Son of Heaven

by David Wingrove

‘Quite.’ George Hinton looked entirely different in the skin. Even without his mask on, he looked transformed from the business-suited ‘chap’ he normally was. Not only that but he had developed a middle-age paunch, which the skin accentuated.

  Like a fish out of water.

  ‘What do we know for certain?’

  ‘We had five logins in at the time, three of whom we’ve had the chance to debrief…’

  ‘And?’

  ‘That’s just it. They saw nothing.’

  ‘But there was damage?’

  ‘Quite considerable damage. But limited. Like they were flexing their muscles.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘As I said, it only happened an hour back. We’ve not had the chance to analyse it properly just yet. Oh, and before you ask, there’s nothing in from MAT. They’re keeping this all very quiet.’

  MAT was Market Activity Tracking, the Market’s own version of DAAS4. It was designed to prevent runs on the Market. To anticipate and act. That they’d not issued a warning suggested that they didn’t yet know what they were dealing with.

  Jake spoke to the air. ‘Daas? Anything to add?’

  ‘Just that the attacks seemed to come from four separate sources, but were timed to coincide.’

  ‘And those sources?’

  ‘Melted away as soon as we put tracers on them. They must have been rerouted twelve to fifteen times.’

  So. Serious stuff. Major-league hackers by the sound of it.

  ‘What if it’s schoolboys?’

  Daas was silent a moment, in case George should choose to field the question. When he didn’t, it answered.

  ‘I don’t think this is schoolboys, Jake. It was a particularly vicious attack.’

  ‘And schoolboys aren’t vicious?’

  ‘Not in this fashion. It was too sophisticated. And besides, we’ve got information on all the known hackers. This didn’t have the fingerprint of any one of them. It was… well… unique.’

  Daas’s choice of that word fed Jake’s curiosity. Daas had seen it all before, many times over. It was why it was such a good system. And if Daas didn’t recognize something, then maybe it was a big thing.

  And there was that phrase George had used. Flexing their muscles. Now why would anyone do that? Why draw attention and then run away?

  He didn’t know. But he was going to find out. He was going to go in and look at the evidence. Forensically. Because everything you did in the datscape left a trace.

  He followed George, their harnesses jolting along the guide rails.

  Inside was a massive sphere, within which hung the logins. Compared to the virtual space of the datscape it was incredibly small. Less than a thousandth the size. But it didn’t need to be big. It only needed to be large enough for the company’s logins to hang there, in their harnesses, while data flooded their skins and masks. ‘The drying room’ some of them called it, because that’s what it looked like to the engineers who had to go in there sometimes to make repairs.

  It was all an illusion. The very best available.

  Jake stepped inside.

  He’d not mentioned it yesterday when he’d been making the immersion. Explosion wasn’t really the word for it. Sensory overload, more like. Every time he ‘stepped’ through. Like an all-body orgasm. The drugs from the immersion skin helped, of course, sensitizing him, letting his real skin merge with the artificial one. It was one great data feed, only translated into see, feel, smell and touch. SFST, or a walk down Science Fiction Street, as some wag had called it.

  If his avatar had had a cock, it would have been hard every second he was in there.

  ‘Christ,’ George said quietly. For a moment he had forgotten.

  Jake glanced to his side. George’s avatar was hardly subtle. He was a British grenadier from the eighteenth century, complete with cocked hat. A major, by the look of his regalia.

  Jake stopped, looking about him at the sweeping vistas of that rainbow-coloured landscape, seeing, in the distance, a number of other figures wandering about.

  Everything looks fine. Fine and healthy.

  That was the other thing about the datscape. The silence. It was all a great dumb show. Not a cry or echo.

  Some companies even hired the deaf, thinking they were perhaps better sensitized to such a place, but Jake knew better. One filled that absence with one’s thoughts.

  Besides, if anything, the removal of one sense enhanced the others.

