one end of the room to the other. Today the FTL Technologies game room was running a lacrosse program— baggataway, in Iroquois. The kids called it "bang-it-away." The sticks they carried were made of foam, the netting of a soft foam cup inlaid with a fine web of wires. These "caught" the holographic ball and held it until the glowing blue sphere was hurled away.
    Even the goals were holos, so the kids wouldn't hurt themselves by running into them.
    Kimi liked playing bang-it-away. It was her favorite of the virtual games that the creche kids got to play—not because she liked running around after a silly ball, but because its holographic displays were the best. Whenever a goal was