by Tad Williams
She was just about to close the whole mess in disgust when she suddenly wondered why Jongleur should take such an interest in the waste removal infrastructure for the corporate property, to the extent of having it on his own personal system. It was his own principal residence, of course, but it still seemed odd. She checked and found that the same set of files existed in the corporate system, but that didn't prove anything—Jongleur could simply have wanted his own copy, perhaps because there was some more mundane accounting discrepancy he was examining. Still, the Jongleur that Dread had spoken of didn't seem like a man too interested in the day-to-day business of maintaining corporate headquarters.
Dulcie ran a comparison study of the two files, drumming her fingers impatiently until the processing marker stopped flashing.
Two files with the same name, She saw, excitement rising again. And the J Corp. version is smaller than the Jongleur version. Bingo!
A moment's spin of the digital tumblers and the larger file was open. Dulcie's fingers were no longer rapping on the edge of the pad but curling like the claws of a hunting bird ready to swoop. The extra information was secured in a lower layer, like a smuggler's false bottom bolted to the undercarriage of a truck. She keyed it open, holding her breath.
Something whined like a dental drill.
Files and signifiers began to leap onto the screen and dissolve. Message pointers flashed like tiny explosions. Her system defenses were screaming, the high-pitched alarm so painful that for a moment she could not understand what was happening.
Oh, shit—a 'phage! But why isn't my gear stopping it?
She had opened the file without proper permission and had set off a dataphage, one that her own gear apparently did not know how to handle. Within moments it would destroy all the material in the file, not just delete the markers but chew the actual data off the storage. God only knew what else it might do on the way—maybe take her whole system down.
Once, as a teenage babysitter in someone else's house, she had dumped an ashtray into a wastebasket and, without realizing it, set the wastebasket's contents on fire. The flames had climbed the long drapes of a picture window before she wandered back into the room. The feeling of terror and transgression had been just like this. It was all she could do not to leap up and smash the pad against the floor in an attempt to kill the horrible thing she had awakened.
Knowing that every second was critical, she switched the pad over to voice command and began calling up emergency measures, her system's equivalent of the volunteer fire department, since the dataphage's explosive onset had already overwhelmed her built-in regulators. Within a few moments she had managed to isolate the cancerous 'phage from the rest of her own data, but that was doing nothing to stop the destruction of the disposal file she had copied from Jongleur's system. And despite her quick move to firewall the damage, the 'phage seemed to have done odd things to her system already: the communications markers were flashing, as though she herself had been trying to obtain an outgoing line.
Another minute's frantic work enabled her to find another piece of emergency gear she had almost forgotten she had, allowing her at last to grab the isolated section of data and freeze it, but the destruction was huge if not total. She very much doubted there was anything left of the original group of files.
But that's just a copy, she reminded herself. The primary version's still there on the Jongleur system. I'll just call it up and copy it off again, then be more careful with it next time. . . .
It was only then that she understood the significance of the blinking communications marker. With dawning horror, she disconnected, but it was already too late. The implanted dataphage was an extreme measure, constructed not only to destroy the pirated file but to call out and destroy the master file, too, probably after sending a high-alert warning to the owner of the file to give them a chance to countermand.
But if Jongleur's not around, then the whole thing is just gone now. Gone. And if he is around, then I've just told him that someone has one of his most sensitive files.
A quick check confirmed her growing misery. The master file in question was now officially nonexistent.
"Shit," she said aloud. "Shit, shit, shit!"
"What's the problem, sweetness?"
Dulcie shrieked and her pad slid from her knee and thumped on the carpeted floor. Dread was standing beside her, all long, tawny muscles and bare skin, wearing only a towel wrapped around his waist so that he looked like a statue stepped down from its plinth. She had not even heard him approach.
