Tyger Burning

by T. C. McCarthy

  Something pinged all of his feelers now. His semi-aware threw up walls and traps as fast as it could while a portion of it examined the decompression bomb to see if it was of any use. Maung powered up the capacitor again. Now he watched a visualization of what approached, a black mist that slipped in from every side, like nothing he’d seen before and he barely had time to activate the bomb before making his final escape. The bomb wrapped the mist in streams of energy, making much of it disappear.

  Maung’s system calculated that the mist was probably a creeper. A fragment of it—so small that it must represent only a few lines of code—grew nearby and Maung considered something that he never would have under different circumstances. A millisecond later he had the creeper fragment, stored in his wetware, in a sector isolated from the rest of his brain to keep it trapped. In such a small space it could only grow so much.

  Maung cut loose. He shut down and jerked the cable from her head before pausing, listening to his breathing as he went over every inch of his semi-aware, then did it again before he was satisfied that nothing followed him down the cable and that his captive, the creeper, was well contained.

  Nam shone a light in his eyes. “You OK?”

  “Yeah. A little thirsty. How much time do we have?”

  “Not much,” said Than. “We’re reading about ten minutes until the outermost nanos reach us.”

  “That means you have three minutes,” said Nam. “What did you learn?”

  “A creeper. The Sommen used a creeper that hit these people internally at the same time the Sommen attacked them physically. I can’t think of a worse way to go.”

  “What’s a creeper?”

  “It’s like a virus,” said Maung, “but instead of hitting programs immediately, it exists alone on the first network it infects and takes its time to analyze the environment. It’s a complex code, almost semi-aware. Once it gets a handle on the host it makes changes slowly, so the infected don’t know they’re infected and the thing doesn’t replicate. It sends subroutines out to other users who access the main system, and in that way it infects them with backdoor access points, viruses, whatever it needs to collect a host of slave computers and then convert the entire thing into one big super-aware, spread out over a wide geographic area and ready to do the bidding of whoever owns the creeper. If it had succeeded, these people would have been made virtual slaves.”

  Nam backed away from the bodies. “The Sommen are beyond evil.”

  “I don’t know,” said Maung. “I don’t think the Sommen thought it was evil. This was . . . different. In examining it quickly I got the sense from its code that the creeper is just something they do to anyone who merges with machines.”

  “Can we just go?” Than asked. “I don’t even know what this all means but it scares the crap out of me; let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Before they could leave, Nam reached behind Maung’s helmet and deactivated the microbots, waiting a moment before pulling the cable off and stuffing it with the others in his bag. Maung stood. At first he almost fell, the exhaustion from linking up more than he expected, but he found his balance and bounced toward the wall stations.

  “Not yet,” said Maung. “Now we know the Americans had their own Dream Warrior project going, maybe before the Chinese, and yet we never saw them use it on the battlefield. But they must have; otherwise how could they have defeated us, and how did we never see signs of it? And we still don’t know what this place was, Nam, or where the creeper came from; that must be information the Old Man can use. Five more minutes?”

  “You’re crazy.” Nam said nothing for a moment, then reached for Maung’s shoulder. “I can let you have two; that’s it. We really have to go soon; I’m not messing around—Old Man or not.”

  It took Maung over a minute to find a wall port that worked. By the time Nam plugged him in he estimated he had less than twenty seconds and Maung told them to pull the plug if they had to, then closed his eyes and submerged into the darkness of a mainframe, one long dead and whose fibers and superconductors were so compromised that it seemed like every path was a dead end. Maung wrote a routine to automate the search. He created copies of programs that ran feelers down every route until they found one he had a chance of following, but the process was risky. If he hit a creeper with one, these wouldn’t be able to alert him to the weapon’s presence so he needed to move fast. All but one reported back negative; Maung pinged it and waited, but still nothing came back.

  The lack of any signal puzzled Maung. His systems operated so that even a dead line created a detectable echo but then he kicked himself for forgetting: The only power came from him. So it was possible that on a good line his signal weakened to the point where it couldn’t report back, meaning that path was still open and intact for a long distance, but too far to receive a response. He followed it eagerly, almost forgetting to lay traps and alarms at each branch off the main trunk so he wouldn’t get stuck.

  Something took shape ahead. In the electronic darkness, a visualization of the lifeless system in gray upon gray, one line faintly glowed pink. It was barely there. At first Maung thought his system had made a mistake, created an artifact, but he moved off the main line and after branching a few times stumbled onto a live conduit—this one propagating its waves at almost half the normal speed, a fact that puzzled him for a moment until he grasped they’d used coaxial cable. Maung almost laughed. From the spectra it was clearly copper and the speed of propagation was spot-on for coax but he’d never encountered the stuff in his entire life and he could only imagine what Nam must have thought now that a smile crossed his face. He stifled his amusement and edged into the line, probing the electron flow and wave traffic simultaneously.

