by Tom Clancy
Except last night. Now this is very interesting…and Wayland’s smile.
Where’s Megan?!
He didn’t have her voice com-code. They’d never needed it; all their contacts had been through the Net.
“Computer! Get Megan on chat.”
“She’s not available, Boss.”
“Log in to Sarxos. Look for her there.”
He waited through intolerable seconds while the machine logged in, while the logo and the copyright notices displayed. After a moment, his machine said, “Not there, Boss.”
He couldn’t find out when she’d last been there either, because he didn’t have the token. She had it.
With the weight of the information in front of him, the data that she now had — with the memory of their meeting last night with Wayland, the information that he now knew they had — and the fact that Leif couldn’t find her — it all came together, and suddenly Leif knew what had happened: what, if he was lucky, was just now happening.
Then he started to swear, calling first Megan, and then Wayland, things in Russian that would doubtless have sent his mother straight up the wall if she’d heard them. He was seized with the complete helplessness of being virtual when you desperately needed to be concrete: his total inability to be in Washington, right then, when he was actually stuck in New York.
Leif shouted at the computer, “James Winters! Net Force emergency! Immediate connect!”
A slightly bleary voice said, “Winters—”
Leif gasped for breath, and then shouted:
“HELP!”
She sent the e-mail, and she waited…and nothing happened. Some sensible person is still asleep at seven in the morning, she thought. Why not?
Finally, Megan gave up on waiting. It was getting late. She went upstairs and had her shower and got dressed, keeping as quiet as she could because her dad had plainly been up late, working in some other room besides the office, and had turned in. Her mom, as so often happened, was already gone. The brothers hadn’t stayed over last night — one had had med-surg nursing rounds early the next morning, and the other had been complaining about an impending final exam in a course called Advanced Stressed Concrete 302. They had both made themselves scarce after dinner.
She came down again, thought about another cup of tea, and decided against it. There was nothing happening at school today that would really be important…but that was no reason not to go. All her schoolwork was ready. The portable was charged up, all the necessary data solids carrying her reference texts were in her bag. And her ride’s horn sounded outside.
Megan grabbed the bag and the portable, dropped her keycard in her pocket, slapped the front door to lock-behind, and breezed out, heard the door clock closed and the lock set, tested it to make sure it was shut tight, turned—
— and simply found him there, standing in front of her, reaching out with something black in his hand.
Reflex saved Megan, nothing else. She flung herself off to one side as he grabbed for her, and threw her bag at him, knocking him back a little. Megan felt the subdued hiss and sizzle of a body-field deranger close by. One solid touch and her bioelectricity would go briefly crazy, enough to drop her where she stood, “shorted out.” The thing’s effective range was about four feet. Megan hit the ground rolling, rolled to her feet, got up, and danced away from the man across the front lawn, intent on keeping him far away from her. He dashed at her again, and again Megan backed off, though it really annoyed her to do so.
Half of her was scared out of her wits. The rest of her was absorbed in the business of the dance. Don’t let him close, stay out of range—and behind, in her brain, a leisurely running commentary seemed to be going on. Heard the horn, where’s your ride, that’s not the right car, same make, though, maybe even same year, how did he—
How long had he suspected that she and Leif were on his trail? How closely had he been watching them? Leif, she thought, why didn’t I—!
The man jumped at her again, not speaking. She almost wished that he would shout, would say something. About five-foot-nine, said another part of the mind, clinical: medium build, gray sweatshirt, jeans, black loafers, white socks — white socks?? Jeez — big nose. Mustache. Eyes — eyes—She couldn’t tell the color from here, and she wasn’t going to get close enough to find out. Big hands, very big hands: a face surprisingly slack and still for all the action they were going through, dancing around on the lawn at seven-forty-five in the morning, and why isn’t anyone noticing this, why aren’t the neighbors—?! Megan opened her mouth to scream as loudly as she could—
And then she realized that he had thrown away the deranger, and had something else in his hand, with which he was taking aim—
She never felt the blast from the sonic hit her. The next thing she knew, she was lying on the ground and couldn’t move a muscle in her body. All this was making something of a mockery of all the training she’d had, all the good advice from her self-defense instructor. Locked out of the house, nowhere to run, no time to get away, no time—
The man leaned over her, his face not quite expressionless — just somewhat annoyed at the trouble she had caused him — as he started to pick her up, haul her up to a vaguely seated position, preparatory, she knew, to him picking her up and putting her in that car to take her away. Never let an attacker take you anywhere, one of her self-defense instructors had said, in a tone more urgent than she could remember him ever having used before. The only reason someone wants to take you somewhere is to make you a hostage, or to rape or kill you in private. Make them do it in public, if they’re going to do it. It may be awful, but it’s better than being dead—
Do something, she said to her throat, her lungs. Scream! Big breath, now scream! But the big breath just would not come in, and the scream came out “huh, huh.” The scream was all in her head, only in her head, and Megan was briefly lost in a paroxysm of rage and fear, but only briefly because — this was strange — the scream was in the air over her head—
The man looked up, startled, at the dark shape dropping toward him like a stone from the sky. He glanced down at Megan again, his eyes just briefly narrowed with intent, and moved his hand—
— and then fell sideways, hard, next to her and partly on top of her. She heard the awful thick thud as his head hit the ground. It had been dry, the lawn was fairly brown and the ground was hard—
Megan fell back, staring straight up. She couldn’t turn her head, could only hear the scream of the engine, the ringing in her ears. And then could have broken right down and wept, though not with fear, of course not, with relief, at the sound of all the footsteps all around her, at the sight, just out of the corner of one eye, of the beautiful black Net Force craft with its gold stripe down the side, and the police craft landing behind it—
— and the sight of James Winters suddenly looming above her, and saying to the medical people, “She’s okay, thank God, she just took some sonic, come on, give her a hand. And as for him—”
He looked down past the narrowing cone of vision that was all Megan had left at the moment. “Here’s our bouncer,” said Winters, in a voice fierce with anger and satisfaction. “Lock him up.”
