ERNIE COLON

CHROMO

Hard plas-soled boots pounded and echoed off the narrow street driving casual
loungers and pedestrians into the nearest cover. Doorways, back alleys, any
space away from that sound became suddenly crowded with terrified, scattering
people.

The leader signaled and the pounding became a whisper of carefully placed feet
in a softer, still determined pace.

The Sanitation Squad halted abruptly on the leader's hand signal. Frank Slater
leaned against the black wall, his ISO suit scraping away rebel graffiti.
Idiots, he thought; they know it comes off easily but they persist in painting
and spraying their seditious nonsense.

He peered around the wall, cursing the ISO suit for jutting out before he could
see. If the pissy little informant was right, there should be two men under that
halo. On a foggy damp night like this the street light was aptly named, its cold
bluish light surrounded by a misty saint's corona. And there he was. Brad
Johnson's baby brother. Johnson himself would be on the scene in minutes, there
having been a general police call.

There were actually four of them, but all the better. Rebels were rebels and he
and his unit were empowered to eradicate where deemed necessary. Slater smiled.
It usually was necessary.

Even at this distance, he could seethe red eyes of the carrier. His brow
furrowed. How could the scum rebels stand close to a man so clearly infected
with CHROMO? No matter. It was time to get to work. The carrier must be the
first target. There must be no chance of his getting away. Slater let his weapon
hang from its sling and made a pattern of signals that his men, through long
hours of training, understood immediately. The man in the long gray topcoat was
his, Slater's.

A patrol's nearing wail was the signal for Slater to spring into action. That
vehicle could only be Brad Johnson responding. Slater jumped out, his weapon
already fixed on Terry Johnson. The group of four, alerted by the siren, were
crouching, ready to bolt. Two of them did and were cut down by Slater's men. One
of them was the carrier. Their bodies, already lifeless when they smashed into
and slid along the street, smoked with the crackling energy of the Sanitation
Squad's weapons. Terry Johnson and the remaining rebel put their hands up.
Slater laughed out loud, the metallic sound eerie in counterpoint to the nearing
siren. He smoked the quaking rebel next to the Johnson brat. The body jumped and
slid near the other two. Apart from briefly closing his eyes and compressing his
lips, Terry Johnson said nothing and revealed nothing of his feelings or
reaction. Slater smiled approvingly. The boy had balls, no question. He was a
traitor and a fool, from a family of fools, but he had balls.

Slater walked closer as the siren behind him stopped, the patrol car's wheels
sliding on the wet ground. Doors were opening. Voices raised. Brad Johnson's
booming above the others. "Wait, Slater--don't fire!" he pleaded. Now, thought
Slater. Now. The boy blinked once, then attempted what Slater thought might be a
sneer.

The charge blew away Terry Johnson's head, disintegrating each fragment with a
lingering succession of crackling puffs of blue lights. They died away in tiny
sparks bouncing along the street. Brad Johnson's initial bellow of fear and rage
echoed once along the now quiet street. A smiling Slater turned to face him.

It was a recurring nightmare.

Brad Johnson's dream world has become a monochrome, monotone hell. In that
inferno, a twelve-year-old boy, trapped in an ISO protective suit far too large
for him, screamed soundlessly, his breath misting the faceplate. As Brad clawed
at the suiting's controls, trying to open it to help the boy, a green mist began
to rise in the suit like stagnant water, slowly gathering around the boy's chin,
then lips, then . . .

Every time he awoke from the dream, Brad's hands were still clawing, hooked like
talons, still trying to open the damned suit. He knew that boy. His face, so
clear in the dream, blurred into something like a police fugitive sketch on
waking, its features not really those of anyone. But he knew that boy.

Another drink, he was certain, would not help him at all to figure out exactly
what it was he was up against. But it would ease things a bit. Make him feel he
was up to it.

To what?

To going up against Dr. Maelstrom. There. That wasn't so hard, was it? No, that
special blended liquor didn't solve anything, but it sure made you breathe
deeply. (He eschewed the opti-cube. As it was, he'd been using it more than he
thought safe. Psychosis was & real danger with the little old cube.) He checked
the time. A few minutes yet before he had to leave for the shareholders'
meeting. Brad poured himself three more fingers in a wide glass.

After all, Richard Maelstrom had to piss like anybody else, didn't he? In fact,
Brad remembered a time when he and the all-powerful head of Genetix were side by
side at the company urinals. The Captain of all Captains of Industry had cupped
his penis so that it would be safe from Brad's possible gaze.

