by Tad Williams
The bit of code she had received in return, which her Malaysian friend had called "Stethoscope," was not the most broadly employable piece of gear she'd ever owned, but it had its uses. What it did best was to locate extremely small changes in processing speed—things that would never show up at the interface level of the system, but which could be used to discover potential bugs before they became larger problems. Not being in the gear-creation business, Dulcie had never used it for its intended purpose, but she had occasionally found it useful for locating flaws in the security of systems she wished to attack. She hadn't used it for almost a year before the Australia trip but it had proved very handy during Dread's incursion into the Grail system. Now something—hacker's intuition, perhaps—suggested it might serve a purpose again.
Because there has to be something else going on, Dulcie told herself as she put Stethoscope to work.
She started up the random-character generator again so the gear would have something to analyze, then sat back to sip her tea. She had almost forgotten the bolt of fear that had shot through her when Dread had burst shouting onto her screen. Almost.
Three minutes later the character-generation cycle had finished, as unsuccessfully as it had the other two dozen times. She opened the Stethoscope report and felt her heart quicken. There was something, or it certainly looked that way: a small hesitation, a minute hitch, as though Dread's system security had paused for a moment. Which, she guessed, meant that the security program had seen part of what it wanted, done a check, not found whatever else it needed to open access, and rebuffed the overture.
Dulcie bit her lip, thinking. It had to be some kind of double password—first X, then Y. But if the generator had given a prompt for the second password? Why hadn't the system stopped and waited? No human being could input fast enough to cough up another password in that microsecond of hesitation, even if it was spoken instead of typed.
Spoken. The back of her neck prickled. She checked Dread's system and felt a glow of triumph when she discovered, as she had guessed, that the audio input was turned off. That was it. The second password was supposed to be spoken after the first had been typed. The system had heard the first, checked for audio and found it disabled, so it had treated the whole thing as a failed attempt, all of this happening in a flash of time too small to be perceived by human senses.
She turned the audio on, reminding herself to be damn sure to turn it off again when she was finished—otherwise she might as well leave Dread a note saying she had been trying to hack his system—and began to patch together some modifications, hooking the character generator to the Stethoscope gear. When the hesitation came this time, the character generator would stop to be read, which should at least give her the first password.
She took another sip of tea, barely tasting it, then set the generator to work—in her mind's eye it was a roulette wheel, spinning so fast as to be almost invisible. In less than a minute it stopped, the letters "DREAMTIME" blinking in the log-in box. She recognized the word from her brief survey of Aboriginal mythology and felt a flush of triumph. This time, with the audio enabled, the system had recognized the first password and was waiting for the second.
But it's not going to wait very long, she suddenly realized, and the glow of victory faded. It's going to give me ten seconds, or twenty at the most, then it's going to shut off unless I say the right word. And the next time, or the time after that, when I don't give the right password, it's going to shut down for good—cut off all access, maybe even set off an alarm. It will certainly leave a damn clear mark that someone tried to get in.
She could never come up with the second password off the cuff, could think of nothing to try except "Wulgaru," which still seemed too obvious. And she could not generate could generate characters directly to the system, not even if she modified the character generator—which would take days anyway, maybe weeks of work in an area she knew almost nothing about.
Ten seconds gone. "DREAMTIME" still blinked on her screen, mocking her, but any moment now the window would close. She had worked so hard to solve the first part of the puzzle, but even though she had done it, she was stuck, fooled, foiled.
"Son of a bitch!" she said feelingly.
At the last word, the screen went blank. A moment later, "ACCESS GRANTED" flashed up and the door of Dread's hidden room opened.
The fifty-six files were ordered by date, the first over five years old and simply labeled "Nuba 1." She opened it and discovered it was sight-and-sound, but only 2D, not full wraparound. In many ways the quality was even worse than the lab experiment files. The whole thing had been shot by a single very primitive camera fixed in one place, like surveillance footage.
At first it was hard to make sense of it. The picture was extremely dark. She only realized after watching for half a minute that the concrete pillars in the foreground were some kind of outdoor structure, the support for a freeway ramp, perhaps, and the dark background near the top was actually night sky.
Movement near the base of one of the pillars, hidden in shadow despite a pool of light from what she guessed was a sodium lamp on the freeway above, proved eventually to be two human figures, although the human part was only an educated guess until at least a minute of the footage had passed. At first she thought the dark, indistinct shapes against one of the farther pillars were making love—first a hand, then a leg extended out into the light splashing down beside them. Then, with an indrawn breath of horror, she became sure that the larger one was strangling the former. But even that seemed not to be true, since after a moment the larger figure stood and the smaller was revealed to be still moving, slumped against the pillar but holding out its hands as though imploring the large one not to leave. The only sound in the file was the continuos rumble of traffic, muted and low, as though the camera were closer to the roadway than the events being viewed.
It was hard to see what happened next and harder still to understand why anyone should bother to make a record like this of it. The quality of the image was maddening, as though someone had found a way to reroute the footage from a security camera with a bad correction chip. Why? What did it all mean?