It took several days for the excitement to die down. Megan spent a couple of them in the hospital — sonics are not something you just walk away from — and a third day talking to the police and to the Net Force people who came by to see her, including Winters, and to Leif, who came down from New York.
Everyone was treating her very gently, as if she might break. For the first day, she didn’t mind it so much. The second day, it was only occasionally annoying. But by the third day, it began to get on her nerves, and she said so, forcefully, to several different people. Even Winters, finally.
“She’ll be all right,” she heard him say to the nurse outside her door as he headed off. He turned, pointed at her. “But the day you get out of here — you and him—” He pointed at Leif. “My office, ten o’clock.”
“I’ll be
in New York,” Leif said hopefully.
“What, is your computer broken? Ten o’clock.”
And he was gone.
Megan sat back in the comfortable chair in the corner — they’d let her out of bed at this point — and said to Leif, “Were the Net Force people in with you this morning?”
“Yeah.”
“Did they give you any more technical detail on how they thought Mr. Simpson, or Wallace, or Duvalier”—he had had several aliases, it turned out—“was managing to fool the system into thinking he wasn’t there when he was, and vice versa?”
Leif shook his head. “I have to confess, I’m not real strong on the technical side of it. He apparently had a second implant which he had somehow taught to fake being connected to his body. Don’t ask me how you do that…they’re apparently real interested. And he had it running an ‘expert program,’ an aware-system routine.”
Leif leaned on the windowsill. “This is real old stuff. You ever hear of a program called RACTER? One of my uncles knew the guy who wrote it.”
Megan shook her head.
“The name was short for ‘Raconteur,’” Leif said. “It was a descendant of those old Turing-test programs, the ones meant to fake being human, enough to pass in conversation, anyway. RACTER was meant to convince you that you were shooting the breeze with somebody, just casually. Simpson, or whatever his name is, had done a tailored ‘aware’ program for Sarxos, one that could hold moderately good conversations with people in his persona…and get away with it. It’s no surprise it worked, I guess. You just automatically assume, when you’re in Sarxos, that whoever you’re talking to is either a real player, or generated by the game itself…and sometimes game-generated people do act up a little bit. Even Sarxos has bugs, after all. And it looks like our guy had four of these programs running, sometimes all at once. The fifth ‘self’ would be him, turning up here and there, servicing the various personas to make sure that everyone thought they were who they were supposed to be…while he went about the rest of his business: being Lateran, and getting rid of the people who he thought were getting in Lateran’s way, one by one.”
“Do they have any idea why he bounced Elblai so hard?”
Leif shook his head. “The police psychiatrists have been talking to him, but I think the general feeling is that Elblai just put too much pressure on him. He cracked. He might have been going that way for a while. Shel had been putting a lot of pressure on him…but not as much as Elblai did. It just all got too much for him. But he’d been very careful, very canny. Covering his tracks for a long time…lots more than four months, apparently.” Leif made a bemused face. “I don’t think anything the shrinks can come up with is going to help him when he comes to trial, though. Hit and run, attempted manslaughter, various burglaries and destruction of property, and in your case, attempted murder…I doubt we’ll see him in Sarxos again anytime soon. Or anywhere else.”
Leif looked at her, folding his arms and turning away from the window. “I’m just glad you’re okay,” he said.
“Yeah, well, if it weren’t for you, I might not be okay.”
“I was terrified that I was going to be too late.”
“I thought that I might be about to be late, too,” Megan said, “in the less-usual sense of the word. Look…let’s just forget it. There are more important things to worry about now.”
“Oh?”
“The day after tomorrow,” Megan said, “at ten o’clock…”
When the hour came, Megan and Leif were sitting, virtually, in James Winters’s office; but not being there physically did not make their presence any more comfortable for them.
His desk was neat. There were a couple of tidy piles of printouts laid in front of him, a couple of data-storage solids off to one side. Winters looked up from the paperwork, and his face was very cool.
“I need to talk to you two a little bit,” he said, “about responsibility.”
They both sat mute. It didn’t seem like a good time to argue the point.