He took another sip of the amber bliss. Oh yes. Much better.

Brad concentrated on Raymond Masters, Dr. Maelstrom's dogsbody, for all his
brilliance. Then, of course, there was Masters' wife, Sonia. What should he make
of her?

Brad stepped over the ISO window and stared out at the city he'd once loved. He
looked past his reflection; an athlete going to seed. His hair, though still
full, was lank and lifeless. His slacks, not quite freshly pressed. The
once-trim waistline protruded above the loosened belt.

The city's pinpoint windows winked like stars on the impossibly high edifices.
How he had once loved that city. He tried to remember how he'd felt, that very
long time ago. It was no use. Too much had happened since. Too many killings in
the name of protection. Protection from CHROMO: the disease that has inspired
abject, deathly fear in all of us for how long now?

And to Brad and his men had fallen the awful task of protecting the general
populace. Protecting their lives, that is, by taking the lives of others. Of the
afflicted.

Sonia Masters had sworn to him that she was close, very close, to finding the
key. Not according to her husband, the celebrated discoverer of the lock to that
key, the CHROMO molecular chain. Masters' brilliant research had culminated in
the exposure of the elegant pattern now so familiar through constant vidnews
bulletins. Culminated.

And then stopped.

Somehow, Raymond Masters, superscientist, winner of every truly prestigious
international prize, holder of some of the most complex and envied genetic
patents, had come up against a solid wall. CHROMO yielded its outline, its
mathematically elegant patterns, like a posturing flirt, then halted all further
advances. Stopped at the moment of intimacy, the moment of revelation. The
moment of pleasure.

How then could Sonia Masters say she was fashioning the key? Was she deluded?
She would not lie to Brad. Not now. But if neither lie nor delusion--what? Not a
real cure, surely.

Across the city he once loved, lay the Sprawl. In its labyrinthine alleys and
hovels, the broken streets and filthy poverty, rebels without hope plotted. He
pitied them. The military man in him hated them for their ineptitude, their lack
of discipline, of power.

He checked the time again. Now he was sure of what he would say at the meeting
when called. It would be short and sweet and they wouldn't like it one bit. Brad
Johnson rubbed at the stubble on his chin and decided that, if two drinks were
this beneficial, why then, two more . . .

Dr. Richard Maelstrom's passion was chess. Computers having long since become
grandmaster players, Maelstrom tired easily of draw play, however elegant the
moves. Three-dimensional chess was his game. He loved sucking in the computer
programs, making seemingly random and illogical moves and then listening to the
low whir as the idiot machine tried desperately to log in the strategy for
future use. That machine reminded him of Masters. He chuckled as he thought of
Raymond.

Masters had balked at first. Oh, he ranted a bit about his principles, his
ethics, the morality of it all--God help us! In the end it all came down to the
matter. The mattel The stuff that cannot be held in the hand; or smelled; or
felt: But for Richard Maelstrom it was as palpable as air and just as important:
it was power.

Project Habitat.

Maelstrom's computer reminded him of the time in soft, mellifluous tones. When
Maelstrom grunted, the machine, mistaking it for absentmindedness, said, "The
shareholders' meeting, sir." Maelstrom waved at it impatiently. "Yes, yes, I
know. Bishop captures pawn. Queen check."

He smiled as the machine whirred, trying to make sense of the move. It was
simple, really. Take the pawn. The machine--for so Maelstrom thought of it,
never giving it a name--would be forced to take the bishop with its king,
thereby losing its castling privilege. It was a fair trade, Maelstrom felt.

He had explained the project to Masters in words of many syllables, that being
Masters' mode of understanding and expression. Maelstrom could almost hear the
whirring in the man's brain as he tried to log in the sense and store the
strategy for future use.

Genetix, the entity Maelstrom had fashioned as surely as it were clay in his
hands, was embarking on the greatest, the most expansive industrial enterprise
in the history of the planet. Nothing less. Its scope was no longer a measurable
form. It was beyond wealth, beyond power. It was ultimate.

And Raymond Masters would be responsible.

Of course, Masters didn't know that. It was his speech at the shareholders'
conference that would trigger the explosion. It would mushroom immediately and
become The Project. And the Japanese, those double-dealing, genetically
self-centered, would-be world leaders, would atone. Maelstrom liked that.

