Fic: Meat 1/8 (Sherlock BBC)
Jul. 1st, 2012 03:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anactoriaTitle: Meat
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
anactoria
Characters/pairing: Sherlock/John, Irene/Kate, Moriarty, Mycroft, Lestrade
Rating: R
Warnings/contains: Drug use, prostitution, character death. (None of this takes place ‘onscreen’, and, given the nature of this AU, death is not an entirely stable concept…)
Summary: Cyberpunk AU. Sherlock wants to disappear. John wants to stop him, but how’s he supposed to help when they’re barely in the same world anymore?
Notes: This story is set in the world of William Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy, but it’s not a fusion; I haven’t tried to slot Sherlock and co. into the roles of Gibson’s characters, and I hope you don’t need to have read them to make sense of the story. If any of the terminology is confusing, I've put a little glossary in my endnotes over on AO3.
Thanks tokeevacaereni for all her beta help!
When Sherlock jacks out, it’s long past midnight, and John has been telling himself he’s going to bed in ten minutes for the last hour. He’s been telling himself he’ll go and get something to eat to calm his rumbling stomach for longer than that, but he hasn’t moved from his chair.
He hates himself for doing this, sometimes. For sitting up, as good as alone, late into the night, watching the lights of the Ono-Sendai display flicker across the hollows of Sherlock’s face, reflected in the blank slits of his eyes, while his hands fly over the deck and his mouth works around words half-formed, spoken to people who aren’t even in the room with them. People in that same non-place Sherlock inhabits more often than not, these days—inside his head, and so far away from John he might as well be in high orbit.
John watches wanting, every minute, to go over there and pull the dermatrodes off Sherlock’s forehead, push his fingertips against Sherlock’s temples instead and feel the low warm thrum of a pulse, the shift of thin skin as his eyelids flutter at the transition from cyberspace back into flesh. John’s a medic. He knows bodies—human, augmented-human, desperate-not-to-be-human—inside out. Still, sometimes, he catches himself envisioning the veins in Sherlock’s wrists as blue streams of data, throbbing with electricity and light instead of blood; imagining, though he has the memories (small, and worn with long handling) to prove it nonsense, that Sherlock would be cold to the touch, and buzz slightly. The joints in his hands itch with the impulse to prove to himself—to both of them—that it isn’t true.
He never does.
Someone has to keep an eye on Sherlock, he reasons to himself, when he’s sick of the silence and sick of whatever part of his stupid brain won’t let him leave. It’s just that John doesn’t know how much good he can do when Sherlock doesn’t even want to be in the same world as him anymore.
Sherlock jerks upright in a snap of irritation, ripping off the trodes and flinging them halfway across the living-room as he surfaces. His eyes flash annoyance—then they lose their focus momentarily, and he flops back down in his chair.
“Alright?” John asks, after a minute.
Sherlock scowls. “A complete waste of my time. I think.” He’s on his feet again, then, peering through the darkness, scanning the carpet for the trodes he’s just thrown away. “If I could just get one look at the data without Anderson breathing down my virtual neck—Lestrade ought to revoke his clearance. He’s a liability.” He makes a disgusted face. “Honestly, it’s as bad as being in the same room as him. Unbearable. John, help me look, will you?”
“Not a chance.” Sherlock is slow, by his standards, still readjusting, and John gets there first, snatching up the trodes and tucking them in his arse pocket before Sherlock can grab them out of his hand. “You’ve been in there four hours. Food.”
“Angelo’s will be shut by now.”
“So we’ll just have to go elsewhere, won’t we? There’s got to be somewhere else nearby where you haven’t managed to offend the owner by deducing his financial problems from the state of the wallpaper or—”
Sherlock opens his mouth, about to retort, and then freezes, gaze fixed on the empty air an inch or so above John’s head.
“Sherlock?”
