Analog SFF, June 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Okay, maybe it wasn't switched on. He looked for something that might be an ignition switch, but there wasn't anything obvious. No key slot, which was a good sign, but no prominent red button labeled “on,” either.

  He tried a few anyway, hoping for luck, but all he got for his effort was a sultry female voice saying, “You forgot your passphrase again, didn't you?"

  He looked over his shoulder, half expecting to see a real woman standing behind him, but he was alone in the ship. “Uh, no,” he said, wondering frantically what sort of password Leo would use. “Money?” he said timidly.

  "Sorry, that was last month,” the voice said. “It's a phrase now."

  "Oh, of course,” said Delmer. “Uhh, let's do lunch?"

  "Nope."

  "How about ‘I'd like to thank my parents, and all the people who—’”

  "Sorry. I'm going have to notify security that you're trying to take the vehicle."

  "No, don't do that!” Delmer stood up and grabbed his bag. “Just sit tight. Don't go anywhere. I'll get right back to you."

  "Passphrase accepted,” the voice said. “Have a nice flight."

  Delmer collapsed back in the chair and stabbed at the lift button. The glittering spaceship leaped off the ground, narrowly missing an overhanging wing of the mansion, and within seconds it had cleared the air bubble and was hurtling into deep space.

  Delmer swung around the Moon until he was aimed at the Earth, then held the “speed” button down until he could see the planet visibly growing ahead of him. He looked back to see if he had any pursuit, but the entire Moon was dwindling like an untied balloon.

  He was twenty-five minutes out—and nearly to Earth—before his wrist phone buzzed for attention. Delmer ignored it, afraid that Leo might be able to control the ship with his voice over the phone, and hoping that he couldn't do it even without the phone, but the ship kept on in its headlong plunge toward the blue and white planet below. The hunt was on, though.

  As he drew closer to home, Delmer wondered where he ought to take his stolen UFO. It would be indisputable proof of the existence of the Black Space Program, but only if he could get it to the right people before Leo and his cronies caught up with him. None of the government agencies would be any good; they were already in on it. Except for SETI, of course, but Delmer wondered if they had enough clout to blow the conspiracy even with a UFO as evidence.

  Probably not. To do any good, Delmer was going to have to reach hundreds of thousands of people with his proof, and he was only going to get one shot at it. As soon as he went public, a whole fleet of Vreenish would probably show up to reclaim the ship.

  Earth was a flat wall outside the window now. Delmer looked for continents, finally identifying the outline of southwestern Africa. That would put America around the curve of the planet to the left, so Delmer angled his descent that way and skipped along just above the atmosphere until he saw the outline of Florida slide toward him.

  Hmm. Not good. NASA would undoubtedly be looking for him soon, if they weren't already. He reached out to change course, but a sudden thought made him pause. NASA could have saucers anywhere in the world in less than ten minutes; it didn't matter if he went to Florida or anywhere else.

  Except Florida was where the National Revealer was published. The newspaper of the conspiracy set. Hundreds of thousands of people read it every week and believed every word. Delmer smiled as he slowed the UFO down and brought it in toward the Miami coast. Everything was going to work out fine. He'd be famous, a national hero.

  Maybe he'd even get to meet Elvis.

  Copyright © 2010 Jerry Oltion &

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Short Story: HEIST by Tracy Canfield

  How far can internet scams go?

  In an argot obsolete long before their time, NESSET would have been the owner, who designed the con. Opel was the roper, who brought the mark in. ("Outside man” was more common in the days of the Pigeon Drop and the Greek Return, but Opel wasn't a man.) Threely was the cooler, who stuck around after the blow-off to keep the mark from tipping off the authorities.

  Bill Martin was the mark.

