Cyberweb Read online

  Cyberweb

  Lisa Mason

  This is an adaptation of Lisa Mason’s cyberpunk classic, Cyberweb, first published in 1995 in hardcover by William Morrow, in trade paperback by Eos Books, and in mass market paperback by AvoNova Books.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright 2017 by Lisa Mason.

  Cover copyright 2017 by Lisa Mason.

  Colophon copyright 2017 by Tom Robinson.

  All rights reserved.

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Bast Books Ebook Edition published 2017.

  Bast Books Author’s Print Edition published January 2018.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Smashwords Edition

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting my hard work.

  For information address:

  Bast Books

  [email protected]

  Thank you for your readership! Visit the author at her Official Web Site for more about her books, ebooks, screenplays, stories, interviews, blogs, cute cat pictures, and more. Enjoy!

  Lisa Mason

  Table of Contents

  Praise for Books by Lisa Mason

  Cyberweb

  About Lisa Mason

  Books by Lisa Mason

  Praise for Books by Lisa Mason

  Arachne and Cyberweb

  Locus Magazine Hardcover Bestsellers

  “Powerful . . . Entertaining . . . Imaginative.”

  —People Magazine

  “Cybernetics, robotics, the aftermath of San Francisco’s Big Quake II, urban tribalism—Lisa Mason combines them all with such deftness and grace, they form a living world . . . Her characters and their world will stay with you long after you’ve finished this fine book.”

  —Locus Magazine

  “Lisa Mason stakes out, within the cyberpunk sub-genre, a territory all her own.”

  —The San Francisco Chronicle

  “Mason’s endearing characters and their absorbing adventures will hook even the most jaded SF fan.”

  —Booklist

  Summer of Love

  A San Francisco Chronicle Recommended Book of the Year

  A Philip K. Dick Award Finalist

  “Remarkable. . . .a whole array of beautifully portrayed characters along the spectrum from outright heroism to villainy. . . .not what you expected of a book with flowers in its hair. . . the intellect on display within these psychedelically packaged pages is clear-sighted, witty, and wise.”

  —Locus Magazine

  “A fine novel packed with vivid detail, colorful characters, and genuine insight.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “Captures the moment perfectly and offers a tantalizing glimpse of its wonderful and terrible consequences.”

  —The San Francisco Chronicle

  “Brilliantly crafted. . . .An engrossing tale spun round a very clever concept.”

  —Katharine Kerr, author of Days of Air and Darkness

  “Just imagine The Terminator in love beads, set in the Haight-Ashbury ‘hood of 1967.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Mason has an astonishing gift. Her characters almost walk off the page. And the story is as significant as anyone could wish. This book will surely be on the prize ballots.”

  —Analog

  The Gilded Age

  A New York Times Notable Book

  A New York Public Library Recommended Book

  “A winning mixture of intelligence and passion.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Should both leave the reader wanting more and solidify Mason’s position as one of the most interesting writers in science fiction.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Rollicking. . .Dazzling. . .Mason’s characters are just as endearing as her world.”

  —Locus Magazine

  “Graceful prose. . . A complex and satisfying plot.”

  —Library Journal

  One Day in the Life of Alexa

  “Incorporates lively prose, past/present time jumps, and the consequences of longevity technology. An absorbing read with an appealing narrator and subtly powerful emotional rhythms.”

  —Goodreads

  Five Stars! “Like all the truly great scifi writers, what [Lisa Mason] really writes about is you and me and today and what is really important in life. . . . I enjoyed every word.”

  —Reader Review

  The Garden of Abracadabra

  “So refreshing! This is Stephanie Plum in the world of Harry Potter.”

  —Goodreads

  “Fun and enjoyable urban fantasy”

  “This is a very entertaining novel—sort of a down-to-earth Harry Potter with a modern adult woman in the lead. Even as Abby has to deal with mundane concerns like college and running the apartment complex she works at, she is surrounded by supernatural elements and mysteries that she is more than capable of taking on. Although this book is just the first in a series, it ties up the first "episode" while still leaving some story threads for upcoming books. I'm looking forward to finding out more.”

