by Marge Piercy
As soon as the three of them were gathered, Yod changed. It was uncanny, even though she tried to remain aware at all times in the Net that the images they presented of themselves were merely that. He began to turn translucent, so that she could see the wall dimly through him. “I see no reason to retain my external form. After all, we’d prefer not to be recognized.”
“But how do you do that?” Malkah asked.
“Malkah, you must know already. You don’t look the same—I mean, not exactly,” Shira said gingerly.
“Nonsense. I just project myself. I know how to make myself other.” Suddenly Malkah was a natty tall man of perhaps forty, with black hair and a rakish grin. “But how can I become transparent?”
“Merely project yourself as transparency, just as you project your thoughts forward.” Yod made himself a large bright red box and then a cleaning robot and then a big black dog. Then he resumed the translucent form.
Malkah closed her eyes and concentrated. Shira watched her for a moment. Nothing happened. She closed her eyes, too, and focused on herself as the assassin who had attacked her, the woman who had broken her wrist. She was six feet two. She had long spidery arms and legs with the tensile strength of steel. She could not remember the woman’s face clearly, so she gave herself Nili’s face and skin. When she opened her eyes and looked down, she saw the woman’s claw hand on an arm half again as long as her own.
Malkah opened her eyes and looked down. She appeared just as she had before. “I seem not able to get the hang of it. I don’t want to waste any more time practicing now. I’ll go as my alter ego.” She was once again the natty man. He looked to Shira like a movie star from perhaps fifty years before, when flat films had been commonly projected in public, perhaps some cherished actor of Malkah’s youth.
The usual way to break into a base, the standard approach of data pirates, was to enter along the com-con channels, to pass in with messages. There was no way a base could distinguish between legitimate entering data and folks along for the ride. They rode in on the communications channels, past the otherwise impermeable shield that surrounded the Y-S set of bases. It was a matter of keeping a low profile in energy readings, not reacting, not speaking, simply moving along in the chain of data that appeared in the conventional imagery of the Net as packages whizzing on a very fast conveyor belt. The trick was to build up to speed and then slip in. It felt dangerous, but as the bits and you were both merely charges, there was little danger. The spatial dimensions of the Net were all metaphorical, mental conveniences. The dangers of the Net were real, but they were dangers caused by the human brain or nervous system or by encounters with other humans or traps built into the systems.
All the real defenses were inside the perimeter of each base. They could not ride the com-con any further, since it connected with individual receptor areas. They would have wound up in somebody’s terminal. One by one they rolled off into darkness lit only by flashes of what appeared to be heat lightning. In the distance they could see a vast city glittering, surrounded by an energy field that was the source of the crackling light patterns. “How will we get in there?” Shira wondered.
“We won’t bother. It’s a chimera,” Malkah said confidently. “We’re on the wrong level. We need to go up or down.”
“A space platform or an underground warren,” Shira guessed.
“There’s a space platform above and to the right.” Yod pointed. “Six hundred kilometers above this level.”
“How do we get up there?” she asked him.
“We can project ourselves. Remember, space isn’t real here,” Yod said patiently. He demonstrated by rising in a straight line about ten meters upward, then landing again with a light bounce.
Malkah said, “But to no end. That’s another chimera. No, we must go down.”
“Down?” Shira stomped her foot on the ground. It felt solid. “Are you telling me we can simply pass through earth?”
“No. No more than walls. They represent a lack of pathways. We must find an opening. Now, if this is designed anything like I’d design it, the entrance will be apparently unimportant. A hole, a cave, an abandoned tunnel, a mine shaft. Whatever was reasonable in the designed landscape.”
“Wait for me.” Yod rose and then darted forward. His translucence and speed made her think of a large dragonfly. Then they could not see him at all. Shira practiced fading to transparency.
Malkah closed her eyes and tried again. Shira said, “There, you blurred a bit. Try again.”
“I think I’ve got the knack. I can’t bear to think there’s any little trick of the trade I can’t master. My pride is leaking.” Again Malkah’s strange male body wavered as if it were painted on a flag in the wind. Then slowly it dimmed.
Malkah opened her eyes and looked down. “Well, I’m less visible—a personal fog.”
Yod alighted before them, still blurred. “How about a dump?”
“A dump?” Shira repeated blankly.
“An old-fashioned phenomenon of the idiot days,” Malkah explained. “They used to take waste and simply put it in the earth or burn it into the air. They also dumped their feces and sewage in the water. Let’s have a look.” Malkah rose elegantly, her ankles crossed.
On a dark plain near the city, coruscating with colors and light, a valley had been dug in a range of low hills to accommodate old trash, the rusting appliances and vehicles of fifty years before, barrels of dangerous chemicals no doubt dumped here to leak at their leisure into the water table. They landed, gingerly, among mounds of old plastic. “Now, what’s that?” Malkah pointed. “Over there.”
“I believe it’s an incinerator,” Yod said. “A device for turning refuse into toxic smoke.”
“Let’s go in.” Malkah led the way briskly.
