Springboard nf-9

by Tom Clancy

  He opened the box and pulled out what looked like a pair of wraparound sunglasses. A small plastic packet with a cable fell out as he removed the glasses, but he ignored it. Cables were for people who couldn’t afford wi-fi.

  The glasses were much lighter than the flexscreen LCDs he currently used.

  He opened them and looked at the lenses, which were brightly mirrored.

  Interesting. They don’t look like thinscreens.

  The inner surfaces were more curved than even flexible-screen technology was supposed to allow. Jay felt his interest sharpening. At the corners of each lens were tiny little holes. The temples of the glasses seemed slightly thick, and there was an optical output on the right earpiece.

  A jack: These things need wires?

  He pulled out the installation sheet. Well, not necessarily. If he had an optical repeater, which would pick up tiny infrared pulses from the front of the glasses and run them into the VR input card on his machine, he wouldn’t need wires.

  Unfortunately, since he’d been using radio-based wireless for the last several months, it looked like he’d have to use the output jack on the glasses.

  Crap.

  He made a mental note to order a repeater if the new glasses worked, and then bent over to pick up the cable that had slipped out of the box when he opened it.

  Wires. I hate wires.

  He hadn’t had to use a cable to connect his VR gear since forever. Yet, at the same time that he was annoyed at having to regress to being tethered to his machine, he was intrigued. To require an optical cable, these things had to be drawing an awful lot of data to them.

  He opened the cable packet and slipped one end into the right earpiece jack, then swiveled the end of the test machine around to find its VR card.

  Do I even have optical in?

  He searched the back of the machine, and was relieved to find one where he’d hoped on the VR card. Net Force cards were state-of-the-art with all the latest ICs and inputs. He hadn’t remembered the input, but since he hadn’t had to use it yet, there was no reason he should have.

  He attached the cable to the card, snick. He spun up the odorama and pulled on some gloves. The LCD monitor tank he used when he wasn’t wearing VR gear lit up: New Hardware Detected. Updating.

  Since he’d put the driver disc in his computer already, the process was fairly automatic. A calibration screen came up with another message: Please put on your new Raptor 9000X glasses!

  He put on the glasses and saw his eyes reflected for a second, and then the holes in the corner of the glasses lit up and he gasped.

  He flew over a huge plain. He looked down and saw the shadow of a great bird, and then looked ahead. There was movement. His vision zoomed in as he watched, and he saw a tiny field mouse scampering for safety toward a tiny hole that had to be its burrow.

  The VR sim was on rails, so he couldn’t control where he was moving, but he could look around as he flew. The scene changed shockingly fast, clear colors, realistic mountains and scrub brush rising up to meet him as he landed and pounced on the mouse.

  Again he soared, and a tiny translucent window appeared telling him to acquire three more targets to locate extreme eye focal points.

  Fantastic.

  It was like calibrating an old PDA’s stylus. He completed that stage of the calibration, and went to a testing range where his eye movement allowed him to change VR views almost instantly.

  Eye movement tracking. That was brand-new. Such technology had been around for ages for helping paralyzed people, but coupled with the sharpness? It was very impressive.

  Jay tilted his head slightly and moved his eyes, and the device compensated. Apparently there was some kind of tilt sensor in the glasses as well that read head inclination and mixed the data with the eye sensors.

  Nice.

  But best of all was the extreme resolution. VR was fairly realistic — at least his scenarios were — but this was like when his folks had gotten their first High-Definition TV set. He remembered how amazed he’d been to suddenly see how sharp TV looked — the sweat on the announcer’s head, the seams in scenery — things had reached an entirely new level of reality.

  This is great.

  He called up the documentation and checked his suppositions. Sure enough — there was a new Texas Instruments gyro chip that read head movement, and the tiny holes in the lens corners tracked his eye movements, then bounced three low-power laser beams off the mirrors — made by Nikon to the highest standards, if you could believe the rap — into his eye, painting directly on his retina. Things looked real, because as far as his eye was concerned, they were real.

