CyberNation said it would offer all information to all its "residents," for free. Music, vids, books, medical formulas, whatever. It was a chaos engine looking for a place to have a train wreck, and anybody who believed it would work was a few sandwiches short of a picnic.
Still, they had money, and they were willing to spend it. And enough money could, if used correctly, translate into power. Otherwise, would a senate committee be calling the head of Net Force to the hill for a little chat? Not likely.
Michaels hated this part of his job. The glad-handing he had to do, the whole political game. It was necessary, he knew that, and the director could deal with a lot of it and more power to her, but now and then it fell to him. Politicians did things for reasons not connected to logic or science, but because they were trying to please voters back home; being re-elected was always in the rearview mirror for professional politicos, and some of them wouldn't go to the bathroom without taking a poll to find out if it was okay to unzip.
He sighed. It was always something. He wished he could just take the day off, go home, and be with his wife and baby son. Sitting in a rocking chair with a sleeping baby on your lap was a lot closer to paradise than listening to the director caution him on anger management against the likely possibility some fat cat senator from Bug Dick, Arkansas, asked you a question that would insult the intelligence of a retarded moron…
Aboard the Gambling Ship Bon Chance Somewhere in the Caribbean Sea
A long-legged, blue-eyed blonde in her early twenties, hair down to the middle of her back, and wearing just enough to be legal for network television smiled, showing perfect teeth. She inhaled, and breasts too perfect to be real nearly broke free of their translucent gauze microbi-kini top.
"I'm in CyberNation. Why don't you join me?" She moistened her ruby lips with her tongue, then drew one finger down her cleavage, down her belly, and to the hem of her bikini panties.
A phone number and e-mail address appeared in the air next to her as she inhaled again.
• • •
Jasmine Chance touched a button on the remote, and the hologram froze. She looked at Roberto. "What do you think?"
"I wouldn't kick her out of bed."
Chance laughed. "You wouldn't kick a crippled blind pig out of bed if it was dark enough so you didn't have to look at it. I meant as an ad. We're running it on the TV nets, movie house commercials, and the big servers and comware."
He shrugged.
She said, "Yes, it goes straight for the groin, nothing subtle. If we could get away with it, we'd have her say, 'Join CyberNation, you can date me, and I do housecalls.''
"Yeah? You have her number?"
"No, but I've got your number. She isn't even real, Roberto, she's a computer construct."
'Too bad."
"It's end-justifying-the-means," she said. "They join, they'll get more than their money's worth, in the long run. But we need bodies. If we have enough members, we can start to get things done."
"I thought the exercise with the computers was getting things done."
"Yes, but our fork has four prongs. We do ads, we do politics, we rascal computers, and if push comes to shove, we hit hardware with hardware. We have to come at this from every angle we can think of."
He shrugged again. "You the boss."
"No, I represent the bosses. I'm just the hand."
"What does that make me?"
"A finger."
"Ah. Which one?"
She showed him.
He laughed. "Want me to show you what I can reach with that ringer?"
"Go for it."
Washington, D.C.
When he finally got home, Michaels was tired, but looking forward to seeing Toni and the baby.
She met him at the door. Before he could ask, she said, "He's asleep. I just got him down. Wake him up, and you die."
He chuckled.
"Let me go turn the baby monitor on and I'll be right back."
When she left, he opened his briefcase and removed the gift-wrapped present he'd hidden there. He had spent some time looking for it. It wasn't their wedding anniversary, but the anniversary of the day they had first kissed, sitting in that old Mazda MX-5 he had bought to restore, somewhere in Virginia. It had taken a while to find what he wanted, and it had cost five times what it had sold for new, only a decade back. He'd stashed it at the office for a couple of months after he'd gotten it. He hadn't wanted to wait, he'd wanted to give it to Toni the first day it arrived, but he'd held off. She was gonna be surprised, he was sure of it.
When she came back from Little Alex's room, he had set the blue foil-wrapped box casually on the end table.
"Chinese food'll be here in about ten minutes. Hot and spicy chicken, purse shrimp, chow mein, dried, sauteed string beans."
"Sounds good. How's the boy been today?"
"An angel."
"But of course."
"Better enjoy it while we can. We—what's this?"
"That. Oh, you mean that package there? Got me."
"What did you do, Alex?"
"Me? I didn't do anything. I never saw that before."
She grinned and picked up the package. Shook it.
"What's it for?"
"You've forgotten what today's date is?"
"January 15th, isn't it?"
"Toni."
She grinned wider. "And they say women are romantic. No, I haven't forgotten. It's the day you bought the Miata."
"And…?"
"Isn't that all?"
"You're scum."
She laughed. "Our first date, first kiss, and the first time you were able to admit what I had known for a long time before that. You didn't need to buy me anything."
"No, I didn't need to, I wanted to. Go on, open it."
She did, ripping the paper off with abandon.
"Wow. Where did yon find this?"
"You like it?"
"You're an idiot. Of course I like it."
"It's a first generation," he said. "A collector's item."
