Ash Ock

by Christopher Hinz

  A smell of home. A smell that could be trusted.

  The dead-fish odor came from the dozens of Costeaus who milled around the house and throughout the acres of surrounding woodlands. This was a Costeau place—more specifically, a park reserved for the Lion’s clanspeople: the Alexanders. Some of the pirates who came here were mainstreamed Irryans, but many were not; odorant bags hung from numerous belts.

  Over thirty years ago, the Alexanders had purchased this entire tract, as one of the first official acts of the Grand Infusion—the mainstreaming of Costeaus into colonial culture. It had been a purchase fought by many colonials, the Lion recalled, and the rationalizations of bigotry had abounded. Proper Irryans had been indignant. It was one thing, they had claimed, to ask pirates home to dinner, show that you were willing to beat down the walls of prejudice—it was quite another matter to actually invite Costeaus to purchase Irryan property.

  Nevertheless, reason had prevailed. Naturally, the land had not been prime: anything within two miles of the north or south polar plates was considered poor real estate. Too much moisture in the air and a view that many considered unpleasant. But the Alexanders had ripped up the old streets and had torn down the crescents of dilapidated, mostly abandoned, buildings, and had made this section of the seventy-mile long cylinder into a peaceful arena of pines, roses, and carefully spaced habitats.

  And when the Lion of Alexander, as chief of the United Clans, rose to the Council of Irrya, this park grew into his second home, a retreat from the skyscraper pace of the Capitol district, thirty miles to the south. The park was a fine place to hold meetings. Surrounded by trees and flowers, people seemed to feel more comfortable.

  The Lion hoped that the environment would soothe whatever was troubling Inez Hernandez.

  She had called him late last night, hours after the Council meeting had ended, and the strain on her face and in her words had been obvious. The Lion had known Inez for many years, and not once in all that time had he ever sensed such worry. Nor had he ever known her to be so cryptic.

  “We have to meet,” she had said, “secretly and as soon as possible. I’ll be bringing someone with me—it’s vital that this person’s identity be protected. Can you arrange it?”

  He could.

  “No one must know about the three of us getting together. This is an extremely delicate situation, for all involved. Security measures must be stringent.”

  He promised that they would be.

  An odorless guard, armed with a thruster rifle, entered the clearing, “Sir, they’re here.”

  The Lion stood up and brushed a coating of damp earth from his knees. Behind him, on a slightly elevated ridge of shaven white grass, the servants had prepared a lawn table with three chairs. Pitchers of coffee and cognac-flavored leaf tea highlighted a setting of walnut cookies, sliced carrots, and buttered perch wafers on toast.

  Inez and her companion approached from the south, on the stony path, which wound its way down through the pines from the main parking lot. La Gloria de la Ciencia’s councilor wore loose hiking slacks and a purple bandana with matching wide-brimmed sombrero. She greeted the Lion with a smile and a hug.

  “You look well-disguised,” he offered.

  “I hope so. We took precautions to make sure we weren’t tracked.” The smile faded as she gazed at her surroundings. “This place looks . . . very open.”

  The Lion waved his arm at the canopy of pines. “The trees shield us from observers.” Even on a cloudless day, no one could spy on them from the colony’s Alpha or Gamma sectors—Irrya’s other land strips—which hung overhead, on bisected arcs of the six-mile-diameter cylinder. “We also have a special permit for an AV scrambler system to deter remote surveillance, as well as a variety of other toys that my security people beg that I keep silent about. And the grounds are swept constantly for intruder bugs.”

  Inez seemed satisfied. She introduced her companion. “Jerem, this is Adam Lu Sang.”

  He was a tall and slender young man who appeared to be in his late twenties. Oily black hair was cropped short in front, long on the sides, and the gaunt hollow cheeks of his Oriental face gave him a slightly undernourished appearance. For a moment, piercing brown eyes regarded the Lion with suspicion. Then Adam Lu Sang extended a frail hand.