The larger figure leaned over the smaller, exhibiting something that shimmered palely for just a moment, catching a glint of the overhead light—a bottle? A knife? A folded piece of paper? The small figure seemed to be arguing or pleading, with much movement of hands, but Dulcie's bad feelings about the whole thing were eased a bit by the fact that the smaller one made no attempt to escape.
The larger shape knelt beside the smaller, holding it so close that again they appeared to be making love, or at least preparing to do so. For a long time—it was two minutes' worth of file but it seemed even longer—the two shadowy shapes were merged. Every now and then a hand would emerge again, waving slowly as though to the distant camera or to a departing train. Once the hand emerged, stretching to what must have been its greatest reach. The spread fingers slowly closed, like a flower shutting for the night, a movement almost beautiful in its simplicity.
At last after many minutes the larger figure rose. The smaller still sat against the pillar, but before Dulcie could see anything more the footage ended.
Dulcie sat staring at her pad with a sour taste in her mouth. It was impossible to tell exactly what had been happening and it might take hours working with her enhancement gear before she'd even be able to guess. But whatever she was going to do, she should do it on her own time, on her own system. It was foolish sitting here with Dread's secrets exposed—better to copy everything, then deal with it on her own terms.
But she could not resist opening a few more files, just to see if everything Dread had stored so carefully was as ambiguous as what she had seen. She selected a few more, turning her attention first to one labeled "Nuba 8."
The images in Nuba 8 were much sharper, although they also seemed to have been downloaded from a security camera, this one on the stairwell of what looked like a large office or apartment building, also at n
ight. The scene was lit by floodlights; the figure of a woman, when she emerged from the glass door with her purse under one arm and her keypad in her hand, was quite clear. She was young, perhaps Dulcie's age, dark-haired, slender. She paused on the bottom step and fumbled in her purse, withdrawing a cylinder that looked like some kind of chemical defense weapon, but even as she did so she looked up in startlement. A shadow moved in front of her, swift as a flitting bat; an instant later the stairwell was empty. The image jumped and changed, the footage now coming from a different camera in an underground parking lot, but the woman being shoved toward it by an indistinct figure in dark clothing was recognizably the same, even with her face disfigured by terror.
Disturbed as she was by this brief bit of horror flick—was this Dread's ugly, awful secret, that he collected snuff footage?—Dulcie was even more disgusted by herself than she was sickened by what she was watching.
It figures, she thought. The first guy I get interested in for months and he's into this kind of horrible shit. Thank God I didn't let him. . . .
The woman was shoved to the ground. There was no sound in this file, but Dulcie didn't need to hear it to know the woman was screaming. Then the man who had thrown her down onto the cement floor looked up to the camera—he had known it was there all along—and smiled as though he were sending a snapshot home to his family.
Dulcie didn't find out until later, but that was just what he was doing.
She gaped in unbelieving horror as John Dread, also known as John Wulgaru and Johnny Dark, elaborately bound the woman's wrists and gagged her with duct tape, then produced an extremely long knife. He arranged everything with care so that the security camera would have the best possible angle. Watching, Dulcie felt as though she were paralyzed and could not turn away, as though she too had been tied down, with nothing left in her control but her staring, horrified eyes.
It was only when a soft, sentimental piano melody began to play, joined alter a few bars by strings and an artificial choir, and Dulcie realized it had been added to the footage afterward, that something snapped inside her. She staggered to her feet, whimpering, then fell down twice before she could make it to the bathroom to vomit.
CHAPTER 38
Boy in Darkness
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"Stephen?" Renie scrambled along the ledge, searching desperately for some way to crawl down to the boy, but the path ended within a few meters, rejoining the wall of the pit like heat-fused glass. "Stephen! It's me, Renie!"
His head tilted up slowly, his shadowed eyes catching a glint of slow fire from the stars high above, but he gave no other sign of recognizing her. Could she be wrong? It was dark here in the pit despite the distorted, weirdly bright stars overhead, as dark as late evening, and he was many meters away.
Renie crawled back and forth at the end of the path like a leopard trapped on a branch. "Stephen, talk to me. Are you okay?"
He had stopped crying. As the echoes of her call died away she heard him sigh, a trembling exhalation that stabbed at her heart. He was so small! She had forgotten how small he was, how vulnerable to the world and its cruelties.
"Look." She struggled to keep the fear out of her voice. "I can't find a way down, but maybe you can find a way up to where I can reach you. Can you look, Stephen? Please?"
He sighed again. His head sagged. "There's no way up."
Renie felt something so powerful it was like a hard thump on her chest. It was his voice, unmistakably his. "Damn it, Stephen Sulaweyo, don't you tell me that without trying." She heard the anger in her voice, an anger born of exhaustion and terror, and tried to calm herself. "You don't know how long I've been looking for you, how many places I've been trying to find you. I didn't give up. You can't give up, either."
"No one was looking for me," he said dully. "No one came."
"That's not true! I tried! I've been trying." Tears were in her eyes, blurring the already strange scene into complete nonsense. "Oh, Stephen, I've been missing you so much."
