by James Luceno
A rotund man of medium height, Bulkroad had somewhat blunt features and a paunch he wore proudly beneath a tunic of medieval design. His melon of a head was completely hairless, and his hands were stubby and thick-fingered. The deep-red walls of the room he inhabited were adorned with priceless works of art and ancient weapons. Bookcases, suits of armor, and pieces of classic furniture surrounded a hand-woven rug of exotic design. Rare-metal sculptures and artifacts of extinct civilizations rested atop marble pedestals, and a gilded chandelier hung from the center of a vaulted ceiling.
The journal excerpt was from a speech Bulkroad had delivered a decade earlier to a gathering of corporation CEOs and world leaders.
“The Virtual Network offers vast opportunities for business and pleasure, and I am determined to see Peerless Engineering take the lead in opening this realm to the world at large. It is a matter of being able to provide a suitable and affordable operating system for the new class of enhanced cybersystems that are already in vogue. As regards the Network itself, we will expand in all directions to house a cityscape of virtual constructs, which Peerless is now leasing to corporations, governments, universities, and a multitude of specialinterest groups. This is the ‘unreal estate’ of the future.”
Felix shifted his view from Bulkroad to objects in the background, many of which were interactive as indicated by pop-up menus. By clicking on an interactive item—certain texts, sculptures, or furnishings—a description of the item could be obtained, along with information regarding how and when the item had become part of Bulkroad's extensive collection.
Although not indicated on the menu—but known to Cyrus and now Felix, the small coat of arms embroidered on Bulkroad's medieval tunic was also interactive. Purposely inserted by Peerless programmers, the family emblem provided access to the code that supported the entire digital-video presentation.
Felix targeted the coat of arms and blinked his right eye.
Instantly he was delivered into a completely different space—a world of zeros and ones that constituted the language of all computers, thinking or otherwise. But it was in the spaces between the zeroes and ones that Cyrus’ missing part was hidden.
Felix immediately began to highlight and drag the scattered fragments into a folder he and Cyrus had created before Felix had entered Peerless. Since he wasn't pilfering or duplicating essential code, the contents of the folder wouldn't be detected by the copyright sentinels who presided over the database. On emerging from the castle, Felix would transfer the folder to Cyrus, who in turn would presumably drag it back to his octagon and perform whatever collating or organizing was necessary to restore himself to full, or fuller, function.
Felix concentrated on his task. He tried to keep from imagining what repercussions his actions might have to the journal entry itself. Suddenly, however, and with less than five hundred gigabytes of code remaining to be pasted into the folder, he was dragged back into the digital video.
The room was dramatically altered.
Parts were missing from the furnishings—carved legs, cushions, drawers, or pieces of armor—and in several cases items had vanished entirely, leaving bright-white blemishes in the video. Skander Bulkroad's thick lips were moving out of sequence with what he was supposed to be saying. The phrases, in any case, sounded like processed babble. The puffy face of Peerless's CEO was frozen in an expression of either pain or outrage. Degraded, the deep-red wall behind him resembled the leaping flames of a bonfire or funeral pyre.
Bulkroad's rheumy eyes seemed to be staring directly at Felix when a monstrous creature, black as midnight, oozed from the room's deteriorated walls and pounced, gobbling up Felix's beetle craft as if it were a midday snack.
“What's he doing?” Tech asked, ceasing his pacing to peer over Marz's shoulder at one of the monitor screens.
“He's still in the library, but he doesn't seem to be moving,” Marz said, staring at the screen in incredulity.
“Are you sure you have him?” Tech growled.
“Yeah, I'm sure.”
Tech gritted his teeth and shook his head back and forth. “Something's wrong. If he'd finished retrieving everything, he'd be long gone from the database by now. I told him not to do this.”
“We could try to hail him,” Isis suggested from the other side of the console.
“You think that's safe?” Marz asked. “We don't want to blow his cover.”
Tech paced through a quick circle. “Do it,” he said finally.
Marz enabled the communications program and brought the headset microphone closer to his mouth. “Felix? Felix?”