  Very clever work here.

  Time to play.

  He called up a favorite test scenario, a glade in Japan looking toward Mt. Fuji, cherry blossoms falling around him.

  It looked…

  It looked like crap!

  Jay walked over to the cherry tree and peered at it. Had the glasses malfunctioned?

  No. There was the texture he’d programmed — it had looked great on his flexscreen glasses because their resolution was so low.

  Holy cow.

  The resolution on these glasses was so sharp that he could see the edges of the pixels. It was like stepping into a comic book from the real world.

  Hmmm, I’ve got some work to do.

  It wouldn’t do to have anyone else seeing his VR with these glasses, that was for sure. He’d have to amp up the textures, improve the bump-mapping, and double or triple the data throughout for this scene. No way he was going to be caught looking amateurish.

  No wonder these things needed optical. It was like giving somebody who had 20/60 vision a pair of glasses that corrected for near-sightedness. They could see all right before the glasses, but afterward would be ever so much better.

  Which gave him an idea.

  He called up a firewall he’d been trying to break, looking to find the cracks where he could drive a code-breaking spike.

  On his older VR visual gear he hadn’t been able to see any difference in the smooth, black obelisklike wall. But with the Raptor’s resolution, he could suddenly see a pattern of cracks where data structures joined together and made up the firewall. Yeah, sure, it was part metaphor and part construction, but he’d take it.

  Just glancing at the wall with these new glasses, and he could see exactly where to crack that wall. He was sure of it.

  Now, that was cool.

  Net Force was going to be outfitted with these within a few days — hours — if Jay had his way. As soon as they hit the commercial market, there was gonna be a boatload of VR reconstruction as other makers suddenly saw their constructs in a bright new light, but until then, wearing these babies would make you at least a prince in the land of the blind, if not the king.

  Until these things became common, the bleeding edge of technology was gonna be something with which Jay Gridley could slice the bad guys.

  He couldn’t wait to show this to somebody.

  “Jay?”

  The voice brought him back to the moment. He looked up and saw his assistant standing there. He blinked at her. “Huh?”

  “I have Mr. Chang here to see you.”

  “Oh. Oh, yeah. Sure. Send him in.”

  A moment later, she was back, leading a short and definitely Chinese-looking man in a gray suit.

  “Mr. Gridley. My honor to meet you.”

  Jay waved that off. “Mr. Chang.” He stood. The two shook hands.

  “Cal Tech, right?”

  “Class of ’03,” Chang said.

  “Come on in. Take a look at this.” He waved at his computer. “You’re not gonna believe these visuals!”

  13

  Net Force HQ

  Quantico, Virginia

  After they introduced themselves and sat back down, and before Thorn could say anything else, Charles Seurat nodded at the corner behind and to the right of Thorn’s desk. “You fence?”

  Thorn had his gear bags in the corne
r of his office, and the only way Seurat could have known what was in them was to recognize the logo on the épée bag. Most non-fencers would not have a clue what the name meant. And because he obviously did recognize it, then that meant Seurat, too, was a fencer or a serious watcher.

  “A little,” Thorn said with a small smile. “Don’t look for me in the next Olympics.”

  “Nor me,” Seurat said. “Would that I had brought my blades. We could have worked out.”

  That was a pretty obvious hint, Thorn thought. It was not what he would have expected, even if he had known that Seurat was a fencer as well. Even avid fencers didn’t normally throw down the gauntlet within moments of meeting another fencer — and certainly not under circumstances like this.

  On the other hand, he had known that Charles Seurat was anything but ordinary — something, Thorn acknowledged, that could be said for himself as well. And the Frenchman did have the right idea. After all, what better way to measure a man’s mettle than at the point of one’s sword?

  “I have extra,” Thorn said with another small smile. “Just down the hall. It wouldn’t hurt to stretch a little after sitting at this desk all day.”

  Seurat returned the smile. “Lead on,” he said.