  Who are you? something asked.

  Maung almost withdrew. But the question was a challenge and he tracked American feelers on every side of him, their wave patterns barely overlapping with his but moving at the speed of light—on superconductors. They weren’t there a moment ago. His semi-aware warned him in a whisper: This is a threat.

  Maung almost froze in terror when he realized he’d stepped right into a trap: His main wave patterns had moved onto an ancient coaxial zone that moved at half the speed of his adversary. If he needed to retreat, there would be a moment of agonizing slowness as if trying to flee through quicksand, making him vulnerable.

  Maung responded, his message flowing outward in bands of color along with the old code he used earlier. “Someone with the proper credentials.”

  You aren’t authorized.

  “Wait. Before you act you need to know; your system is dead. The facility inside which you were constructed is destroyed and the Sommen slaughtered all authorized to use it; check your chronometer. You know it’s been a long time and you know that something catastrophic occurred. I’m part of the salvage team sent here to investigate what happened.”

  There was a flurry of wave motion, but it soon settled back into its original pattern. I know of the Sommen attack. They came soon after we were hit with a creeper and I was assigned the task of backing up key data in an area they or the infection would never look—

  “Maintenance and waste handling,” he interrupted. Maung knew that it was setting up a wall behind him and he winced when his timer went off—the two minute mark. With what he was about to try, he hoped Nam was ready to pull the plug in case he failed. “You disguised yourself as waste handling and had microbots set the entry line as coax with air-gapped superconductor channels you can bridge with mechanical actuators. What was this place? What were the American Dream—what were the humans assigned here for?”

  Maung wanted to wait for the answer but couldn’t; the thing’s trap was almost ready. He launched himself at the exit but before Maung got halfway there the strange system had almost an infinite number of cycles to attack and his electron stream disintegrated, picked apart by bursts of focused magnetic fields, each one ripping through to the point where he had trouble keeping track of who and where he was. Once
he reached the trap, Maung almost stopped to examine it; he had forgotten his purpose. The bursts became more intense, forcing his electrons to merge with the greater environment but before the trap closed a portion of his consciousness reassembled. Maung leapt back onto the superconductor and reconnected with his main signal to tear off, retreating so fast he couldn’t drop feelers behind him. He mentally screamed at Nam, Unplug me now!

  “Damn it!” Maung shouted. It was as if a saw cut through his head and he clapped both hands to the sides of his helmet.

  “Two minutes,” said Nam. “I said two minutes. I had to unplug you, the nanos are almost here and could cut off our escape.”

  “I’m not complaining, Nam; you may have saved my life.”

  Than picked Maung up and the three of them started bounding toward the line, the one leading upward toward the air-handling system through which they had entered. Maung resisted the urge to pass out. His head pounded and he ran a full diagnostic before shutting down, just to make sure that there was nothing permanently damaged, but he couldn’t feel his extremities and guessed he was on the verge of losing consciousness.

  “What did you learn?” Nam asked.

  He was about to tell everything when he stopped; holding onto the information about a backup storage site for the entire dataset for the American project might be useful one day, and he was tired of Nam holding all the cards.

  “Nothing,” Maung lied. “I didn’t learn a damn thing, but almost got caught by an American trap. It was useless.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  They reached the line and climbed. Halfway to the top Maung looked down and had the sensation of being in the middle of a black world, with darkness on every side and in which he was the only thing that existed other than the cord, which was the only thing that promised him a reconnection with civilization. And his semi-aware was still active; he was on the verge of switching off when it alerted him about an incoming transmission, tight-beam, coded for his reception only. The abnormality of it made him shiver. Nobody except the Sommen nanos should have known his position and to transmit on these codes was impossible for anyone except other Dream Warriors, and he admitted the message only after setting up his defenses; the structural interference filled it with static but he understood the words, just before he shut down his entire system.

  “Hello brother.”

  Maung relaxed when they reached the access panel. He looked back. Nam brought up the rear this time and the man paused to fumble with something that he then dropped into the chamber below.

  “What is that?” Maung asked.

  “A transmitter that mimics your emission pattern for one hour—to give the nanos a target—and if you haven’t switched off, now would be a good time.”

  “I did. Nam, I just received a transmission; it was from the Chinese. They must have a ship nearby for the signal to have had the strength to pass through all this crap.”

  “Great,” Nam said. “This is turning into an awful day.”

  “Why the Chinese?” Than asked.

  “We had a run in with them at Europa. One of them got away and must have told its superiors about me.”

  Nam pushed him upward. “Move, Maung. Hurry.”

