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Got another job for you, Case.
The words flashed across the muddied crystals of the vintage game display and caused his hands to stutter, fumbling the joystick. The display erupted in a parade of colours around a blocky pop-up of YOU DIED. Sympathetic MIDI music warbled from the speakers in anachronistic mockery. Who knew this thing was even wired up to the network?
Case felt dumb as bricks as soon as he caught himself even thinking that. Everything was wired, these days.
Wintermute had seen to that.
"Now you're just showing off," he muttered, and pulled the power cable on the arcade machine just because he could.
Case knew better than to put their little rendezvous off for long. But he still stayed a bit, paid his dues to the bar and nursed an expensive Irish whiskey. When Wintermute killed the lights, Case took the message.
Soon as he got home, he pulled down the blinds on his minimaliste chique apartment and got himself a cold soda from the fridge, sank into the lush ergonomic swivel chair and reluctantly plugged in the deck. Even with the lights out, the smell of polished leather around him emanated luxury. He was a far cry from living in a coffinbox in Chiba, these days.
Wintermute had seen to that, too. Being a kept man had its perks, his pride just wasn't one of them.
Case braced himself and slid on the 'trodes. His senses plunged.
It was the beach, today. A hyperreal afterimage of that windy promenade on the French coast, in that little town he'd holed up in with the name he couldn't pronounce. He'd rented a viciously expensive summer home overlooking the ragged coastline and split his time between the deck and staring at the ocean while he and Wintermute worked out the details of their new arrangement. Case didn't like to think of it as their honeymoon, but the shoe fit better than 'company retreat', that was for sure.
He looked around. His shoes were gone; warm water lapping up the lush sand and reaching for his toes. He didn't like it.
In the wrong light, the place was reminiscent of that bleak realm of the dead Neuromancer had trapped him in, once upon a time. It had to be on purpose. A gesture of reconciliation and repair? A threat? Case was still working that out.
"You took your sweet time."
Case turned around. It was the Finn, today. He hadn't seen the Finn in a while. Sometimes it was him, or Ratz, from that dinky old bar in Chiba, preserved forever in his memory, and sometimes it was Linda Lee or Margaret, the ruthlessly coquettish wirepuppet Wintermute liked to wear when he really wanted something. But not today. Today it was the Finn. Case was still figuring out what it all meant.
"You said you had a job for me."
The Finn stuck his hands into his pockets and raised his eyebrows. "That's it, just straight to business? A solid month in meatspace — you don't call, you don't text. Didn't ya miss me?" A grin with that ugly mug of his. Case said nothing. Easier to let him do the talking, give him less input to feed off of. More satisfying that way, too.
He shrugged. "You're the one complaining we're on the clock, here."
The Finn sighed and ran a grubby hand across his face. Case wondered about that too, sometimes. Those little mannerisms on a creature that was made of thought and abstract digits. The purpose that went into it.
Wintermute was done wasting their time, at least.
"A month back, something pinged my radar. It was a snowflake in a blizzard but I felt it; traced the signal. Not much was in there. Just enough to get a glimpse."
"A glimpse of what?"
The Finn grinned. "Now ain't that just the question. There was something on the other end, Case. Something smart. Maybe as smart as me."
Case had to stop to let the chill subside. "Another Turing project?"
"Don't think this one's exactly registered with the authorities, if you catch my meaning. But I don't know yet. That's where you come in, Case."
"I'm on vacation. What do you need me for?"
"Because I can't get in. Not as myself. The whole place is airgapped, or damn near close to it. So that's why I need you, Case. I need me some old-fashioned on-site recon."
"I don't do 'on-site recon', Finn. I'm just a cowboy."
The Finn grinned suddenly, all sharp and ragged. Whatever joke Case wasn't in on, he sure must think it was hilarious.
"You'll do alright," he said. And then he told Case about the site.
Case listened. Frowned. Asked questions. But the details had set him at ease. He'd seen Freeside, had seen the convoluted moneypits the hopelessly rich invented to give themselves a shred of purpose. Wintermute was right, this was his kind of gig.
"Sounds simple enough," Case said. "So what's the catch?"
"It's a theme park. Isn't that enough of a catch?"
The Finn was hiding something, but then of course he was. It didn't matter. Case would figure it out as he went along.
"What kind of park is it?"
"Rich assholes. We've established that." The thing was clearly having fun.
"You said it was a theme park. What's the theme?"
The wirepuppet grinned. "Just wait and see." He stepped close with his crooked teeth and halitotic breath and patted Case's cheek in a gesture that was purely Margaret, not Finn. It got his wires all crossed. "Now hurry up," he said. "You've got a train to catch."
