by Tom Clancy
“Makes the computers hard to repair.”
“If you have a problem, you get a replacement,” Luddie said. “We’re selling a luxury machine here, not some sort of run-of-the mill computer you can get at Circuits Maximus. Call it the difference between caviar and scooter pies. The systems are built in automated factories, untouched by human hands—or eyes. Nobody knows exactly how these gizmos go together, except for me.”
The young man grinned and tapped the side of his head. “And there are more than a couple of details that never made it onto paper or a datascrip.”
“I guess that explains the security all around you,” David said.
“Most of it’s because of this crap about leaks,” Luddie said brusquely. “I know they’re not coming from our computers. I designed the safeguards between our systems and the Net myself. We’ve got a physical lock, software, and circuitry.”
“A lock? You mean one of those submicro padlocks they used to put on the old floppy disks?”
Luddie gave David a superior look. “Better.”
David wasn’t about to disagree. Whatever surrounded them—energy field, light packet, bead of light—suddenly accelerated to warp drive.
“What—?” David began.
“This part of the tour is over,” Luddie explained. “We’re heading to one of the interface circuits.”
“This is the part that will make computer-link couches a thing of the past?”
“It’s bidirectional and biological. Input and output through the natural electrical conductivity of the skin as well as through user implants,” Luddie said. “People have been trying to do it for twenty years. I made it work.”
The micro-scenery around them was now a featureless blur as they rocketed along. Ahead was a huge square of whiteness. David abruptly recalled a line he’d read in every cheesy description of an out-of-body experience: “Headfor the light/’
He didn’t mention it, not sure how the joke would be taken—and, frankly, his mouth was a little too dry for talking. They swooped toward the square opening—some sort of receptor, David figured—and the glow enveloped them, a featureless pearly illumination.
David was reminded of a plane flight he’d taken, where the transcontinental jet had passed through a huge cloud bank. Beyond the porthole the world had been featureless, glowing whiteness, the sunlight filtered through millions of tiny ice crystals.
Then the haze thinned, and David wondered if the sim had somehow read his mind. They were in a cloud, or rather they’d been in a cloud. Now they had come out of it and were heading toward the ground—without an airplane, without even a parachute.
Free-falling from a couple of thousand feet would be enough to get anybody’s adrenaline going. But David found himself nearly overwhelmed with terror as he dropped. His heart was thumping wildly, as if it were going to burst out of his chest… or just plain burst.
It’s just a sim, he kept telling himself. This is veeyar! But as the ground came ever closer, the irrational panic gnawed away at him.
Every commercial virtual simulation had built-in safeguards to keep people from getting hurt. You could go skiing nude in a virtual blizzard without worrying about frostbite or broken legs—thanks to automatic pain blocks. Oh, some veeyar operators believed in punishing people for their simulated screw-ups. You might get a twinge of pain, even a zap. David did it himself. That’s why some people were a little nervous about his space sims. Still, any serious pain was filtered out by the safeguards on the Net and by the users’ own default settings for pain in their individual systems.
But Luddie MacPherson was a computer genius. And they weren’t accessing the Net from David’s own system. All this was almost certainly private, proprietary software operating in a closed system. Who knew what Luddy might have worked into this sim for their impact at ground level?
David wanted to ask, to make some sort of a comment. His friends always kidded him about being a bit too much on the cool side. But right now he could barely think, much less speak.
Wait — something’s happening! David felt his body somehow stretching, expanding. His head remained about a hundred feet above the ground. But his feet grew down to make a gentle impact, actually sinking a little bit into the soft earth.
David blinked, trying to assimilate the lightning change of perspective. He’d just gone from a microbe’s-eye view of the world to becoming a giant. Luddie MacPherson gestured expansively to the rolling farmland around them. “Some view, huh?”
“It was a little more . .. intense a couple of seconds ago,” David replied.
“Sorry about that.” The boyish inventor looked apologetic. “It was in the nature of psychological testing—to see how you handled stress.”
David looked down at his pants. “Well, they don’t look wet.”
MacPherson laughed. “Very good.” He pointed toward their feet. “This is one of my factories.”
David squinted downward. “No windows?” The Hard-weare manufacturing complex looked like a set of concrete blocks dropped in the middle of the green fields.
“None needed,” he was assured. “The whole setup is automated.” Luddie peeled back the roof on one of the featureless blocks. Antlike machines were busily at work churning out lines of vests which looked like periods from where David was standing. As for any secrets of the manufacturing process, they were too tiny for David to make out.
You ‘ve got to hand it to this guy, David thought. He shrinks me down too small to understand how the vest works. Then he blows me up to keep me away from the way they* re constructed.
He noticed something else that didn’t show at first in this scale. “How thick are those walls?” he asked. “If Hitler had fortifications like that in Normandy, we’d still be trying to get a foothold in France.”
Smaller boxes surrounded the factory buildings. These ones did have windows—that looked more like loopholes. “Security?” David asked.
“I’ve got competitors who would love to see Hardweare factories suffer… accidents,” Luddie said flatly. “It’s not so different from what surrounds this house—although we’re better landscaped.”