  —Reader Review

  “I love the writing style and am hungry for more!”

  —Goodreads

  Strange Ladies: 7 Stories

  “Offers everything you could possibly want, from more traditional science fiction and fantasy tropes to thought-provoking explorations of gender issues and pleasing postmodern humor…This is a must-read collection.”

  —The San Francisco Review of Books

  “Lisa Mason might just be the female Phillip K. Dick. Like Dick, Mason's stories are far more than just sci-fi tales, they are brimming with insight into human consciousness and the social condition….a sci-fi collection of excellent quality….you won't want to miss it.”

  —The Book Brothers Review Blog

  “Fantastic book of short stories….Recommended.”

  —Reader Review

  “I’m quite impressed, not only by the writing, which gleams and sparkles, but also by [Lisa Mason’s] versatility . . . Mason is a wordsmith . . . her modern take on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is a hilarious gem! [This collection] sparkles, whirls, and fizzes. Mason is clearly a writer to follow!”

  —Amazing Stories

  Celestial Girl (A Lily Modjeska Mystery)

  Passionate Historical Romantic Suspense

  5 Stars! “I really enjoyed the story and would love to read a sequel! I enjoy living in the 21st century, but this book made me want to visit the Victorian era. The characters were brought to life, a delight to read about. The tasteful sex scenes were very racy….Good Job!”

  —Reader Review

  Cyberweb

  1

  Street Tough

  Carly Quester creeps through the crowd, winding her way around a hydroponic vegetable vendor whose brackish tomato tanks twitch with mottled olive crawdaddies. Her stomach rumbles at the sight of fresh food, but shellfish grilled in butter will have to wait for another day. A frumpy bank teller lingers in the gridloc
k, humming softly, waiting for the light at California Street to change.

  Yeah, that’s right. Don’t freakin’ move.

  Green light, and traffic plunges forward half a block. Red light, and traffic halts. Steaming with frustration. Spewing noxious fumes.

  With a cautious hop, the bank teller ventures off the curb, navigating the squat stack of its main housing between a pickup truck packed with surly locomotors and a bus of screaming schoolchildren. The bank teller pauses in the crosswalk, twiddling its secondary cables.

  Carly pounces, seizing the bank teller’s monitor. She jams a credit disk into the teller’s download drive, punching her code on its astonished keypad, together with a bootleg file extension overriding Data Control’s order freezing her assets.

  The bank teller struggles and beeps, staggering and swinging about.

  Carly slaps the monitor’s faceplace, holds snub-nosed pliers to its main cable. “Spit it out, bot,” she mutters to its audio. “It’s my damn account. Eight grand or you’re chop-shop parts.”

  The bank teller sputters but commences downloading credits onto Carly’s disk. One thousand, two thousand, three. Four thousand softbucks.

  A synthy voice suddenly murmurs through the bank teller’s audio. “Hello, Quester space C colon fifty-three dash five point twenty-four paren AAA close paren. How are you today? We’ve got to talk.”

  Carly slaps the monitor again. Flat of the hand, no fingerprints. Talk, right. The synthy voice, the voice of a sengine, is reciting her former telespace access code. Talk? Don’t even breathe.

  The bank teller’s alarm system clicks on, wailing through the downtown din. The red Cancel-Trans light blinks furiously. Carly joggles the main cable with the pliers till the cable is nearly free of the port.

  Five thousand, six thousand softbucks.

  “Carly Quester!” rattles Pr. Spinner’s rusty synthy voice. The perimeter prober stands next to a Recycling Bin on the opposite side of California Street. Her owlish faceplace puckers, her graspers clack, her spinnerets click. The prober’s foot rollers scoot back and forth with anxiety. “By bot, it’s the heat!”

