Hardwired

by Walter Jon Williams

  “Even more reason to stay out of their comp, I’d say.”

  “Have you ever heard of Project Black Mind?”

  Cowboy thinks for a moment while he runs over the engine and weapons displays. “No,” he says finally. “Can’t say as I have.”

  “I’m not surprised. I never heard of it, either, before I got in here. It’s an intruder program of the worst sort. Developed by the U.S. network security people just before the war. The same people who set up this lab, years ago. And who are still running it.”

  No surprise, Cowboy thinks. Intelligence types like to keep their fingers in many pies. Used to run lots of interface banks to launder money for their operations, and when the face banks made money, they looked for places to invest. When their government was flattened by the blocs, they just kept on doing what they knew best.

  “Okay. So what does it do?”

  “Sets up a mind in crystal. Then goes into another mind, a live mind, and prints the first mind on top of it. Imposes the first personality on the second. Backs up the program.”

  Cowboy feels the crystal in his head turn cold. This time he forgets not to vocalize, blurting into the mic in his face mask. “God, why? What good would it do? The guy wouldn’t have the target’s memories to draw on, or anything. ”

  “He might, he might not. Brain transfer is an inexact science. ”

  “There are safeguards. No program can jump from crystal into someone’s head.”

  “Black Mind says different.”

  Cowboy thinks of someone swarming into his mind through his sockets, destroying his memories, his personalities. His body, whatever remained of his brain, turning into the puppet of someone else. Worse, Cowboy thinks, than what Roon is doing to those kids.

  “Fuck,” Cowboy says. Horror clutches at his heart. “Stay the hell out of that crystal, Reno. We don’t want to have anything to do with this.”

  “The intelligence people intended to use Black Mind against the Orbitals. The plan was to have a few fanatic assassin types intrude on the minds of key Orbital personnel. If all went well, they’d start giving orders that would leave the Orbitals open to a preemptive attack from Earth. They’d suicide if they were discovered–– the original assassins would still be alive down on Earth, remember. Even if the plan didn’t work perfectly, at least the key Orbitals would go psychotic or something, and there would be confusion at the top. Nobody would dare use the eye-face for communication. It was a good plan.”

  “So what went wrong?”

  “The Orbitals preempted the plan and attacked before Black Mind could be put into operation. But the point is, Cowboy–– Black Mind is still here. It’s sitting in the computers of this lab, and maybe other labs. Blacker labs. The Orbitals–– hell, anybody–– could get hold of it. We’ve got to wipe it out.”

  “Shit, yes.”

  “After this run, I’m going to start looking. Find out who else might have Black Mind hiding somewhere.” There is a pause. Reno’s tone changes. “The shuttle’s on time, Cowboy. You should see its signature at about two-seven zero.”

  Cowboy turns his head to port, sees a brightness in the darkening sky. “Confirmed, Reno. High and to port, about eight o’clock.” Pony Express begins a slow bank to the left. Engines cycle from blue to green. Cowboy can feel his veins opening as the alcohol fuel pours through them. Black Mind is forgotten in an instant as Cowboy’s electronic nerves extrude into the delta, into the wings and engines, the smooth composite skin studded with sensors and the cold cybernetic hearts of the missiles that wait, shrouded protectively by the curved black wings.

  “Hey, Cowboy.” It’s Sarah’s voice, speaking from the base transmitter down in Nevada. She sounds a little nervous. “Thumbs up. Good hunting. I don’t know what you people say at these sorts of times.”

  “You said it just fine. Thanks.”

  “I’m taking myself out of the net for now. But I’ll be thinking sentimental thoughts about you.”

  The words stir a warmness in Cowboy, but it’s washed away by the surge of data swarming into his crystal, his extensions. His turbopumps moan, pouring fuel into the combustion chamber of his shrieking heart. Neurotransmitters pulse to a steel beat like Smokey Dacus’s drums. “Thanks,” he says, his eyes flickering in and out of infrared perception, tracking the glowing path of the shuttle in the sky. The leading edges of the delta warm to the onrushing air. Pony Express twists in the air, banks, falls onto a new path. Engines climb to orange. Coming down above the shuttle, out of the sun.

