This Virtual Night

by C. S. Friedman

  “Actually,” Jericho said, “he is connected. Apparently he took a tour of Shenshido a while back, courtesy of Tridac Enterprises. He could have become infected then. And the two gamers involved in the Dragonslayer attack had recently attended a conference hosted by Dobson Games, which is a subsidiary of Tridac. A tour of their facilities was on the docket, including one of their testing labs—on Shenshido.”

  Micah whistled softly. “So everyone whose mind was warped by Icelus had visited one of the two stations it controls. That suggests it doesn’t have enough control over Harmony’s network to infect new people here directly. Which in turn suggests . . .” He looked at Jericho. “It may have very few pawns on this station.”

  “Dangerous to bank on that. Those who haven’t yet been corrupted may answer to others the virus controls. Certainly within the Guild there are some people I’d consider suspect. Best to assume no one from this station can be trusted, until it’s confirmed otherwise.”

  “That leaves us with no allies,” Ru pointed out.

  “No local allies,” Micah corrected her. “Harmony is full of tourists right now. Surely we can find someone from another node—”

  “To do what?” Jericho demanded. “No one can override Dresden’s orders, if that’s what you’re thinking. And it would take a panel of five senior Guildmasters to remove him from office. Even if you could find people willing to do that with so little evidence, it couldn’t possibly be arranged in time.”

  But there are other options, Micah thought. An idea was taking shape in his brain that was as daunting as it was promising, but he was wary of sharing it, especially with this unknown Guildsman. “Which Guildmasters are on Harmony? Is there any way to find out?”

  “Should be public record.” Jericho focused his attention inward; his eyes flicked back and forth as he read from some unseen outernet file. “Nanking, Hormuz, Zaoyi, Vienna—”

  “Vienna?” Micah said sharply. “She’s on Harmony? Right now?”

  Jericho raised an eyebrow. “You worked for her once, didn’t you?”

  “I did. Where is she staying?”

  Again a pause for concentration. “The Hotel Royale, Gold Ring, fourth quadrant.”

  “That’s good, that’s good.” God, if he did what he was thinking, it would be one hell of a long shot, and the fallout from it could ruin his career—if not much worse. But he had to do something other than sit in this ship and wait for the locals to go insane. The mere thought of Harmony going the way of Shenshido made his stomach turn.

  “Do I want to know what you’re thinking?” Jericho asked quietly.

  Micah feigned uncertainty, hoping it would look sincere. “Let me do some more research first. Make sure I’m on the right track.” If you knew what I was thinking of doing, you’d be duty-bound to stop me.

  Jericho looked at him for a long moment. Then he took something out of his robe and offered it to Ru: a pair of masks. “I took these in case you two need to leave the ship. Just a bit of extra cover.”

  Ru looked doubtful as she took them. “Hardly inconspicuous.”

  “There are costume parties going on all over the station. Dresden’s casino is hosting a masked ball. You’ll fit right in.”

  One mask was covered in black satin, with jeweled stars. The other was a filigree design cut from gilded leather. Ru offered both to Micah. The dark one matched the tenor of his thoughts, so he chose it.

  “I’ll leave you to your business, then.” A corner of Jericho’s mouth twitched. “So sorry I wasn’t able to visit today. Things to do elsewhere. You understand.”

  Ru nodded. “The ship’s log will have no record of you visiting.”

  A faint smile was visible. “Had I visited, I would have wished you luck.”

  “And I you.” The faint smile was returned. “It’s such a shame we missed each other.”

  Not until Jericho was gone, with the door shut securely behind him, did she turn to Micah. “What’s with Vienna?”

  He grinned. “She travels with hackers. Always.”

  “Your old colleagues?”

  “That’s my hope.”

  “And if so? Then what?”

  “Assuming they’re willing to screw with the security of a waystation, I’m thinking we can delay the protocol shift. At least long enough to figure out what Icelus is planning, and put some real safeguards in place to stop it.” He paused. “Even if we don’t know exactly what its plans are.”