“Wallpaper.” He stares off into space a millisecond longer, then smiles widely. “Of course. John, you’re a godsend.” He waves an arm vaguely in John’s direction—where six months ago he might have clasped John’s hand or clapped him on the shoulder; he used to invade personal space without so much as an ‘excuse me’, once—and John tries to ignore the cold prickle of disappointment beneath his skin. Shading closer and closer to resignation, these days, in any case. He doesn’t feel much like a godsend.
He shouldn’t be disappointed. He knows that. It’s not as if they were ever the kind of friends who went in for excessive hugging or matey roughhousing. Sherlock doesn’t drink, and the kinds of stimulants he goes in for are the ones that pinpoint awareness and jack up reflexes to a hair-trigger, not the love-and-comradeship-for-all-mankind variety. John may not be the reserved type, but he doesn’t go in for showy demonstrations of affection, either: hugs are strictly for family gatherings, pissups, and people you haven’t seen in the flesh in at least three months. And besides that, being a bit weird about touch is normal, for cowboys. Okay, that’s not precisely what Sherlock is—other side of the law, such as it is, for one thing—but it’s as close a description as anything. Spend long enough in the matrix, and you can end up forgetting you’ve got a body. Psych isn’t John’s area, but you see it everywhere. It was probably only a matter of time before Sherlock went that way, too.
Now, Sherlock has disappeared into the hallway. He’s on the phone.
“Of course there was no break in the ice,” he’s saying, with a trace of irritation in his voice. “It isn’t their ice.” He sighs, shoves a hand through his hair so it sticks up mad-professor style and doesn’t bother to smooth it back down. “Just get into the bank headquarters. Their console men are already dead, but that should be all the proof you need.”
He hangs up and drifts back into the living room, frowning slightly, eyes narrowed on some distant, invisible point.
“Oi,” John says. “Knock knock, anyone home?”
“This isn’t a simple data theft,” Sherlock says, mostly to himself. “Too neat. It’s perfect.”
“Could it not just be, I don’t know, a very good theft?”
A minute, dismissive headshake. “An ordinary thief might’ve patched up the damage to the ice to cover their traces, if they were very good; more likely, they’d just have cut and run. A wholesale substitution like that takes work. This wasn’t about taking the financial data and getting out of there. Someone’s showing off. Why?” Sherlock presses steepled fingers to his lips, takes a step toward the sofa, ready to flop down into the permanent indent his bony arse has left in the worn-out temperfoam.
John gets right in his way. “Oh no you don’t. Dinner, remember?” He glances over at the time display blinking on the simstim unit. “Or breakfast, whatever you want to call it.”
Sherlock’s brow furrows in annoyance. “I need to think about this.”
“You can think while you eat. I won’t even distract you with boring everyday things like conversation.”
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”
“You know, most people don’t sulk about having to talk to their flatmates occasionally.”
A glance, half puzzlement, half annoyance. “I talk to you all the time.”
John stares. “You—” Then he breaks off. The inevitable argument will only help Sherlock to stall. One piece of ridiculous behaviour at a time. “Oh, you know what, never mind.” He grabs his jacket off the back of the door. “Come on. You’ve been running on nothing but those bloody octagons for two days now, and you’ll be no use to anybody if you make yourself ill. Man cannot live by uppers alone.” Sherlock may not like having to eat—having to remember he’s made of anything so unreliable as flesh and blood—but he likes being incapacitated by physical weakness even less. “Anyway, there’s fuck all you can do until Lestrade gets back in touch. You don’t even know if you were right about the console men.”
“I’m always right,” Sherlock retorts, rolling his eyes, but he gets his coat.
* * *
They end up in one of those cheapo late-night Japanese places, heaving even at this time with zaibatsumen off the plane from Narita and teenage club rats waiting for the greasy spoons to open for breakfast, staving off jet-lag and comedowns with greasy ramen and endless cups of coffee and pills of varying legality. Stuffed into a corner booth between sweating conveyor-belt sushi and a window display flashing international headlines, the hubbub rendering individual sounds unrecognisable, it’s almost as good as privacy. From John’s point of view, anyway; Sherlock glares at the newsscreen, narrows his eyes at the snick-snick of the razorgirls in the booth behind them comparing black-clinic fingernail-jobs. You’ll thank me when you don’t pass out at the deck later, John tries to convey with his eyebrows, but he sticks to his word and stays quiet.
