by J P Carver
"How?"
Merigold shook her head. "Not sure. You still got that wire, right?" I nodded as I followed her back through the airlock. Ian came up to her, and she held up the helmet. "I need to take this."
"That shouldn't even be out of the room!" His voice grew louder with each word, and he staggered back into a metal table. "Take it back before you infect—"
"It's not a disease, you idiot." Merigold placed the helmet down on the table beside Ian then removed the helmet of her suit. "This is something a lot worse."
"Like what?" Ian asked as he stumbled away from the table and to the other side of the room.
"Like, someone figured out how to kill people using a VR system. I want the body brought out and a suite of I-Dent systems here. We need to nip this in the bud before word gets out and causes a real panic."
Ten minutes later, Merigold had her machines and the body on the table in front of her. I watched, a death hold on my stomach, as she cut into the guy's head and removed the I-Dent chip. She placed the chip in a little bowl on the table beside the body then hooked up one of the machines on the cart to it.
"What are you doing?"
"Checking a theory." Merigold tapped the screen to bring up a page of stats. She sighed and shook her head before turning back to the body. "His I-Dent chip overloaded."
"Is… is that even possible?"
"I didn't think so, but"—she waved a hand toward the screen—"there's nothing left in the chip. My guess is this is what killed him."
"But nothing interfaces directly with that chip for more than a check. Not even a neural can get access to it without a lot of hacking." I went to the screen and checked the data myself.
She wasn't kidding; every last bit of data had disappeared from the chip, and all that was left was a bunch of gibberish. I-Dent chips had bugged out before, but an overload of a chip, which wouldn't take much, could link into the brain because it was just a tiny hop away. "This makes no sense."
"It does." Merigold picked up the VR helmet from the tray. "If you take into account that a VR system checks the I-Dent chip to personalize its settings."
"But only on log-in and log-off. Are you saying the headset created the voltage?"
She pursed her lips. "No, not on its own. I think when it was removed, the system connected to the I-Dent chip and set off a chain reaction from the helmet to the chip and, finally, into the kid's brain. There's a lot of power in these things. The real question is, what was he doing when it happened?" She looked pointedly at me.
I took a step back. "No goddamn way. There's no way I'm connecting to that thing."
She continued to stare.
"You really think it's a good idea after everything you just told me?" I said. "You're insane."
"I ain't gonna let you die," she said with a laugh and slid the headset over. "Besides, all you gotta do is dig into the log files. I'm not asking you to put it on."
I sighed and removed the wire from my wrist. "If this does kill me, I'll haunt your ass for eternity."
"Stop being a baby, and get to it." She patted my shoulder and took a step back. I glared at her as I picked up the headset. There was a port on the back, and the connection on my wire fit in.
The icon for the headset showed up in the overlay across my left eye. With a thought, it opened, and I began to drill down into the system files, opening each folder and scanning its contents for the log files. After a few seconds of searching, I found a few user files and ran through them.
"Well, shit." I turned on a heel. "He was playing the same damn game."
Merigold cocked a brow. "Game?"
"Autumn Sin, the same VRMMO Winter was playing. We all were playing it earlier tonight."
"Always told you those games could be the death of you."
"That's not freaking funny, Merigold." I copied the files to my local drive and disconnected. "Is that a strong enough connection? Could it still be something else?"
Merigold shrugged and started to pace in front of me. "You get his avatar name? Right. Then do a search on that and see if he was into any of the shady stuff. As for now, you do not go into that game, you hear me? I don't care if it's triple-XP weekend—you don't go near it."
"But—"
"I don't ask much from you, Ragan, but I'm asking you to stay out until I get more information. It wasn't just headset users this happened to."
I grimaced. "Fine, but if it is the game, I'll go in if I can help Winter."
"Can't help anyone if you get stuck too." She held my gaze for a moment as if to hammer the point home then put her hands into the pockets of her white coat. She turned to the screen with the I-Dent system and shook her head. "I'm gonna report this to the higher-ups here and hopefully get them to stop acting like this is some kind of contagion. You, meanwhile, are going to go sit with Nina and Winter and do research on this kiddo. When you have something, I want you to send it over."
"We need to make sure no one else tries to remove a headset or reset a neural."
"Yeah, I'll make sure they get that, but you remind Nina, in case some stupid nurse doesn't get the memo." She took off her rubber gloves and tossed them on a tray. "I'll be in touch. I'm gonna see if I can't get some time with one of the other patients. Hopefully, I can figure out something from the live ones."
"Don't kill any of them, all right?"
"Stop messing with my fun," she said with a smirk.
I followed her out, leaving the dead guy on the table with the back of his skull opened. It felt wrong, but to Merigold, he was nothing more than meat now. I couldn't help but wonder if she would think the same about me one day. She always had a coldness around her when it came to that sort of stuff, but I didn't know how she would react to a friend's death. Would she show any emotion if we couldn't get Winter out?
We split in the main lobby. Merigold tried to grab my ass before she took off at a jog, moving between patients and nurses. I made a mental note to slap her the next time we met—if she wasn't already being taken away in chains after getting caught.