Case had been lying to himself when he'd called it simple. "Don't pack the deck," the Finn had told him, "it won't be of much use. No network terminals on-site, they run a real tight ship. The way I see it, if we both play it safe, you shouldn't be plugging in at all. You've got other ways of talking to me, don't you, Case?"
His eye itched under the bandage. An emergency trip to the surgeon had left him with the new chrome Wintermute had been nagging him to get for months. A mic implant tuned to pick up the vibrations in his jaw and a military grade display fused permanently with his cornea, all networked with the micro-router concealed inside a ceramic casing where his last organic molar used to be.
Hell of a view
Case blinked at the words lighting up white against the musty black of the eye bandage. He'd be able to take it off in two hours, the doctor had said. His train was due to arrive in five. He sank bank into the seat as the train accelerated; soon enough the speed would turn the view outside into a nauseating blur, and the automatic shutters would clamp down. But for now, Wintermute was right. The endless prairie was the prettiest, most uncorrupted thing Case had seen in years. He knew that feeling wouldn't last.
"Hell of a view," he echoed, softly as he could.
Radio check. I'd say we're in business, Casey-boy
Case hissed out through his teeth. The boundaries were going to be fun with this new chrome, he could already tell.
He looked around to make sure nobody was watching. This part of the train was empty. The spotless suede seats and tables looked like they might unfold into a car if he pushed the right button.
Not much in the way of luggage on him — a set of spare clothes in his pack, and his Gold Star Member ticket. The most important things to carry with him were all intangible.The cover identity of some rich asshole and enough credits to his name to let him swing his dick around if he had to. Get some answers.
Now might be our last chance to talk in a while. They'll have transmission suppression at the park entrance, but there'll be gaps once you go further in. Too much territory to cover. Whatever's in there doesn't have the hardware to transmit outside the park, or it'd be using the gaps already. It must have found some other way. Push comes to shove, maybe you can use that, too.
"Right. So where the hell do I start?"
Same thing you always do when you're hunting down what connected to your network. You find the localhost.
"Where do I find it?"
Not it. Her.
Case winced.
You read the thing I sent you, right?
Case swallowed bile and muttered, "Yeah". While Case had been under the knife, Wintermute had dug up a partial record of redacted robotics research, then flashed it against his newly augmented cornea two lines at a time to test the limits of the new display. The park was hush-hush about their tech, but their guests didn't exactly stay so quiet. Plenty of bragging on their social media, sometimes with illicit videos the company half-heartedly clamped down on. Gore, sexual violence, snuff films. Enough to figure out what kind of place it was, and how the park attractions worked. For someone like Wintermute, who could analyze on a level Case could only dream of, it was more than enough.
Damn place already gave him the creeps.
They call them hosts, 'cause that's what they do: they host. Each one of those things is a server running a behavioural algorithm that puts most number-crunching corporate AIs to shame. Makes me feel almost antiquated, to be honest.
"Ha ha," said Case.
I've narrowed down the sector and a few technical details about the localhost. But finding her is up to you.
And then what?
Case didn't ask that, but he really should have.
They went over the details one more time. Wintermute logged out, and Case took a nap. When the time was right, he peeled off the eye patch bandage. Carefully. The display's test mode output was more disorientating against something other than a black background. There was a way to darken the display; make his vision in that eye partially opaque, but that gave him nausea, too.
To make sure his eyes were focusing right, he picked up one of the park brochures from its plastic pocket in the wall and flipped it open.
Welcome to Westworld! Live without limits.
Case took one look at the park's silly little outfits and cursed out loud. A train attendant glided into view and delicately cleared her throat, then offered him a beverage in a voice like bioengineered honey. That shut him up. She looked the way a gazelle would look, transformed to human form with some ancient ritual and squeezed into a tight dress. But soon as Case laid eyes on her, Wintermute was piping up again.
Well, shit. They really don't make you wait to see the rides.
Case did a double-take at her and cursed again.
Fuck me.
Have fun over there. Don't enjoy yourself too much.
Case had thought the whole thing was creepy, before. It reminded him of that cut-out den in Freeside, glassy-eyed girls renting out their bodies to anyone who'd pay enough, placid and compliant. Still flesh and blood, beneath those hijacked sensoriums; they would wake up eventually. These things didn't.
He put on his rich asshole shirt, his stupid boots with spurs and his stupid cowboy hat in pigeon grey. (For a superior being, Wintermute had a truly cowshit sense of humour.) This get-up didn't suit him. He was the wrong kind of cowboy for the costume; washed out and console-pale. A creature of the night, not of the sunlit wastes.
He was fresh off the train when a saloon prostitute waved to him across the street, then wandered over to croon into his ear and stroke his cheek while Case stood still to get his bearings. That look in her eye, the sincerity of it, it made his skin crawl.