He even manages to keep it up for a whole twenty minutes.
John’s finished his noodles and most of the overpriced piss masquerading as lager he ordered to go with them. Sherlock pushes rice and katsu sauce around in his bowl and glowers at everything: the backs of the customers jostling around the till; the slivers of vat-grown sashimi that trundle past them on plastic plates, fleshy and drooping beneath the counter lights. His expression grows more and more thunderous and his bites of food less and less frequent, and eventually John’s had enough of watching him scowl.
“So, what actually happened, then?” he asks, keeping his tone deliberately light and conversational.
Sherlock gives him a frankly evil look.
John ignores it. He’s been on the receiving end of worse. “Just thought it might help if you went over it again,” he goes on, with a small shrug. “Out loud, I mean. To me.”
You know, like you used to, he doesn’t add. Wouldn’t help, probably.
Not that John’s under any illusions. He knows he’s not being a hundred per cent altruistic, here. Yes, he’s genuinely concerned for Sherlock—with the drugs and the endless hours of work and the resentment he displays toward physical necessities, any sane person would be—but equally, he misses it. Being part of the action. Running through the streets side-by-side with him, or, at least, seeing the letters ‘SH’ blink up in the corner of his vision as Sherlock accessed his sensorium via the deck. John’s military rig is basic, but it has a two-way link that would let them trade cheerful insults as they worked without needing to be in the same room. Sometimes, Sherlock’s voice would hiss, stop thinking, right inside his head, which John thought was a bloody cheek. But other times his own amazement would expand past the bounds of matey banter into amazing, he’d find himself whispering it aloud in the street, and the answering to an idiot, probably would seem to bear a different quality, somehow, a similar overflowing. A gratitude, even. He was sure that at least a little of Sherlock’s showing-off was for his benefit. The way he’d interpret London, with all its tangled streets and accumulated information, its piled-up centuries of junk, easy as reading data in the matrix. As if there was another city out there, shimmering beneath the one you could see with the naked eye (army-issue Zeiss-Ikon or otherwise), an augmented reality to which only Sherlock had access, but he’d deign to lend John his special glasses every now and again.
John doesn’t see much of it, these days. Not since—since the Adler business, if he had to put a date on it, though he’s pretty sure the germ of it was there in some form or another all along. But before that he’d just assumed it was a cowboy thing, or an ego thing. Now, the way Sherlock locks himself away in the matrix, or in his own head, and refuses to say why—well, sometimes it seems like hiding.
Sherlock would probably call him an idiot for thinking that. If it even occurred to him to wonder what John’s thinking.
“It makes no sense,” Sherlock says at last, interrupting his reverie, and John blinks and pauses with his beer halfway to his mouth. “Why replace the bank’s ice with their own? Why leave a system in place to protect something that had already been stolen?”
“Industrial sabotage? A virus destroying the data cores? Getting rid of the bank’s console men would slow the response down, give it time to do its dirty work.”
Sherlock dismisses the suggestion with a wave of his chopsticks. “Any half-decent finance institution has strategies in place to deal with that kind of eventuality. They’ll already have transferred their files. Any kind of sabotage would have had to take place immediately after the theft; the delay would be fatal. And so far, nothing.”
John shrugs. “Don’t know, then. Sorry.”
Sherlock’s expression is distant again. John finishes his drink in silence.
* * *
Halfway home John notices a quick black shadow and a silvery gleam down a side-street. Notices it again five minutes later. This time, he turns his head quickly enough to get a glimpse. It’s a woman, pale-faced, mirrored implants covering her eyes. Her suit—mimetic polycarbon, military-grade—absorbs the flicker of neon on brickwork and the darkness of the alley, and she melts into the gloom quicker than blinking.