  “Cowboy.” It is an uninflected voice of pure crystal, purged of personality. Someone faced in through a vast computer heart, part of a gigantic cybernetic mind. “This is Roon. I’m faced into the net. I’m going to run with you. I want you to be my eyes and ears. Maybe I’ll be able to offer some suggestions.”

  Cowboy’s anger flares like a bloom of chaff over Damnation Alley. He’s not one of the little boys and girls who have no choice but to let Roon ride their minds, their bodies, sucking sensation like a vampire studding into a vein. “The fuck you will,” he says, and cuts himself out of the net. He thinks for a moment about what Roon could do with the Black Mind program and hears a mutter of terror in his expanded mind.

  He can feel microwave pulses from over the Sierras frantically trying to reestablish contact. He fends them off. The cargo shuttle is coming down now, fast, a silver alloy brightness in the sky. Cowboy is punched back in his couch by the thrust of the afterburners. Engines red to max. The g-suit clamps on his veins, trying to keep the blood from pooling. He can hear the shuttle pilot chatting with Vandenberg ground control. Runs through the weapons check again. Thinks about the shuttle’s cargo, the cryogenic pods containing billions of the mutant spaceborn viruses tailored to destroy the epidemic called viral Huntington’s, the cure into which Tempel has sunk part of its massive research budget for eight years.

  Pony Express buffets as it strikes the shuttle’s slipstream. The shuttle is vast, 200 meters long, occupying half of the forward view from the delta’s canopy, pounding through the atmosphere at twice the speed of sound.

  He’s been over the shuttle specs, and it’s immensely strong, with multiple redundancy built in, able to absorb implausible amounts of damage. Cowboy figures he’ll have to shoot it down about eight times over, and he’s got less than two minutes before touchdown at Vandenberg.

  Microwave squawks from Nevada batter his sensors. Cowboy ignores them. First, he thinks, the thrusters. The shuttle can out-accelerate him if he doesn’t cripple it. He falls into the shuttle’s trough, decelerates, fires a radar-homer. Pushes the delta into the sun again.

  “What’s that signal?” one of the shuttle pilots asks, his passive sensors having picked up the radar pulse from the missile. His answer comes soon enough. Flame blossoms at the shuttle’s base, among the clustered rockets.

  “Himmel!” says the same voice. Cowboy pushes another radar-homer out of its fairing.

  “Ground, this is Tempel one-eight-three. Report we are under attack...” The boy twigs fast, Cowboy thinks. The second missile plunges into the shuttle’s stern and sends molten metal spewing through the thruster compartment. Cowboy is already feeding alcohol into the afterburners, slamming back into his couch again, diving under the target. The shuttle is twisting, trying to make its escape. Too slowly, too big to miss.

  “Tempel one-eight-three, say again?” Ground doesn’t seem to be very quick on the uptake.

  Cowboy looses another missile in the direction of some cargo doors and pops out his dorsal minigun turret. Thirty-millimeter rounds riddle the shuttle’s belly. If he knocks out enough hydraulics, they won’t be able to drop their landing gear, and even if the shuttle gets away, it might crash on landing. Sparks stitch a bright trail along the shuttle’s vast belly as pieces of alloy shielding are torn apart. Freon pours like mist into the sky from broken coolant veins. The pilot isn’t waiting for the people on the ground to figure things out; he’s making maximum use of his maneuvering th
rusters and flaps, and is dropping like an elevator, trying to swat the delta with his entire craft. Cowboy dodges easily, fires a missile into a riddled part of the ship, and hopes it will cause structural damage. His dorsal minigun is empty and he retracts the turret.

  He burns forward along the massive ship, inverting himself, the belly gun slamming out of its faired hatchway. He begins firing the minigun up into the command section, aiming for the control crystal and the pilot. An oxygen tank explodes with a puff of frigid gas. He can see electricity arcing between broken cables. He fires another missile into the wreckage and suddenly the shuttle’s frame screams in pain, a sound Cowboy hears as attenuated shock waves that rock the Express. Pieces of metal begin peeling off from the base of a fifty-foot canard, little bits of chaff whipped by the thundering slipstream.

  “She’s coming apart under us,” the pilot reports, and it’s true. Pony Express twists out of danger as the canard rips away, as hydraulic fluid spurts like arterial blood into the air. At Mach two there isn’t much leeway for a shape that loses its aerodynamics. The shuttle lurches, slews to one side, begins to crumple.

