by James Luceno
“Are you Mystery Notes?” Tech asked.
The man's eyes widened, and a short laugh escaped him. “Ah, right to the point, I see.”
“I'm Tech. This is my brother, Marz.”
Strange squinted at them, scrutinizing Tech's blond hair and Marz's nut-brown face and curly dark hair. “You two are brothers?”
Tech gave his standard reply. “We were designed to be different.”
“Tech and Marz?” Strange said skeptically. “Those sound like robot names. And yet you appear to be flesh and blood.”
“We're cyberflyers,” Marz said, staring at Strange as if he were a comic superhero come to life. “Tech and Marz are our user names.”
“‘Robots in disguise,’ “Strange sang, then straightened somewhat and rubbed his bearded chin. “What exactly brought you to my humble abode, Tech and Marz?”
Marz held up the minidisk. “This.”
Strange took the disk between his thumb and forefinger and peered at it curiously.
“Most of the data is encrypted,” Tech said, “except for one phrase. The phrase says that Mystery Notes will know what to do.”
Strange's eyes darted from the disk to Tech. “Who's doing the talking?”
“We're hoping you can tell us,” Tech said. “Do you believe in Network legends?”
“Legends of what sort?” Strange inquired, his eyes sparkling. “Spooks? Spies? Aliens? Mad, gray-haired hackers?”
“Ghosts in the machine,” Tech said. “Program gremlins, in this case. A gremlin that knows you.”
“A… program gremlin actually mentions me by name—Mystery Notes?”
“Actually, what it says is ‘m-s-t-r-n-t-s.’ ” Marz explained.
“We ran hundreds of possible combinations,” Tech said. “Mystery Notes was the only phrase that made sense because of the link to you.”
“Then you know who I am.”
“Author of The Strange Manifesto,” Tech said.
“Legendary cyberflyer,” Marshall added almost breathlessly. “Freeware radical. Musical genius. Mystery Notes is awesome sound.”
“Well, I can see that you boys have good taste.” Strange sniffed in playful derision and stepped back from the door. “Come in.”
The tiny, two-room apartment was crawling with cats, many of whom came running to rub themselves against Tech's and Marz's legs. The shabby, cat fur–covered furniture and woven rugs looked as if they had come from great distances and been made by people who lived in a different century. The place was also filled with instruments of endless variety—reed, stringed, keyed, and skinned. Obsolete computer processors, boxy monitors, peculiar keyboards, and laser printers took up an entire wall. Elsewhere were piles of hardcover books, graphic novels, videotapes, CDs, minidiscs, and DVDs—libraries of information that were now accessible with a few quick keystrokes or could be amassed electronically in individual rental-storage facilities in the Network.
Strange planted himself in a padded swivel chair before a large, dust-covered monitor and slipped the minidisk into an ancient reader that lacked a cover. For a long moment, he studied the jumble of numbers and letters that resolved on-screen, then he sat back, tugging on his beard.
“I know this code,” he said at last, poising his crooked fingers over the keyboard. “Let's see if we can't get this critter to tell us in plain speak what it's after.”
Strange's fingers began to fly across the keys, all of which were apparently linked to a music synthesizer, so that each phrase of input constituted a musical composition. He crossed his hands over one another and expanded his reach to cover the entire keyboard. When he struck the enter key for the final time he might as well have been playing the last chord of a piece of classical music. Throwing his hands up, he leaned back from the keyboard like a piano virtuoso waiting for applause—which Marz, unable to contain his excitement, provided.
An instant later, the voice of the program gremlin issued through the room's untold number of speakers.
“My name is Cyrus Bulkroad,” the gremlin began. “I'm trapped, MSTRNTS. I need your help.”
Strange didn't say anything for a long while. He simply stared at the monitor screen while the boys continued to stare at him.
“Who's Cyrus Bulkroad?” Tech asked at last.
Strange, looking as if he had seen a ghost, swiveled to face him and Marz. “Cyrus is the only son of Skander Bulkroad—founder, president, and chief executive officer of Peerless Engineering.”
“Do you know him?”