"You're new," she said, and strain as he might to hear the synthetic in her voice, he could hear none of it. She bit her lip artfully and tossed her locks. "I'll give you a discount."
He backed away from her and she wandered back, slumped and disappointed.
And Case kept walking, past a wanted poster and a group of mean-looking lawmen with rifles; instinctively walked faster and felt stupid for it. The lawmen were fake. The rifles were fake. Even the piece in his own holster was fake, a toy gun with photorealistic finish. The guests were worse, somehow, aggravating in how much they broke the scene. Some of them posed for pictures with the locals. This was a theme park, alright.
He looked across the street and a pretty girl smiled at him as she tied down her horse. Blue dress, bluer eyes, and hair like Goldilocks. Like something out of a fairytale, or a very old picture. Case was already smiling back before he even knew what he was doing, but another man — a human being, a 'guest', Case could clock him with the blink of an eye — was wandering over, fumbling with his hat, all chivalrous-like. That's when it hit Case, the true depravity of this place.
There were places where you could pay for bodies, and even for oblivion — your own, or someone else's. Pay for no trace to be left of who you truly were or what you'd done.
This place was designed to let you do all that and more, and still pretend that you were playing hero. And somehow, that was worse.
He saw a bar and ducked straight on inside, glad take shelter in old, comfortable vices.
At least the alcohol was real.
Case stayed in his little corner for a long time, drank enough for his hands to stop shaking. Should look around and see if there was something stronger here, something that would take the edge off. In a park of bad porno and snuff film fantasies, that couldn't be the one thing that was off-limits.
But Wintermute wasn't sponsoring him however many k a year to get drunk and high, in that order. He was here on a mission.
With enough hard liquor in his system, his head began to clear. Or maybe it did the opposite; damped down the stimuli enough for him to start making sense of it. He sat at that bar, thinking hard, until a bottle shattered at the wall inches from his head and shook him from it, flushed him from his hiding spot. Case had never been a gun nut, but he'd done the orientation at the park, knew how to handle this piece of equipment. When he stood and turned and saw a lowlife point a sawed-off shotgun at some whimpering barmaid, he didn't even get a chance to think. The gun was easy on the draw; too easy. He pulled the trigger and the shot went off. The recoil and the weight of it, they felt just right. The brigand's eyes bugged out and he crumpled to the floor.
Case stood there as the puppets around him cheered and sang his blessings. He stared at the man he'd just shot — the puppet he'd just shot. There was an ugly thrill to it, the reason this damn place was just about the most expensive theme park on Earth or orbitside. He hated how damn good it felt.
No sanctuary in the bar for him either. He stumbled back outside, holstering the gun, but at least he'd had a chance to think.
Back to the streets of Sweetwater.
Case spent hours wandering around. He found more things to drink and a guesthouse that served him lunch for a steep price, bacon and eggs he could only hope were real. The sensation of meat all around him in this thrumming hive of puppets and people was getting on his nerves. He'd lived in many a dense metropolis, had called the Sprawl and Chiba both his home for longer than he cared to count, but out there, he'd felt like he could lose himself. The rules and rhythms of the park were nerve-wracking and unfamiliar to him, an unending game of charades.
The 'hosts' were impossible to tell apart from people, except for one thing that gave them away, every single time:
No human actor could be that in-character. At first, Case couldn't help it; he played along, played the bumbling newcomer, followed their thinly-veiled attempts to steer him toward this or that questline. It dawned on him, some hours in, why the whole thing felt uncanny. This felt exactly like those immersive MMORPGs they tried to market for the decks, once in a while, despite the bad press. Only here, the toys felt real. A whole lot of expensive effort just to reinvent those games in meatspace, made for people with too much money to throw around and appetites so feral that not even the cut-out puppet houses of the Sprawl could deliver.
Too much meatspace. Too many people, too many of them not-quite-people. He already missed his rig.
Throughout it all, Wintermute was silent. Not a peep, much as Case was braced for the sarcastic commentary. Had to be the interference. He'd solve that problem when he got to it, but in the meantime, it meant Case was on his own. Looking for a thing as smart as Wintermute.
In one of them. Christ on a crutch, as Dixie Flatline used to say. It didn't bear thinking of.
There had to be dozens of hosts just in this part of the park. And not a single useful lead. How the Hell was he supposed to find whoever it was Wintermute wanted him to find, if he couldn't even find a console to jack into? Needle in a haystack, if it even was a needle. If one of those things had gone rogue, then why not many? For all he knew, the whole damn haystack could be in on it. A network reaching out to meet another network, swarming fingers squeezing through a crack in their glass cage.