  “Tempel one-eight-three...” the pilot begins, but then there’s a final, echoing click as the transmitter flattens against a wall of air and suddenly there’s nothing on that channel, nothing but the feeble sound of ground control trying to regain contact, talking to no one but himself. The shuttle is a silver blizzard of alloy, twisted structural members, wings, canards, tumbling cargo drums, all spinning toward a final engagement with the Pacific hidden under the vast swirl of cloud below. Pony Express banks over the metal storm, its engines cycling down toward green, and begins its long descent toward Nevada.

  Cowboy feels his neurotransmitter hail begin to slacken. He flips a mental switch and fires a quick-burst transmission toward Nevada. “This is Cowboy. Mission accomplished. You may applaud at will.”

  “No time to cheer, Cowboy.” It’s Reno’s waterlogged voice. “Everyone’s too busy right now. Would you like to listen in?”

  “So long as you keep that white-brained pederast out of my head,” Cowboy says.

  “I don’t think he wants to talk to you anyway. He seemed kind of upset.”

  Pony Express stoops like a hawk over the Mojave, shedding speed as it loses altitude. Reno cuts him into the commo net and suddenly his mind is a babble of voices. The Dodger’s people in the West, the Hetman in the East, and Roon’s people everywhere are all feeding news releases to the interface screamsheets. “Tempel Cure Down in Flames.” “No Relief for Sufferers of Viral Huntington’s. ” That’s the first news.

  Then the news reports begin to target on specific screamsheets. NewsFax receives a report that the Tempel flight was shot down. Seconds is told the Tempel shuttle was sabotaged. MedNews gets reports that the cure might have had unforeseen side effects, that all the Tempel money went down the drain. MarkReps receives a report that Tempel is overextended in its takeover bid, a report fleshed out with a lot of Roon-generated statistics. MedNews gets confirmation from a “high Tempel official” that the Huntington’s cure was worthless. NewsFax receives an “unconfirmed report” that Tempel sabotaged its own shuttle in order to prevent the news about the cure from Leaking.

  While the reports storm into the screamsheet offices, Roon, the Dodger, and Michael are beginning to dump Tempel stock on the Chicago exchange. The sell orders are laundered through a few hundred robobrokers, concealing the fact they’re coming from only a few sources. The robobrokers are monitoring the screamsheet traffic and “Tempel” is coming up a lot. Red lights begin to wink on the computer decks of the robobroker’s human supervisors. News about the sell orders hits the screamsheets, and the panic begins.

  Temper stock falls, triggering automatic sell orders from thousands of automated brokers. Nervous stockholders jitter to their monitors. Tempel had been hovering at 4,500 when Cowboy’s miniguns began hammering the shuttle, now it’s down by nearly 800. Screamsheet stories reflect Tempel’s lack of capital reserves, its research budget wasted on a useless cure, the rumors of the self-sabotage, the possibilities that there will be no dividend this year or the next. Michael and the Dodger feed the panic with a continuous round of small sell orders. The market goes crazy.

  Pony Express whispers across the Nevada line, a black cursor descending, like a graph of the values of Tempel shares. More warning lights flash in Chicago. Tempel execs are denying the screamsheet reports, but no one believes Orbitals anyway, and all it does is feed the rumors. Tempel shares have lost 56 percent of their value in about twelve minutes. Chicago exchange officials begin feeling heat from outside the well, and trading in Tempel stock is frozen “pending confirmation of outside reports.”

  That only fuels the action elsewhere. Roon dumps large blocks of stock onto the Osaka and Singapore exchanges. Tempel shares are falling so fast in Mombasa that Roon doesn’t even need to interfere there. In Osaka, Tempel is down under 900 before trading is shut off on orders from the Exchange Master Program. Singapore doesn’t follow the regs and Tempel continues to decline.