“Cyrus was my friend,” Strange said. “He vanished ten years ago.”
“Just fifteen more minutes,” Felix mumbled, reaching out blindly to shut off the alarm clock. Instead of finding the clock, however, his hand made contact with something soft and yielding. Felix smiled and a woman squealed in unhappy surprise. Meanwhile, the alarm clock continued to chirp so persistently that it sounded as if a dozen clocks were going off.
“Mr. McTurk?” another woman's voice said above the racket. “Mr. McTurk, can you hear me? Are you all right?”
Felix's eyes snapped open. Momentarily discombobulated, he found himself still strapped into one of Virtual Horizons’ flight chairs. All around him people were speaking furious hellos into incessantly ringing cell phones and glancing in enraged puzzlement at beeping pagers. No one seemed to know the parties at the other end of the connections or the phone numbers being displayed by the beepers.
Felix realized with a start that Worldwide Cellular had been dazed by the data extraction Gitana had engineered. He could only hope that Cellular's cybertechnicians hadn't tracked Gitana's coconspirator to Virtual Horizons.
Judging from the way his forehead and ears felt, someone had torn the visor from his face and yanked out the audio beads. The motion-capture vest was open, as was his now-buttonless dress shirt. The tour technician and a worried-looking Ms. Dak were standing over him, preparing to press self-adhesive electrodes to his chest and neck.
“Mr. McTurk, what happened to you?” Dak was saying, her own designer visor dangling around her slim neck.
Felix fought down nausea and fingered the chair's positioning switch to raise himself upright. His shaking hands waved aside the electrodes. The sullen-looking technician helped him onto the couch while the other tourists continued their futile attempts at silencing their cell phones.
“Our pilot says that you disappeared,” she whispered, just loudly enough to be heard.
Felix forced his eyes to focus on his wristwatch. Twelve minutes had elapsed since Gitana's assault on Worldwide Cellular. Ms. Dak caught the gesture and said, “I'm sorry if we seem so confused, Mr. McTurk, but I assure you that this has never happened before. Our pilot insists that someone else was navigating for you in the Network.”
“I don't know what you're talking about,” Felix said.
The technician eyed him with suspicion. “You were gone before we even reached InfoWorld. I saw you flicking the joystick back and forth.”
“That was just nervous twitching,” Felix said. “I have a fear of flying.”
“Our pilot is one of the best in the business,” Dak said quickly. “He claims that he had you one minute and that the next minute you were gone. Exactly where did you go, Mr. McTurk?”
Felix crossed his arms, as much in defense as to get control of himself. “You're the experts. You tell me.
Dak adopted a conciliatory smile. “Please don't get us wrong, Mr. McTurk. We're not suggesting it was your fault…”
Felix pretended to be miffed. “I certainly hope not.”
Straightening her glistening smile, she said, “Inform Network Security.”
Chapter 7
Harwood Strange twisted the top from a bottle of flat room-temperature soda, poured three glasses, and carried the drinks into the front room of the apartment, where Tech and Marz were still puzzling over the coded information Mystery Notes had conjured from the minidisk. Strange had been dismayed to learn how easy it had been for the brothers to locate hi
m and had insisted on knowing everything about Felix, Data Discoveries, and the illegal run into the EPA.
“So Cyrus didn't show up until after you had launched Subterfuge,” Strange said.
Tech set aside the tasteless soda. “If you're talking about the gremlin, then, yeah, it didn't appear until after we unzipped Subterfuge.”
“Well, of course, I mean the gremlin,” Strange said, laughing. He lowered his tall frame into an old armchair, atop which were perched two calicos and a tabby, all three of them purring up a storm. “Cyrus and the gremlin are obviously one and the same.”
Tech frowned. “How is it that obvious? Cyrus is a person. And what I saw was a gremlin.”
“Perhaps the gremlin you saw was merely Cyrus's cybercraft.” Strange sat back, eyes half closed, hands placed together like he was praying. “Or perhaps Cyrus dispatched the gremlin as his messenger from wherever he is in hiding.”
Tech and Marz traded excited glances and leaned forward, eager to hear more.