"You're not my mother."
Renie froze, leaning out over the long fall down to the river. She wiped the tears from her face. Was his brain damaged? Did he think Mama was still alive? "No, I'm not. I'm your sister, Renie. You remember me, don't you?"
It took him long moments to answer. "I remember you. You're not my mother."
How much did he recall? Perhaps he had invented a protective fiction about their mother still being alive. Would she frighten him into some kind of catatonia if she disputed it? Could she afford the risk? "No, I'm not your mother. Mama isn't here, but I am. I've been trying to find you for . . . for a long time. Stephen, we have to get out of here. Is there someplace you can climb up?"
He shook his head. "No," he said bitterly. "No place. I can't climb. I hurt."
Slow down, she told her rabbiting heart. Slow down. You can't help him if you get in a panic. "What hurts, Stephen? Talk to me."
"Everything. I want to go home. I want my mother."
"I'm doing my best. . . ."
"Now!" he screamed. His arms thrashed—he was hitting himself on the head. "Now!"
"Stephen, don't!" she shouted. "It's okay. It's okay. I'm here now. You're not alone anymore."
"Always alone," he said bitterly. "Just voices. Tricks. Lies."
"Jesus Mercy." Renie felt like her swelling, aching heart would choke her. "Oh, Stephen. I'm not a trick. It's me, Renie."
He was silent for a long time, a tiny shape barely distinguishable from the nodules of stone along the bottom of the pit. The river murmured.
"You took me to the ocean," he said at last, his voice calmer now. "There were birds. I threw . . . threw something. They grabbed it in the air." There was a tone almost of wonderment in his voice, as though something had been given back to him.
"Bread. You threw pieces of bread. The seagulls were fighting over it—do you remember? It made you smile." Margate, she remembered. How old had he been? Six? Seven? "Do you remember that man playing music, with the dog? The dog that danced?"
"Funny." He said it as though he did not quite feel it. "Funny little dog. Wearing a dress. You laughed."
"You laughed too. Oh, Stephen, do you remember the other things? Your room? Our apartment? Papa?" She saw him stiffen and silently cursed herself.
"Shouting. Always shouting. Big. Loud."
"It's okay, Stephen, he. . . ."
"Shouting! Angry!"
Something rippled across the stars above, a lurch of shadow that for a moment turned the great cavern dark and set Renie's heart pounding again, she did not take a breath until she could see Stephen's small, huddled form once more.
"He does shout sometimes," she said cautiously. "But he loves you, Stephen."
"No."
"He does. And I do. You know that, don't you? How much I love you?" Her voice cracked. It was horrible to be so close and yet be separated. All she wanted to do was grab him and hold him and kiss his face, pull him close and feel the tight curls of his hair, smell the little-boy smell of him. How could a real mother feel more?
The memory of his father seemed to have pushed the child into sullen silence once more.
"Stephen? Talk to me, Stephen." Only the murmuring river answered. "Don't do this! We have to find a way out of here. We have to get you out. But I can't do anything unless you talk to me."
"Can't get out." The voice sank so low she could hardly hear. "Tricks. Hurt me."
"Who hurt you, Stephen?"
"Everyone. No one came."
"I'm here now. I've been looking for you a long time. Won't
you try to find a way to climb up to me?" She crawled back along the path, away from the dead end, looking for a place where it might be possible to get down the steep stone wall. "Tell me some other things you remember," she called. "How about your friends? Do you remember your friends? Eddie and Soki?"
His face tilted up. "Soki. He . . . he hurt his head."
She felt a chill race up her spine. Did he mean Soki's seizures, the convulsions Renie had seemed to provoke when she had questioned him? How much did Stephen know about that? Could he have buried memories of the boys' first time in that horrible nightclub, Mister J's? "Yes, Soki hurt his head," she said carefully, waiting to see what would come next.
"He was too scared," Stephen said quietly. "He . . . pulled away. And he hurt his head." A strange tone crept in. "I'm . . . I'm so lonely."
Renie closed her eyes for a moment, trying to squeeze back tears, but was terrified that Stephen might vanish when she wasn't looking. "Can't you remember any nice things? You and Eddie and Soki—didn't you use to play soldiers together? And Netsurfer Detectives?"
"Yes . . . used to. . . ." Stephen sounded exhausted, as though even their brief conversation had made him dangerously weak. He said something else, an unintelligible mutter, then fell silent. Again panic flared in Renie's midsection.
"I really need you to do something," she said. "Okay? Stephen, listen to me. I need you to get up. Just stand up. Can you do that?"
He sat, slumped, his head down on his chest.
"Stephen!" This time, she could not keep the terror out of her voice. "Stephen, talk to me! Damn it, Stephen, don't you dare stop talking to me." She raced back down to the lowest point of the path, then leaned out until she could feel her weight tip to the outermost edge of balance. "Stephen! I'm talking to you. I want you to get up. Do you hear me?" He had not moved for half a minute now. "Stephen Sulaweyo! You pay attention! I'm getting really angry!"