  “Pleased to meet you, sir.”

  The voice was soft and controlled, the handshake firm. The Lion motioned his guests to the table and they sat down.

  “Now, Inez,” said the Lion, after drinks and food had been served, “what is this matter of gravest urgency?”

  Inez hunched forward. “Adam approached me several weeks ago—secretly—and asked for a meeting. Last night, I finally managed to find the time. We talked for several hours and when I realized the staggering import of his information, I called you immediately.” Inez turned to the young man. “Go ahead, Adam, tell him everything you related to me last night.”

  Adam Lu Sang took a long swig of cognac tea and began.

  “I work in the E-Tech vaults in our Irryan headquarters building. I’m a programmer; decryption and detoxification are my specialties. I’m one of about fifteen people in all of E-Tech who has full access to the data archives.”

  The Lion was suitably impressed. The E-Tech archives was an impossibly immense warehouse of riches; information about thousands of the so-called lost sciences resided there, encoded into the computers—data from the pre-Apocalypse days, when science had run amok. E-Tech, working under its original five-hundred-year plan, was slowly reintegrating the immense wealth of information back into colonial society at a slow, restrained pace that, hopefully, this time would prevent humanity from self-destructing.

  The Lion knew that some alterations to that original reintegration plan had occurred, most notably the run on weapons data, which had begun fifty-six years ago in response to the feared return of a scientifically advanced Paratwa culture from the stars. La Gloria de la Ciencia had been given almost carte blanche approval when it came to developing means to defend the Colonies from the possible invasion; over the years, E-Tech had permitted Inez’s people to convert a great deal of archival data into working technology.

  But even so, since the Apocalypse of 2099—two hundred and sixty-four years ago—only the barest fraction of the archives had ever been opened. And in each era, only a handful of trusted individuals were ever granted complete access to that vast mélange of data.

  Adam continued. “My main job is to break into heavily encrypted pre-Apocalyptic programs and detox them for analysis.”

  “Detox?” quizzed the Lion.

  “Yes—make them safe, remove any data roadblocks installed by the original programmers. Back in the final days, everyone was paranoid—even simple, innocuous programs had angels crawling all over them.” He stopped, noting the Lion’s confused expression. “Angels,” he explained, “are subroutines installed into the main program to prevent illegal entry. Angels guard the data from being improperly accessed, lost, or rerouted.

  “Many of these old programs have soft perimeters, too—that means you can’t guess your way in. In order to gain access to a soft perimeter program, you have to share your own knowledge with the program, feed it information. In simple terms, you have to open up your whole network and allow the program’s angels to explore your data before it lets you have its data.”

  The Lion nodded.

  “Anyway, about three months ago, we started turning up some weird discrepancies in some of these pre-Apocalyptic programs. I was assigned to decrypt-detox a program, which told how North American shuttle maintenance contracts were awarded for the fiscal year 2094. A university researcher was writing a paper—the specific data was requested—our normal procedures couldn’t break into the program, so it was sent over to my department. Routine business—no big deal.

  “But when I opened up the program, I discovered a rash of tumors—the worst case of terminal cancer I’d ever come across.”

  “Terminal cancer?” whispered the Lion. He
had a feeling that this was going to be a long meeting.

  “The original data had been almost completely wiped out. Only the program shell remained, along with the angels. But what they had been protecting was almost completely gone—data lesions everywhere. For all practical purposes, it was a dead program. It had been reamed of its content, and it had been reamed from the inside.

  “So, I thought—fine, no big deal. The damage to the program had probably occurred centuries ago. Maybe someone wanted to hide information about how shuttle maintenance contracts were being awarded back in 2094. This person got into the program and wiped out the data, but left the shell intact, so that later programmers would not become suspicious unless they actually tried to access the information. From the outside, it still looked like a solid program.

  “Anyway, that was three months ago. We all thought this shuttle contract program was a freak—an anomaly. But then we started turning up more cancerous programs. In fact, these tumor-infested programs started turning up everywhere—two or three new ones each week.”

