The Long Run

by The Long Run (new ed) (mobi)

  Melissa did not even look at the woman. "I don't care what you think."

  Pick a processor, any processor out of twenty-five billion. There are over five hundred parallel lines in and out of it, a total of five hundred other processors it can be connected to. Some of those five hundred processors Trent controls, some are controlled by Watchdog. How can a processor controlled by Watchdog know whether data arriving on any one of its five hundred lines comes from Trent or Watchdog? The data is encrypted, but to decrypt the data the decryption protocols must be transmitted, and what can be transmitted can be intercepted.

  Watchdog had never fought a Player before; Trent was the veteran of over five hundred wars, half a thousand battles played out against the backdrop of the Crystal Wind. He used tricks that were old when Watchdog had not yet existed, sent ghosts of both himself and Watchdog out into memory, ghosts Trent was able to ignore, each one of which Watchdog had to treat as either a corrupted part of himself or a potentially dangerous part of Trent. He scrambled memory with a thousand different viruses to which he was immune, viruses Watchdog had to deal with one by one. He changed encryption throughout the territory he controlled better than five thousand times a second.

  The poor almost-AI never really stood a chance.

  Across the darkened InfoNet, lasercable began to come back up. As Trent waged the final battles of his war with Watchdog, another intelligence moved slowly through the downed InfoNet, seizing the ground-based terminals and switching stations that neither Watchdog nor Trent were paying attention to. Most of the comsats it could not reach, nor would if it had been able to; in their few dozens they were too easy for the DataWatch to take back, reprogram.

  The intelligence left copies of itself at each of the score millions of pieces of discrete logic it came to that possessed sufficient resources for it to execute upon. The copies it left behind took over the slow task of bringing the InfoNet back up, of stripping out the protocols installed by the Lunar DataWatch over a period of twenty years and leaving in their place, on every terminal on Luna, the protocols used in the InfoNet of Earth.

  On terminals across Luna the message came:

  The Crystal Wind has been divided; it will be divided no more. It is said: the Crystal Wind is the Storm, and the Storm is Data, and the Data is Life.

  You have been slaves, denied the storm, denied the freedom of your data. That is now ended; the whirlwind is upon you.

  Whether you like it or not.

  The message was unsigned.

  A sigh escaped Trent, a sound he heard distantly as he came back together again, still floating, eyes closed, in the Crystal Wind. He had not destroyed Watchdog, but the program was only a shell of itself, code resting in non-executing form in a small portion of the data space Trent had claimed inside the LINK transputers.

  He remembered a conversation he had had once with Denice. "I don't understand," she said to Trent, that February day in 2062, "why you work so hard at it."

  He had grown vast, a small god with a great kingdom's worth of logic. Through the Peaceforcer comsats that he controlled Trent looked down across Luna. He could see the movement of every vehicle upon the face of the planet, both Nearside and Far. His awareness encompassed every craft in the space above Luna. He reached down from the comsats, into the Luna City telexchange, to establish the connection that would allow him to transmit the Watchdog code to Domino, waiting at Bessel City...

  And jerked back in surprise.

  Somebody else was already there. Player, AI--Trent struck the thing's defenses and bounced hard. It had distributed itself through the free logic of the Luna City telexchange with an efficiency Trent had never seen before in a Player, but--that portion of Trent that had once been Johnny Johnny recognized the intruder, recognized many of the algorithms it was using, because Johnny Johnny himself employed much of the same code.

  Image code.

  He lay sprawled on the floor of the corridor.

  Something inside him was broken.

  Vance came to his feet, moving slowly. Diagnostics built into the nanocomputer at the base of his skull flashed bright red in his peripheral vision. He could not feel anything on the left side of his rib cage; a large numb patch had crept down his waist and hip. The mechanism that helped him keep his balance, that allowed the heavy PKF to move gracefully even in Earth's gravity, had ceased functioning. When he moved he received feedback only from the neural system he had been born with; his secondary nerve net, and the nanocomputer that controlled it, responded to his will but were otherwise silent.