She turned the old VHS videotape box in her hands, and he smiled at her happiness.
The tape was an introduction to Pukulan Pentjak Silat Serak, techniques from djuru one, as taught by Maha Guru Stevan Pünck. There was a web address and a picture.
According to what Michaels had learned, the vid had been shot in a borrowed kung fu school in Longview, Washington, ten or eleven years ago, the first one of a series, about the time Americans started realizing there were such things as Indonesian martial arts. Toni had another tape by Plinck, an intro to Bukti Negara shot a couple of years earlier, also in the old VHS format. The serak tapes were harder to find, since they were self-marketed by Plinck in the backs of martial arts magazines, and from a single web page on the net. Most of the commercial producers had gone to DVD or super SQD formats years ago, and the old magnetic tapes were harder and harder to come by. The instructional video consisted of Plinck, who looked to be in his early forties, lecturing on laws and principles of serak, then demonstrating them on various students, along with the students punching, kicking and bouncing each other off the floor and walls. The players all wore T-shirts, sweatpants, and sarongs, most of them men, a couple of women. One of the women was even smaller than Toni.
From his web research, Michaels had found that Plinck, a former Special Forces soldier, was one of the senior students of Paul de Thouars, a Dutch-Indonesian who, with his brothers Maurice, Willem, and Victor, had been among the first to bring the nasty and violent Javanese martial arts to the west. Probably the brothers all knew Toni's teacher, the old lady Toni just called "Guru."
Toni could slaughter most men with what she knew, size notwithstanding.
She hugged him. "Thank you, sweetie. This is terrific."
He smiled. Since Toni had been teaching him—he was up to djuru eight of eighteen—he had gotten more than a little interested in the art's history in the U.S. One of the brothers—the youngest one, Victor—had apparently written some book
s on serak, and Michaels had a web search going to find those for Toni's birthday.
"Okay, sit right there, I'll be right back."
"Going to slip into something more comfortable?"
"No, goat-boy. I'm going to get your present. You really thought I forgot, didn't you?"
"No, of course not."
"Liar."
He smiled, and she was back in less than a minute. "I had this hidden at the bottom of the spare Huggies pack. I knew you'd never find it there."
"Hey, come on! I change diapers all the time!"
"Here." She handed him a rectangular wooden box, hinged on one side, about the size and shape of a small hardback book.
He undid the brass latch and opened it.
"Whoa!"
Inside, nestled into recesses carved out for them, were two small knives. They were kerambits, all steel, no handle scales, a quarter-inch thick, each with a short, sickle-shaped blade on one end, and a finger ring on the other. The edges were smoothed and scalloped with fancy file-work. Toni had a pair—he'd used them once, against a drugged-to-the-gills psycho who'd wanted to kill him—and these looked almost identical, a little fancier with the filework. He took them out and without thinking, automatically slipped his index fingers through the rings, holding them in a reverse grip with the points curved forward and extending from the little finger edges of his hands. He regularly practiced his forms with her knives, so they felt comfortable.
"I couldn't find the knife maker who did Guru's," she said, excited for him. "But there's this guy down in Baton Rouge, name of Shiva Ki, who specializes in custom-made stuff for martial artists, an old warrior himself. I sent him a picture and a tracing of mine, and he made these. They are nickel Damascus, almost like traditional kerises, too. I figured you should have your own."
He put the knives back into their case, and hugged her. "Thank you. They are beautiful."
"So maybe now I'll go slip into something more comfortable," she said.
"Yeah, hurry, before the monster child from hell wakes up."
Toni left, and Michaels leaned back on the couch and looked at the little kerambits. He wondered what normal couples gave each other for anniversaries. Surely not a tape of how to stomp attackers into hamburger, or a pair of custom knives designed to fillet muggers? He laughed. What you got when you fell in love with a serious martial artist who converted you.
"What are you laughing at in there?"
"Nothing. Hurry up, I miss you."
Already his day was a thousand percent better.
5
On the Bon Chance
Chance strolled through the casino, listening to the background sounds: the rumble of conversation from people playing cards, the musical tones of slot machines, the big, old-style roulette wheel with its clattering marble. Yeah, you could gamble on the web, do virtual games that looked and felt almost perfect, but there was always going to be a market for the high-end experience. Anybody could plug in and go on the web for VR; that didn't get you bragging rights:
"So, how was your weekend?"
"Pretty good. Went to the Caribbean, played a little blackjack."
"Yeah? What program?"
"Nah, man, no program—real world."
Except for the staff, none of the gamblers here had a clue as to what this ship's main purpose was. Oh, sure, there was money to be made, and it did that, a handsome profit every month that got plowed back into the cause.
What went on below the casino and cabins, in the electronic heart of the vessel, that was the important thing.
This was one of the three main mobile loci for CyberNation. From here and from the other mobile and hardset locations, a virtual country was going to arise, and that was ironic, since it was going to be helped along in no small part by people who'd rather do things in RW than VR.
"The web is the future! Information should be free! Access is all!"