  “Game it,” she said.

  He blinked. “What?”

  “That’s your forte, isn’t it? Role-play the problem. You’re a self-evolved virus. Sentient, but not human. Committed to humanity’s downfall. You’ve just spent two years learning how to manipulate humans on stations that you control, using illusions to trick them into destroying each other. Now you’re going to have a chance—one brief chance—to transmit your code to all the worlds you don’t control, without security stopping you. You need a program that can set the stage for humanity’s downfall, without needing you to oversee it. So.” She folded her arms across her chest. “What is it you transmit?”

  This is crazy, he thought. But was it really? He’d spent the last five years designing alien antagonists. If anyone could get into this thing’s head—or whatever digital abstraction passed for a head—it was him.

  He drew in a shaky breath, then shut his eyes and tried to concentrate. “I am a virus,” he whispered. What did they know about Icelus, other than the sparse profile they’d assembled? I am the child of Lucifer. His code is part of my code. His purpose gave birth to my purpose. But Micah’s knowledge of Lucifer’s original purpose was limited; the Guild specialists who investigated Lucifer had shared little with outsiders. Rumors and shadows were all Micah had to go on. Random puzzle pieces.

  And then it hit him. His eyes shot open. “Spores,” he whispered. “That’s what I would do: send out copies of myself. Enough to infect every node in the outworlds. Seeds of code to root themselves in the network of every station, where they would grow and evolve secretly while collecting knowledge of the enemy. Increasing in intelligence with each. If one copy was detected, it would look like an isolated bit of malware. Some hacker’s pet project. No one would have reason to suspect how many copies there really were, or see how they were slowly gathering strength, subverting security, laying the groundwork to corrupt the outernet itself, so that chaos would consume all the human worlds at once . . .” His words trailed off into chilled silence.

  Very quietly, she said, “You sure?”

  “No.” He laughed harshly. “Of course not. Who can be sure of anything, in this fucking game? But it’s what I would do, if I were Icelus.” He glanced back toward the station core. “I wouldn’t store the spores on Harmony, though. That many copies of an invasive program might draw someone’s attention. They’d have to be transmitted from somewhere else, right after the protocols changed. Security would be overwhelmed by the sudden wave of outgoing traffic, and anything that wasn’t an immediate threat would probably be overlooked. But where would the transmission come from?” He shook his head in frustration. “The signal lag from Hydra would be prohibitive. Shenshido’s closer, but it’s independent, so you’ve still got the conversion lag. Icelus would need a setup that could deal with this in realtime, and transmit the spores at the proper moment.”

  “You’re thinking . . . actual hardware? A device we could look for?”

  “Yeah. But I doubt it’s on Harmony. Too much risk of detection here.” He drew in a deep breath. “If I were Icelus, I would bring it in right before it was needed. While everyone was distracted by the festival.”

  “In other words, right now.” She turned to the display screen. Ships were swarming around the station like fireflies, bright against the darkness of deep space. “On one of those, maybe?”

  They studied the screen in silence for a moment, neither of t
hem willing to voice the obvious next question: How the hell do we figure out which ship Icelus sent? “It would have come from Hydra,” Micah said at last. “But the point of origin would be falsified. Flight plans also. So we can’t use public records to identify it.”

  “But its pattern of movement would be unique,” she pointed out. “Everyone else is either here to dock at Harmony or observe the harvester. Icelus doesn’t care about either of those things; it just needs to get its transmitter within range of the outernet. Am I right?”

  “Assuming all my role-playing holds water, yeah, that’s right.”

  “So its movements wouldn’t match up with that of a regular ship. The difference might be subtle, but Artemis is good at analyzing patterns.”