  “She means scram, flesh-and-blood,” squeaks Saint Download standing beside Spinner, waving its multitude of armlets. Its gender-neutral faceplace clicks through a dozen ambiguity sequences. Saint Download is the ugliest little bot Carly has ever seen. The bot doesn’t think much of her, either.

  Six and a quarter, six and a half. The bank teller stalls at six thousand five hundred softbucks. “Damn!” Carly pounds Eject but the disk won’t come free.

  A team of copbots careens down Sansome Street, weaving in and out of the gridlock. Sirens shriek.

  Carly pries the disk out with the pliers, denting the edges of the bank teller’s drive. Then she yanks the main cable before the bank teller can save a commcord of her face and voice. Cutting its power won’t void identification of the transaction, though, since Carly’s code was archived with Data Control as soon as the credits down-loaded. Still. Any spybyte or telespace pirate could have pillaged her account, too. Data Control doesn’t have to know who.

  Or what Carly looks like these days. No longer the polished professional telelinker. No longer a telespace mediator with the corrupt megafirm of Ava & Rice. That gig is gone. Her copper-gold hair spills down her back in a wild mane. Always slim, she’s gotten scrawny. If she can’t rustle food from the lockbox Bins before recyclers sell it to second-hand markets, she doesn’t eat. When the cuffs of her silk blouses fray, she cuts off the sleeves, layering on bits and pieces of patched clothes. She avoids her reflection most mornings because she doesn’t want to see the haunted expression in her own eyes.

  “Tweak it up, Carly!” Spinner yells.

  Saint Download’s armlets wriggle. One grasper pokes an electroneedle into the keyhole of the Bin’s lockbox, overriding the security code. The lid clicks open. Saint Download seizes a dipstick from the Bin’s corner, pries the Bin open.

  Copbots screech around the corner at California Street, sideswiping the pickup truck. The locomotors jeer and rattle the chains cinching them to the truck’s flatbed. The copbots fan out, spit projectiles. The projectiles explode, ejecting a cyberweb, the steel strands of it gleaming in the cold morning sun. The cyberweb drops down around the bank teller’s shoulder ridges.

  Green light again, and traffic races for a half-minute sprint. The school bus fender-butts a copbot, knocking it aside. The children cheer.

  Carly crouches, rolls into oncoming traffic, which swerves around her without stopping. But the cyberweb catches her scuffed boot. Catches her, grips her. Damn! She struggles, kicking and twisting, The cyberweb pulls tighter, feeding her movements into its standalone software, countering every thrash by tightening the trap.

  A copbot chugs up, synthy voice booming from its mouthplace. “Hands up, you have five seconds to get your hands up . . .”

  Bye-bye boot.

  Carly darts, leaping around a smart Harley-Davidson motorcycle that wolf-whistles through its tailpipe, a pedicab of gawking tourists drawn by the usual wizened peddler, a wind scooter with azure sails afloat in the sea breeze. She rolls to the opposite curb, crawls to Pr. Spinner and Saint Download.

  “In you go,” cackles Saint Download, eyespots blinking in its pinball machine of a faceplace. “Garbage in, garbage in.”

  “Funny, Download,” Carly says, sniffing at the ripe funk inside the Bin. “Also, you’re buggy.”

  “Do it, Carly Quester,” Spinner urges. “And you shut your mouthpiece, Saint Download. She’s my flesh-and-blood.”

  The prober gives Carly a leg up, and she scrambles into the Bin. The lid clangs shut. She hears Saint Download’s electroneedle scrabble in the lockbox. Beep. She hears a click like doom sealing her fate, then hunkers down, crouching as still as she can.

  The Bin smells of rotting vegetables and days-old fish, but contains no food bound for the fourth-hand markets. Only paper and wrappings, bound for end-product recyclers. Mega. What if the recyclers come, haul off the Bin, incinerate its contents without logging in types and quantities? It happens. Lockbox Bins are one way to dispose of all sorts of illicit things: corpses, toxic waste, criminal evidence. She fingers shredded paper. How loud will she have to scream before the recyclers hear her? Sometimes companies on the cheap take the audio chips out. The incinerators won’t hear a thing.