“One of Mycroft’s,” Sherlock says, without turning his head, at the same moment John says, “We’re being followed.”
“Jesus. Can’t he just pick up the phone?”
“If current rumours are to be believed, then quite possibly not.” Sherlock shoves his hands deep into his coat pockets. “Besides, he never passes up an opportunity for needless theatrics.” And he stalks on down the street, long coat flapping out behind him.
John shakes his head. The ghost of a smile tugs at the corners of his mouth, then vanishes. He follows.
* * *
Grey cubic structures, representing financial systems, pulse silently on the transparent grid. The impostor ice sits neatly in among them, betraying itself only to the sharpest of eyes—only to his eyes. The matrix—clear geometry of logic—manipulated with a magician’s skill.
Sherlock would very much like to meet the magician.
The phone was ringing when they got back to the flat. Mrs Hudson asleep downstairs, held gently under by pink derms, hadn’t stirred to answer it. Lestrade.
“Yeah, you were right,” he said. “Question now is, what did they leave in there, and what the hell is it for? Think you could take a look?”
“You’re not—oh, God, you let Anderson try getting in, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, and now Anderson’s in Medical.”
“Moron.”
“I’ll tell him you send your best. So, you’ll be in touch?”
“Of course.”
He hung up and found John looking at him. (Lines around his eyes deep-etched in the shadow. Concern.) John pursed his lips as if to speak, hesitated. Eventually: “You should go to sleep.” Not much hope in it. He shrugged and headed up to his own room, then. His tread heavy on the stairs.
Sherlock jacked in.
And now the black ice parts for him like water. No need for an icebreaker. Dark planes of data deliquesce at his approach, clustering shadows dance at the edges of consciousness and then—
A shift. He’s inside a construct. A dark room, low ceiling striped with powered-down striplights. Cyberspace decks—basic models, twenty years out-of-date—ranged along windowless walls. A screen covers the far wall. Dark blotches of gum trodden into the carpet, graffiti scored into the edges of desks by artificial nails, acrylic and illegal razor. Immaculate texturework. The whole scene could have been drawn straight from his memory.
No doubt about it, then. This is for him.
It’s the computer lab in a school. The school he attended, to be precise.
Glance downwards. Human body, apparently solid, not the bare dusting of pixels that serves as his representation in the matrix. The simulation’s doing a little of the work; fooled by the hyperrealism of the construct, his mind does the rest, filling in what it expects to see. He crosses the room, sits at the corner table he used to favour. Runs simulated fingers across a simulated pattern of wear on a simulated keyboard. Every detail present and correct. Someone’s done their research.
But the room remains empty and silent. No message is forthcoming—unless it is, perhaps, I know who you are. Rather a lot of trouble to go to for that.
He contemplates briefly. Rolls his eyes at the redundancy of the action—an absurd charade, pretending to access a matrix within a matrix—and reaches for the trodes.
Students used to leave messages for one another on startup. (The messaging system designed for the use of educators, but easily hacked.) Holmes is a twat was a frequent one.
Sure enough, there it is:
Ready to play?
His (‘his’) fingers skitter across the keypad in annoyance. You don’t seem to be much of a gamesmaster.
Aw, come on. Give me another chance? :-)
To do what?
A moment passes. Then:
Look left.
He jacks out of the school system, blinks back to (simulated) reality. There’s someone sitting at the next desk; someone who wasn’t there before. Slumped in the swivel chair, head lolling to the right, eyes sightless. Definitely, definitely dead.
* * *
“Carl Powers,” Sherlock announces, and John looks up from his cuppa through bleary eyes.
“What? Who? Wait, is that the suspect? You’ve found him already?”
Sherlock summarily ignores John’s questions, and helps himself to the last of the coffee. There are two bright-blue derms stuck on the underside of his wrist; he obviously hasn’t been to bed, but that’s no surprise.