They would atone.

To have to explain it to Masters at any length was a measure of the man's
essential smallness. But he was reachable. The carrot, looming impossibly large
before his astonished eyes, shielded him from the stick behind. He would, did,
submit. Con Amore.

His wife Sonia was another matter.

Masters, Maelstrom mused, seemed to have only a tenuous control over her. Her
constant probing into what she called the key to CHROMO's lock was--un-settling.
She was not approachable through the same avenues of conviction as her husband.
Nor was the used-up hulk of an ex-commander, Brad Johnson. He was no longer a
factor, excepting insofar as he could still be used, public hero that he still
was. And Maelstrom knew just how to use him.

That was part of his genius.

"Shareholders' meeting in 22 minutes, 17 seconds," the computer reminded him. It
would not do so again, having been programmed against what his owner would
consider nagging. Maelstrom called for the door and it whispered open. He turned
and conceded the game.

The machine, insofar as any machine could be, was puzzled. "You . . . concede,
sir?" It whirred, then clicked, then accepted. As a smiling Maelstrom left to go
to the Genetix shareholders' meeting, the singular turning point of his
remarkable life, he chuckled at the machine's inherent stupidity, and its
surprising malleability.

Spiral remembered his sixth birthday quite clearly. His father overheard him
blurting out as fast as his baby syntax would allow, the square root of a
seven-figure number to his astonished uncle. He beat the boy until restrained by
a horrified family.

Father and son thereafter regarded each other only peripherally, suspiciously,
and as seldom as possible. After CHROMO felled most of his family, Spiral made
his plans to leave. Only his mother kept him from fleeing their now uncrowded
home. When the Squads killed her like an animal, her eyes blazing red with the
disease, Spiral left. He felt a horrible guilt that her death was his freedom.
But it was worth a lot to look over his shoulder on leaving and see his father
staring after him, stunned and alone.

He made his way easily into the first ranks of the rebel cadres. They were
cells, really. Five men to a cell. If captured, they could not tell what they
did not know, however ingenious the persuasion. Their connections were cellular;
easily and often changed, impossible to trace.

His ability to snake his way through cyberspace was invaluable. Any degree of
classified information was open to him. He checked the day's haul. A pass to a
conference on holo-solids and their artificial gestation--whatever that was
about. Must be good for something. Some profit for him or the cause. He would
bring it to Mr. Light-stone as he did with almost everything he brought back
from the space.

Lightstone was the man. He made it all happen. Without him there was no rebel
cause; he was it. A first-class VIP pass for the Genetix shareholders' meeting
tonight. With it, anyone would gain instant entry. Unchallenged. That looked
real good. Mr. Lightstone would know what to do with that. He was the man who
was going to make things right. Though, in some vague way, Spiral did not want
things to be made right. He liked things the way they were; with infiltrators,
spies, good guys,bad guys. The Sprawl and the City, the black wall to be
broached with contraband, guards to be bribed, and above all what he alone could
supply: info.

As he made his circuitous way back to Lightstone--or where Lightstone might
be--he glanced at a terminal way station with the usual longing. It was one of
the new models, one he hadn't tried to tap into yet. No. Enough for the day. He
sorted through the rest of the take and put it neatly into the little boxes.
That was how he thought of the processes of his brain: little boxes, like egg
crates, all stuffed with info, and all instantly accessible.

Spiral knew he was important to the cause. Lightstone himself, his arm around
Spiral's shoulder, would praise him to the others. Spiral regarded Mr.
Light-stone with great love and something close to pity. For all his years, his
courage and generalship, Mr. Lightstone was somewhat naive. He seemed to be sure
of the cause winning, an end to the fighting. There was no end to the cause, the
fight. Any more than there was an end to CHROMO. It was the disease that kept
the struggle going, Spiral knew. While there was CHROMO, there would be the
fight, the cause, the good guys and the bad guys.

Spiral was proud to be known by name to every Squad in and out of the Sprawl.
His capture or death, he knew, would have meant instant recognition, promotion
for every man on the team that brought him down.

He was twelve years old.

Maelstrom considered the enigmatic Lightstone, leader of the rebel resistance.
His legend had grown beyond reasonable belief. His narrow escapes, retold and
told again throughout the Sprawl and into the city, gave credence to the biggest
part of his mythos: that Lightstone was part holo, part machine, wholly
untouchable. There would be time enough to deal with him and the rebels. They
served a purpose, after all. Were it in Maelstrom's power to magically vaporize
them all instantly, he would not.