“We're not getting through to him,” Isis said after a moment.
Tech hurried to the dentist's chair and bent over Felix's reclined body. Isis joined him there.
“His breathing's too fast,” Tech said worriedly.
“Like he's having a nightmare or something.”
Marz gulped audibly. “That's the way Harwood sounded.”
Isis reached for the eyephones. “Should I pull him out?”
“No!” Tech blurted. “Don't touch anything.”
The videophone chimed and Tech rushed to grab the call.
“Tech,” the AI started to say.
“Cyrus, what's going on? Felix isn't moving.”
“Scaum has him,” Cyrus said dolefully. “I don't understand how it became aware of what Felix was doing, but Scaum most certainly has him.”
Tech ran for the couch, extending one hand to Isis. “Quick, give me a visor.”
“What are you planning to do?”
“I've got to reach Felix before Scaum does to him what it did to Harwood!”
“You'll never be able to get to Peerless in time,” Isis said, even while she helped him slip his feet into the redesigned ski boots.
“Maybe not by the usual routes,” Tech said, slipping on the shades, “but I know a shortcut.” He glanced at Marz. “You still have the course Harwood and I took through the delivery entrance?”
“Of course I have it. What do you want to fly?”
Tech thought for a moment while Isis checked the fit of the headset, visor, vest, and boots. “No point in being low-key. Give me the DB5. Max her up, bro.”
Marz nodded soberly. “You got it—bro.
” “Once I'm inside the construct, you can direct me to the database.”
Tech ran a finger across the sleek visor. But before it went active, Isis took Tech's face between her hands. “Hurry back, Tech. I'll be waiting for you.”
Chapter 14
Tech called on the power of the enhanced cybersystem to propel the silver Aston Martin DB5 down the Ribbon. Narrow-bodied and low-slung, the armored cybercraft gleamed like a newly forged sword.
He told himself that instead of flaunting the DB5's power he should imitate Harwood's careful and precise style, but his hands and feet refused to yield to caution. Right foot heavy on the accelerator pedal, he wove in and out of traffic, illegal detector and stealth programs enabled to alert him to the presence of speed traps, roving enforcement, or anything else that might delay him.
The grid was gaudy with flashing lights and busy with Saturday-night surfers cruising the chat rooms and role-playing arenas for cute meets. Tech was no stranger to those places, but they felt suddenly alien to him. He wasn't a cyberjockey now, hell-bent on placing first in the arenas or demonstrating his mad skills at Network flirtation. What days earlier had been a virtual playground had since become a realm in which good and evil did battle, and the lives of friends and loved ones could be forfeit.
The Peerless Castle soared into view at the far end of the Ribbon, with tens of thousands of flyers queued up, awaiting access. As he and Harwood had done on their joint run, Tech steered himself west. But he hadn't gone a block when he decided that even that approach was too meandering.
Impatience overcame him once again.
“I need a more direct course to the delivery entrance,” he told Marz and Isis. “Use Turbo seven point five, and whate
ver shortcuts you can find.”
“Could make for a bumpy ride,” his brother warned.
“Hit me!”
“Okay, hotshot,” Isis said. “You want speed, you got it.”
Tech had scarcely relaxed his grip on the joystick when they assumed control of his craft and whipped him through an abrupt left-hand turn and down a near-vertical chute. At the bottom of the chute, the route became an undulating ascent that tossed Tech around like a kayak in class-five white water.
Dead ahead lay a shopping mall, but Marz and Isis didn't even bother to reduce his speed as they took him through the congested entrance. Shoppers and browsers were knocked aside as he mowed a path down the center of a broad corridor, streaking past stores, kiosks, and waterfall and fountain effects. Public-safety programs took shape in his wake, but before they could so much as mount an organized pursuit, the DB5 was outside the mall and plummeting toward the dolphin-crowned entry gates of the National Aquarium.