“Get dressed,” he says, instead of explaining. “I need you to go to school.”
Chapter 2
Author:
anactoria Characters/pairing: Sherlock/John, Irene/Kate, Moriarty, Mycroft, Lestrade
Rating: R
Warnings/contains: Drug use, prostitution, character death. (None of this takes place ‘onscreen’, and, given the nature of this AU, death is not an entirely stable concept…)
Summary: Cyberpunk AU. Sherlock wants to disappear. John wants to stop him, but how’s he supposed to help when they’re barely in the same world anymore?
Notes: This story is set in the world of William Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy, but it’s not a fusion; I haven’t tried to slot Sherlock and co. into the roles of Gibson’s characters, and I hope you don’t need to have read them to make sense of the story. If any of the terminology is confusing, I've put a little glossary in my endnotes over on AO3.
Thanks to
keevacaereni for all her beta help!When Sherlock jacks out, it’s long past midnight, and John has been telling himself he’s going to bed in ten minutes for the last hour. He’s been telling himself he’ll go and get something to eat to calm his rumbling stomach for longer than that, but he hasn’t moved from his chair.
He hates himself for doing this, sometimes. For sitting up, as good as alone, late into the night, watching the lights of the Ono-Sendai display flicker across the hollows of Sherlock’s face, reflected in the blank slits of his eyes, while his hands fly over the deck and his mouth works around words half-formed, spoken to people who aren’t even in the room with them. People in that same non-place Sherlock inhabits more often than not, these days—inside his head, and so far away from John he might as well be in high orbit.
John watches wanting, every minute, to go over there and pull the dermatrodes off Sherlock’s forehead, push his fingertips against Sherlock’s temples instead and feel the low warm thrum of a pulse, the shift of thin skin as his eyelids flutter at the transition from cyberspace back into flesh. John’s a medic. He knows bodies—human, augmented-human, desperate-not-to-be-human—inside out. Still, sometimes, he catches himself envisioning the veins in Sherlock’s wrists as blue streams of data, throbbing with electricity and light instead of blood; imagining, though he has the memories (small, and worn with long handling) to prove it nonsense, that Sherlock would be cold to the touch, and buzz slightly. The joints in his hands itch with the impulse to prove to himself—to both of them—that it isn’t true.
He never does.
Someone has to keep an eye on Sherlock, he reasons to himself, when he’s sick of the silence and sick of whatever part of his stupid brain won’t let him leave. It’s just that John doesn’t know how much good he can do when Sherlock doesn’t even want to be in the same world as him anymore.
Sherlock jerks upright in a snap of irritation, ripping off the trodes and flinging them halfway across the living-room as he surfaces. His eyes flash annoyance—then they lose their focus momentarily, and he flops back down in his chair.
“Alright?” John asks, after a minute.
Sherlock scowls. “A complete waste of my time. I think.” He’s on his feet again, then, peering through the darkness, scanning the carpet for the trodes he’s just thrown away. “If I could just get one look at the data without Anderson breathing down my virtual neck—Lestrade ought to revoke his clearance. He’s a liability.” He makes a disgusted face. “Honestly, it’s as bad as being in the same room as him. Unbearable. John, help me look, will you?”
“Not a chance.” Sherlock is slow, by his standards, still readjusting, and John gets there first, snatching up the trodes and tucking them in his arse pocket before Sherlock can grab them out of his hand. “You’ve been in there four hours. Food.”
“Angelo’s will be shut by now.”
“So we’ll just have to go elsewhere, won’t we? There’s got to be somewhere else nearby where you haven’t managed to offend the owner by deducing his financial problems from the state of the wallpaper or—”
Sherlock opens his mouth, about to retort, and then freezes, gaze fixed on the empty air an inch or so above John’s head.
“Sherlock?”