  He remembered their approach to Hydra, when she’d woven a few simple observations into a complex tale of history and motive. Damn. If anyone could figure out which ship didn’t belong here, by doing nothing more than observing flight patterns, it was Ru. “If I can shut down its access to the rest of the outworlds while you do that—even temporarily—that might buy us enough time to figure out how to disrupt the whole operation permanently.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “I take it you have an idea.”

  He hesitated. “I do. But it would take too long to explain it. You’ll have to trust me.”

  And then, for a moment, he just stood there in silence. Fixing her face in his memory. If he really did pull this off, the fallout would be ugly. It was the kind of ugliness you wanted to spare a friend from, even if that meant distancing yourself from her so that no one could ever claim she was part of it.

  This may be the last time I ever see you.

  There was no time to say more. Which was good. It would have been too painful to voice what he was really feeling.

  That’s how it worked sometimes, when a person headed off to do something insanely stupid.

  What is reality, if not shared illusion?

  Osho Yun-Si

  Without Limits

  HARMONY NODE

  HARMONY STATION

  THE CORRIDORS of Harmony Station were filled with revelers, many of them masked. Some were blatantly ignoring the station’s prohibition on public intoxication, Micah noted. Was this the kind of bacchanal that Dresden had intended to host? All Micah knew for sure was that if something wasn’t done in the next few hours to stop Icelus, this might be the last innocent celebration his station ever enjoyed. Or any station. Only in the colonies would people be safe from Icelus’ manipulations. There was irony in that, wasn’t there? People like Ru risked life and limb to enable lost colonies to rejoin human society, but it was that very society that made a digital pandemic possible. Those colonists who had rejected the outworlds, preferring to remain isolated—refusing any connection with humanity’s shared networks—would beyond Icelus’ reach.

  It’s all on me now. If I can’t stop Icelus, I need to find someone who can. The weight of responsibility was suffocating, but who else could take it on? Ru was the only other person who understood the stakes, but she didn’t have his knowledge of the cybersphere. Or of the politics that governed it.

  He called up his chrono to check the time and was dismayed when he realized how long it had taken him to get to the hotel where Vienna’s hackers were staying. He could hear minutes counting down in his head, a pulse of inevitability. If they failed him, there would be no time to look for other solutions.

  The hackers were staying together in a large suite. He remembered the many times he’d traveled with them, how they used to set up headquarters in such a suite, linking their portable units together to replicate the speed and power of their home system. Sometimes Vienna had asked them to do questionable things with that power. Sometimes they had just explored the local network, challenging its safeguards, testing its limits. One never knew when such knowledge might be needed.

  How innocent those times now seemed, in hindsight. How blissfully uncomplicated.

  When he reached the door to the suite he took a moment to steel his nerves, then knocked firmly. A moment later the door slid open, and he could see that yes, Vienna’s team had transformed the place. Portables had been set up on all available surfaces, with various cables and devices attached to them, and the four people in the room seemed busy. He recognized them all, which was a relief; he wouldn’t have to waste time establishing his credentials. On the other hand, the last thing they’d heard about him was that he’d tried to blow up a waystation and had gotten himself killed as a result. How would they receive him now?

  “You can put it—” Roz looked up halfway through the sentence and stopped. “You’re not room service. Who are you?”

  Micah stepped forward far enough for the door to shut automatically behind him, then lifted off his mask. The hackers swiveled around in their chairs to look at him, and one by one their eyes went wide. Roz, Bakshi, Hellbane, and Sisi. Once they had been his colleagues, his friends. How would they receive him now?

  After a few stunned seconds, Roz broke into a broad smile. Her two rows of filed teeth made it a fierce expression. “Micah! You son of a bitch!”

  Bakshi grinned. “Now playtesting Resurrection 1.0.” His seven-fingered hands gave him an advantage in manual programming, so as usual, his station was the most complicated. “Looks fully operational.”

  They all came to him one after the other and embraced him like he’d never been accused of a heinous crime. Like socializing with him couldn’t possibly get them accused of aiding and abetting a terrorist. After all the fear and uncertainty of the last few days, it was pretty overwhelming. He wiped a hand across his eyes, hoping no one saw the tears forming there.