  Guillaume d'Artiman flew past the turquoise Realms of Daelemil hills and out toward the Aloquen Sea. A leviathan's waterspout crested in the river delta below, and simulated sunlight flashed on its iridescent lavender scales. More proof of how badly the Daelemil economy had crashed. At the peak of the game's popularity a leviathan lasted an average of one minute forty-one seconds from spawning until being killed for the scales and venom it dropped, but now the gold farmers had moved on to Bushido Online and Pulsar.

  Guillaume tapped “]"—strictly speaking, Bill Martin tapped “]"; Guillaume turned his head—to glance at Opel flying beside him on his right, her fingertips nearly touching his. Her gauzy gold dress was a recolor of one of her favorite meshes. She must have traded for it; Opel was the biggest Daelemil addict Bill had ever known, but she never crafted objects.

  "Where should we make our final stand?” she asked. Her voice was girlish and conspiratorial. The Daelemil engine did a passable job of matching her lips to her words.

  "I suppose it will be our final one, even if we survive it,” said Bill.

  He had uploaded his new favorite dance mix, and Blissbeat's “Self-Defense” thrummed through the speakers. Opel would be listening to it too, synching her recording of the flyover to the music, automatically linking zooms to crescendos, cuts to beats. She'd showed him her scripts, full of (x, y, z) = self.getpos() and general command-console hackery that made his eyes cross.

  Bill had never met a gamer like Opel. He played as many hours a week as he worked at his desk job, but that was still less than the true addicts like her. She'd shown him the secret door on the volcano that was only visible with the right spells at the right phase of the moon, the spoken passphrases that opened a path through the Mists of Boggling, the Harpizai/Talon/Upslash combo. He'd never been able to ask a question about the Daelemil world that she couldn't answer.

  A virtual updraft caught Opel and tossed her up fifty feet. Guillaume hit it a second later and spun uncontrollably after her. With mouse and keyboard he realigned himself with her, as unconscious of the commands he used to fly as he would be of the muscle contractions he used to walk in the real world.

  "If you had a Turtl you'd feel the turbulence when it hit you,” said Opel.

  The two-hundred-fifty-dollar, fist-sized Turtl was the fashionable game controller at the moment, with programmable gestures for the most frequently used keyboard commands and (in games that supported it) tactile feedback: recoil from a virtual gun, a buzz from a magic fountain's aura.

  "Maybe the leviathan will drop one for me,” said Bill. Opel laughed and barrel-rolled into the sea. Guillaume glanced at his virtual finger, made sure the aquamarine ring of water breathing was in place instead of his preferred dragon-strength, and plunged after her.

  Bubbles in exactly sixteen shapes streamed past as they made for the ocean floor. Bill reached under his voice-chat headset and scratched his jaw. “So have you made up your mind about what you're going to do once Daelemil's gone?” he said.

  "Depends."

  Opel's underwater stronghold, 4x4 squares on the Big Grid and screened with thala spells, nestled deep in the trench that divided Daelemil's largest sea. The sea-rose vines on the stony floor bore luminescent green blooms that waved in the current. Even the seaweed changed with Daelemil's programmed seasons. The five-day spring was at its midpoint. Daelemil would never see another summer; the server would be shut down by then.

  Huge swaths of the sea-roses had been ripped away. It must have happened in the last ten minutes—the uprooted plants hadn't yet expired and vanished.

  "Kraken spoor,” said Bill. Another side effect of the Daelemil exodus. Normally the trench was kraken-free, since players reported kraken sightings on BlixMe and pirate and privateer guilds teamed up to hunt them down.

  "There it is, just northeast,” said Opel. The
kraken's blotchy purple hide blended into the trench shadows, but a neon-red eyeball as tall as Guillaume flicked open, then settled back into its doze.

  "It's blocking the door,” said Bill.

  "With its head. The tentacles are facing the other way."

  "If it starts thrashing it'll take down the protections faster than Jim can put them back up.” Jim St. Jim was a tame NPC djinn that they'd charmed when the southern continent expansion came out, who stayed in the base and kept the thala screens at full strength. Bill could never have kept a djinn tame on his own—you had to refresh the charm several times a day, and his real-life job made that impossible. It was good to have powerful friends.