“Wallpaper.” He stares off into space a millisecond longer, then smiles widely. “Of course. John, you’re a godsend.” He waves an arm vaguely in John’s direction—where six months ago he might have clasped John’s hand or clapped him on the shoulder; he used to invade personal space without so much as an ‘excuse me’, once—and John tries to ignore the cold prickle of disappointment beneath his skin. Shading closer and closer to resignation, these days, in any case. He doesn’t feel much like a godsend.
He shouldn’t be disappointed. He knows that. It’s not as if they were ever the kind of friends who went in for excessive hugging or matey roughhousing. Sherlock doesn’t drink, and the kinds of stimulants he goes in for are the ones that pinpoint awareness and jack up reflexes to a hair-trigger, not the love-and-comradeship-for-all-mankind variety. John may not be the reserved type, but he doesn’t go in for showy demonstrations of affection, either: hugs are strictly for family gatherings, pissups, and people you haven’t seen in the flesh in at least three months. And besides that, being a bit weird about touch is normal, for cowboys. Okay, that’s not precisely what Sherlock is—other side of the law, such as it is, for one thing—but it’s as close a description as anything. Spend long enough in the matrix, and you can end up forgetting you’ve got a body. Psych isn’t John’s area, but you see it everywhere. It was probably only a matter of time before Sherlock went that way, too.
Now, Sherlock has disappeared into the hallway. He’s on the phone.
“Of course there was no break in the ice,” he’s saying, with a trace of irritation in his voice. “It isn’t their ice.” He sighs, shoves a hand through his hair so it sticks up mad-professor style and doesn’t bother to smooth it back down. “Just get into the bank headquarters. Their console men are already dead, but that should be all the proof you need.”
He hangs up and drifts back into the living room, frowning slightly, eyes narrowed on some distant, invisible point.
“Oi,” John says. “Knock knock, anyone home?”
“This isn’t a simple data theft,” Sherlock says, mostly to himself. “Too neat. It’s perfect.”
“Could it not just be, I don’t know, a very good theft?”
A minute, dismissive headshake. “An ordinary thief might’ve patched up the damage to the ice to cover their traces, if they were very good; more likely, they’d just have cut and run. A wholesale substitution like that takes work. This wasn’t about taking the financial data and getting out of there. Someone’s showing off. Why?” Sherlock presses steepled fingers to his lips, takes a step toward the sofa, ready to flop down into the permanent indent his bony arse has left in the worn-out temperfoam.
John gets right in his way. “Oh no you don’t. Dinner, remember?” He glances over at the time display blinking on the simstim unit. “Or breakfast, whatever you want to call it.”
Sherlock’s brow furrows in annoyance. “I need to think about this.”
“You can think while you eat. I won’t even distract you with boring everyday things like conversation.”
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”
“You know, most people don’t sulk about having to talk to their flatmates occasionally.”
A glance, half puzzlement, half annoyance. “I talk to you all the time.”
John stares. “You—” Then he breaks off. The inevitable argument will only help Sherlock to stall. One piece of ridiculous behaviour at a time. “Oh, you know what, never mind.” He grabs his jacket off the back of the door. “Come on. You’ve been running on nothing but those bloody octagons for two days now, and you’ll be no use to anybody if you make yourself ill. Man cannot live by uppers alone.” Sherlock may not like having to eat—having to remember he’s made of anything so unreliable as flesh and blood—but he likes being incapacitated by physical weakness even less. “Anyway, there’s fuck all you can do until Lestrade gets back in touch. You don’t even know if you were right about the console men.”
“I’m always right,” Sherlock retorts, rolling his eyes, but he gets his coat.
They end up in one of those cheapo late-night Japanese places, heaving even at this time with zaibatsumen off the plane from Narita and teenage club rats waiting for the greasy spoons to open for breakfast, staving off jet-lag and comedowns with greasy ramen and endless cups of coffee and pills of varying legality. Stuffed into a corner booth between sweating conveyor-belt sushi and a window display flashing international headlines, the hubbub rendering individual sounds unrecognisable, it’s almost as good as privacy. From John’s point of view, anyway; Sherlock glares at the newsscreen, narrows his eyes at the snick-snick of the razorgirls in the booth behind them comparing black-clinic fingernail-jobs. You’ll thank me when you don’t pass out at the deck later, John tries to convey with his eyebrows, but he sticks to his word and stays quiet.