Maelstrom watched the glittering lights of the city blurring past the limo
window. The chauffeur occasionally glanced at the traffease screen as it
computed the time it would take to reach the Genetix auditorium. Cruising the
VIP lane made the trip easier, though there was some traffic this evening.

Still, Lightstone was a bit beyond control. Too many recent casualties among the
Sanitation Squads. Morale was slipping. As good as Frank Slater was, he was not
the leader Brad Johnson used to be. 'Used to be' being the operative term. Yet
Slater had what Maelstrom most needed: an amoral ferocity that could be turned,
like a white-hot torch, against whatever target it was directed. Slater seemed
to hate everything outside of himself with a paranoid simplicity. The man was
invaluable. A great tool. Like all tools, useful. Until the day they were no
longer useful. Then . . .

Lightstone stared at the pass with disbelief.

The boy, Spiral, had outdone himself. Lightstone doubted the cause could
continue in its present escalation of harrying the Maelstrom structure without
the gifted boy. The Genetix shareholders' meeting tonight was no mere bean
counting profit-and-loss affair. Though some members might have expected it to
be just a self-congratulatory gathering, the atmosphere, the feel of the thing,
told him otherwise. Something was up. Something big. Everyone who was anyone
would be there tonight. Including, Lightstone mused, some previously uninvited
guests, courtesy of our gifted young Spiral.

Frank Slater's dream would come true.

Brad Johnson would fall into his hands, along with the Masters bitch. There is
injustice after all, Slater chuckled, winking at one of his men. The man nodded
uneasily. The others did their best to ignore the weird, metallic chuckles
emanating from Frank Slater's ISO suit.

Brad Johnson's brother, sent out to kill Lightstone--a prime assignment given to
baby brother and better handled by himself--had been turned instead into a
traitor by that freakish entity. What infernal incantations the evil Lightstone
had breathed into that little man's ear no one could tell, and Slater could not
guess at. What a plea-sure--what a delight--it had been to waste the little
bastard. Then to see big brother boo-hooing over the corpse--ah, that had been
even better. It had taken three men to hold the raging Brad back from Slater. Or
at least, thought Slater, that was how it appeared. Had their positions been
reversed, Slater knew it would take more than three men to stop him from
whatever damage he wished to inflict. When Johnson had calmed down sufficiently
and the men had released him, staying close by at the ready, Johnson had
threatened legal action. Slater almost spit into his faceplate in utter disgust.

The whole damned family was like to like; self-righteous poseurs. Ineffectual as
eunuchs. Johnson's appointment, for example, to the theater of war where he had
'distinguished' himself was what actors called actor-proof. It had been like
shooting fish in a barrel. Hardly any resistance. They could have sent Bo-Bo the
chimp and he would have garnered every ribbon and medal given to Johnson. That
hogwash about rescuing his men from an encirclement. A leader took care of his
men, that was that. That appointment should have been mine, Slater often
whispered through gritted teeth.

For Frank Slater, the killing had become pleasurable early on. Dumb shit Brad
Johnson with his professional scruples. He'd have let that diseased kid get away
that day. Ten-year-old kid, his eyes already a deep red with CHROMO, his
movements erratic. The little twerp would've infected half the damned Sprawl.
One shot brought him down. Little guy. He remembered Johnson's look. Made Slater
happy for a week.

Taking Brad Johnson's place would be only logical. Should have come sooner, but
. . . what the hell. Commanding the Squads was what Slater was born for. And
hey--it was for the public weal, wasn't it? He was the bulwark between CHROMO
and the gut-less populace hiding up in the great citadel, in their mile-high
condos, away from the Sprawl. Away from the poverty, the stink, the CHROMO--the
action.

He was a hunter by disposition, by nature. Though hunting CHROMO vectors was not
entirely satisfying; they had no means with which to fight back, not much
defense. Oh, occasionally an armed ragtag inflicted a casualty or two among his
men, or the rare armed rebel appearing out of nowhere, wild-eyed, making a
suicide attack.

These skirmishes kept the politicos generous and on their toes. Funding was
never a worry; the fat asses gave him more than he asked. Invitations to their
fancy homes, too. The menfolk uneasy with him, the women fascinated. He found
the women disgustingly easy and eventually of no interest to him at all.