  To his right, great melted slabs of glaucous blue climbed the air like some nightmare giant’s causeway. Beyond them was a riot of sienna and slate-grey crystalline shapes, while to his left, beyond George, piles of tiny blocks of shining amethyst fought for space with massive spikes of olive green. Steaming flows of hot pink lava ate narrow gullies into the surrounding rock-like edifices, whilst just above them to their left, a waterfall of forest green and ivory particles fell in a constant tumble from a ledge of startling black crystal. And always, everywhere, were the data threads, like rainbow-coloured smoke trails.

  ‘Daas? Where the fuck are we heading?’

  Daas answered at once. ‘I’ll put up a guide thread.’

  Instantly, a pulsing thread of bright, golden light appeared, snaking its way through the geometric chaos into the distance.

  He looked to George and pointed, mouthing the words.

  ‘You go first.’

  Like Orpheus in the underworld…

  Or like Joe Chip in the half-life world.

  Only he knew where he was here. And if there was danger you had only to cut the connection and in an instant you’d be back there, in the drying room, hanging limply in the harness.

  Jake smiled and walked on, following the portly figure of the grenadier.

  The smell of it hit him from twenty paces away. A sickly sweet, charred kind of a smell. Not healthy, like the smell of cooked meat. This was something rotten, something suggestive of corruption.

  ‘Archer and Simmons,’ George said, kneeling over it to conduct an examination, ignoring the stench.

  Instantly, Daas fed him data. Archer and Simmons had been bond merchants, specializing in Far Eastern bonds, commodities and London financial futures. Now they were little more than a charred space on the floor of a virtual landscape.

  In the real world they would be arriving any time now, to find their doors barred, their company wound up and in administration.

  Poor bastards. They never knew what hit them.

  ‘Systematic destruction,’ George said, straightening up. ‘Only why? Is this someone getting their revenge?’

  Jake spoke to Daas. ‘Can we see a re-con?’

  At once a massive, opaque bubble formed about them. An instant later, the datscape shimmered and then jumped. They were back two hours.

  The reconstruction began.

  Jake watched. Saw how good a company Archer and Simmons had been. The tiny clusters of purple, grape-like growths that represented it were bulbous and had a healthy shine. You could smell how rich and fine they were.

  And then, suddenly, and with a savage intensity that took Jake by surprise, the attack began. For a moment there was nothing, just a kind of pulse in the air, and then a swarm of tiny orange crystals, no bigger than dice, seemed to materialize from nowhere and descend on the grape-like clusters.

  It was over in seconds. Literally in seconds.

  They slowed it, ran it back.

  ‘Jesus… look at that…’

  Slowed down you could see how the tiny crystal shapes attacked, like a pack of jackals, prising the skin of the company open and manoeuvring themselves into the tiny fissures that formed in the bruised purple of the clusters. Once they were in they began to digest it piece by tiny piece, devouring it in moments, leaving only the tiniest traces of it to linger, like some vile calling card.

  Leaving just the rotted carcass smell.

  Jake stared at it, impressed, but also the tiniest bit afraid. He had never seen its like. This wasn’t malware or a virus, not even of th
e most complex kind. This was different. As different as one species from another, for each crystal had been programmed to work with every other crystal, like a tiny army of super-efficient soldiers. This wasn’t hacking in its traditional sense. It went way beyond that. To visually conceive this was one thing – to programme it quite another. As he ran the re-con again and again he realized just how astonishingly complex they were, the code written in counterpoint, like tiny symphonies. Yes. But who could have written anything quite so beautiful, quite so devastatingly destructive?

  And one other thing. Where had it all gone? The bonds. The company’s assets. If this was a metaphor, what did it represent? Because something must have happened to them. They had to be somewhere, didn’t they? Archer and Simmons had been worth six billion Euros. So who had that money now?

  George looked to him and shook his head. ‘Come, Jake. Let’s move on. I want to get this done, before the board meets at ten.’

  While the board met, Jake went home. Kate had gone, but she had left him a note, propped up on the kitchen table.

  Gone to see M & D. See you later. K xxx

  Jake smiled. So she’d gone to tell her parents.

  He showered again, standing there in the fine hot mist of water while he thought about what he’d seen.