"God, y–you scared me!" But the mere fact of his sudden appearance was not the only reason for her stuttering heart. The pad lay faceup on the floor, full of incriminating data. She dropped to her knees and picked it up, babbling to cover her real terror. "I didn't know . . . I thought you were . . . it's so quiet in here, but I didn't hear you. . . ."
As he stared at her, an amused smile quirking his mouth, she blanked the small screen. "Didn't mean to give you a heart attack," he said. "What's up?" He squinted at her pad. "Why aren't you using the wall?"
"My eyes . . . it gives me . . . makes my head ache, sometimes."
He nodded. "What pissed you off so badly?"
"What?" She was desperately trying to remember what was still open and flowing to the pad. What if he wanted to access his system? "Oh, just . . . some problems with security on some of Jongleur's files. Some of his banking stuff." As far as she knew, Dread's accounting data was still live and connected, her own gear waiting for further search requests. She cursed herself for not having done the prudent thing and copied the files she was examining to her own system. She had a desperate, clammy feeling that if he found out, something worse than the usual firing might be the result. She tried to calm her unsteady voice and speak lightly. "I've been doing this for hours and I'm ragged, utterly. Are you up for a while?"
He cocked his head. "Why?"
"I don't know. Could we go out and get some dinner, something? Just get out of here for an hour or two?"
Something moved behind his dark eyes; she prayed she hadn't caught him in a suspicious mood. "Right," he said after a moment. "Why not? Are you buying?"
She forced herself to laugh. "Sure. Just let me tidy up a few things. . . ."
While Dread was pulling on clothes, Dulcie closed and locked off everything, then ran her cleanup gear. She was trembling so badly she had to set her pad down on a table-top so she didn't drop it again.
How can he move so quietly? He got out of that thing and walked all the way across the room behind me and I never heard him. Maybe he really is a vampire. It wasn't a very good joke, not at the moment. She finished and turned off her pad, then wiped her sleeve across her face. The room was cool, but she was sweating.
Maybe Renfield needs to think about getting into another line of work. . . .
Dread was quite charming over dinner, flashing those white teeth, playfully exaggerating his Aussie machismo to try to make her laugh. If Dulcie had been meeting him for the first time she would have been quite taken by his stories of the strange places and even stranger folk he had met in his peculiar line of work. If it had been even a week earlier, she might have had that third glass of wine, even a fourth, and let herself descend into warm compliance. Instead, she spent the entire meal thinking about how close she had come to being caught, wondering every time he gave her one of his penetrating looks whether he was about to reveal that he knew what she had been doing.
Whether he suspected her of misbehavior or not, there was definitely something going on beneath the surface. Dread had always been subject to oddly high-flown, almost feverish bouts of enthusiasm. That was going on tonight, but it was twinned somehow with the watchful Dread she also knew, as though he were keeping a tight rein on himself because he knew he was on the brink of letting go entirely. As they walked back from the cafe he fell silent, looking neither at her nor the rain-spattered streets, but keeping his eyes fixed at a point somewhere above the invisible horizon. There was a
n unusual bounce in his step, a subtle but consistent flexing of muscles, as though he alone of all humanity had overcome gravity but had decided to maintain the pretense of obeying it.
In the main room of the loft, with the overhead fluorescents still off and only the red and white fairy-lights of the coma bed giving shape to the dark walls, he put his arm around her and drew her close. He was shockingly strong, even in this swift and apparently careless gesture; for half a moment she thought he planned to break her spine and did not doubt he could do it. Instead he laid his cheek against hers, his lips close to her ear.
"Shall we dance, sweetness? I have music inside me, you know. I can play it for you."
She had already spoiled any chance of a graceful exit by stiffening at his touch. Suddenly the idea of having sex with this man seemed far more disturbing than she had ever imagined it to be, not a question of morning-after remorse but of actual terror. A little voice deep inside her brain—the child-voice, the rememberer-of-stories—squealed He wants to steal your soul. . . ! She struggled to calm herself, although she was certain that with his sharp animal senses he must smell her fear. "I . . . I don't feel very good. Cramps. But . . . it was a very nice dinner."