  The return trip lasted forever. By the end of it, Maung could barely move his arms from the effort of dragging himself through the tight passages, and he was so tired he almost failed to notice the bright lights that hit when Than popped the exit hatch. Maung’s visor dimmed to compensate, and he pulled himself out, wobbling on cramped legs and angry because he just wanted to go to bed but now couldn’t. The Sunny Side team had arrived and gathered outside the access port, waiting for Nam to extract himself before one of them spoke.

  “Are you the last one, Nam?”

  Maung recognized the man; it was the Korean guard who insulted him in front of Nang on Sunny Side. Nam chuckled. “Yeah. Last one.”

  “I told you to stay put in your barracks; that Sommen area, the site, is restricted until the Americans show.”

  “You’re not on Sunny, kala.” Nam popped his helmet and stepped closer to the Korean guard. “I go where I want on Dark Side. My side.”

  “We’ll see what the Americans say, dumb ass.”

  Maung had a flash of admiration for Nam. He seemed undaunted by the Korean or his guards, and Maung popped his helmet, about to give Nam support when one caught his attention—a guard at the rear of the Korean group. A woman stepped to the side so Maung could see more clearly and he held his breath. It was Nang. He couldn’t see much of her through the bulk of her environment suit, but her hair was in a ponytail and her smile made him warm.

  “Hi, Maung,” she said.

  Maung nodded. “Nang. If the Americans won’t be here for a while, what are you guys doing here?”

  “Hey, it’s the new Burmese,” the Korean guard said, holding up his hand to keep Nang from speaking. He stepped between them and poked a finger at Maung. “We’re here for security—to prevent you from messing things up.”

  Maung clenched his fists and was about to grab for the man when Nam stepped forward again and snatched the Korean’s finger, snapping it like a twig. The man screamed. The Sunny Side guards lifted weapons and Maung’s rage disappeared to be replaced with fear until other Myanmar guards arrived, gathering and pointing their weapons at the Koreans.

  Maung nodded at the injured one. “That must hurt, kala.”

  “Screw you!”

  Nam, Maung and Than joined with the other Burmese and filtered back through the passageways, heading for the barracks. Maung could barely hold his helmet. His eyes closed and his head ached so badly that he wore a constant grimace. Once they arrived he said good-bye to the others and made the climb to his cubicle, not bothering to de-suit before crashing into a deep sleep.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  There is no way to get anywhere near the site, Than said.

  Maung’s eyes snapped all the way open. He’d fallen asleep on watch and waited for Nam to scold him, but the old man just nodded.

  “Welcome back,” Nam said,

  “What day is this?” asked Maung. “How long has it been since I linked up with the dead woman?”

  Than lounged in a couch, watching the holo-display of his drifters, and flicking through the camera selections to make sure they worked. He glanced up and asked “What?” so Maung had to repeat himself.

  “A few days, Earth time,” said Than. “Long time. And congratulations; we thought you’d never wake up.”

  Maung shook his head. “I feel like a truck ran over me. I never had it this bad, just because someone unplugged me.”

  “Nah, it’s probably not just that, Pa; the bone-density drugs are hell. You get hammered at first, even though you’ve been at zero g for however long it takes for your ship to get here. The meds, the transition from Earth g, to zero g, to low g—it’s way too much for people to handle. Then you went and did all that Dream Warrior stuff, Pa.”

  Nam nodded. “We’ve been dragging you here during your watches and let you sleep through.”

  But Maung ignored the old man and looked at Than. “You called me Pa.” he said.

  “Yeah.” Than shrugged. “Guess I did.”

  Pa. It was a term of respect and Maung noticed that Than’s head bowed when he spoke and that his eyes focused on the floor, not on him. Pa was for holy men, for the pure, and Maung shuddered to think that some viewed him this way; they wouldn’t, he suspected, if they knew how many people he’d slaughtered in the war.

  “Everyone calls you that, Maung. Pa-Maung.”

  Maung sat up at the implication. “Do they know? Does everyone know what I am?”

  Than waved him away. “Nah, Pa. Relax. They just see the way that Nam treats you and they see something—like you’re special. But nobody knows the real deal. We’re Burmese, dude. Take it easy, you’re with your own people and it’s safe.”

  Maung settled back into his seat, slowly bouncing up and down with every movement of his arms or leg
s. The red dots looked like a disease. Measles. It was hard to focus on the faint blue lines of the structures, massive buildings that probably took only a few years to erect but which would take decades to disassemble, and which consumed so many valuable resources—resources that people had killed for on Earth. It was a monument to military power, now disintegrating, but even in decline the enormity of it filled him with awe.

  There was no order in the data. Maung couldn’t make heads or tails of all that had happened and he closed his eyes to concentrate on the creeper, the Chinese, the Sommen and American Dream Warriors and most of all the structure, within which the Americans fought one last battle against a Sommen onslaught. Tears formed in his eyes. Maung struggled to contain his emotion because he wanted to keep from fogging his visor but without his semi-aware his mind threatened to give in, unable to interpret the complexity.