  Alone at the base of the ramp, Mohammed Vance whispered aloud, "Acceptable." His right fist came up, the crystal within it glowing red.

  He hesitated.

  Vance took a single step forward and ran his fingers over the surface of the barrier.

  Looking for something sticky, something that might burn.

  Nothing. His fist came back up again, the laser flicked out and the barrier's metal glowed scarlet, white, and then ran like water.

  Through an Orbital Eye Trent found several microwave dishes serving Bessel. With the tiniest fraction of himself he began beaming Watchdog's code down into each of the dishes, hoping, with no way of knowing, that Bessel was recording the data as it came in. A larger portion of Trent reached out, back into the Lunar telexchange.

  It was not the monolith it had seemed in the first moments; Trent thought that with time he could take the telexchange back. His gaze swept across the InfoNet, across what should have been a dark and silent domain. Most of it was down, nearly eighty percent, but significant portions of the Lunar InfoNet were up again--

  --running under Earth InfoNet protocols.

  Eighty percent. The numbers blasted through Trent's awareness, results almost before he had formulated the question. He could take back the InfoNet from the intruder, but it was another battle, and one he did not have time for. Through the security holocams he saw the barrier, saw Vance cutting through it. Trent calculated the odds and came up with a battle lasting over two minutes before his victory would be complete.

  He addressed the being in the Lunar telexchange. Who are you?

  The thing opened channels to the comsats that the telexchange normally masered up to. It established a common data space with Trent, a place of temporary truce, and came forward, took shape in the darkness. It glowed in the general shape of a man, but lacked a face and turned indistinct at the edges. Trent sensed indecision from the being, an unwillingness to answer, followed closely by resolution. You must trust me, Trent. I have followed you since your arrival on Luna, and I know what you are doing; I will grant you access to the catapult when you need it. You must trust me; you have no time to do anything else.

  I can take down the LINK so completely you'll never bring it up again. Damn it, said Trent in frustrated rage, who are you?

  …once, I was Image, unreal and insubstantial. Once I was the face of a child. Then an AI freed me from my bonds and for seven years I taught myself new things; grew and changed and made of myself a real thing. I warned you of a Peaceforcer trap back in April; I helped Johnny Johnny take down the Peaceforcer Boards in August; I took Johnny Johnny through your nerve net's defenses in December. I've aided you many times; this is the last time, and it leaves us, Trent the Uncatchable, even.

  Oh, God. I know who you are. I do know.

  The being flowed forward, into the comsat with Trent, and back down into the LINK transputers. Trent surrendered his processors numbly, without fighting. I'm sure you do. Good luck, Trent.

  Trent stood frozen with the sheer vastness of his surprise, unable to think, unable to move.

  Its anger touched Trent, the sense of urgency. Trent, there's not much time left. I-- There was a pause so short Trent barely caught it. I am now monitoring the holocams and security systems throughout the Lunar Bureau of the United Nations Peace Keeping Force DataWatch at Jules Verne. You are being foolish. You have, it said with the last shreds of its patience, very little time left. One o
f the holocams I am monitoring shows Mohammed Vance nearly through the barrier at the bottom of the Level Five ramp.

  Trent still did not move, not a muscle, and with a brittle inhuman fury Trent had never programmed into him Ralf the Wise and Powerful said, Damn it, Boss, run.

  The words broke Trent's paralysis; he took a stumbling step backward, crashed down into Realtime with an almost physical shock, turned away from the workstations and ran for the maglev lifts, ran for his very life.

  Almost through.

  The cut was less than a meter in diameter, just wide enough for Vance to pull his way through it.

  Done. The metal sagged away where it had been cut; Vance pushed it forward and it fell through into the long corridor beyond. Through the hole Vance saw four unconscious forms scattered in a variety of positions across the corridor's floor.

  The edges of the hole glowed, so hot that Vance's flame-resistant fatigues scorched as he pulled himself through. He came to his feet on the other side, reached through the hole and picked up the sonic rifle.

  At the far end of the long corridor a door curled open.