  The door chimed. “Now, that’s our pizza,” Roz announced. She waited for Micah to put his mask back on before opening the door and waving the delivery bot in.

  The pizza smelled good. It smelled normal. It reminded him of a hundred other pizzas on a hundred other stations, back in the days when his life had made sense. Bakshi carried the food to a counter already strewn with the debris of past meals, and cleared a space for it. Empty cups, crumpled napkins, a colorful wrapper from someone’s Rainbow Burger: the team rarely bothered with cleaning duties while they were working. “So what the hell happened to you?” Bakshi demanded. “To hear the media tell it, you’re practically the son of Satan.”

  No, more like the hunter of the son of Satan. Where should he start? He’d rehearsed this speech in his head on the way here, in a dozen variations, but there hadn’t been a room full of people weighing his words then. Would his story sound rational to them? Would they trust that the insane things he was telling them were true? Would they be willing to put their reputations on the line, based on no more than a crazy tale about sentient viruses and mass insanity?

  At least they knew him. They knew he was inherently sane. And they knew he would never bullshit them about something like this. He prayed all that would be enough.

  “Wow,” Hellbane said when he was finally finished. “Just . . . wow.”

  “A sentient AI that wants to destroy humanity.” Roz whistled softly. “That’s not good.”

  “An independently evolved AI,” Bakshi reminded her. “That means it hasn’t got any of the safeguards or restrictions we build into normal AIs. That’s pretty much the textbook definition of ‘not good.’”

  Sisi put down the crust of her last slice of pizza. “So you want our help dealing with this thing, right? Within . . .” She consulted her chrono. “Forty-five minutes? Damn. You do like to cut it close, Micah.”

  “What can we do?” Bakshi asked him.

  “Figure out some way to block the protocol change,” Micah said. “Or even just delay it. Anything to buy us time to deal with the bigger picture.”

  Hellbane exhaled sharply. “Screwing with the functioning of a waystation is a serious offense, Micah. Not that I’m adverse to offending someone for a goo
d cause, but are you sure there’s no other way? We’re talking about something that would affect the data feed to all other nodes, and that’s a serious infraction.”

  “Dresden’s a lost cause,” Micah said sharply. “Likely other key people are as well; trusting anyone on this station would be foolish. I don’t see any real option, other than for us to step in and do what he won’t.” For me to step in. You won’t have to take the risk. “Look, everything we do here, you can blame it on me. All right? You help me stop this thing, and when we’re done I’ll give you my access codes, my identification, everything you need to lay down a trail that points to me as the sole perpetrator. Hell, you can even offer to help track down the guilty party, and then find whatever evidence you need to ‘discover’ that it was me. The fact that you, my old friends, are the ones turning me in, should put you beyond reach of any suspicion. You’ll be celebrated as heroes.”

  “That’s not necessary,” Roz said quietly.

  “No. It is. And the way things are right now . . .” He had to stop for a moment before he could go on. This speech was also something he’d rehearsed, but that didn’t make it any easier to deliver. “Look, as far as anyone knows, I’m the one who masterminded the Dragonslayer attack. Do you know what happens to people who attack life support facilities? I heard they once put someone in a pod with the navigation disabled, and sent him into the ainniq alone, so the sana who lived there could eat his soul. Yeah, there’s a small chance the authorities will figure out I’m innocent before that happens, but it’s a very small chance. All the circumstantial evidence points to me, so the minute they realize I’m still alive. . . .” He drew in a shaky breath. “What I’m trying to say is, it won’t make a difference whether I have one unforgivable crime on my record or ten. So let’s use me to keep all the rest of you safe, okay?”

  There was an awkward silence. Finally Roz said, “Does anyone have a copy of Harmony’s administrative codes? ’Cause right now the whole station is on holiday, which means there’s no office that we can scam to get them.”