The Long Run | Page 6

to the historian Corazon de Nostri.
The sunglasses had cost Trent more than the rest of what he was
wearing put together. The lenses filtered ultraviolet from bright
sunlight; in dim surroundings they stepped infrared up into the visible
spectrum. The arms of the glasses, where they crossed his temples, held
the contacts for the traceset in the handheld InfoNet link in the right
hand pocket of his coat.
The Down Plaza was run by Frazier Enforcement, the firm which ran
many of the shopping districts located either in the Fringe proper or at
its edge; Frazier got along acceptably well with the Peaceforcers, and
they were experts in the unique problems of Fringe-area security.
They also had the worst software in the state of New York. Trent's
Image, a program named Johnny Johnny, said softly, Boss, somebody's
messed with Plaza security.
I know, Johnny. Standing with his eyes closed behind the concealing

lenses, Trent merged with his Image, and ceased to be Trent.
Johnny Johnny roused himself into full wakefulness.
He could never remember, between times when Trent was not with him,
how it was to be truly alive in the InfoNet. Unlike most Image
programs--unlike Johnny Johnny's predecessor, Ralf the Wise and
Powerful--Johnny Johnny had never been turned off, and only rarely
reprogrammed. His memories stretched back over six years to his first
nanoseconds of awareness; in those days he had been little more than a
filter program, a collection of routines to enable Trent to quickly sort
and discard the network's vast crush of irrelevant detail, to select
communication routes through the millions of Boards which had, at any
given moment, surplus available logic that Johnny Johnny's master
might hijack.
That was Johnny Johnny's function: to act as a front end for Trent, as
an interface to the InfoNet, as Trent's Image to the world.
But the flow was not one way. The relationship between Johnny
Johnny and Trent was a partnership, a symbiosis.
Trent's touch brought Johnny Johnny to life.
Johnny Johnny blasted out into the Crystal Wind of Data.
Trent heard Jimmy Ramirez's voice, far away, talking with Bones. A
voice rumbled something slow and distant, and Trent relinquished all
touch with Realtime and fell away into the glowing Crystal Wind.
Johnny Johnny went into the Board that ran Down Plaza's security
through a line of lasercable that was putatively a failsafe backup for
tracking of Personal Protection Systems inside the Plaza. Though
expected to be so in the near future, the PPSs were not yet illegal, and
therefore could not be banned from the Plaza. Still they were
potentially so dangerous that any good security program had to keep an
eye on them.

That particular strand of lasercable did not track PPSs. It was one of
several third-layer backup systems Johnny Johnny had corrupted for his
own use. There was no time to trace through every line of lasercable in
the Plaza; Johnny Johnny did not seriously consider trying. He loaded
Frazier Enforcement's Security Diagnostics and ran it. The program
took forever to run, most of six seconds. Johnny Johnny waited
patiently, and then swore in surprise when the results came back to
him.
There was something excessively strange in the Security Board with
him.
Player, web angel, a DataWatch webdancer--Johnny Johnny had no
time to find out. In approximately two thousand nanoseconds Johnny
Johnny copied himself into eighty functional ghosts, sent them out into
the Net in all directions, disengaged from the Security Board, and fled.
Trent's eyes snapped open. Tammy the Rat was on her way across the
length of the Plaza, striding angrily toward him through the crowd.
Trent was peripherally aware of the gendarmes over at Googie's,
watching Tammy walk across the Plaza. Wearing a conservative
businessperson's suit, briefcase dangling loosely from his left hand,
Jimmy Ramirez stood next to Bones; a tall, handsome, ex-semi-pro
boxer with muscles on his muscles, slightly taller than Trent, simply
watching Trent with that cool, reserved look he saved for those
instances when he was genuinely pissed.
"Hello, Jimmy."
"Hello, my man," said Jimmy Ramirez softly. "You're late again."
"People keep saying. I had to stop and talk to a man--"
"About?"
"--and then the baby carriage blew up--"
Trent never had a chance to finish; Tammy pushed her way through the

last few meters of crowd, radiating anger so palpably that those who
saw her coming got out of the way without further encouragement.
"What the slithy goddam hell is going on? I've been stalling the
BloodSilk Boys but--"
Trent said clearly, "It's a drop."
Tammy the Rat was a professional; she froze in mid-word, turned away
from Trent almost instantly and without hurrying merged back into the
flow of the crowd around them.
"Walk away." Trent did even look in Jimmy Ramirez's direction. "Have
dinner