I turned down the opposite hall and made my way toward Winter's room.
"Ragan, you still on?"
I squinted and glanced at the people around me then ducked into one of the open examination rooms. "What is it, Plotigan?"
"Not secure. Right… look, I got a bit of a problem."
I leaned back against the counter and pulled my hair free of the strap. "With what, exactly?"
"Well, you see, I tried to release the information to the media like you asked, but I tripped some kind of filter. Someone was waiting for this stuff and intercepted everything and almost fried my system."
"Shit… did you capture a copy of the sentinel?" A sentinel was a program that acted a bit like a web crawler. It traveled through the net, waiting for its filters to trip, then zeroed in like a virus, clamping down on the information and shutting down the source. They were becoming more and more common as corporations and governments tried to keep a lid on their activities.
"I screwed up, but I'm not an idiot." He smiled and held up a data chip just bigger than his thumbnail. "Did some digging and got an IP address, but it's a black hole. There's nothing to track back."
"That's great, Plot… just wonderful." I ran a hand through my hair and thought. If someone was watching the net, that meant someone knew what was going on. The story was being buried. "All right. You're still up and running, right? Then run the information through Ziller's encryption, and send it to him. I'm sure he's got his own contacts in the media that he can get to. Tell him it's important that it gets out."
"What are you gonna do?"
"I gotta look up a dead kid's online handle." I explained what Merigold and I had found.
He gave me a strange look and scratched at his cheek. "So it's the game? Do you think it's got anything to do with Winter being taken?"
I stood straight up as something clicked into place. "That poison… remember when Crow couldn't cure it in game? It got Winter too—Sa
mhain took Winter. It's why he didn't show up in town. Could something in game really do that?"
"If an I-Dent chip can kill someone, I don't think anything is out of the question right now." He paused and glanced at his other screen. "Ziller's got the medical records you gave me. What do you want to do? You think looking the kid up will be of much help now?"
I sat down on the bed in the room and flopped back. "I'm not sure. We need to look into this Samhain thing. You up for meeting in person? Crow has enough on her mind with Winter, so you're all I got for the moment."
"Wow, never thought you'd want to meet IRL. Not that I have a problem with the idea, but why?"
"There's a system café a couple blocks away. Let's meet there, and I'll explain. Bring that data chip with you." I sent him the address. "Keep your link on so we can find each other. I got a bad feeling about this whole thing, so if anything looks off, you run back home, all right?"
"We'll see. I ain't one to run from a fight. I'll be there in forty."
"Good." I cut the communication and left the room while sending Nina a message.
A sentinel had upped this whole thing in a big way. I wondered if the game creators had their hand in it, but that would be suicidal for them. It had to be a competitor, but making people fear VR wouldn't work out for them either. I was running out of suspects.
Four
BlackHole
Morning crept over high-rises as I ducked into the darkness of the cyber café. Inside, smoky light beamed down from the arched ceiling. The place had an old twentieth-century feel and used the brick-and-steel cheapness to its advantage, but there were signs of tech everywhere. Thick vine-like power lines snaked along the walls to the large consoles that made up the center of the room. People sat at the blinking holomonitors while smoking and chatting or looking blissed out on drugs and VR programs. To my right was a section of black-colored booths. At the head of the room was a bar, and I made my way to it, weaving between the chairs that sat before the consoles.
An older man grinned at me as he stocked the shelves behind him with what I assumed were clean glasses, although they didn't look like it. "Morning. We ain't serving alcohol yet."
"Too early… or rather, too late for me. Get me a coffee?"
The guy grinned. "Sure." He picked up a mug and went over to a machine. "Don't remember you coming around here before. New hire at the hospital?"
I looked down at my scrubs and mentally cursed. "Uh, yeah. Just started and on my break."
"Most of your kind like the more upscale stuff." He slid the mug over to me, the black sludge shifting like Jell-O.
"Like I said, I just started, so money is tight." I tested the liquid and forced myself to swallow before setting the mug back down. "You been having any problems here the last couple of days?"
"Like what?"
"Anything weird like—" The screen playing in the corner caught my eye. At first it was playing some sports show, but now a man sat behind a desk with a graphic beside him that said "VR Plague." I snorted. Leave it to the media to use the old click-bait crap. If the media was running with this story, that meant Ziller was able to get the information out. I pointed toward the screen. "Like that."
The man turned, watched for a moment, and turned up the volume. "Anonymous sources have recently contacted us with information about a possible epidemic that is occurring in our very own city. These sources have provided documents about a number of people being admitted to the hospital due to not waking from their VR systems.
"Twenty-five people have been reportedly admitted. We've reached out to local hospitals for comment, but for now, we urge you to stay out of your VR components until this matter is resolved—" The screen went blank, and the man in front of me turned sickly pale.
"Shit… there goes business." He turned bloodshot eyes out to the café. I turned to find startled patrons staring at the screen. A few just shrugged and went back to their consoles, but the rest quickly gathered up their gear and rushed out of the room in a mini stampede.
"Thanks. You going now too?" he asked in an almost defeated tone.