  Adam leaned forward; his piercing brown eyes seemed to drill into the Lion. “And over the past few weeks, the rate of cancerous programs has risen—as of yesterday, about one of every seven hundred programs we open up is dead—reamed of usable data. And that rate is increasing.”

  The Lion frowned. “You say that these programs become . . . cancerous. What exactly does that mean? How does it happen?”

  “We don’t know,” admitted Adam, “not exactly. But there are two theories floating around the programming department.

  “Theory one—which the heads of my department are in agreement with—claims that we are witnessing a natural process that was initiated back when these pre-Apocalyptic programs were actually created. In the late twenty-first century, E-Tech and other organizations that were attempting to restrain runaway technology, started talking about creating programs with built-in terminators. In other words, rather than fashion a program that would theoretically last forever—or at least as long as the computers existed to support it—the designers would encode a self-destruction module into the fabric of the program.”

  “Why would they do that?” asked the Lion.

  Adam leaned back in the chair and shrugged. “I guess it fit in nicely with their idea of limiting science, limiting technology. And it was also a way to eventually cut down on the sheer bulk of data, which was being encoded into the world’s computer networks at a geometrically increasing rate. Self-destructing programs would eventually create more space in the system.

  “Of course, no one wanted to lose crucial information overnight, so they talked about allowing generous time frames before these terminators would finally wake up and destroy the data. And the figures most often discussed were in the two- to three-hundred-year range—exactly the period we’re in now.”

  The Lion nibbled on a carrot. “So what the heads of your department suggest is that these cancers were deliberately put into the programs over two and a half centuries ago, and that today we happen to be witnessing the fruition of these ancient data-termination plans.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But you don’t believe that.”

  “No. There’s no hard evidence to indicate that the pre-Apocalyptic programmers ever implemented any of these self-destruction concepts. I believe it was all talk—just ideas that were thrown around. Programmers talk concept all the time, but little of it ever gets translated into working tech.

  “I have another theory, which is shared by a few of my department coworkers. We believe that these cancers have a more recent origin. We believe that someone, somehow, managed to input a sunsetter into the archives. A sunsetter is a killer program, designed to destroy angels and pierce soft perimeters in order to wipe out targeted information.”

  “Like a data virus?” asked the Lion.

  “Yes, but far worse than a simple virus. And if my theory is correct, this sunsetter would have been put into the network approximately twenty to twenty-five years ago—that’s about how long we calculated it would take a sunsetter to explore such a vast network and figure out where everything was—establish a base of operations, so to speak. When the sunsetter was finally entrenched in the system—which probably occurred a couple of months ago—it went to work and began reaming programs.”

  “What about E-Tech’s other data facilities?” asked the Lion. “Aren’t there a dozen colonies where the archives are duplicated?”

  “That’s right. But there’s only one network—in terms of data flow, everything’s linked together. This sunsetter simultaneously destroys program copies along with the originals.”

  “A powerful program,” mused the Lion.

  “Very powerful.”

  “And you have no idea who would have put such a thing into the archives?”

  “Not really. Anyone who had access to the system twenty-odd years ago could have done it. I mean, they could have input the program. Where they obtained it, I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  Adam hunched over the table. “And this sunsetter is very particular. Mainly, it seems to be attacking very old programs—primarily those that contain classified scientific and technological information. We’ve calculated that if this sunsetter is not stopped, in under ten years it will wipe out ninety-five percent of these old programs! And that’s a liberal estimate, based on today’s rate of attack. That rate could increase in the future.”

  The Lion remained calm. “But your superiors do not share your belief in this . . . sunsetter.”

  “No,” Adam said bitterly, falling back into his seat. “They’d rather cling to safer theories. They think we just happen to be in the time period when a lot of these encoded terminators are waking up and destroying their programs. They believe we’re at the top of the curve—everything will level off in a couple of years and we’ll end up losing no more than five or six percent of the archives. They shrug their shoulders and say: ‘Nothing to be done. It’s an unavoidable tragedy, just another legacy from the pre-Apocalypse.’”