Beyond the gates lay the spherical construct that housed the aquarium itself. Notices reading SINGLE-FILE ONLY were posted at the base of a wide ramp that coiled around the virtual tank, but Tech's navigators paid the notices no mind. Taking the DB5 headlong through the gates, they whipped Tech up onto the ramp, creating their own passing lane as they corkscrewed him toward the top.
Tech was making great progress until they lost control of him halfway to the summit. Sent crashing into the ramp's curved retaining wall, the DB5 rebounded directly into the spherical fish tank, erasing a virtual stretch of coral reef in his passing. Two sting rays, a hammerhead shark, and an entire school of angelfish unlucky enough to be in his path also vanished from sight.
With thousands of tiny effervescent bubbles marking his trail through the sea-green water, Tech burst from the top of the tank like a submarine-launched missile, dispersing a crowd of frequent flyers who were clustered at the entrance to an interactive news magazine. Spinning out of control, Tech made a sudden grab for the joystick, but he was a second too late. The DB5 skidded through a wall of the People magazine construct and immediately collided with the best-dressed actress of the year, ridding her of her head. Then it went on to rip a gaping hole in the construct's download pro gram, scrambling the magazine's audio-video feeds to countless subscribers.
Careening back onto the grid, Tech found himself so close to Peerless Engineering that its western ramparts, towers, and bartizans overwhelmed the visor.
In the Network's false evening, searchlights at the base of the castle played across the simulated darkness as if on the lookout for attacks by squadrons of enemy bombers. Tech was struck by how formidable Peerless’ construct suddenly appeared—more unassailable fortress than fairy-tale castle.
Vising his hands on the joystick, he dove the DB5 for the buttressed base of the construct. The delivery entrances came into view, perforating the walls of the ramparts like the mouths of caves.
Inbound messages and transfers destined for different areas of the dungeon were jammed at every entrance. The snarl of messages was insignificant compared to what he and Harwood had encountered days earlier, but Tech wasn't about to wait his turn in line.
“I can try flagging you ‘Urgent,’ ” Marz said, even before Tech could ask for help. “That'll get you to the gate ahead of the rest, but not necessarily past the security scanners inside.”
“Do it,” Tech said. “Just be sure to have Harwood's map running by the time I enter the routing corridors.”
“It's loading now,” Isis assured him.
Tech's priority status allowed him to move through the messages in front of him as if they had lost all presence. But traffic supervisors started scanning the DB5 almost immediately, and finding no listing for it, they began to lower the gate. Fusillades of minimizing code streaked upward from anti-cybercraft-security emplacements at the base of the mount.
Anticipating fire, Tech enabled the Aston Martin's concealed forward guns and answered the fusillades with broad beams of dazzler code. Demanding increased power from his cybercraft, he stunned the gate with a logic bomb and shot under it before it could secure the entrance. Panicked that a virus had infiltrated the firewalled perimeter, Peerless instantly deployed a flight of antiviral and chase programs, some of which resembled fletched arrows bearing trefoil tips. At the same time, gargoyle-tracker programs materialized to all sides, determined to get a fix on Tech's identity before he could penetrate any deeper into the construct.
Obstacles began to appear in his path. Barricades rose from the floor, blast doors dropped from the ceiling, and tufts of inward-facing spikes sprouted from the walls. Tunnels narrowed and intersections sealed themselves in an effort to steer him into a cache bin. But as fast as the defenses could be activated, Tech neutralized them with bursts of forward fire. His closest pursuers he threw off track with rear sprays of slick go-to code.
By then he had already entered the labyrinth of routing tunnels that undermined the Peerless mountain. Now all he had to do was negotiate the maze in one piece and undetected.
“Tech, Peerless is issuing a construct-wide intrusion alert,” Marz said suddenly. “You need a new identity, and fast.”
“Delete my priority status and flag me as a standard request,” Tech said. “That should keep some of the trackers from sniffing me out.”
“I'll handle that,” Isis said.
Tech managed to worm the DB5 around two more gates, but he was forced to corrupt two others by triggering hyphens of code from Harwood's Armor program—a surefire method of calling attention to himself.
“Security checkpoint coming up on your right,” Isis updated. “Virus-detection and identity scanners.”