He even manages to keep it up for a whole twenty minutes.
John’s finished his noodles and most of the overpriced piss masquerading as lager he ordered to go with them. Sherlock pushes rice and katsu sauce around in his bowl and glowers at everything: the backs of the customers jostling around the till; the slivers of vat-grown sashimi that trundle past them on plastic plates, fleshy and drooping beneath the counter lights. His expression grows more and more thunderous and his bites of food less and less frequent, and eventually John’s had enough of watching him scowl.
“So, what actually happened, then?” he asks, keeping his tone deliberately light and conversational.
Sherlock gives him a frankly evil look.
John ignores it. He’s been on the receiving end of worse. “Just thought it might help if you went over it again,” he goes on, with a small shrug. “Out loud, I mean. To me.”
You know, like you used to, he doesn’t add. Wouldn’t help, probably.
Not that John’s under any illusions. He knows he’s not being a hundred per cent altruistic, here. Yes, he’s genuinely concerned for Sherlock—with the drugs and the endless hours of work and the resentment he displays toward physical necessities, any sane person would be—but equally, he misses it. Being part of the action. Running through the streets side-by-side with him, or, at least, seeing the letters ‘SH’ blink up in the corner of his vision as Sherlock accessed his sensorium via the deck. John’s military rig is basic, but it has a two-way link that would let them trade cheerful insults as they worked without needing to be in the same room. Sometimes, Sherlock’s voice would hiss, stop thinking, right inside his head, which John thought was a bloody cheek. But other times his own amazement would expand past the bounds of matey banter into amazing, he’d find himself whispering it aloud in the street, and the answering to an idiot, probably would seem to bear a different quality, somehow, a similar overflowing. A gratitude, even. He was sure that at least a little of Sherlock’s showing-off was for his benefit. The way he’d interpret London, with all its tangled streets and accumulated information, its piled-up centuries of junk, easy as reading data in the matrix. As if there was another city out there, shimmering beneath the one you could see with the naked eye (army-issue Zeiss-Ikon or otherwise), an augmented reality to which only Sherlock had access, but he’d deign to lend John his special glasses every now and again.
John doesn’t see much of it, these days. Not since—since the Adler business, if he had to put a date on it, though he’s pretty sure the germ of it was there in some form or another all along. But before that he’d just assumed it was a cowboy thing, or an ego thing. Now, the way Sherlock locks himself away in the matrix, or in his own head, and refuses to say why—well, sometimes it seems like hiding.
Sherlock would probably call him an idiot for thinking that. If it even occurred to him to wonder what John’s thinking.
“It makes no sense,” Sherlock says at last, interrupting his reverie, and John blinks and pauses with his beer halfway to his mouth. “Why replace the bank’s ice with their own? Why leave a system in place to protect something that had already been stolen?”
“Industrial sabotage? A virus destroying the data cores? Getting rid of the bank’s console men would slow the response down, give it time to do its dirty work.”
Sherlock dismisses the suggestion with a wave of his chopsticks. “Any half-decent finance institution has strategies in place to deal with that kind of eventuality. They’ll already have transferred their files. Any kind of sabotage would have had to take place immediately after the theft; the delay would be fatal. And so far, nothing.”
John shrugs. “Don’t know, then. Sorry.”
Sherlock’s expression is distant again. John finishes his drink in silence.
Halfway home John notices a quick black shadow and a silvery gleam down a side-street. Notices it again five minutes later. This time, he turns his head quickly enough to get a glimpse. It’s a woman, pale-faced, mirrored implants covering her eyes. Her suit—mimetic polycarbon, military-grade—absorbs the flicker of neon on brickwork and the darkness of the alley, and she melts into the gloom quicker than blinking.