  “They sound like a bunch of old fools,” the Lion said softly, with a glance to Inez.

  “They are fools,” muttered Adam.

  “And what are you, Adam Lu Sang?”

  The young man met the Lion’s gaze. Suddenly, his face broke into a weak grin. “I know—I sound like a fatix. After all, I’m only twenty-nine years old and some of my superiors have been doing programming since before I was born. What do the young upstarts like me really know about programming? Maybe after we’ve been around a few more years, we’ll begin to gather a little wisdom? Right?”

  The Lion said nothing.

  Adam shrugged. “I happen to think that after you’ve been around for a few years, something other than wisdom takes hold. I think you begin to like your job so much that you’ll do anything to keep it. I think that you won’t risk admitting that the entire data archives could be in jeopardy—at least not until it’s too late.”

  “And what does Doyle Blumhaven have to say about all this?” asked the Lion.

  Adam gave a cynical laugh. “He supports my superiors, of course. In fact, he hardly seems worried about the whole mess. He’ll come down to the archives once every few weeks, pat everyone on the back, and say: ‘Handle the situation the best that you can. I’m sure everything will work out.’ Blumhaven’s a professional bureaucrat, and that’s about the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about the man.”

  Inez poured herself a second cup of coffee. “Adam, tell Jerem about the Begelman program.”

  “You know who Begelman was?” asked Adam.

  The Lion nodded. “Fifty-six years ago, he was one of E-Tech’s finest programmers.”

  “Not one of the finest,” corrected Adam. “The finest. Begelman was state-of-the-art, and probably one of the best computer hawks since the Apocalypse. He wrote half the standard material circulating today—hell, I cut my teeth on his work.

  “Now fifty-six years ago, it was Begelman who was responsib
le for waking up Nick and Gillian—the Paratwa hunters. And after the liege-killer was stopped, when Nick and Gillian asked to go back into stasis, it was Begelman who created the program that was to be used to wake them up again.”

  The Lion found himself concentrating intently. Gillian. It was as if Adam had used a magic word, lanced a fishhook into his spirit.

  The young programmer went on. “Rome Franco, who was head of E-Tech back then, didn’t want Gillian and Nick brought out of stasis until our era—the year when the Paratwa were supposed to return from the stars. So he arranged to hide Gillian and Nick amid the millions of other pre-Apocalyptic stasis capsules in the E-Tech vaults and he had Begelman create a soft-perimeter program to make sure that they stayed hidden.

  “Now we all knew about this program, but we couldn’t enter it until ten months ago—the beginning of the year when the Paratwa were scheduled to make their reappearance. Once the year began, we were able to detox and run the Begelman program. It gave us the location and access code for the stasis capsule that Nick and Gillian had been put to sleep in, fifty-six years ago.”

  “But Doyle Blumhaven won’t allow you to awaken them,” whispered the Lion.

  “Exactly. And that’s ultimately why I’m here, why I’ve taken the chance to tell you all this.” Adam folded his arms and slumped down in his chair. “Do you have any idea what would happen to me if E-Tech learned I’d gone public with this information? Do you know what they could do to me? Hell, I signed my life over to them the day I was given a full security clearance to work in the vaults. For violating my oath, E-Tech could have me banished to one of the criminal strips. And that would be after they did some enzyme-scrambling in my brain, wiped out a good chunk of my memories.” He shook his head. “I must be crazy for even taking this chance.”

  He stared at the Lion. “But someone has to do it. I’m certain—absolutely, positively certain—that my sunsetter theory is correct. We’re going to lose a large part of the archives. We’re going to lose sciences and technologies and philosophies that took humanity ages to reach. The pre-Apocalypse, for all the destruction it brought on us, for the Paratwa and all of the technological evils it unleashed on society—those final years of the twenty-first century still remain the epitome of human achievement.