Tech shot past the checkpoint without slowing down. Security nodes began to take shape, clogging the tunnels like plaque in an artery. Intent on discovering a route around them, Tech zigzagged through a series of hairpin turns only to end up losing his bearings.
“I've lost sight of Harwood's markers,” he said in a rush.
“Left at the next intersection, then straight through two more,” Marz responded a second later. “Up one level, and an immediate right-hand turn into routing colonnade 475.”
Tech tried to blank his mind to everything but the sound of Marz's voice, to make himself a machine answering only to his brother's prompts. He stopped thinking about the danger Felix was in or about just what he was going to do when he reached him.
He lost all sense of himself in a blur of intersections, mail drops, relays, and routing switches that flashed on his visor. He went into game mode, letting his instincts guide him as he hurtled deeper and deeper into the maze, still following Harwood's music-note markers. He was dimly aware that he had to be nearing the castle's central tower when Isis affirmed it.
“Tech, you're under the castle keep. On your right is a transfer chute that links to the database. The chute is reserved for incoming requests from researchers petitioning for access to the library, so we're renaming you.”
“Is Skeleton Key still running?” Tech asked.
“Slowly,” Marz replied. “If you want, I can boost it by shutting down Blueprint.”
“Do it.”
Tech slipped the DB5 into a line of requests being shunted to the library. Scanners were scrutinizing every petition. With his description altered, however, none of the scanners recognized him as the counterfeit incoming message security was chasing.
“We're giving you the access code Felix was given,” Isis reported. “That should trick the librarian into thinking that you are Felix. Tell the librarian that you want to return to the same journal entry Felix chose.”
“Sounds good,” Tech said.
What he did next would depend on what awaited him inside the journal. If good fortune was with him, he would be able to piggyback Felix to safety without engaging Scaum in a showdown.
But he knew that he needed to be prepared for the worst.
Without warning, the DB5 screeched to a dead stop.
“I'm stalled.
What happened?”
“The database is shut down! Access denied.” Tech muttered a curse. “There has to be another way in.”
“Don't hang there,” Isis relayed. “Go to the main lobby. You'll be harder to single out in the public areas.”
Tech saw the wisdom of it, though there was no way the DB5 would be able to blend in with the sports-utility vehicles weekend drivers liked to pilot; so instead he headed for the reception hall. A domed atrium, the spacious room was bustling with visitors scarfing up video and sound bytes for who knew what reason. Some of them might have been kids doing school projects or novice hackers looking for ways to infiltrate Peerless.
“What's taking you guys so long?” Tech asked while he tried to lose himself in the crowd.
“Hang on,” Marz said.
“Can you find your way to the visitors’ waiting area near the main-entry gate?” Isis interrupted.
“That's the opposite direction of where I want to be.”
“Just off the waiting area is a gallery of photographs and video images.”
“How's that going to get me any closer to the database?”
“Some of the photographs are interactive,” Isis explained. “If we can hack into the code level, we might be able to discover a link to the database that bypasses the librarian.”
Tech was already in motion, whirling the Aston around and peeling for the gallery. The walls of the gallery were lined with images of Skander Bulkroad posing with politicians and celebrities. There was live video transmitted from the company's headquarters in the real world, as well as from Peerless's orbital platform.
“The photo of Bulkroad holding an early-model data visor,” Isis said.
“I'm looking at it now,” Tech said.
“In the background is a house with a bunch of curved-top windows. You want the third window from the left.”
“It links to some of the journal entries,” Marz chimed in. “Hand off control to us so we can route you through.”
Tech took his hands from the joystick and eased up on the pedals. “Righteous.”
The word had scarcely left his mouth when he found himself scurrying through code scrolls. Dizzying arrays of numbers and characters paraded before his eyes. Then, just as suddenly, the DB5 was inside what little remained of a room with red walls. Shot through with black-rimmed holes, the room resembled a negative that had been burned by a projector bulb. The ceiling was arched and black, and pressed against its highest point was Felix's tiny beetle craft.