  They still had no idea who was behind the attacks. Whoever had written the attack programmes had made sure that the datscape tracers that latched on to them were led a merry dance, this way and that, until they fell off cliff-edges or found themselves in virtual cul-de-sacs.

  Exasperated, Jake had run several of the complex ‘fox and hound’ programmes he had developed for this purpose, trying to discern patterns, to work out just how they had slipped in and out again, under the radar. Trying to get under the skin of what happened, to understand it better.

  Only it hadn’t worked. Whoever had devised these attacks had known someone like Jake would try something like this. They had anticipated it. Had written it in.

  Part of the ‘beauty’ of these rogues was the fact that they were so efficient, and that had happened because someone had spent a long time analysing the datscape’s protection system, looking for its fundamental weaknesses.

  Given time, data-shields like MAT and DAAS4 were programmed to deal with such intrusions. However, they had first to identify them. Thus there was a delay in responding. Not a long delay – in both cases it was less than four seconds, real time – but a delay nonetheless. A hiatus in which an aggressive interloper could break in and cause havoc.

  All four of the attacking viruses had played on that. The longest had taken 2.357 seconds start to finish, the shortest a mere 1.670 seconds. All four had been tightly coordinated, such that the intrusion took just 2.623 seconds in its entirety.

  Daas hadn’t stood a chance. By the time it had realized they were hostiles they were gone, leaving smoke trails and a false scent.

  Not only that, but each was quite distinct. One tore its victim-host apart. Another stripped it to shreds. The third vaporized its victim. And the last – Jake smiled as he thought about it – the fourth had simply frozen the assets of the company it had attacked. Left them intact but made them valueless. He wasn’t sure how they had done it, but they had.

  So. Four coordinated attacks on four quite random, unconnected targets, each of them frighteningly efficient. Each utterly untraceable.

  Muscle flexing. That’s what George had said. But by whom?

  The truth was, he didn’t have a clue. Couldn’t begin to think who could benefit from this.

  Maybe George was right. Maybe it was school kids. Geeks. After all, there was a long history on the internet of smart-arse kids fucking about with so-called ‘secure’ systems. Why shouldn’t this be simply another instance?

  It was a possibility, but a very remote one. Because it would take an absolute genius to have devised those programmes. A regular Beethoven of the computer keyboards, a Michelangelo.

  Or four teams of slightly lesser talents, each team working on a single programme. For years.

  The idea, once he’d had it, stuck.

  Okay. But who would put the money into that kind of intensive research. And why?

  He didn’t know. Not yet. But he would.

  Jake dried himself, then sat down at his console in the bedroom.

  ‘Trish… give me what you know about GenSyn.’

  ‘Is that wise, Mister Reed?’

  He turned, looking to the ceiling, as if she were physically there. ‘I’ll be the judge, thank you, Trish. I’m not going to see her again, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m just interested, that’s all.’

  There was a second’s delay, then Trish responded.

  ‘On-screen, or shall I give you a summation?’

  ‘Just tell me, Trish…salient facts. When the company was formed, how it’s doing, what it’s developing.’

  ‘And your friend?’

  He smiled. ‘Make it brief. I’m just intrigued as to why she joined them.’

  ‘Okay. The company was formed twenty years back, in 2023, by Gustav Ebert and his brother Wolfgang.’

  ‘What lovely names…’

  ‘Gustav, it seems, was a genetics specialist. He’d been working at the University of Heidelberg. He’d done his doctorate there and stayed on to do pure research. It was while he was there that he came up with something. A year later he had formed the company with his brother.’

  Jake interrupted. ‘Came up with something… what do you mean by that?’

  ‘It’s not clear. He’s never specified in any of the interviews he’s done since. But within the first ten years of its existence, GenSyn registered over three hundred and forty patents with the WPO, all of them within the field of modified genetics.’

  ‘I see… and the finance for all this?’

  ‘Wolfgang was the financial genius. He raised sufficient capital up front to build his brother a new block of labs and, three years down the line, a fully-mechanized factory just outside of Bremen. They call it “The Farm”.’