  The two men went to the gym, which was empty at the moment. Thorn opened his locker, wherein he had an extra set of practice gear — blades, including foil, épée, and saber, along with gloves and a mask, and a variety of jackets. He kept hoping that some of the other Net Force personnel would decide to try their hand at fencing, and so had a small array of gear to fit a variety of sizes.

  “Excellent! I see you use first-rate gear.”

  “What is your pleasure, Charles?”

  “Foil, I think. I’m a bit sluggish and out of practice.”

  “Foil it is. Help yourself.”

  Thorn smiled again, but privately, when he noticed that the Frenchman chose a blade with a German Visconte grip rather than the traditional — and expected — French grip. This just might be fun, he thought.

  The two men changed clothes and donned fencing gear. They each went through a series of stretches and warm-ups. Thorn noticed that Seurat moved very well for a man who claimed to be sluggish and out of practice.

  Warmed up and looser, they took their places on the piste, or fencing strip, Thorn had taped out on the floor and regarded each other.

  It had been a long time since Thorn had fenced foil, and even longer since he’d fenced it for real. It was the weapon he’d first learned, back in high school, and as such it was his first love, but he’d pretty much abandoned it after he’d discovered the épée and the saber. And lately, of course, thanks to the promptings of Colonel Kent, he’d been focusing almost exclusively on iaido.

  Old habits die hard, however, and he was pleasantly surprised at how comfortable the blade felt in his grip.

  He sketched a quick salute, saw Seurat mirror the move, and they both slipped on their masks and came to guard.

  “Ready?” Thorn asked. As the host, it fell to him to start the opening touch. He used English, however, since it would feel more than a little awkward using the traditional French “Etes-vous prêt?” with a Frenchman.

  He could see the small smile that formed on Seurat’s lips, and knew that he understood.

  “Ready,” he said.

  Thorn smiled, too. “Begin.”

  The word had barely left his lips and the Frenchman was in motion. Two quick steps, a liquid smooth — and lightning-fast — lunge, and Seurat’s blade was slipping around Thorn’s guard.

  Except that Thorn wasn’t there. At Seurat’s first step, he had begun sliding backward, letting the Frenchman close distance, but not, perhaps, quite as quickly as Seurat had hoped.

  When the attack came, Thorn was just far enough away to bring his hand back along Seurat’s blade, press against it in opposition, and then, swiveling his left shoulder back to draw his belly out of line in case he’d failed in his attempted opposition, send his own point streaking toward Charles’s heart.

  Seurat countered with a parry four, Thorn pressed back with his bell guard, trying to maintain the opposition, and a moment later the Frenchman recovered backward out of his lunge, retreating out of distance and coming back to guard.

  No touch. Neither point had met the opponent, on target or off.

  Both fencers smiled and saluted each other.

  “Nice attack,” Thorn said. “Very quick.”

  “And an excellent move on your part,” Charles said. “I anticipated the opposition counterattack, of course, but I hadn’t expected that particular evasion from an épéeist.”

  Thorn smiled again. So Charles had done his home-work, had he?

  “Yes, well, I wasn’t always an épéeist,” he said.

  Seurat nodded and tossed Thorn another quick salute. “Prêt?” he asked.

  Thorn answered the salute. “Oui, je suis prêt,” he replied.

  “Allez!”

  And they were off once again, a ballet of blades and body, dancing the ancient dance of victory and of death.

  Thorn grinned, feeling the adrenaline rush through him once more, the exhilaration of competition, the incomparable thrill of testing oneself against another. Through the mask, he saw an answering smile on Charles’s face.

  Yes, the Frenchman had had a very good idea indeed.

  Jay was ready — as ready as he was going to be, anyway — for the meeting with Seurat. The one with Chang, that had been fine. The little guy from China was sharp and very appreciative, and they’d be getting together again in RW or VR to establish some Chinese connections. Chang was quiet, down-to-earth, had some moves, and deferred to Jay’s expertise, which he was smart enough to see, no problem.