His teeth gently, gently closed on her earlobe. The tiny pain sent a bolt of black lightning down her spine. "Oh, Dulcie, sweetness—you wouldn't be teasing a bloke, now would you?"
"No." Her heart was thumping painfully, I'm all alone. "No, I'm not that kind . . . I don't do that."
He took her jaw between index finger and thumb and turned her face so he cold look closely, his smile completely at odds with the shadowed hollows that were all she could see of his stare, like the black eyeholes of a mask. She felt a clawing urge to cry out, but for that brief moment, as if plunged into nightmare, she could make no sound.
When he let go of her, she almost fell.
"Well, then," he said lightly, "I suppose I might as well get back to work. It's quite a job being God, after all." He kissed his fingertip and touched it lightly against her dry lips. "Wouldn't want you to think I was the kind of man who can't control himself." He laughed, then with startling unconcern began to undress for the coma bed. Dulcie fled to the bathroom.
I don't trust myself anymore, she thought. I can't tell what's real and what's not. He's a monster? Then why didn't he just force me—I couldn't have lifted a finger. No pleading, no trying to scare me.
But she was scared, although the rationale-collectors of her upper mind were beginning to send memos, form committees, call meetings.
He's just . . . weird. Dark. But what did you expect? The guy is an international mercenary, for God's sake, not a homeroom teacher.
Just go to the airport, a more frightened voice told her. Get the hell out of town. Tell him your mother's dying. Tell him anything.
But I can't just walk out on him, she suddenly realized. He's not going to let me, is he? I'm the only person who knows what he's been doing. The nervous fear she had been feeling suddenly frosted over, turned into something thicker and colder. If he killed his boss, is he going to just let me walk away? Certainly not if I do it in a hurry—that's what starts a hunting animal chasing you.
Listen to you, Anwin—a hunting animal? Let's not get carried away. What has he done, really? He hired you. He's paying you. So you've decided you don't like him much. . . .
She sat up on the bed, head pounding. She fumbled in her bag without result, then remembered she had put her gun back in the drawer next to the coffee things.
Am I really being ridiculous? Besides, he's so fast—if he doesn't want to take no for an answer next time, would I even get the chance to use it? She let her purse slide to the floor. Too much. This is too much—I need some sleep.
Half an hour later, although the painblockers had dulled the throb of her head, sleep was still depressingly distant. She got up and walked quietly down the short hallway into the main section of the loft.
Dread was again lying in the special bed, serene as a buddha. A slightly less adult part of herself whispered, Typical man. I've got a headache and I'm thinking about shooting him, and he sleeps through everything.
But he wasn't sleeping, of course. He was back in the network, doing whatever it was that he did there. Dulcie had not seen the place for weeks, and found herself oddly nostalgic for it.
What the hell is he up to?
Angered by her own fearfulness, although it was by no means gone yet, she took her pad off the tabletop and retreated to her room, then slid closed the bolt on her door. Within moments she was surveying the almost complete destruction of the disposal files caused by the dataphage. She put her salvage gear to work and sat back, wishing she had some uncomplicated hobby with which to pass the time—smoking or serious drinking or Russian roulette.
Time for a major State of the Self meeting, Dulcie? She considered, but set it aside. Life was too strange right now, and it was never a good idea to make decisions when you were depressed and exhausted.
She had walked around the loft three times and returned messages from a few people in the States, including a cranky, rambling explanation from her neighbor Charlie about why she had accidentally fed dog food to Dulcie's cat Jones, which even a face-to-face call didn't ever quite clear up, before the gear finished its work. With very low expectations, she opened the salvaged files and found pretty much what she had expected—fragments. Some of them were incomprehensible segments of scrambled text, parts of what might have been accounting files or even personal messages, but now might as well have been written in a dead language. There were a few recognizable passages, but they were the predictable result of resurrecting a random half-percent of what had been a huge and diverse load of data, meaningless remnants of reports without enough context to make sense. The only intriguing thing was that some of the fragments were couched in what seemed like medical language, as though they were part of someone's health records. There was a mention of changing medications and a list of what seemed to be brain chemistry readouts, but oddly sophisticated, not the kind of thing you would expect in the medical records of even so important and unusual an employee as Dread.