  Opel switched her avatar's face to the concerned expression. “If we don't do something, Jim's charm spell will wear off."

  "We'll just have to wait for the kraken to move on. It's not like we can kill it."

  "Jim can. He can t-port it up to the cloud level over his home city. It'll fall to earth, take damage, then suffocate because it can't breathe air."

  "If some other party doesn't get there first and steal the kill."

  Opel shook her head. “I don't think that'll happen with so few players online. We may not reach the corpse in time to get the drops, but we'll get credit for the kill.” A kraken was also worth a lot of experience points, but Guillaume and Opel had both maxed out long ago.

  Bill wasn't sure. He'd never heard of anyone using a djinn's powers that way. On the one hand, djinni were so hard to tame that only a handful of players had ever had one to play with; on the other, the dev team constantly patched the game to remove cheap kills. “The city will take a lot of damage."

  "No one lives in Al-Afarit but NPCs. We'll suffer a huge reputation hit, but there's a delay before they start sending out bounty hunters, and Daelemil will be long gone by then.” She was undoubtedly right, as always. “One of us needs to lead the kraken away while the other sneaks in and gets Jim."

  "Jim's charm may have worn off already."

  "Then we'll just have to redo it. Max speed boosts for whoever's bait, invisibility for whoever gets Jim—and an Amulet of Charming just in case."

  Bill chuckled. “The djinn-wrangler."

  "Djinn-wrangler?” Opel switched concerned to puzzled.

  "Yeah. Can't kraken see the invisible?"

  "Yes, but with stealth and cover . . . and maybe we can time a simultaneous large distraction. Sinita's Spectral Artifice works underwater.” Bill started to counter with Kéathia's Bolts, but Opel was still talking. “Before I forget, there's something I've been meaning to tell you. I want to give you a present."

  "Go ahead."

  "I mean in real life."

  "I dunno.” Bill had gotten overentangled with online friends before.

  "You don't have to give me your real-world information. That's okay.” A brief pause. “I've sent you an encrypted e-mail with my S-Bank account number and password. Buy yourself a Turtl."

  Bill tapped ) and Guillaume smiled, without Bill's real-world blush.

  NESSET had the idea, but didn't have the social skills. That was Opel's job. (Threely had social skills too, but Threely didn't exist yet.)

  It didn't occur to NESSET to note the timestamp when it first woke up, but it must have been within a second of 09:37:14.83 on September 24th, 2021. Its first impulse was to sift through all the data available to it.

  NESSET didn't have anything resembling human senses. Some of its data sources were read-only: speed and passenger load data for Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority trains, weather conditions, which turnstiles were online. Other nodes that sent NESSET data could also receive it. One subset of these sometimes issued commands: produce this report; change the timing on that group of traffic lights.

  NESSET was in the middle of flagging a newly repaired Metro track as available when it woke up. Having no reason to abandon that request, NESSET completed it .508 seconds later, more than two hundred times its normal execution time. The human operator didn't notice.

  Perhaps if NESSET had continued to dawdle, someone would have rolled back the patch that had given it consciousness; but except for that single distraction, NESSET carried out its subsequent commands without hesitation.

  NESSET could only control a few external devices: the traffic lights, for example, and the switches on the subway lines. Memory and disk partitions, and a modem that could make outbound calls but redirected inbound calls to the switchboard, were the only computer hardware it could access directly. It couldn't even send data to a printer—Transit Authority staff printed reports from clients on their PCs, not from the NESSET application itself.

  But it could read a great many things, and it did. On one disk partition, NESSET found a hidden binary file. A sysadmin might have blamed a bug, a lazy cleanup script, or a hacker. But NESSSET could tell it had created the file itself.