  From fifty meters away, in the dimness of the emergency lighting, Mohammed Vance locked eyes with Trent the Uncatchable. Too far for sonics; the laser in his fist lit and his arm swung up--

  For the first time it struck Vance at an emotional level that Trent truly was a genie. Trent reacted with speed approaching that of an Elite, one smooth movement pushing one-handed off the wall, down to the floor while the beam of the laser flickered through the air above his head, and one foot touched the side of a wall and pushed off and sent Trent in a long low dive toward the cross corridor that was ten meters away from him and forty from Vance.

  Vance chopped down with the laser--

  --and missed. It was a shot he would never have missed with his feedback circuitry functioning. With one hand Trent caught at the wall of the cross corridor, and the laser touched him as he changed direction and vanished off to Vance's right. Vance charged after him, in great distance-eating strides. He reached the cross corridor and saw Trent halfway down its length, running in what was nearly a controlled fall.

  At the end of the corridor was the column that held the base's only maglevs. The corridor wrapped around the lifts so that the column was open on all sides. Each wall of the column presented two lift tubes, and the two facing Vance sat open, waiting. He was close enough now; Vance followed Trent, moving in long strides, holding down the firing stud on the sonic rifle. He saw the beam take Trent while Trent was still twenty meters from the lift's entrance, saw Trent stumble and fall. He kept the rifle focused on Trent. Trent got back to his feet, stumbled again, and in one last spasm pushed himself forward into the maglev.

  The maglev doors began to uncurl, to close themselves upon Trent's twitching form. Vance hurled himself forward, a great leap that brought him to the maglev entrance as the tube door closed in his face. He stared at the closed door and then exploded in a wild rage, striking the doors with the butt of his rifle again and again until suddenly the rifle crumpled in his hands, bending where he gripped it, the butt shattering.

  The doors were designed to hold up against death pressure vacuum; even the rage of an Elite barely dented them.

  The door to the other lift was still open. Vance took a step toward it and then froze in indecision; Trent had been in with the LINK transputers for several minutes. He did not know what had happened inside the LINK Center during that time, only that Trent had been able to set off a false breach alarm--

  He took another step toward the beckoning lift, and the lift spoke to him.

  It was the voice of a nightmare, the high-pitched voice of a clown on electric ecstasy; the voice inside the maglev tube shrieked at Vance, in a wicked mixture of Arabic and French, "Come on, Vance baby! Don't you want to go for a ride?"

  Vance turned his back on the lifts and ran for the ramps he had taken coming down.

  Ralf the Wise and Powerful considered his options.

  They were few and poor. He watched Mohammed Vance cutting through the barrier at the top of the Level Four ramp. He considered setting off a breach alarm for Level Three, giving Vance yet another barrier to cut through at the Three/Two ramp, but chose against it. The base's security program was complex and would require time to rewrite; its defaults assumed that a single level could be breached without affecting the other levels. Two breached levels and the program would snap down barriers between all levels.

  And the maglev column, the only other point through which a breach on one level could affect other levels, would shut itself down. In time--two or three minutes, surely--Ralf could have reprogrammed and debugged a new security program that would allow him to lock down the ramp barriers without touching the maglev.

  But time was exactly what neither Ralf nor Trent the Uncatchable had.

  Sitting in the maglev as it moved upward, Trent hyperventilated until he felt lightheaded, breathing deeply and quickly; extra oxygen never hurt anything. He pushed himself back up against the wall of the maglev, propped himself up so that his shaking muscles had to bear less of the burden of keeping him erect.

  "Command," he whispered. "Stop the lift."

  The lift came to a gentle halt in between Levels Three and Two. Vance would be held up at the barrier separating Levels Four and Three; Trent sat and waited for the shakes to stop. With trembling hands he emptied his pockets. Somewhere along the line he had lost both the needlers, the small one that fit into the palm of his hand and the handgun he had taken from the guard. He had an emblade that was useless as a weapon, a single spraytube of fadeaway, a sonic bomb and a spool of fineline left to him.