Yeah, right.
The CyberNationals—her term for the human engines that drove the concept—really wanted this to happen. They believed the slogans. They ate, slept, and breathed the idea. And they had plenty of support, especially among kids who had grown up with computers as much a part of their lives as cars and television. Kids who figured that whatever they wanted, be it music, or vids, or books—those who could actually read—games, whatever, should be theirs for free. That some artist might spend a month or a year of his life creating something didn't mean anything to them. Why should they pay for it? Take it, put it on the web, make it free to anybody who wanted to crank in and download it, that was how it should be, and screw anybody who didn't like it.
To these people, the concept of intellectual property, those who even understood it, was passe, a product of the Dark Ages, and those times were past. Extinct, like the dinosaurs, and good riddance.
The way it should be? Well, from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. They didn't have a clue where that idea originally came from. They had no sense of history.
Lenin must be laughing in his grave.
Chance was a player, but she didn't share the fanatical ideology the movers and shakers of CyberNation and their most rabid supporters embraced. It was a job. Well-paying, exciting, interesting, but a job, nonetheless. She could toe the party line, mouth the slogans, but she wanted to accomplish CyberNation's goals for her own reasons. She was a winner. She didn't like to lose.
Roberto, dressed in a tuxedo, drifted over to intercept her. He looked good in the dress clothes—he looked good in any clothes, and out of them, too—though it had taken her some time to teach him the casual attitude he needed to make a tux work. Pretend you're wearing a workshirt and blue jeans, she'd told him. Clothes don't make the man, the man makes the clothes.
"Missy," he said. "How goes it?"
"Fine. Meet me in the greenroom in ten minutes. I have a small chore for you."
He grinned, probably thinking it was carnal.
Four decks down, past a heavy, locked steel door operated by a fingerprint reader, and manned by a pair of armed guards, was the greenroom. The term came from the entertainment industry: It was the traditional name of the place where actors, prepared to go on camera, waited until they were called.
Roberto was there when Chance arrived.
"What do you have for me?" he asked.
She smiled. "Keep your shirt on, bucko. Don't be so eager."
"That's not what you usually tell me."
She allowed herself a tiny smile. "We have on board tonight Mr. Ethan Dowling, of Silicon Valley. He's doing fairly well at the tables, up about five or six thousand dollars at the moment. He is also VP of Programming for Blue Whale Systems. We need to know everything he knows about the security codes for his company."
"No problem."
"Well, that's not strictly true. First, we can't do it here. You'll have to follow him and grab him elsewhere. His chopper will ferry him to the airport in Miami, where he has a corporate jet waiting to take him to San Francisco. We want him to be on the Mainland, and preferably back on the West Coast, when this goes down."
"Still no problem."
She handed him a holograph of Dowling. He looked at it, nodded.
"He has a pair of armed security guards with him. They are ex-FBI, expert shots, big, strong, and well-trained in mano a mano combat, too." She gave him two more pictures, and he glanced at them.
"Only two of them?" He flashed his white teeth in a big grin.
"God, you're an arrogant bastard, aren't you?"
He shrugged, still grinning. "Why they call it 'Blue Whale?'"
"Because that particular creature has the largest backbone of any animal on Earth. His company is a backbone server, and if not the largest, quickly getting there."
"Ah."
"It needs to look like an accident. If anybody suspects his brain has been picked, they'll start changing codes."
"No problem."
"This is important, Roberto."
His smile vanished,
and for just a second she saw a feral gleam in his eyes. "This is what I do, Missy. You don't need to tell me about it."
She felt a chill course through her. Looking at Roberto now was like being inside a cage with a partially tamed jaguar. It could kill her with one swipe of a paw, and only its conditioning kept it from doing so. "Of course," she said, with an offhand ease she did not feel. "That's why I'm asking you to do it."
Asking. Not telling. Roberto was picky about such things.
"Then you must consider it done," he said.
She nodded. "Of course."
Net Force HQ Quantico, Virginia
Mid-morning in his office and fairly quiet, Michaels got a call.
"Aloha, bruddah," the voice said.
The call was vox only, but even if the ID hadn't been working, Michaels would have known who it was. The caller was Duane Presser, one of the FBI close-combat trainers, a big, broad-faced Hawaiian who'd been with the Bureau for fifteen or so years.
"Aloha," Michaels said. "What can I do for you, Duane?"
"Make me skinny and handsome and rich."
"You don't want me, you want a magician. And he'd have to be the best one who ever lived."
"You a funny man, bruddah."
"Convince my wife."
"Now who needs a magician?"
Presser used his island-boy talk to lull people into thinking he was maybe a little slow; anybody who thought that would, however, be making a mistake. Michaels knew the man had graduated first in his law school class, and was sharp as a room full of razors.
"Why I'm callin', we got a new class of recruits to the point they think they each can whip a platoon of Marines. I thought maybe they tried to see how their stuff works against a fat old haole Net Force Commander and his scrawny little wife, it might make 'em think twice."
CyberNation Page 4