He snapped a finger, and the rolling landscape turned into the silver-gray carpeted splendor of Luddie MacPherson’s rubber room. David felt a tingling at the back of his neck.
The door swung open, and David swung warily to face it. The surroundings matched the real-world room where they’d started this little veeyar trip exactly. Were they back in the real world? Was the sim actually over? Or were they still in veeyar and was MacPherson about to throw a new curve at him?
A deeply tanned guy about David’s age breezed into the room, a questioning look on his handsome face. “How’d it go?”
“Here’s the guy you can thank for the wild ride,” Luddie said. “David Gray, meet Nick D’Aliso.”
David glanced in surprise at Nick’s regular features.
“From that once-over, I take it you know my nickname— no, it ain’t based on my looks,” Nick told him.
No one who was into computers could fail to hear stories about Nick D’Aliso, alias “Nicky da Weasel.” Although the nickname sounded like something out of a bad Mafia movie, it came from D’Aliso’s hacking ability. He was able to weasel his way into supposedly impregnable systems. Then, when he finally got caught, he had weaseled his way out of trouble by hiring out as a computer security expert.
If MacPherson hired this guy, he really is serious about keeping his secrets under wraps, David thought. Considering the hacker’s slippery business ethics, though, who would protect the secrets from Nicky da Weasel?
“Nick programmed everything you just went through in that sim,” Luddie MacPherson explained. “It all came from the vest you were wearing—we never connected with the Net.”
“Stand-alone computing—what a concept,” David said.
“Our customers are willing to pay for privacy—even if all they’re doing is running a sim.”
Another way for rich, bor
ed executives to waste their time, David thought. He thought back over his orientation tour and turned to Nick D’Aliso. “You must have had an interesting time of it coming up with some of that stuff. It really caught my … attention a couple of times.” David couldn’t forget the moments his heart had pounded with fear during the sim— fear all out of proportion to the situation.
“I hear you’re pretty handy at getting attention yourself,” Nick replied. “Is it true you won that space race competition out in Hollywood by running your end of the sim through a laptop computer?”
Before David could answer, Luddie turned the conversation back to business. “We need creative programmers. Our clients pay for and expect the best from us. No computer has the processing capacity to create infinite real worlds in a sim. That means we have to fool people’s eyes—and minds. Have you ever heard the word gestalt before?”
“It’s German, isn’t it?” David said. “I’ve seen it in relation to psychology. Something about perceiving things or symbols as something more than the sum of their parts.”
Luddie nodded. “Close enough. We have to make our sims more than the sum of their parts. For instance, in that tour, the landscape wasn’t that remarkable. Neither was the system architecture.”
“But you dropped me over one landscape and blew me through the other.” David thought about his sudden panic attack. “You did something else as well, didn’t you?”
“That’s where I really got involved,” Nick said. “I’ve been working on manipulating moods in veeyar through subliminal cues.”
“Triggering emotions, you mean,” David interjected, remembering how he’d felt. “That was more than a mood I went through.”
“It’s not that much different from when the screechy violins start playing during a horror flick.” Nick shrugged. “It’s just a warning that scary stuff is coming. In this case, the warnings can’t be sensed by your conscious mind, but we can get your heart thumping and your palms sweating. Every veeyar sim does it to some extent—it’s what makes them fun. I’m just better at manipulating emotions through subliminal input than most programmers. Much better, in fact.”
“We need something to give us an edge,” Luddie said.
David thought it came uncomfortably close to brainwashing, but he didn’t say anything.
“Nice to meet you,” Nick said. He stepped toward the door, then swung back. “Oh, yeah, Luddie. Sabotine didn’t want to disturb you during the sim. She asked me to ask if a rerun of the dinner we had last night was okay. I guess we’ve got lots of leftovers.”
Nick D’Aliso was living with the MacPhersons?
A little of the surprise David felt must have shown on his face.
“Most of the work here is handled freelance, or by telecommuting,” Luddie said. “But if there’s a hot project on, it’s just as easy to move someone in. We’ve got lots of room, especially since there are no servants around.”
Or maybe he just wants to keep an eye on the slippery Mr. D’Aliso, David added silently. I certainly would.
“It’s a pretty big house, just for your family,” David said.
“Just my sister,” Luddie said abruptly. He looked at his watch. “Damn, got to run. Nick, you’ll take care of David?”
Before David quite realized it, Luddie MacPherson was gone. Not even a handshake.
Nick D’Aliso gave him a sardonic smile. “You were doing pretty well until you mentioned family.” He shook his head. “Luddie’s family is a real sore point. Of course, it’s not common knowledge. The records are all in juvie court, and they’re sealed. I take it you don’t do much hacking? Because I’m sure you checked up on the MacPhersons before you came here.”
“No,” David said. “I try to not to commit any felonies when I’m interviewing for a job. But I’m aware that’s not everybody’s approach.” Certainly not Nicky da Weasel’s, if the rumors David had heard were true.
“It would have saved you real trouble here. Luddie had himself declared an emancipated minor. He divorced his family—had to, if he wanted to go full-speed ahead into computers. His father wouldn’t let him.”
“Wouldn’t let him?” David echoed.
“His dad heads up the Manual Minority. You must have heard of them.”