“One of Mycroft’s,” Sherlock says, without turning his head, at the same moment John says, “We’re being followed.”
“Jesus. Can’t he just pick up the phone?”
“If current rumours are to be believed, then quite possibly not.” Sherlock shoves his hands deep into his coat pockets. “Besides, he never passes up an opportunity for needless theatrics.” And he stalks on down the street, long coat flapping out behind him.
John shakes his head. The ghost of a smile tugs at the corners of his mouth, then vanishes. He follows.
Grey cubic structures, representing financial systems, pulse silently on the transparent grid. The impostor ice sits neatly in among them, betraying itself only to the sharpest of eyes—only to his eyes. The matrix—clear geometry of logic—manipulated with a magician’s skill.
Sherlock would very much like to meet the magician.
The phone was ringing when they got back to the flat. Mrs Hudson asleep downstairs, held gently under by pink derms, hadn’t stirred to answer it. Lestrade.
“Yeah, you were right,” he said. “Question now is, what did they leave in there, and what the hell is it for? Think you could take a look?”
“You’re not—oh, God, you let Anderson try getting in, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, and now Anderson’s in Medical.”
“Moron.”
“I’ll tell him you send your best. So, you’ll be in touch?”
“Of course.”
He hung up and found John looking at him. (Lines around his eyes deep-etched in the shadow. Concern.) John pursed his lips as if to speak, hesitated. Eventually: “You should go to sleep.” Not much hope in it. He shrugged and headed up to his own room, then. His tread heavy on the stairs.
Sherlock jacked in.
And now the black ice parts for him like water. No need for an icebreaker. Dark planes of data deliquesce at his approach, clustering shadows dance at the edges of consciousness and then—
A shift. He’s inside a construct. A dark room, low ceiling striped with powered-down striplights. Cyberspace decks—basic models, twenty years out-of-date—ranged along windowless walls. A screen covers the far wall. Dark blotches of gum trodden into the carpet, graffiti scored into the edges of desks by artificial nails, acrylic and illegal razor. Immaculate texturework. The whole scene could have been drawn straight from his memory.
No doubt about it, then. This is for him.
It’s the computer lab in a school. The school he attended, to be precise.
Glance downwards. Human body, apparently solid, not the bare dusting of pixels that serves as his representation in the matrix. The simulation’s doing a little of the work; fooled by the hyperrealism of the construct, his mind does the rest, filling in what it expects to see. He crosses the room, sits at the corner table he used to favour. Runs simulated fingers across a simulated pattern of wear on a simulated keyboard. Every detail present and correct. Someone’s done their research.
But the room remains empty and silent. No message is forthcoming—unless it is, perhaps, I know who you are. Rather a lot of trouble to go to for that.
He contemplates briefly. Rolls his eyes at the redundancy of the action—an absurd charade, pretending to access a matrix within a matrix—and reaches for the trodes.
Students used to leave messages for one another on startup. (The messaging system designed for the use of educators, but easily hacked.) Holmes is a twat was a frequent one.
Sure enough, there it is:
Ready to play?
His (‘his’) fingers skitter across the keypad in annoyance. You don’t seem to be much of a gamesmaster.
Aw, come on. Give me another chance? :-)
To do what?
A moment passes. Then:
Look left.
He jacks out of the school system, blinks back to (simulated) reality. There’s someone sitting at the next desk; someone who wasn’t there before. Slumped in the swivel chair, head lolling to the right, eyes sightless. Definitely, definitely dead.
“Carl Powers,” Sherlock announces, and John looks up from his cuppa through bleary eyes.
“What? Who? Wait, is that the suspect? You’ve found him already?”
Sherlock summarily ignores John’s questions, and helps himself to the last of the coffee. There are two bright-blue derms stuck on the underside of his wrist; he obviously hasn’t been to bed, but that’s no surprise.
“Get dressed,” he says, instead of explaining. “I need you to go to school.”
Chapter 2