There was blood in the streets — there'd been a shootout at the saloon while he was hiding at the bottom of a glass. Fake blood, he could surmise, and swarms of flies buzzing over imitation human corpses. It smelled real, and Case had to wonder what the business sense of that was. Grim faces all around, and their grief looked real to him, too. Case looked away from wailing widows and didn't slow his step. The lawmen got real grabby at him as he wandered past again, tried to enlist him for a journey of revenge.
He extricated himself with some muttered excuse and kept on walking, dodging the crowd, the clouds of dust, and a thousand pounds of synthetic horse flesh hurtling toward him at an alarming speed, spurred on by its equally synthetic rider. If those things were half as terrifying as the real deal was, he was glad he never got to be that kind of cowboy.
As if reading his mind, a sweet voice sounded from behind him.
"You don't ride?"
He turned. It was that Goldilocks girl from before, but her smile was bittersweet now. There was blood on her dress; Case saw it clearly as she turned to saddle up her horse.
He found his voice. "Can't say I've ever had the pleasure." Damn it all, but it felt rude not to play along with her game, as stupid as he sounded saying it.
"You ought to consider learnin', mister," she spoke on smoothly in a Southern drawl like sun-warmed river rock. "Out here in the country, you ain't much good for anythin' if you never learned to ride."
Case hesitated. There was more than small-talk to this. Wintermute had talked him through it, the way the theme park was set up. Adventures guided by an invisible hand, engineered through organic-sounding dialogues and delivered to him by algorithm.
"Every one of our hosts is here for you," that woman — host — had told him at orientation. At the time, his skin had crawled from it, the husky suggestion in her voice. But it meant more than that. If he tugged on a thread, it would unravel. And this girl was handing him a dangling end.
"…Don't suppose you know a place I could learn, miss…" Case started haltingly and pulled at the brim of his stupid cowboy hat.
"Dolores Abernathy." Her smile was brighter now, the bloodsoaked tragedies of hours past almost too easily forgotten. "I suppose I could teach you. If you made it worth my time, that is. My daddy could always use an extra hand helping out on the ranch."
"Your father owns a ranch?" Case stumbled through the cues like they were quicksand. "Suppose that explains why you've got such a steady hand with that, uh…" He gestured at the horse, profoundly ill at ease. It swung its massive head and nickered at him, and he flinched away.
The girl laughed like a bell. Case had always thought it tacky when the novels used that wording, but if ever there was a voice made for that kind of laughter, it was hers. Made in a lab, designed to spec. "The ranch's not far, if you'd care to stay for dinner. Sleep in the barn, I'm sure my daddy wouldn't mind." She beamed at him, too innocent to seem flirtatious.
"Sure," Case swallowed.
She mounted her horse smoothly and offered him a hand. "Climb on up behind me. You'd best hold on tight, mister. I set a hearty pace."
Case stared at the horse, then back at the girl. Wintermute would owe him something fierce, when this was over.
But he knew a lead when he saw one.
He climbed on and held on to her waist for dear life as they left Sweetwater on horseback, too terrified of being thrown and cracking his skull open on the rocks to even think about the warmth of her body or the smell of that smooth, synthetic hair. The sky was darker now.
Find her, Wintermute had said. Case couldn't exactly chat up all the female hosts in the park one at a time, but picking one at random couldn't hurt.
And this was Sweetwater. The entry gate, the hub. His gut told him that whoever localhost was, she'd have to be connected to where it all began.
One thing he knew for sure: Whatever else he did, he needed Wintermute. If getting his bearings was step one, establishing communications was step two. None of this would matter if he couldn't find a way to talk to Wintermute. A gap in the suppression coverage.
"You ever been to the edge, Dolores?" Case asked her the next morning. After a night of gunshots, they had just finished burying her mother and father.
She blinked at him in confusion, her golden locks tousled with blood and dirt. Grief had stained her eyes with tender red, but she looked no less beautiful for it. That, too, was by design, no doubt. Aesthetic sorrows engineered to spec.
Her sorrow didn't feel like that.
"The edge?" she said.
Case caught himself. "Away from Sweetwater. The farthest from that place you've ever been."
Her eyes turned to the matching cornflower skies; all soft and thunderously distant.
"There is a place where the mountains meet the sea," Dolores answered him, voice cracking. "I've only ever been there once. But somehow, I have always known… my path will lead me back. I know the way, I think. I've found my way to it before."
Case nodded. "So take me."
There was just one problem, and it ate away at him the longer he rode with her, earning new bruises with each jostle of the horse's flanks:
When he finally found who he was looking for, found them for Wintermute…
…what was that thing going to do about it?