Asimov's SF, October-November 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  The downside, of course, was one of concentration. Splitting focus—half on the virtch, half on physical place—could lead to embarrassing gaffes.

  Without further hesitation, he rode the wireless directly into Salee Taggart's memory space. He immediately built a virtual table to protect against the watchdog scan, and was relieved to see Taggart give no indication that she was aware of an intruder.

  Stango finished the introductory portion of his pitch.

  “That's good and fine,” Taggart said, leaning forward crisply. “But we all know the real issue here is schedule."

  Room temperature dropped into January.

  Stango cleared his throat.

  Gordie's virtch slipped through layers of locked code, swapping keys and overriding password routines. Finally, her system was open. Her files were bucketed in clean, easy-to-follow logic that rarely required more than a handful of objects to be stored in any single place. A series of relational linking routines gave her access to this information from a variety of thought mechanisms. Financial records and business reports sat in a breakout structure. Project briefs sat in a different framework. Her personnel commentary was accessible through any portion of the framework. If her data retrieval system was any indicator, Salee Taggart had risen through DigiCorp's structure by being intelligent, ordered, and under control.

  Gordie's virtch marked data buckets for extraction and toggled an execution bit from 0 to a 1 so that his extraction routine would run. Then he slipped out of Taggart's system. The results would be waiting for him later.

  “We're working our way back to schedule,” Stango said, his eyes wide and his jawline firmly set. “Gordie's got the interface working in a good third of the modules, and has been knocking them off at a clip of twenty or so a day."

  “The target you agreed to is a fully operational system two months from now,” Harold McIntyre said with blustery impatience.

  Taggart ignored McIntyre, but added nothing. She merely folded her hands under her chin and waited for Stango to reply.

  This is where Yulani had once earned her money. She could handle the heat. She would have looked the tiger in the eye and somehow managed to emerge with even more than her fair share of meat.

  “That's right,” Stango said, clearing his throat. “Two months was the agreed upon date."

  Taggart's words were a guillotine blade poised overhead. “Can you finish by the deadline?"

  Gordie piped up, his concentration fully on the moment. “I see no reason why not."

  “You've got thousands of routines to sort out,” Taggart said.

  Gordie stood, calling a flow diagram to the screen. He ran his hand over the screen around data repositories. Will Darbringer edged slightly forward with a razor's gaze.

  “I've taken an approach that groups neural functions into collections of various characteristics."

  “You changed the interface,” Will Darbringer said quietly from behind the group, his voice thin and reedy like a mouse's squeak.

  “Yeah."

  “The same code runs multiple sensors."

  “Yes. That way there's less to go wrong. The interface should be more robust and reliable."

  “I see,” Taggart said.

  “I can't imagine we'll see the same functionality,” Darbringer added.

  “Why do you say that?” Gordie challenged.

  “It'll mess up the visual component. Driving an arm's movement with a routine designed for a leg won't result in a smooth motion."

  Every eye in the room was on Gordie. Sweat welled up through his armpits and a film formed on his forehead. Stango stood silently to the side of the room.

  “I changed that paradigm, too. If you look at the body's movement from a pure interface standpoint—at a higher order of abstraction—nerves don't do anything but command muscles on and off, and the muscles either contract or don't. In the end, the goal is to either abduct or adduct a body part."

  “You're characterizing types of component motion rather than individual systems’ contribution to it,” Darbringer said.

  “Yep. Pretty much the same way game designers worked until bandwidth caught up with them."

  Darbringer sat back, nodding. “That's a different interface,” he whispered to himself, but the sentence rasped across the room with the sound of dry snakeskin rubbing. “Totally different."

  “So, now you can see why I think we'll make the target dates,” Stango said as he emerged from the corner of the room again.

  Heads nodded.

  Gordie sat down and tried not to hyperventilate.

  The meeting went on, DigiCorp management expressing reserved optimism by its end.

  But Gordie felt a presence here that he hadn't felt before. He noted that the kid's gaze continued to slide his way. There was something about Darbringer he didn't like. Maybe it was that he reminded Gordie of himself ten years before, brash and completely lacking in fear.

  Darbringer cast him a glance that Gordie finally decided to interpret as deferential admiration.

  Take that, kid. This old gak still has a trick or two left.

  But still the kid's expression bothered him, and try as he might, he couldn't shake the image of those glittering dark eyes slicing through him like a cat's claw, cutting cleanly but not bleeding until sometime deeper in the future.

  * * * *

  “You're not leaving now, are you?"

  Stango's face seemed to move a thousand ways at once. He was high on success, riding a cloud that formed under his feet when Salee Taggart and the rest of the DigiCorp team had left the building. Gordie couldn't blame him. It isn't every day that a man's company is so obviously at stake, and certainly not every day that he lives to see it through.

  “I'm beat, Stango. I'll get back into it in the morning."

  “We've got a deadline, man. Time to go into overclock."

  Gordie shrugged. The data from his scan of Taggart's system should be packaged up and waiting for him when he got home. He had other things to do.

  “Mañana, Stango. Mañana,” he said, waving wearily and turning to head for home.