Strange picked up one of his cats and held it close to his face, where he could look it squarely in the eye. “Do you think these two boys can be trusted with such information, Reaper?” he asked the creature. When the cat let out a long meow of either affection or protest, Strange placed it gently on the floor and regarded Tech with a serious expression. “You're in luck. Reaper believes that you can be trusted, and I have implicit faith in Reaper's judgment.”
Tech rolled his eyes. “Whatever. I'm just curious how you knew Cyrus.”
“Ah, you see. You and Reaper have something in common.”
“Curiosity,” Marz said, clearly caught up in the spirit of Strange's mind games.
“Precisely,” Strange said. He paused, then added, “Cyrus first contacted me about twelve years ago. My user name at the time was m-s-t-r-n-t-s—as you've guessed, a kind of vanity tag for Mystery Notes.”
“Cool, man.” Marz nodded his head.
“Marz is all over your DVD,” Tech said, reining in an amused smile.
Strange tilted his head to one side to regard him. “Not your style, eh? You prefer synthesizers to guitars, just as you probably prefer computer-generated characters to live actors.”
“Yeah, so?”
“No matter,” Strange said, waving his long-fingered hand. “You came to me to learn about Cyrus not about music.”
“When you say Cyrus contacted you, you mean he made e-contact?” Marz asked.
“Yes—exclusively so.”
“Then you two never met in person,” Tech surmised.
Strange shook his head and took a sip of soda. “I was working in North Carolina, and Cyrus was living in wealthy isolation with his father in Silicon Valley. For good reason—the constant threat of kidnappings and such—Skander Bulkroad was obviously determined to keep his son out of the lime-light. I never read or saw anything about Cyrus in the media, or about Skander's wife, for that matter. Of course, Cyrus and I talked about getting together, but we never made it happen.”
“How old was he,” Marz asked, “when you were e-mailing back and forth?”
Strange smiled lightly. “Well, he claimed to be about your age, but I always suspected he was younger. Maybe eleven or twelve, but brilliant beyond his years. A genius, like his father.”
Tech detected a note of disdain in Strange's voice when he mentioned the elder Bulkroad, but before he could even ask about it, Strange offered his own explanation.
“Despite the age difference, Cyrus and I developed a true friendship over the course of the two years we communicated. From the start he revealed a vast knowledge of the Virtual Network, and his beliefs in a free Network and free information were much in keeping with my own and not at all like those of his father, who has succeeded in turning the Network into yet another mindless playground for tourists and thrill-seekers.”
Tech frowned, but kept his thoughts to himself.
“Little by little, however, I began to realize that Cyrus was deeply troubled about something going on at Peerless Engineering.” Strange's forehead creased in dark recollection. “He never admitted this to me outright, but I could tell from the information he was beginning to send me that he wanted me to investigate Peerless on my own. He even furnished me with entry codes that would allow me to sneak past the company's highly sophisticated security programs.
“Then, without warning, Cyrus stopped contacting me. I was puzzled and deeply worried. Rumors began to spread that Skander was denying Cyrus access to any cybersystems. Other rumors emerged that Cyrus had died of a rare blood disease. I could never corroborate any of them. There were no obituaries in the media, no hints that Skander Bulkroad was in mourning. It was as if Cyrus had suddenly vanished off the face of the earth.” Strange glanced at the computer screen where the minidisk code was still scrolling. “And now, after all these years, we come to learn that Cyrus may have been kidnapped.” He blew out his breath and shook his head.
“What kidnappers would be crazy enough to take on Skander Bulkroad?” Tech asked.
Strange smiled enigmatically and smoothed the ends of his drooping gray and yellow mustache. “About the same time Cyrus disappeared, there was a lot of hacker buzz about Peerless Engineering's real purpose in commercializing cyberspace. A more sinister purpose.”
“Like what?” Marz asked, literally on the edge of his seat.
“There were rumors that Peerless was in fact constructing a cyberdomain all its own—a top-secret domain no one outside of Peerless was aware of.” Strange smiled ruefully. “Unfortunately, we never found out, one way or another.”