“Steps,” Yod said. He brushed past Malkah. “I’ll go first.”
“This is it,” Malkah said. “It’s just such a small and inconspicuous entrance as I design. You have to have various ways into your Base, but no one except a debugger or a trouble-shooter should ever use this one. I work the same way. Always disguise your alternate entrances.”
“We’d never have found this without you,” Yod said. “You were right. Now perhaps you should return.”
“Not on your life—or mine, to be more accurate. I want in, all the way. This is the chance of a lifetime.”
They climbed down and down and down. “Once, years ago—I was living in Prague then, and I was on vacation with my lover, your grandfather, Shira. We went to Paris during a school vacation. It was fall and everything was gray and gold. It was raining that day, and we decided to see the catacombs.” Before them the stairway corkscrewed down in total darkness. Yod raised his hand over his head. It became a bright flashlight. “You could only visit the third Sunday of every month, whatever. So down we went just like this, descending for what felt like hours. Remains had been moved there from old cemeteries, from charnel houses. Then the bones had been neatly stacked—all the thighbones together—and then a motto made of skulls. ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Remember thou art mortal.’”
“I love it when you talk about when you were younger,” Shira said.
“A sense of continuity,” Malkah offered.
“You are embedded in history in a sense that I can’t be,” Yod said, plunging ahead even faster. “What leads to me? Legends, theories, comic books. All my destroyed brother machines.”
Shira was abruptly jolted as they arrived at the bottom and fell into a well-lighted place, what felt like a landing strip for zips, a broad glaring expanse of concrete. Yod immediately thinned himself close to invisibility. With difficulty Shira and Malkah managed to imitate him. He was arrowing straight ahead. “Do you know where you’re going?” she called after him.
“No. But anyplace is better than this. We can get our bearings once we’re out of trouble.”
A blade of some kind of energy swept suddenly across the lighted area. Ahead of them Yod immediately spread himself on the concre
te flatter than a skate. Both of them again imitated him. “He knows how to combat the defenses,” Malkah said. “He responds instantly. We’d be dead before we recognized the danger.” Their thought projected as voices, although they were spread like rugs on the cement.
Yod collected himself and sped forward. They hastened to follow. Finally they escaped the blinding glare. What they saw under a low gray sky were rows and rows of warehouses, identical as barracks, stretching to the horizon. “Okay,” Shira said. “This is archives. The realm of backup programs and old information. This part of the Y-S Base has its own independent solar power supply. There are actually two such facilities, one in orbit and one underground in Nebraska. There!” She pointed to an empty road stretching off. “That’s where we must go next.”
Malkah said, “I suggest following it off to one side as far as we can travel and still keep it in sight.”
“If we climb, we can increase that distance,” Yod said, rising.
Every human has had fantasies of flying like a gull, Shira thought, veering after him. This ought to be exhilarating, but because there’s no air against the face and hair, no sense of motion, it felt curiously flat.
They were approaching what looked like a combination of a power station and a honeycomb, crackling with a pale straw-colored light, when Yod ordered, “Drop!” He plunged like a stone, falling to spread himself thinly over the dry earth. They imitated him again, just as another bolt slashed across.
“What would one of those do to us?” she asked Malkah, the glass puddle.
“It would send an electrical charge back through your plug into your brain, sufficient to produce mental disruption and possibly death. I can’t say if your body would hang on in a vegetable state or if your functions would stop, but it wouldn’t much matter.”
“That’s the hub of programming,” Shira said. “We don’t want that. We want planning. This way.”
“On the way out, we must stop here,” Yod said. “We can’t start sabotage till we have the information we seek.”
Those slashing beams crossed the space between different bases within the larger Base. Yod was attuned to them, and each time he gave Malkah and Shira just enough warning. Shira began to think that the defenses would not prove as dangerous as she had feared. From a wasteland, the country they were crossing began to be landscaped. Groves of trees, lawns, farms, country roads. “It ought to be here, but there’s nothing. We should be in it by now.”
Malkah swooped down. “This is it. Under us.” She was heading straight for a landscaped area under them, shrubs set around a pool. As she dived, several winged entities emerged from a hill that opened. They were part bird, part plane, part armored reptile. They came streaking for Malkah. A long tongue of fire licked from the foremost, close enough to Malkah to make her cry out in pain. Yod, armored now and glinting, intervened and tore right through the flock of them so they exploded behind him. He ripped at their wings, he slashed at their metallic beaked heads. He moved almost faster than she could see. He was a blur enveloped in the fire they breathed out, followed by a rain of machine parts. Malkah had resumed her dive. Yod and Shira followed her as she passed headfirst through the pool and then into the undisguised machine imagery underneath. Around them and through the pool fell parts of the harpies, blasted metal littering down.
They were in the machine now, in its representation within the Base. Somewhere the actual nanochips existed, but this was a simulacrum. “Is this the right stuff?” Malkah asked Yod. “Are we on target? I’m pretty sure this is no chimera, but let’s proceed cautiously. It has to be well defended.”