  But CyberNation’s rep coming in? Jay didn’t have much faith he’d be so easy. First, he was with the organization that had given Net Force a royal pain in the posterior. Second, he was French, and there was a reason that “snotty Frenchman” had become a cliché.

  Jay didn’t want to do it, but he had told Thorn he would try to behave in a civilized fashion, and he’d give it a shot. That CyberNation had been responsible for nearly killing John Howard, and had done a bunch of other dangerous and illegal stuff, didn’t make it easy. This was going to be like sitting down with a terrorist, as far as Jay was concerned.

  Sure, CyberNation had claimed no responsibility for the two incidents—“rogue elements out of our control,” and so on. But, hey, the Secretary always disavowed all knowledge of the Mission Impossible team, too, didn’t he?

  No need to disavow anything that was successful, was there?

  The door opened and in walked Seurat. Jay recognized him from some of the background VR he’d run. Tall, aristocratic-looking, with dark hair, well-cut and short. Nice suit. He looked flushed, and Jay understood why — word had come past Jay’s door that Seurat and Thorn had gone to the gym and danced with those whippy blades the boss liked to play with, and wasn’t that just swell? Fencing buddies.

  Really nice suit, though. Give them that. The French sure know how to dress.

  The CyberNation leader eyed Jay like a man might look at a trained chimpanzee, his expression a sort of a wonder-if-it-can-understand-me look.

  Oh, boy.

  Could be that Mr. Seurat had what some of Jay’s buddies at MIT had called Euro-Q. Back in his school days there had been a good number of best-of-the-brightest imports from Europe, who had thought that because they were in the land of the tasteless American, that it meant they were naturally smarter as well.

  But Jay also remembered one of his old college buddies, a guy named Bernard from Tennessee. Bernard had been invited to play chess by an Englishman named Sykes. Bernard, who spoke slowly with a thick Southern twang, had looked mildly bemused.

  “Well, ah’m afraid I barely know the rules of that game, sir,” his friend had said. “But ah’ll give it a try, if’n you want.”

  Sykes had, according to the story, looked positively gleeful. He’d been
ready for a fine round of pummel-the-Colonial, but instead had been destroyed by Bernard, who in fact was a ranked chess player and had competed nationally. The lesson hadn’t been lost on Jay: Never judge a book by its cover.

  Maybe he’s not just an arrogant, well-dressed jerk.

  “Allo? You must be Monsieur Greedlee?”

  Because he didn’t want to be at the meeting, Jay was primed to be irritated, and this was enough to start the ball rolling. “Mr. Seurat,” he said, taking care to pronounce the second syllable “rat” instead of “rah.”

  Seurat’s frown was paper-thin and gone in a second, but Jay had seen it.

  Jay had played this game before. Guy was gonna have to get up earlier than that to stay ahead of him. He smiled and waved at the chairs.

  They sat down at the glossy-finished wood table. The fluorescent lights overhead gleamed upon the thick finish, and Jay could see their distorted reflections as he sat down. Seurat’s body language was relaxed, but Jay could tell it was a front. The man’s eyes did not match his poise, and while there were no overt signs, Jay thought he could feel the man’s annoyance.

  He stifled an inward sigh. Better get it started so he could get it over.

  “I understand you’ve had some problems at CyberNation with your networks?” Jay asked.

  Seurat’s lips compressed slightly before he replied. “Indeed, we have been attacked by a major VR talent, on several occasions. By that, I mean someone very good was involved. World-class, Mr. Gridley.”

  The stupid-Frenchman accent had vanished. His English was now as crisp as an icicle at thirty degrees below zero, with barely a trace of any accent.

  Aha! Shades of the Tennessee chess champion!

  Seurat said, “I understand you have some familiarity with VR?”

  Some familiarity? Jay wanted to stand and spit on the man. Which was, of course, exactly why the man had said it. Don’t let him get your goat, Jay.

  “Yes, I have some small knowledge of it,” said Jay, thinking, More in my little finger than in your entire programming team. “Perhaps we can help train your people to discover what went wrong. After all, the U.S. did invent VR, and not everyone has the same understanding.”