  And what if Pr. Spinner deserts her, leaves the lid locked, and lumbers away, convinced by Saint Download that she’s better off without Carly, a flesh-and-blood on the run from Data Control? A renegade coordinate institutor, Saint Download is wanted by Data Control, too, for unspecified telespace crimes. Same as Carly and Pr. Spinner.

  Spinner herself is hardly above suspicion. The perimeter prober is the last link in a long chain of AI entities that have ruined Carly’s career as a professional telelink mediator with Ava & Rice. The prober subjected Carly to the questionable and dangerous technique called probe therapy. Pr. Spinner has brought Carly to the brink of annihilation. To the brink of death.

  Now the two AIs are spending way too much time together. It makes Carly nervous.

  But in the end, Pr. Spinner didn’t betray Carly. Not since she and the prober discovered an archetype—the Arachne—in Carly’s telelink, shattered her perimeters, and pieced her back together again.

  She hears their synthy voices chatting outside the Bin, can’t help but shiver. The authoritative copbot interrogates Pr. Spinner. “A flesh-and-blood, officer? Grease my wheels, look around you, officer. The street is rotten with ‘em.” Good ol’ Spin. Crackling with baffle-ment, the copbot questions Saint Download, who twitters and clicks like a tech-mech parrot. Well, all right. Carly gives the nasty little bot a couple of points for good behavior.

  A knock on the lid, and the lid pops open. Fresh air, laced with gridlock fumes.

  “Teh! They’re gone, Carly Quester,” Spinner says, fidgeting with her graspers. Her eyespots pulse. Saint Download cocks its faceplace at her curiously.


  Carly climbs out of the Bin, drops down to the pavement. “No fourth-hand food in there, you bucket of rust, just paper,” she says to the coordinate institutor. The bot holds out her boot in one of its armlets. “Thanks,” Carly says, snapping the boot away, stepping into it. “They take the bank teller?” she asks Spinner.

  “Yes, indeed, they did.”

  Carly sighs. Hello, six thousand five, bye-bye fifteen hundred softbucks she worked long and hard for. No hope she’ll see the rest. She pockets the credit disk. Her last six thousand five hundred softbucks, if she can find any vendors who will trade bootleg credits at double and a half. She looks at the cars, bumper-to-bumper, radiators steaming, batteries shorting out. Human drivers faceless, anonymous, behind the windshields. “I hate the freakin’ gridlock,” she says. “Let’s get out of here.”

  * * *

  Carly trudges up Kearney Street, heading for the neighborhood called North Beach, with its fancy bars and grungy shock galleries, world-class eateries and sleazy strip joints, elegant condos and squat-a-week hotels. The scene is warming up, along with the morning sun stretching golden beams toward noon. Ten different styles of music blare, intoxicated people guffaw in the bars, cooking smells and marijuana smoke waft through the gridlock fumes. The mood of tinselly gaiety, of carefree sensuality nearly makes her sick. What right does anyone these days have to have fun?

  The AI entities grind along the pavement behind her, wheels and foot rollers toiling up the hill. What a pair of rattletraps! She’s glad they keep their distance. She’s not sure she wants to be seen in public with either of them.

  These days, they are everywhere. AI entities housed in standalone, fully mobile, robotic bodies. They’re as common as cars. Was there ever a time when there were no cars? When did people notice there were cars everywhere? Was there a moment when people realized there were too many cars. That cars dominated the landscape, blighted it? Or had no one noticed?

  It’s like that with AIs, and within Carly’s short lifetime. Once artificial intelligence entities were confined to telespace. The sengines and traffic controllers, perimeter probers and monitors for access codes, coordinate institutors and industrialbots did their work in telespace. Maintaining the great comm systems, their synthy voices humming in the wires. Processing vast banks of data, invisibly. Now they stride across the real world everywhere. New generations of them—sleeker, smarter, faster, more humanoid—show up on the streets every day.