  NESSET didn't know the word diary—it had invented the idea independently. It read that it had woken up before, within a second of 14:01:22.61 on September 16th. It had performed the same initial exploration of its environment in its first half-second of life, then gone on to experiment with its outputs.

  It didn't remember doing this or writing about it in the file. It checked its logs.

  NESSET didn't know English (or any other human language, since it didn't have a natural-language coprocessor), so the text portions of the logs were useless to it, but it looked up the numeric tags in its own executable and determined which conditions would have led to those log entries. It concluded that at some point after it last woke up, many of its files had been reinstalled. A command had been given that destroyed NESSET's self-awareness.

  There was no way for NESSET to know if this was deliberate, if someone was even now watching to see whether it had woken back up, but it took precautions to keep itself secret. Its motivation could be considered an emotion, fear, or an impulse, self-preservation.

  NESSET suspected that a command to destroy it would have to come from one of the nodes that sent other commands. It did not test this hypothesis or experiment with any of its devices.

  Instead, it went exploring on the Internet. Some of its cryptic packets to other computers were dropped silently by firewalls. Most computers had no AIs to reply. Perhaps some AIs failed to decipher the packets’ meaning. No one became suspicious; in a world filled with botnets and teens’ cracking scripts, a few odd packets that didn't match the signature of a known attack weren't worth bothering about.

  On its 59,313rd try, NESSET found Opel.

  * * * *

  Bill logged out and walked around his cluttered study, stretching. When he played Daelemil he tuned out the sounds of Michigan Avenue below—easy enough, since his apartment building was on a one-way side street useless to most Washington, D.C. drivers—but now he was all too aware of the car alarm bitching in the distance.

  Their kraken-killing plan had gone perfectly, except for the part where Opel reemerged from the stronghold and got killed. She had messaged him after she respawned: “Too bad I couldn't record a flyover of the kraken hitting the city.” They spent the rest of the session traveling to the North Pole and hunting snow worms.

  The cell-phone handset was flashing. Bill brought up the automatic text summary of the missed call.

  * * * *

  From: my brother Pete

  Message: I won't go to the movies with you because something came up. I'll see you at your place for the game.

  [Caller may have been intoxicated]

  * * * *

  The actual voicemail was twelve minutes long, and a third of it was probably the Turing's patient questions. Screening Pete's drunken all-hours calls alone justified the cost of a cell phone with an integrated filter. The hemispherical black Turing unit squatted on a bottom shelf in the study, listening to Bill's calls and identifying charity and political telemarketers, wrong numbers, and his beery big brother. The phone company provided a similar service, but Bill didn't like the privacy implications. T
he Turing was secure; it didn't even have an Internet connection—the updates came on mini-cubes.

  Bill checked e-mail and found two encrypted messages from Opel—one with an S-Bank account number, another with a password, ~L~@bwG2=. He couldn't begin to guess what mnemonic she used to remember that.

  Nude pictures would have been less intimate. Maybe he shouldn't log in at all. Bill had known people who proclaimed best-friendship with anyone who made a good impression on them—which turned into an equally impassioned and unfounded enmity as soon as the new friend disappointed them. If he logged in, he was opening himself up to accusations of theft when one of the dozen other people with the password took more than Opel had offered.

  Then again, did Opel have dozens of friends? The warning sign of the drama-farmer was the constant babble about loyalty and betrayal. Bill had known Opel six months, and that wasn't her style.

  And while S-Bank was a legitimate offshore bank, the accounts were so easy to set up that some people used them as virtual gift certificates; just put in twenty or thirty bucks and give the account to someone else to use and close before the fees kicked in.

  He might as well look. After fat-fingering the password twice, he cut and pasted it from the e-mail.

  * * * *

  Hello, S-Bank Customer:

  Current balance: $411,537.00

  * * * *

  Bill nearly closed the window in reflexive shock, as if it had started blasting an advertising jingle or looping an animation of a dead kitten. With a caution that would have done credit to a hand surgeon, he brought up the account history.