In fact, based on the rubbish left after the dataphage's destructive attack, she couldn't even be sure these bits and pieces were about Dread. It was the logical deduction, but completely unprovable. Worse, though, was the fact that the disconnected bits gave her exactly nothing of what she had sought, information about her employer through his relationship with his own master, Felix Jongleur.
The one decent-sized chunk of data that remained coherent was a long image file, apparently one of hundreds according to its signifier, but the only one that had survived the data explosion. She managed to open it and run it, but was mystified by the small, grainy image, some kind of footage taken in what must have been a badly lit room, and perhaps by a camera with a hinky power supply. A white flash of emptiness was followed by a stark picture which seemed to show a small, dark-haired figure sitting at a table in a white room. A voice-over called a test number, then the camera zoomed in on the subject's hands and a small object lying between them on the table. Nothing else seemed to happen for some twenty seconds, then the camera pulled back again, some numbers were given by an off-camera voice, and the segment ended.
Dulcie sat back, puzzled. Normally she would have abandoned the whole thing as a loss, but she was still wired-up and nervous and wouldn't be able to sleep for hours. Also, she was unwilling to acknowledge defeat, however obvious the fact of that defeat might seem. She searched her system for image-enhancement gear—she had done a favor for a semi-friend who also worked the shadier areas of information transfer and he had paid her back with what he said was a package of state-of-the-art military image-crunchers—then began experimenting to see if she could make anything happen with the single surviving bit of visual imagery.
The first thing she did was work on enhancing the face of the subject. She couldn't improve it much, but brought enough clarity to the image to be certain it was a
dark-haired and fairly dark-skinned boy. She stared at it stupidly for a moment, afraid to let herself believe what seemed obvious.
Could that be Dread? But he looks about thirteen. Why would Jongleur have footage of him when he was thirteen? What possible significance would it have?
She went back to work in earnest, struggling with the unfamiliar gear to get better resolution, wishing she knew more about this kind of work. She managed to alter the contrast enough to bring the cheekbone and jaw out from the fait of straight black hair and felt her pulse speed—the face certainly had something of Dread's shape to it. But no matter how much she tried, she could not make the image any clearer, which was odd because she could improve things like the edge of the table or the subject's hands into a grainy but precise image.
Thwarted, but inwardly convinced it was him, she next began to work on the object lying on the table between his hands, a dark lozenge about ten by five centimeters. When she realized that it wasn't a familiar object and stopped trying to see it that way, she was finally able to bring it into better focus. It was some kind of timer with a digital readout, like an oblong watch with no strap. As she ran the footage backward and forward she began to make out the pattern of the numbers, although she confused herself several times before she finally realized that halfway through the experiment or test the numbers on the readout suddenly began to run backward.
Dulcie shook her head. A teenage Dread holding a timer that ticked forward in the standard manner, then switched and began running the numbers backward? What the hell kind of experiment was that? And why would Jongleur have stashed it in this very secret equivalent of a personnel file?
She reviewed the experiment footage over and over, and although she had become so certain that the figure was Dread she could no longer imagine it otherwise, she could make no other sense of it. It was only when she ran the sequence back to its very beginning for a last look that she realized she hadn't paid any attention to the flash of white at the start, assuming it was just a blank caused by bad data. When she stopped and slowed it she saw that it was actually something white passing in front of the camera. Certain that it would prove to be only someone's lab coat, or perhaps the vastly distorted hand of the person filming the test as they adjusted the lens, she nevertheless began to play with it.
