Free Psychotrope by Lisa Smedman Page B

room. Her long black hair was cut in bangs over her forehead and elsewhere hung down to her waist. It hid the flesh-toned datajack high above her right ear; the cyberdoc who'd done the implant had only shaved a tiny patch on her skull, leaving her hair long.
    Slipping out of the game room, she walked down the hall to the water fountain. She took a drink, glanced around, then ducked around a corner to a public telecom unit—a terminal that was connected with the outside world, rather than with the FTL mainframe. She pulled a fiber-optic cable out of her pocket, plugged one end into the port that would normally be used to connect a cyberterminal to the telecom, and slotted the other end of the cable into the datajack above her ear.
    She closed her eyes and threw her mind into the Matrix, then followed a familiar dataline to the Seattle RTG. SANs blurred past like beads on a neon string until she found the one leading to the LTG where her friends liked to hang out—a system hosted by Toys 4 U, in which the latest toys were displayed in virtual in all their simsense glory. Amid the flash and commotion, Kimi found three familiar personas. Their icons floated toward her, bright and reassuring: the grinning pink plastic doll that was Technobrat, the segmented green body of Inchworm, and the bulbous white snowman Frosty with his carrot nose and red and white scarf. Kimi's own persona was based oh the trideo character Suzy Q. Her icon was a fuzzy turquoise bear with oversized eyes and a high-pitched voice.
    An unfamiliar figure hung beside Frosty—a fluffy white mouse with a big pink bow around its neck and a bright pink nose and ears. A thin piece of fiber-optic cable formed its tail. Its face looked funny; after a sec Kimi figured out it was because the mouse didn't have a mouth.
    "Hoi," Kimi squeaked.
    "Hoi," the mouse answered. The sound came from its silver whiskers, which were vibrating.
    Inchworm reared up on his tiny legs, waving a multitude of arms at Kimi. "Hoi, Suzy Q. Did you complete your mission?"
    "You mean the coup-counting game?" Kimi's bear icon hung its head. "Not yet."
    Technobrat's doll face scowled at her. "You were supposed to do it before the experiment began." The doll gestured, and glowing numbers appeared in the air beside it. The display showed the local time zone for the grid: 9:46:57. "See? It's almost time. We begin in three seconds."
    "The great spirit only said that today was the last day I could do it," Kimi squeaked. "I didn't know it had to be this morning!" She looked at the numeric display, which hung motionless. She was talking with her friends at the speed of thought—a second in the Matrix felt like minutes sometimes. Hours even. In the meat world, her body was between breaths, between heartbeats—even though her heart was beating furiously from having exerted herself in the game.
    Exercise wasn't the only reason her heart was pumping rapidly. Kimi was scared. She'd almost let the great spirit down. She had only seconds to go.
    And that was bad. If she hosed up, maybe the great spirit wouldn't love her any more. She couldn't let that happen. She had to carry out her mission, even though she knew she was already too late.
    "Bye!" she squeaked, and broke her connection with the Matrix.

09:47:00 PST
    The Matrix collapsed to a pinpoint of light. Red Wraith's body collapsed with it, his mistlike form compressing to a single perfect sphere. Something wrenched free of itself, and Red Wraith could no longer feel his meat body. He was used to being unable to feel pain—that much was normal. But now he couldn't feel anything. Not the press of the chair against his spine, not the feather-light weight of the deck in his lap, not a single physical sensation. Nada.
    It reminded him of the explosion of the cranial bomb—the seconds he'd spent floating free, detached from his clinically dead body, before the trauma team had found and revived him. It was all just too fraggin' familiar . . .
    Another