“But you tried,” Tech said.
“Yes, we tried. Peerless had yet to complete and secure the castle it was building in the Network, so my hacker friends and I were certain we could penetrate the construct and uncover whatever secrets the company was harboring. We made use of all the passcodes and tricks Cyrus had fed me. But we failed. We were caught in the act and uncloaked. We had no idea that security inside the castle would be so advanced.”
Tech's jaw dropped in surprise. “Was that the hack that sent you down? The Net says you jeopardized national security.”
“Actually, the run made me quite a celebrity among the hacker elite,” Strange said offhandedly. “But Peerless used all its power and influence to convince the media that my friends and I were a threat to the creation of the Virtual Network. You know how the media eats up cyberterrorism. I was banned from the Network. The rest, as some say, is history.”
“And now the Peerless Castle is the most complex construct on the grid. If it wasn't for the Escarpment, Peerless would have expanded well beyond the Ribbon, into the Wilds.”
Strange smiled, mostly to himself. “We left that little something behind to keep them in check.”
Tech glanced at his brother, then looked hard at Strange. “You were one of hackers who designed the Escarpment.”
Strange's smile broadened. “A nice bit of cyberengineering, wouldn't you say?”
“Not if you've ever gone over the edge without a bungee cord,” Tech said.
Strange's raised his bushy eyebrows in surprise. “It is bridgeable, you know—as well as jumpable. After all, Tech, it's only code.”
Tech averted his eyes from Strange's penetrating gaze. Glancing around the apartment, he tried to absorb the old man's disclosures. And the more he looked around—at the cats, the computer sculptures, the musical instruments, the precarious piles of comic books and graphic novels—the more he became convinced that Harwood “Mystery Notes” Strange was just another burned-out hacker nursing a bruised ego over what Skander Bulkroad and Peerless Engineering had been able to achieve. Venture anywhere in the Wilds and you were certain to bump into flyers who claimed that Bulkroad had stolen their ideas or had ruined their reputations. Like Strange, they talked in glowing terms about a free Network when in fact they did want to keep cyberspace as their private backyard. That's what the Wilds was—a place where the discontent and the disenfranchised could gather.
“Scaum,” Marz said.
Strange glanced at Tech. “You said Cyrus claimed that Scaum was after him.”
“Yeah. But it didn't act like a security program.” Tech shuddered, but didn't betray his disquiet. “The thing… I don't know, it was like it had a mind of its own. Like it was a neural net or something.”
“Could Scaum have been a cybercraft?” Strange asked.
“Only if it was piloted by some serial-killer cyberjock.”
“Scaum must have been created by Cyrus’ enemies,” Marz said. “The ones who kidnapped him.”
Strange glanced at Marz. “A very astute conclusion. But Cyrus could be mistaken about Scaum. Those who imprisoned Cyrus could have been foes of Peerless Engineering rather than personal foes of Cyrus. You have to remember that Peerless didn't achieve its present status without making a lot of enemies along the way.” He shook his head in anger. “I can tell you there was no shortage of people who resented Peerless Engineering. Cyrus's kidnapping could have been prompted by revenge.”
“Wow,” Marz said. “It's all starting to make sense.”
Dismayed by the fact that his brother appeared to be swallowing Strange's bizarre theories lock, stock, and barrel, Tech motioned for a time-out. “None of it makes any sense. The whole idea is crazy. First of all, you were one of Peerless's chief enemies, weren't you?”
Strange steepled his long fingers and bounced them against his lower lip in thought. “I won't deny it,” he said at last. “But I certainly would remember if I had kidnapped Cyrus.”
“Okay, fine,” Tech said. “What makes you think Skander Bulkroad would let someone get away with kidnapping his son? Even if somebody did kidnap Cyrus, why hasn't Bulkroad told the FBI by now if it's been, like, ten years!”
“Perhaps Skander Bulkroad was warned to keep quiet about Cyrus’ disappearance or risk greater harm to his son—even death.”
Strange looked at Marz. “How did Subterfuge coax Cyrus’ gremlin out of hiding?”
Marz shrugged. “It just did.”