Slater looked forward to no more than the hunt, may it last forever. That, and
the final showdown with Brad Johnson. Big fucking hero Johnson, has-been drunk,
his eyeballs rolling with opti-cube use. Christ, how he hated that son of a
bitch! Killing his brother had been most satisfying, Now Frank Slater looked
forward to killing Brad Johnson.

Slowly would be good.

Killing Lightstone--the Lightstone--would then be the capstone of his career. He
was bound to be persona most grata and--in the highest circles. Maelstrom
himself--der alte-el supremo--would place the circle of blue ribbon around his
neck. On national vid. The nation's highest award. Nothing closed to him,
nothing held back. Oh, the swells would still regard him with what they thought
was condescension. But it was weak, like the light wave from an exhausted
weapon, its power source used up. It was he, Slater, who held the high ground,
from which he regarded them all. Only Maelstrom loomed above, and that aerie
Slater granted to him readily, gladly.

Maelstrom after all, was Maelstrom.

Sonia Masters leaned closer to one of the screens. Her lithe body twisted
slightly as she strove to force a result with body English. Raymond Masters
watched her while he pretended to read his news printout of the day. He needn't
bother to pretend, he knew. She was so absorbed she would not have noticed him
dancing a hornpipe.

It would be impossible, he knew, to make her understand the project. She only
saw her own efforts at finding the key. Her world was in that multiscreen
workstation, staring at the damned CHROMO configuration. He watched her edge the
substructure closer to the CHROMO grape cluster. CHROMO shied away, as it always
did; coy, quivering with seeming vulnerability. Raymond's lips formed a sneer.
CHROMO was about as vulnerable as laminated rocket skin. His sneer turned into a
genuine smile as he saw CHROMO gather itself, certain now of its foe's essential
weakness. It straightened. The quivering stopped. Like a faking fighter, it came
off the ropes, suddenly not tired or weak. Adapted. Quickly, easily.

Sonia shook her head, her lustrous hair spilling about her shoulders, then bent
to the task again. Masters checked the time. Soon he would be speaking at the
shareholders' meeting. Maelstrom had insisted that he, Masters, speak first. The
first words on the road to Project Habitat. Raymond felt the beads of sweat on
his upper lip. He patted it gently with a fresh, stiff linen handkerchief.

It would be a dead end, this substructure. Promising, then nothing. CHROMO was
too good. Too adaptive. He remembered reading about the old ebola strain, late
twentieth century. The victims took it to the grave. Outbreaks were sporadic and
limited. CHROMO, on the other hand, weakened and maddened its victims, but they
Survived far longer. The vector, an incubator of swarming, multiplying billions
of bacteria, staggered on to infect others. CHROMO was smart.

Sonia leaned closer again, to the screens. Her concentration, Raymond marveled,
was total. It really was time they were going.

The greater scheme, the enormous enterprise, would be beyond her. The project
did not lend itself to easy description, and besides, she would never understand
or condone Raymond's sacrifices in the cause of the greatest industrial . . . It
was no use, he though, looking at his wife's intent face. He would never tell
her either, of the sacrifices he had made in the name of the enterprise, would
go on making as it matured into reality. What was it Jeremy Bentham
said--"greatest good for the greatest number?" Bentham would have understood.
Sonia never would.

And CHROMO was the key. Sonia searched for the key to CHROMO, not knowing the
disease was itself the main element in the great enterprise. Without it, there
was no enterprise, no Maelstrom, in fact. The entire structure would collapse
without its basic under-pinning. That was the great secret.

Masters marveled at the paradox: CHROMO needed us and, in its struggle for
primacy, killed us. And we, for our own purposes, needed the deadliest plague we
had ever known. CHROMO.

Warning: Enter CHROMO At Your Own Risk

Welcome to the world of CHROMO--if welcome is the right word.

CHROMO--a world of tragedy and triumph, hope and hopelessness, heroes and
villains, a deadly disease and the desperate search for a cure.

CHROMO--something new in the world of science fiction, a bold new approach to
storytelling.

Over the months and years ahead, CHROMO will take shape in many media . . .
novels and stories, graphic stories, interactive CD-ROMS, motion pictures, the
Internet, media not yet invented. CHROMO will spread across them all . . .
taking you along.

For now, enjoy this preview of the world of CHROMO . . . if you're brave enough.