“I had conversations with both of you regarding this problem,” he said. “Do you remember those conversations?”
“Uh, yes,” Megan said.
“Yes,” said Leif.
Winters looked particularly closely at Megan. “Are you sure you remember it now? Because your actions since then are such as to suggest that you had a profound incident of amnesia. I’d be really tempted to suggest that your parents take you down to the NP center at Washington U for the purpose of what my father, in the ancient days, would have called ‘having your head felt.’ If you can demonstrate some physical pathology to support the way you acted, it would make my life a whole lot easier.”
Megan’s face positively simmered with embarrassment.
“No, huh? I was afraid not. Why did you not do as I requested?” Winters said. “Granted, it wasn’t an order, you’re not under my orders…but normally, requests of this kind from a senior Net Force official to a Net Force Explorer can be considered as having some force.”
Megan looked at the floor and swallowed. “I thought the situation wasn’t as dangerous as you thought it was,” she said finally, looking up again. “I thought Leif and I could handle it.”
“The thought didn’t possibly cross your mind that you would like to really look good?”
“Uh. Yes. Yes, it did.”
“And what about you?” Winters said to Leif.
“Yes,” Leif said. “I thought we could handle it. And I thought it would be really neat to handle this ourselves, before the senior members got involved.”
“So.” Winters looked at him. “You weren’t thinking of sparing us danger, or trouble, not specifically.”
“No.”
“Time, maybe,” Megan said.
“And glory?” Winters said softly.
“A little,” said Leif.
Winters sat back. “You two are nothing if not an easy debrief. Well, I’ve had time to look over all the logs. There’s no question of your tenacity. And I have to say I smell dedication here. Got your teeth into it, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t want to let go,” Megan said.
“We started a job,” Leif said softly. “When you spoke to us…we weren’t finished. We wanted to finish.”
Winters sat still, looking down at the paper on his desk. He reached out to the corner of the stack, riffling the many pages. “There has been a certain amount of pressure from above,” he said, “to simply chuck you two out of the Explorers as a liability. The example of recklessness and disrespect for authority which your actions of the last few days suggest is not thought to be a good one for the rest of the Explorers. Because news will get out about what happened — it always gets out — and there’s concern that other Explorers, in their youth and inexperience, will start thinking that this kind of behavior might actually be appropriate. We’ve managed to do a certain amount of damage limitation, but…” He rolled his eyes. “That little scene on your front lawn did not help, Megan. Details of what happened, and what you were involved with, are invariably going to leak out. I’m hoping for your sakes that there are no legal repercussions. When you’re doing what we’ve suggested you do, we have some slight power to protect you. When you’re not…”
Winters glanced at the ceiling as if asking silently for help, and shook his head. “Meanwhile, I have to figure out what to do with you…because there’s pressure being brought to bear on us from more than one source. There are people in this organization who tell me that the analysis which brought you to your conclusions was a nice piece of lateral thinking, and they would look forward to working with you at some later date. And if I throw you out now, that’s going to make that option fairly difficult. Yet at the same time, there are other people shaking their heads and saying, ‘Throw them the hell out!’ So what do I do? Any suggestions?”
He looked at them. Leif opened his mouth, shut it again. “Go ahead,” said Winters. “I don’t see how you can make it any worse for yourself than it already i
s.”
“Keep us on,” Leif said, “but on probation.”
“What does probation look like to you?”
“I’m not sure.”
“You?” Winters looked at Megan. “Any ideas?”
“Only a question.” She swallowed. “What happens to full Net Force professionals when they do this kind of thing?”
“Mostly they get cashiered,” Winters said grimly. “Only extraordinary extenuating circumstances sometimes manage to save them. Can you suggest any in your case?”
“That we’ve uncovered possibly one of the most dangerous trends in thirty years’ worth of virtual experience?” Leif said, just a touch innocently.
Winters gave him a sidelong look, and allowed out just one thin grudging smile. Leif saw it and knew, instantly, that they had him, that it was going to be all right. Not comfortable…but all right.
“That is, fortunately for you, true,” Winters said. “Up until now, the whole virtuality system has been predicated on the certainty that transactions carried out remotely via implant were genuine. Now, suddenly, all that is thrown into confusion. There’s hardly a part of the Net that this doesn’t touch. All authentication protocols everywhere are going to have to be looked at, made proof against the kind of subversion that your Sarxonian friend managed to devise. With whose help, we’re not sure…but it’s being looked into. Sarxos has been a testing ground for some technologies that various countries are interested in. When someone starts interfering with that particular game…well, alarm bells ring. They’ll ring for a long time.
“But leaving that aside for the moment, this incident has been a wake-up call for a lot of people who felt their systems were secure. Sarxos has a very highly-thought-of proprietary security system. The discovery that it was being subverted in this manner, filled with spurious data, and no one suspected that this had been going on for months, perhaps many months…it came as quite a shock. If Sarxos could be subverted this way, so could many other carefully built proprietary systems. Banking systems. Securities clearing systems. ‘Smart’ systems that handle various aspects of national security for nations around the world. Weapons control systems…” Winters trailed off.