I smirked as I swiped my credit stick on the bar to pay for the coffee. "Don't worry about me. I'm waiting for a friend."
I picked up my coffee, made my way to one of the tables against the wall, and sat down. I logged into Autumn Sin's forums and started my search for the dead kid's handle. It didn't take long once I got in touch with some friends in the game. Spectow was clean—not even a complaint against the guy. He had just joined a guild a few weeks before.
There went one good connection. He appeared to have been just unlucky. I sent a few messages to his guild mates and sat back to finish my coffee.
Marcus showed up sometime later as I picked coffee grounds from my tongue. He stumbled into the café, a chill wind following him, and searched the room. He looked a bit like a scarecrow—over six feet tall and lanky, a trait that never came across when I was talking to him through links. He wore a light-red jacket zipped halfway up and a pair of worn blue jeans that were just about white in places. His brown hair stopped an inch or so below his ears and was a mess. Strands of it stuck up all over. He ran a hand through it as his gaze fell on me.
"I think this is the first time we've met in person." He sat down across from me and placed his canvas bag on the table. He had a thin face, cheeks that sank in slightly, and eyes with heavy bags under them. On his chin was the barest goatee I'd seen in a long time. He held out his hand. "Nice to meet ya."
"Sure." I smiled but ignored his hand, and he dropped it on top of his bag. "You're ten minutes late."
"Give me a break, Doll. The trains went to shit after that ran." He pointed to one of the monitors that showed the same broadcast as before. "Ziller moves freaking fast when he wants to."
"He has his moments. Anyone follow you here?"
"No, but then, I don't think many would come here willingly." He made a show of looking around the room. "This place looks like it was dredged up from the sewer. Smells a bit like it too."
"Thought you'd feel more at home here. Come on. We need a booth for this." I got up from my seat and made my way to the wall of booths on the opposite side of the room. They were normally used by people who couldn't afford good VR systems and would go into CityNet for porn. They weren't the nicest of places, but they gave you privacy when you needed it. I plugged in my credit stick, and the door slid open.
Marcus made a disgusted noise in his throat as he followed me in. "I bet there are billions of lost generations in here."
"Shut up." I took a paper towel from the roll on the wall and wiped down the seat and console. "Hand me that data chip of yours."
He dug into his bag and pushed the chip into my hand. The system booted up, and I used the screen so Marcus could see. I interfaced with the console and started in on the sentinel. "Hmm, this thing is studded out. Routine upon routine set up to turn you away from its origins, and on top of that, its code is cloaked. I'm surprised you were able to get an IP out of it."
"Wasn't easy," he said with some pride. "But like I told you, it just leads to a black hole."
"Of course it does, but a black hole is just a mask—another server that routes information."
"Not a first-year here, Doll. I know that."
"Oh, don't get defensive. What you don't seem to know is that sometimes there is a way to get the logs out of a black hole if you have the IP given to the program."
"Bullshit," he said.
"It's adorable that you think so." I started the trace to the black hole and looked over to Marcus. "When there are a lot of credits on the line, you'll find that you too can do miracles." I looked him up and down and smirked, enjoying myself. "Well, maybe not you."
"You're hurtful. You know that, right?"
"There's a rag back there that you can use to dry your tears."
"Yeah, I'll do that if I want to catch a real plague." He bent down over the back of the chair, and his breath tickled my cheek. "So how do you break
the logs back out when there shouldn't be any logs?"
"You eat sushi before you came here?" I pushed him, and he laughed and rested his arms on the back of the chair. "Jackass. I'm not telling you now." I started a program from my storage. It was something I coded over a year ago that I'd dubbed Singularity. I liked names that made programs feel powerful.
The program started with the IP address given to the sentinel and began to eat through the bank of IPs a black hole could assign, looking for the server. From there, it followed that IP back through the black hole and looked to see if the admin kept logs in place to cover their own asses if the feds came knocking. Most of the time, they did.
"What the hell are you doing? Are those—" Marcus watched IP addresses type themselves into existence on the screen. "There's no way those are from the black hole."
"Crazy thing about using free programs is that sometimes they still keep logs, but they're really well hidden and encrypted."
Marcus stood back and started to laugh. "How are you not selling this program? People would stop using B-holes within a day."
"That's why, rookie. You figure out something major, and you keep it to yourself. Yes, that's my nice way of telling you to keep your damn mouth shut." I shifted the focus of the console back to the sentinel. "Let's see if we can get an activation date."
"Three days ago," he said. I glanced at him. "What?"
"Nada," I said. "All right. There were six IP addresses that ran through the hole then and were given the same IP address back out. Couldn't have been easy, I guess. You trace the top three, and I'll take the bottom ones."
He sat down on the armrest and started. I glared at him, but he didn't even look over. It was too silent to be sitting in the room alone with him, and I shifted uncomfortably. "Crow says you've been doing good work lately."
"I guess. Most of the stuff I've done hasn't been solo. I got a lot left to learn. She's been a huge help though. Damn talented… but then, you know that already, as you trained her. No surprise that she's so freaking good."