  * * * *

  The content of Salee Taggart's data was as ordered as the framework it had been housed in. She used language with a spareness that left little room for interpretation. Still, he couldn't believe what was there.

  The wall clock read 1:05 in the morning.

  There was no moon outside the windows of his apartment. He was drained and frayed, worn out from sleeping only four of the past forty-eight hours. The air in his room was still and listless as if it, too, was ready for him to turn in. But he had to finish this now. Had to make sure he was right.

  The facts were laid out in concise Salee Taggart precision.

  DigiCorp had wanted Stango, and now Gordie, to miss their date. They had plans in place, money set aside in legal department budget lines. The contract had performance targets defined. Once Stango missed his date they planned to close in and take the company from him.

  But that didn't make sense. Why throw millions of dollars to develop tactile push, then work to see it fail? Why buy a company whose product didn't work well enough to market?

  A warning buzzer hummed in his ear.

  A light flashed red in the corner of his sight.

  After Stango had such an easy time slipping through his watchdog, Gordie had customized it in a hundred different ways. Now it had found an intruder who hadn't anticipated correctly, and Gordie understood immediately what that meant. There was no coincidence in code circles—no such thing as random error. He knew who was at the heart of this without needing to trace the code, knew without having to recall the way Will Darbringer's eyes had studied him as he walked out the meeting room's doorway. A DigiCorp virtch had landed in his memory space and was at that very instant spawning a series of action agents to do who knew what.

  The warnings set off a chain reaction. Functions called functions, which in turn called more functions. Data paths closed inside Gordie's pro
cessor. Control loops passed parameters to code blocks that shut down interfaces.

  He lost his display feedback and the warning light faded away.

  In the milliseconds it took to power-off these secondary systems, every molecule in his body seemed to vibrate as a separate entity, and in that same time Gordie finally understood just how much was at stake. If his code wasn't airtight, if he had left a hole, he would end up dead and cold, laid out on a stainless-steel autopsy table just as Yulani had been. Every frayed piece of his code rubbed against his memory like ragged burlap, every loop and switch and return, places where extra clock cycles could have been sliced from the logic if he had been more diligent. There was no such thing as perfect code, only levels of elegance defined by a minimalistic lack of keystrokes and shortness of execution cycles.

  He thought of Will Darbringer and his three shining direct connects.

  A sound came from his doorstep, thin and metallic, the discordant scrape of metal inside a lock. Someone to take care of the remains? Someone to drive him out to some obscure place like they had Yulani?

  But Gordie wasn't dead yet.

  His body moved as if on autopilot. An umbrella was propped against the wall beside the closet. He grabbed it and held it in one hand like a club.

  “Who's there?"

  The noise stopped.

  Footsteps retreated hastily.

  Gordie threw open the door in time to see a dark silhouette disappear between neighboring houses.

  He took a step forward. It had rained earlier. The night air was soupy and smelled of damp earth. The streetlight bled yellow haze into the blackness. Footsteps echoed wetly. If Gordie didn't go now the intruder would get away. The empty room behind him beckoned with lighted comfort. Come here, it said. Come here and sit inside me and be safe. Come here and let the world do its ugliness by itself. Come here and just be.

  And he wanted to go back. More than anything he could think of at that moment, he wanted that. But the footsteps echoed, and he saw the image of the inspector's boot.

  He ran outside.

  Darkness closed around him. Air clung to his lungs like a leech. Gordie's bare feet slapped against the concrete driveway as he followed the footsteps. The sound of crickets faded. His breathing rasped. The umbrella handle was wooden, shellacked and hard and rounded, slick and warm in Gordie's hand.

  Fear came as he ran.

  Fear naked like falling, sharp like a wave crashing in the darkness. Fear like a horrific beast caged and starved for a hundred days let suddenly loose.

  Yet there was no sound but the breathing in his lungs and the pounding in his heart.

  The man was gone.

  The code in Gordie's bioprocessor still ran.

  An unidentified night bug screeched solitary defiance in the distance and Gordon Rath stood alone on someone else's dark driveway in the middle of a black August night, swinging an umbrella around him as though it were Don Quixote's sword.

  * * * *

  Like most bursts of clarity in Gordie's life, the answer came when he wasn't thinking about it. It was obvious why DigiCorp wanted them to fail. Simple. It was not billions at stake here. More like trillions—multiples of the gross national product of more than half the nations around the world.

  In the end, as always, it was all about the interface.

  Yulani had probably seen it first.

  She had most likely played hardball then, which was such a typical step for her that Gordie and Stango had once called upping the price in retaliation for a perceived business affront “the Morav Gambit."

  Now, of course, Yulani Morav was dead.

  And Gordie had no doubt as to who was responsible.

  * * * *

  For the second time he pushed through a late-night door with Stango behind it.

  “You gave them the goddamned interface, didn't you?"

  He strode past Stango into a living room the size of a small auditorium. A pair of velour walk-in couches sat in the room's opposing corners, and a ceiling-mounted projector cast holographic images of dark landscapes across the wall. Stock prices glowed from a corner monitor, and a series of sensors blinked, sending fanned shafts of blue light throughout the room.

  “Admit it. You gave them the fucking interface."