  The Orbital begins its response, declaring an immediate 5-percent dividend. The plunge begins to slow as Pony Express begins to circle its base. People are beginning to look more carefully at the rumors. Roon tries to counter by ordering a screamsheet report that Tempel can’t pay its declared dividend, that all its capital is tied up in the Korolev bid. The United Orbital Soviet announces the combined pharmaceutical bloc is funding Tempel’s dividend, which appears simultaneously with Couceiro’s personal announcement that Tempel is divesting itself of all Korolev stock, that the takeover bid is concluded unsuccessfully, but that all profits will be used to guarantee the dividend. With the dividend guaranteed by two different sources, Tempel stock begins to stagger upward. Michael tries more screamsheet rumors, but people are thinking twice about any more unsubstantiated Tempel stories.

  A cold pulse moves over the net, firing at the speed of light from Roon’s big crystal AI. Cowboy cringes at the sound, tastes a phantom foulness in his mask. “We’ve hit bottom. Start buying. We’ll sell at fifteen hundred and hope we catch a profit-taking storm and drive it down again.”

  Cowboy rotates the delta’s exhaust, hovering over the Nevada desert. Buy orders swarm out through the robobrokers. Tempel’s recovery is faster than its collapse. At 1,500, sell orders go out again, but there are more eager buyers than sellers. Prices hover uncertainly for a few seconds as profits are taken, but there is another announcement from Couceiro.

  The reserve supply of the Huntington’s cure will be brought down from orbit within days, accompanied by Orbital cutters to prevent attack. The screamsheets begin printing releases about the safety and effectiveness of the cure. Prices roar upward.

  The Chicago exchange reopens trading in Tempel at 2,000. The Dodger and Michael have exhausted their available funds. The proxy from every piece of stock they’ve acquired is sent at once to Roon in Venezuela. Pony Express hovers over its pad, slipping toward the ground as its landing gear slides smoothly out of its fairings, as Tempel prices seem to stabilize around 3,000.

  The ground crew runs for the delta, carrying their camouflage net. Cold despair gnaws at Cowboy’s heart. The message that Roon sends through the network only serves to confirm Cowboy’s intuition.

  “Your proxies are not enough to force Couceiro out. If I demanded a stockholders’ vote at this stage, I would only call attention to my part in this.”

  “Gutless bastard!” Cowboy shrieks. Pain burns in his awakening limbs.

  “I can try to change some minds on the board, but I suspect Couceiro will have gathered more admiration than enmity for his work today. I suggest we take our profits and consider it a lesson.”

  “Afraid to make yourself a target, Roon?” Cowboy demands. “Afraid to play your games with grownups?”

  “He’s out of the net,” Reno reports. “He can’t hear you. ”

  “I should have killed him when I had the chance,” Cowboy says. He unstraps,
pulls off his helmet. Sweat trickles down his forehead. The canopy rises with an electronic whine. Desert heat takes his breath away, even with the camouflage netting occluding the sun. He feels the crystal in his head burning, his anger a roaring combustion in his heart.

  “Don’t start breaking down the net,” Cowboy says. “We’re going to need it. I’ll explain later.” He unfaces and stands in the cockpit, legging down the ladder as hands rise to his, assistance.

  The headquarters here is a bubble tent draped in camouflage nets. Fuel trucks and a pair of panzers stand nearby, wavering in the heat. Helmet in his hand, Cowboy stalks into the tent.

  Sarah meets him at the doorway. He sees a stricken look, eyes shadowed by despair. There’s a red crease across her forehead from the headset she was wearing when she was, tied into the net. She reaches out, wraps him in her arms. Cowboy lurches to a stop. She presses her cheek to his neck.

  “We almost did it,” she says. “We came so close.”

  “It’s not over,” Cowboy says. “Where’s the Dodger? I don’t want the net closed down.” She pulls back and looks at him. “What are you talking about?”

  “We have a lot more stock now, we made a big profit. We’re in a lot stronger position.” Sarah shakes her head. “What good is it? We don’t–– ”

  Cool air blows fitfully against Cowboy’s forehead. The g-suit seems to clutch at him, dragging him down the well.

  “I shot them down once,” he says. “I’ll do it again.”

  For a moment Sarah seems suspended in time, her face a mask of shock. “The escorts. They’ll have escorts this time.”

  “Fuck the escorts.” He takes her hand and leads her through the big bubble tent, toward the comet section set up in the rear. The Dodger sits there amid the ruin of the plan, the communications gear being broken down, the Flash Force specialists watching the bustle with cool professional interest. Cowboy thinks he’s never seen the Dodger look so old.