  ‘Any reason for that?’

  ‘It seems that one of the things they specialized in is modified animals, for the pet market. Super-intelligent mice, that sort of thing.’

  ‘And the others?’

  ‘The other… Enhanced human replacements.’

  He waited, knowing Trish would explain.

  ‘Their clientele is very rich,’ Trish said. ‘They don’t deal with just anyone. It might interest you to know that your own CEO, Charles Hinton, is among them.’

  ‘And what did he buy from GenSyn?’

  ‘It isn’t specified,’ Trish said. Only Jake knew she was keeping that information from him. And who could blame her? She belonged to the Hinton organization, after all.

  ‘But what kind of thing do they provide?’

  ‘Replacement organs. Replacement limbs. Full-body doubles.’

  ‘Sorry? Body doubles? What do you mean?’

  ‘Precisely that. Genetically precise copies of their clients’ bodies. They grow them, it seems, in vats.’

  Now why the hell haven’t I heard of this before? Or was I simply not attending when that was on the news?

  ‘And these doubles… these golem… are they alive?’

  ‘Physically, yes. Mentally… no. They have no intelligence whatsoever.’

  Jake shivered at the thought. So that’s what the ultra-rich are spending their money on these days. They’ve done with yachts and private jets. Now they’re buying themselves new bodies, to replace the old ones when they wear out.

  ‘Okay… and they’re doing well out of this?’

  ‘Very well indeed.’

  ‘Then why haven’t I come across them in my work?’

  ‘Because they’re still a private company. There are only two share holders…’

  ‘Gustav and Wolfgang?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And Alison’s role in this?’

  ‘Is precisely what she said it was. She looks at new pro
jects and evaluates whether or not they’re worth pursuing. The Eberts think very highly of her. If she says yes to something, then they put money behind it. If she says no…’

  ‘It’s no.’ Jake smiled. Some things never changed. ‘Okay. Forget I ever asked.’

  ‘It’s forgotten already.’

  Jake stood, meaning to go and dress, but Trish hadn’t quite finished.

  ‘One other thing,’ she said. ‘A little bit of gossip. About Ubik…’

  He sat down again. ‘Go on…’

  ‘It’s about Drew Ludd. He’s finally signed a deal with Chinese media agents Huang Chin Shih Tai…’

  ‘Never! I thought he said he’d rather erase everything he’d ever done…’

  ‘That is what he said. But he’s struck a deal. A very good one, too. He’s all set to become the biggest grossing actor in Hollywood, dead or alive!’

  Drew Ludd was the actor who had played Joe Chip in the media drama of Ubik. Until now he had been Hollywood’s most vehement opponent to ‘mor-phing’ – the use of computer-generated actors’ faces, gestures and voices by studios and advertising agencies. Thus far he had insisted on doing things ‘the old way’, using live performances and working with a cast of real actors. But now, it seems, he had sold out to the highest bidder.

  ‘Do you think it was just a bidding ploy, then, Trish?’

  ‘There’s a lot of commentators who are saying that, but there’s also a feeling that HCST offered so much that he just couldn’t turn it down. There’s word that he’s giving half his future earnings to charity.’

  Jake whistled. That would do him no harm, either. He was already the most popular actor on the planet.

  ‘Have they said anything about what kind of thing we’re going to see him in?’

  ‘Well… rumour has it that they plan to re-make the old TV show, Band of

  Brothers, with Drew Ludd playing alongside Spencer Tracy, Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, James Dean, Daniel Day-Lewis, Al Pacino, Peter O’Toole, Charlton Heston, Kirk Douglas, Elvis Presley and John Wayne.’

  Jake nodded. He liked the sound of that. What he didn’t like was when media companies used their licences to bring out crap. The Shou Wei company, for instance, had spent a fortune acquiring the late Johnny Depp’s image-package, together with those of a whole number of nubile young actresses, only to bring out a stream of hardcore porn movies. It wasn’t right, especially as in most cases the actors themselves weren’t alive to defend themselves against such exploitation.