Free Psychotrope by Lisa Smedman Page A

scored, holos of masked dancers sprang to life, filling the game room with their whoops and dancing in celebration around the kid who scored the goal. The holos were ultra high-rez, almost as good as what you saw in the Matrix. Just the sort of stuff you'd expect from programmers who designed some of the most wiz cyberdeck games on the market—and let their children alpha test them.
    These kids were lucky, having parents who worked for FTL. They got to play, and test games, and go to 'puter school, and eat good food. Kimi had grown up in a tiny agri station out on the plains, with no other kids to play with, only soy and vitamin-enriched bannock to eat, and nothing to look at but hectares and hectares of rustling stonewheat.
    Until she discovered the Matrix. That's where she'd connected with other young deckers. Lonely kids like herself.
    Kids who told her this brain-bending story about being able to run the Matrix without a deck after meeting a great spirit there.
    They'd guided her through her own vision quest in the Matrix, taught her how to find the great spirit for herself.
    One year ago, she had at last succeeded, and been transformed. Now she could spirit walk through the Matrix, able to jack in directly without need of a cyberdeck. She had become a technoshaman.
    She'd used her talent to deck into the FTL personnel files and create a mother who worked for the computer software corp. For the past two months Kimi had shown up every weekday at the corp's daycare creche while her purely fictional mother "went to work" in the tower above.
    Most of the time she'd just played with the other kids in the creche or joined them in lessons and at lunch. But she'd also done what she'd been sent here to do: decked into the FTL mainframe from inside this building. The great spirit had explained that it was necessary for Kimi to do this because the system was "closed," not accessible via the Matrix.
    Even the great spirit itself couldn't get at it.
    But Kimi could. And that made her proud.
    She'd done what the great spirit had asked her to: glitching up a program that some FTL decker named Raymond Kahnewake was working on. The great spirit had showed Kimi how to use a complex form that would do the job. She'd memorized its pattern, then jacked into the FTL mainframe and inserted the form she'd been taught. She'd been extra, extra careful to do it just right. And the great spirit had praised her work.
    But then Raymond Kahnewake had designed another program—one that did pretty much the same thing as the first. And so the great spirit had told Kimi it was time to play a game with him, a game that would scare him into being good. The great spirit said he was a dangerous man, that he had to be stopped from making things that would hurt Kimi and her friends—that would hurt the great spirit itself.
    To prepare for the game, Kimi made sure the security guards at the FTL Technologies headquarters in Cheyenne got to know her. She deliberately got caught playing on the building's high-speed elevators, riding them from the second-floor creche to the building's uppermost, twentieth floor and back again. And she made sure the guards saw her playing "coup counter" up and down the halls, stalking the FTL workers with her toy bow and suction-cup-tipped arrows. This was all practice for when she would count coup against Raymond Kahnewake.
    Kimi was frightened about confronting an adult, and the game the great spirit had asked her to play seemed a little silly. But she didn't question it. She loved the great spirit and would do anything for it. She'd practiced, and she was ready. Even so, she'd put the game off as long as she could, just in case the great spirit changed its mind. Maybe she should log on and see . . .
    Kimi ran to the side of the game room and dropped her lacrosse stick, pretending to be out of breath. It was an easy fake; she was a pudgy girl with short legs, at least a head shorter than any of the other nine-year-olds in the