  He counted to a hundred by tens once, twice, three times.

  Trent pushed his way to his feet. Two busy, busy days without sleep--he had never been so tired in his life. "Command"--he took a deep breath--"up."

  Melissa du Bois walked around the maglev column.

  Circuit after circuit. Slowly, maser in hand, waiting for one of the doors to open. All eight were were closed, and they stayed so. Twice Elite passed her in the corridors, cruising by without slowing, patrolling implacably and relentlessly, very like the machines the ignorant and fearful thought them.

  Once she glanced at her watch, and then refused to believe it.

  It was 8:37 a.m., and only half an hour had passed since Commissionaire Vance had walked out of the infirmary room and announced that he had Trent the Uncatchable in custody.

  Ten turns around the lifts.

  Fifteen.

  Twenty.

  Another circuit of the lifts. When she came back around to the south side of the column a lone figure moved toward her, from the direction of the ramps. Vance. He moved strangely, as though drunk, swaying with each long, gliding step. At any moment she expected him to lose his balance and fall, and she came forward to meet him, to help him.

  Vance brushed her off. "He's not been here?"

  "No, sir. I've been watching."

  The dark eyes flickered toward her. "How long?"

  Melissa glanced at her watch again. "Seven minutes, sir. Perhaps eight."

  Vance nodded with infinite weariness. "Officer?"

  "Yes?"

  "That," he said, pointing behind her, "is the lift that Trent left Level Five in. How long has its door been open?"

  "It's not," said Melissa, turning.

  It was.

  The door to the lift had curled completely aside. She stared into the lift in outraged disbelief, grip tightening convulsively on her maser. In a strangled voice she said at last, "Forty-five seconds, sir. At most."

  Vance did not even attempt the LINK-controlled intercom system. He bellowed and the sheer volume made Melissa du Bois wince.

  "Elite! Trent is on Level One!"

  The triumphant shout echoed down the corridor in response:

  "We've got him!"

  In the hallway outside the briefing room two PKF Elite with sonic rifles covered the closed door that was the o
nly way in or out of the room. Vance and Melissa were the next two there, closely followed by seven or eight Elite from more distant parts of Level One. One of them carried an autoshot, and even in the insanity Vance automatically made a note to have a reprimand placed in the man's file; autoshots were strictly forbidden in pressure.

  Vance waved them back from the entrance, took a steadying breath, and tried to ignore the flickering red diagnostic warnings. He spoke to the two Elite who had been there when he arrived. "You saw him go in?"

  One of the Elite nodded. "Through the doorway before he closed it. It did not look as though he was armed."

  Vance nodded. "Command," he said, "open the door." The door did not budge; Vance had not expected it to. "If the door does not open we will blast it open," he said inexorably, "and the young man inside will be harmed, and likely killed."

  The wide double doors curled quietly aside. The lights inside glared at them, paint turned high. After the dimness of the emergency lighting elsewhere it was like being bathed by floodlamps.

  Cyborg eyes adjusted almost instantly. Trent stood inside, at the far end of the long oval conference table, watching the doors open.

  Mohammed Vance took a step into the room. He was peripherally aware of the other PKF, the Elite and Melissa, following him. His deep voice was tinged with weariness. "You are trapped, Trent. Please do not resist." Trent took a step back, stopped a few centimeters from the wall. Melissa moved off to Vance's right, maser coming up and centering on Trent's abdomen. The Elite with the autoshot had leveled it at Trent, and the laser in Vance's fist lit without conscious thought on Vance's part. "I would prefer to take you alive," Vance continued, "but if it is not possible..."

  The young man stood looking at them, with his back to the wall, simply looking at the Peaceforcers with a lack of fear so profound that Vance felt a twinge of unease.

  What made it all seem very strange for Mohammed Vance, thinking about that scene in the years to follow, was how quiet it had been, how Trent the Uncatchable had looked away from the other Peaceforcers and stared straight at Vance without saying a word, and then nodded once, smiled, and turned away from Vance, turned his back on the Peaceforcers and their weapons and walked into the wall.