“Wait.” He stared at the busy grid before them, stretching up beyond sight. He seized one of the metallic feathers that had fallen through the chimera of the pool with them. Chunks of metal curiously wrought. He tossed it forward. When it came within half a meter of the machine, it was pulverized in a flash.
“How do we get around that?” Shira asked.
“We don’t,” Malkah said. “I’m beginning to understand what Yod does. We turn ourselves into some sort of digging devices and burrow through the soil. We’ll come up inside. I have never heard of anyone doing what we’re doing, using shape-changing in a Base, but it seems effective. We accept their metaphors and incorporate them.” Malkah turned herself into a large furry mole. Then she reconsidered, scratching her head, and became instead an armored mining machine. “A mole is too vulnerable and too blind.”
“You had trouble at first, but now you’re faster than I am,” Shira said admiringly.
“I’m a feisty old dog,” Malkah said. “I like to learn new tricks. Especially out-of-the-body tricks. My body is weak, but my mind still has all its teeth.”
“Yod, I don’t know enough about mining machines to become one. Program me.” She held out her hands to him. She remembered how they had exchanged thoughts in the room-sized rose.
He took hold of her. They were both translucent, and she had an odd sensation of their quasi bodies intermingling like smoke and fog. She felt a momentary comfort in his ghostly embrace. Someone you could rely on. Like Malkah that way. A virtue without price. He presented to her mind a clear diagram and picture of a mining machine, which she could emulate. She became a roughly cylindrical machine with shallow treads. Her head was a boring device. She swallowed earth and rock and excreted it up the hole with a violent blast. It was rather fun. She had to remind herself to follow Malkah and Yod and not to twist away on her own, eating rock. Finally they burst through into the machine interior. The women reverted to human shape.
“Now we must access and find what we need,” Yod said. “In real time we have caused some disturbances. Soon more formidable defense mechanisms than we have dealt with will be converging.” He condensed into a ball of light and disappeared into the system.
Shira said, “I don’t much like standing around here without him.”
“We could try to go in after him, but I’m dubious.”
“We might be safer inside. At least we could accomplish something.” The tension of waiting was too great. Whenever Shira paused for a moment and realized where she was, she was terrified. It was better to keep moving. She condensed herself as tightly as she could and projected forward. She could tell that Malkah was behind her. Together they flicked past file names. All around them the system was reacting to commands. She accessed a file being modified. One of the components in the plug embedded in her real body was a decoder that made her able to access machine language, translate it instantly into numbers and words. Without it she could not have accessed any Base or the Net directly. This file was about plans to redesign the delivery system for the space stations. She dropped it.
She began tasting files as she went, moving fast, pushing. Malkah emulated her, forging ahead. They were streaking through. New products, development plans, research, new stations, investment, infiltration, industrial espionage, security decisions, marketing.
“I have it,” Yod said nearby. “I’ve stored the information. We can access it when we’re out.”
“Then follow me.” Shira could not give way to relief, for she still had one more all-important task. “I believe we can use inner pathways to personnel records. I need to access mine, Josh’s, Ari’s.” Without waiting for their response, she rocketed off. She was an impulse rippling along a pathway of ice. She burned without heat, speeding on. She could feel them behind her. She could feel something behind them. Malkah was following her still, Yod was not. A great wave of energy burst along the pathway, almost knocking her loose. Then Yod was behind her again, following with alacrity.
Shira had always been a conscientious worker who preferred understanding the larger picture into which her work fitted, so she had learned far more about the Y-S system than she had strictly needed. She knew the way now, felt the moment they reached personnel records. Accessing here was easy, for she remembered the file names. It was all by employee number, and she had memorized those numbers—those for her ex-husband, her son and
herself—since she had had to use them for routine functions and every request.
Yod ate the files quickly. “Now we must find our way back. At once.”
“Follow me. I’ll take us through the system back to archives.” She went faster than before. She had the knack of it now, the transformations Yod had invented or rediscovered. She had no idea how long ago they had plugged in, sitting in a row in Avram’s lab, but she had the strong feeling it had been enough time to begin to be dangerous. Not for Yod. He could remain plugged in for days without any ill effects she could observe, but she had heard of Net travelers killed because they had got caught in some inner loop and could not escape. While they were trapped in netspace, their bodies died. Presumably their projected minds also died, but it was even worse to contemplate consciousnesses trapped like catatonics within repeating strings in forgotten closed-off sectors of some base.
“We must stop,” Malkah said. “Here I need to introduce a worm.”
“Work quickly,” Yod said. “We have little time. We’re being pursued.”
“You can both help me.”
They worked together, rebuilding the programming. Then they were on their way again. Three times Malkah stopped them. Each time she could feel Yod’s level of apprehension rising. It was not that he grew nervous in a human sense but that he was more alert, more on guard. The fourth time he refused to permit them to loiter.
At archives, Malkah dropped a simple virus, and they fled the system. Now they saw again the representation of the barracks. There was the glare of the concrete field they must cross. “Rockets,” Yod said. “Fastest way to cross. Malkah, do you have the exit in view?”
“Right. I’ll lead.”