“The antitechnology movement.”
“The lunatics who want to drag us back to the Stone Age,” Nick contradicted. “Some of them would actually be happy if we were all living in caves—they seem to think they’d be among the ten percent of the human population that a natural ecology would support.”
’ ‘Computers have remade our world—and in just one lifetime,” David pointed out. “Working, communications, even entertainment… there’ve been a lot of changes to accommodate.”
“Calling computers the devil doesn’t sound much like accommodation to me,” Nick replied. “That’s what Battlin’ Bob MacPherson told his troops at their last big meeting.” As he led the way back to the mansion’s front door, his expression suggested that David didn’t need to worry about MacPherson family difficulties.
He’d never be working for Hardweare, anyway, is pretty strange. But Nick’s been right so far. I’ve been getting nowhere!”
“Come on,” Leif said a little sharply. “Luddie MacPherson is a full-fledged celebrity. The simplest Net search—”
“Hasn’t turned up squat about his personal life,” David finished in a frustrated tone of voice.
“That’s—” Leif bit back on the word ridiculous. David Gray took his computers very seriously and wasn’t about to make a ridiculous announcement. “Tell me about it,” Leif finally said.
David described how a general data request had grown considerably more specific, backed by some heavy-duty search engines. “I got lots of stuff about his business, press releases, statements about company moves and the future of technology—but nothing personal about him, nothing about his sister, and nothing about any relationship with Battlin’ Bob MacPherson.”
“But any decent newspaper archive should have that sort of background,” Leif objected.
David gave him an exasperated look. “The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal all have the same response—‘Information not available.’ That’s when I figured I’d better talk to you.”
“Oho.” Leif grinned at his friend’s image. “Now the picture becomes clear. You aren’t looking for sympathy. You want someone to finagle the information. Now, I’m no Nick D’Aliso.”
“But you know people,” David finished for him. “Besides, I thought this was the kind of mystery that would interest you.”
“Curiosity killed that cat.” Leif brushed a hand through his bright red hair, a broader grin lighting his sharp features. “But people tell me I look more like a fox. I’ll give it a try. If anything interesting turns up, I’ll buzz you back.”
David disconnected, and Leif sat in silence for a long moment, contemplating his Net setup. He didn’t have Nick D’Aliso’s programming brilliance—or even David Gray’s. What he did have was money, lots of it, thanks to his father. Between his dad’s international business and a few of his own ventures, Leif had encountered some of the best hired guns in the programming trade. He’d also come across some oddball bits of information, which he’d squirreled away. Given his much-deserved reputation for loving a good, well-crafted scheme, Leif always tried to keep a surprise or two up his sleeve.
He sank back against a computer-link couch, wincing as he interfaced with his computer. A bunch of cyber-badboys—and girls—had once attacked Leif in veeyar. The result was a sensitivity around his implant circuits. Where others got the equivalent of mental static, he got what felt like a sharp pain in the brain.
When it passed, he was at his virtual desktop, a cluttered collection of three-dimensional icons which drove various programs. Leif picked up three glowing geometric shapes, pressing them in a certain order to open one of the desk drawers. They stuck in place, he murmured a password, and the drawer opened. Otherwi
se, it wouldn’t.
Inside was a smaller collection of icons which he privately called his Cool Stuff—access codes most people couldn’t get; beta-test programs which hadn’t been released yet; unofficial software; quasi-legal bits of hacker work he’d come across or commissioned. Examining the cache, he selected several neat little bits of software … and then put most of them back. A single item remained in his hand. The key chain was a set of access codes he’d acquired from one of his more disreputable acquaintances. “Information not available/’ huh?
“We’ll see about that,” he muttered. He closed the drawer and locked it again.
From the desktop he took a couple of search utility programs, then an icon shaped like a lightning bolt, and launched himself into the Net. Leif took a roundabout route to The Washington Posfs site. It stood like a skyscraper office building built of neon light, emblazoned with the paper’s logo. This was a popular Net site, and tiny mayfly figures whizzed around it: fact-checkers, kids doing school assignments, historical researchers … Leif had heard there was even a group of fans who dropped in to read ancient comic strips from eighty and ninety years ago.
He entered the virtual construct, passing through crowded hallways—access areas for popular data dumps. As he got closer to his destination, however, the crowds thinned, until finally he had a hall of neon light all to himself. Unlike the public data areas, this corridor had no doorways—or rather, none would appear unless the researcher had the proper access codes.
Leif retrieved his key-chain icon and pressed it against the wall. He sighed in relief when an entrance appeared. The codes hadn’t been changed. He stepped into a space that looked like a stylized picture of a file room—glowing file cabinets on all four walls. He’d penetrated the newspaper’s restricted access files—although well toward the bottom of the Post’s security priorities. Leif was unlikely to stumble over the true name of Deep Throat, the guy who’d helped blow the whistle on the Watergate scandal, or any juicy information on assassinations or congressional wrongdoing.
But he could reasonably assume this was the place to verify not-so-hot gossip—like who Luddie MacPherson’s parents might be. Leif activated one of his search utilities, instructing it to search for information on Luddie MacPherson.