  “What are you talking about?” Stango said, rubbing the side of his head in a sleepy stupor. His hair was mussed and he stood there in an oversize yellow T-shirt and a pair of underwear that hung from his ass.

  “Who's there?” A woman's voice came from up a wide central staircase that led to an open doorway. Karish Morreau, the singer from the club, peered out of the darkness with her blonde hair straggling down her back. “Oh,” she said. “Hi, Gordie."

  “They came to my place tonight, Stango. They tried to get into my chip."

  “Shit,” Stango said in a slow, drawn-out breath as he shut the door behind him. “It's nearly four in the morning, Gordie. Can't this wait?"

  “What happened, Stango? I want to know what happened to Yulani."

  “She died,” Stango said.

  “That's not what I mean and you damn well know it. I should have been paying attention, but I was so keyed that I missed it. I should have known the minute that kid with the direct-connect crap hanging from his neck said I changed the interface, you know? He knew, Stango. He knew I changed the interface."

  “So?"

  “So!” Gordie could barely control his voice. “He couldn't have known that unless he saw the original. Yulani's chip was clean. She was taking a hard line with DigiCorp. They wanted the interface but they hadn't paid for it and she wouldn't give it to them. You did, and she ended up dead with a clean chip."

  Stango bit his lip.

  “What did they do?” Gordie growled, backing Stango up against the door, losing control, pressing a pointed finger into Stango's chest with every question mark and letting glorious pressure rise in his veins. “Did they threaten you? Did they promise to let you off the hook if you gave them the interface? Was it money? Was that it? Was it the fucking money, Stango?"

  “Stop it, Gordie! Stop it."

  Gordie paused, breathing raggedly. For the first time ever, Stango cowered before him. His eyes glittered. “What do you want me to say, Gordie? That I can't cut it without you? That I can't code? Do you want me to say I'm dog shit? What do you want?"

  “What made you give them the goddamned interface?"

  “We were behind schedule."

  “And they gave you time."

  Stango gave a self-conscious shrug.

  “No?"

  “They promised me they wouldn't code anything."

  “Oh, Jesus fucking Christ, Stango. And you believed them?” But truth rode Stango's eyes like it was painted on. Scared truth. Defiant truth. He had always sought the spotlight, had always clung to the buzz around his ideas as if it were an invisible umbilical. For a moment, Gordie was almost sorry for him.

  “It's my idea,” Stango said, his gaze bold once again. “It should be my code."

  “They killed Yulani with it. You know that, don't you? Without the interface they couldn't have touched her."

  “I'm sorry."

  “They're going to kill you, too."

  “No. They won't."

  “I've seen the records, asshole—memos and plans and everything else. DigiCorp can write their own code now. They won't stop until they own the system."

  “They already do."

  “What?” Now it was Gordie who was nonplussed.

  Stango swallowed. “They offered me a deal an hour ago. As of now, I work for DigiCorp."

  The news was a punch to his stomach. Gordie staggered backward, turning and walking into the dark living room to sit on the edge of one of the couches. He put his head in his hands and tried to think. Gordie's work had protected Stango. His new interface put a buffer between him and DigiCorp that they couldn't get through, so they had gone to Plan B and hired the enemy. It was slick, too slick, almost as if Stango had planned it from
the very beginning.

  “That means..."

  And it was all suddenly so clear.

  I got sources, the inspector had said back in the first hour of his interrogation, before things got ugly.

  “You gave me to the cops,” he muttered, lifting his gaze to Stango like liquid fire. “You needed help and knew I would come to you."

  “If someone else had to code it, I wanted it to be you."

  “You asshole."

  “It's just business, Gordie."

  Just business.

  How often had he heard that phrase from Yulani's lips?

  Gordie sat on the edge of one of the couches, feeling the bottom fall out of his world.

  Stango stood in the open foyer, shrugging his shoulders, a pitiful, wretched little sot in his T-shirt and underwear. Karish had come halfway down the stairs, then retreated back to the shadows. “You're a code gak, man. Don't deny it. It's what you are. So you got what you needed; I got what I wanted. How was I to know they would tag you so hard?"

  “Was Yulani business, too, Stango?"

  “Only on her end."

  “What's that supposed to mean?"

  “Think about it, sport. She wouldn't have hurt you if she hadn't planned to get something for it."

  Gordie nodded to himself, feeling like the world's most gullible asshole. Optical push was big money back then, and it had been behind schedule. Yulani couldn't have known Gordie would be there that night, but he would have happened upon them sometime. And she certainly understood that Gordie would be angry, and that he would respond by digging a hole into the code and pulling it in over himself.

  The scene on Stango's wall changed to a dark sky.

  She had been right.

  Optical push came about because Gordie closed the interface. He closed the interface by pushing himself deeper into the code for three nonstop days after Yulani humiliated him. And Yulani humiliated him because she knew his anger would be focused, that he'd deliver the product.

  Simple as that.

  Just business.

  “Who was she?” Gordie said.

  “What do you mean?"

  “What was her goddamned favorite color? Where did she like to eat? Did she put her shoes on the left of the closet or the right? What was her fucking birthday?"