Fatal Error rj-13

by F. Paul Wilson

Nelson Ferron's grin shone through his thick white beard as he turned off the network broadcast he'd recorded. The attack on the data center was all over the news.

  "Hear that? My babies worked like a charm."

  Hank nodded and decided the fat Dormentalist deserved some props.

  "Yeah. Those guns made crispy critters of the servers. You did good."

  And what was better, their use of EMP had really shaken things up. All the on-air experts were wringing their hands at the "dire implications" of this sort of attack.

  "Yes," Drexler said from the far end of the table. "Excellent work."

  "What about me?" said Kewan, the fourth attendee around the basement table. "I'm the guy who ran the show. I took out that transatlantic cable."

  "You surely did," Hank said. "But you got yourself caught on that cell phone. Not good."

  He rolled his eyes. "Can't help that. If y'gonna be on the street, there's always that chance. Everybody got phones." He turned to Ferron. "Hey, can't you make a bigger EMP thing?"

  Ferron shrugged. "Of course. How big?"

  "One big enough so we don't have to show our faces or risk getting nabbed. Something that can fry those circuits from a distance, or zap the whole city in one shot."

  "Not possible-at least with existing technology. That would take a nuclear explosion."

  "I didn't say blow the place up-"

  Hank had heard this before but he didn't mind listening again. The subject fascinated him.

  "You wouldn't have to," Ferron said. "You'd detonate the bomb outside the atmosphere. In fact, the higher the better. Set one off thirty miles above Lebanon, Kansas, and you-"

  "Why there?" Kewan said.

  "It's the belly button of the lower forty-eight. Right smack in the center. Explode a nuke thirty miles over that and you toast all the circuitry in the Midwest. Set it off three hundred miles up, and you take out all of North and most of Central America."

  Kewan's eyes lit. "You mean the whole country would be an Internet-free zone? Let's do it!"

  Hank shook his head. That had been his own reaction. Then he'd learned that more than the Internet would be affected. "We'd also be cell phone-free and car-free, plus-"

  "Wait. What you mean, car and phone free?"

  "Well, cell phones use the same kind of chips as computers, and all modern cars have onboard computers."

  "Right," Ferron said. "If you had a vintage car with original equipment, you might keep that going, but you'd have trouble finding a working gas pump because there'd be no electricity."

  Kewan frowned. "Why not?"

  "Because the EMP would also toast the power grid." Ferron snapped his fingers. "Like that we'd be back in the eighteenth century."

  "Okaaaay," Kewan said slowly. "Let's not do that."

  Hank knew that the Change was coming soon, bringing the Others back to this world, and he'd been doing his best to prepare the way for them-hopefully guaranteeing himself better treatment when they took over. But he didn't want to go back to burning wood for heat until they showed up.

  "Right," he told Kewan. "Let's just limit our target to the Internet."

  Kewan nodded. "We're gonna need more of those guns, then-lots more."

  "Wrong. The data centers and exchanges aren't the real targets. We just want people thinking they are."

  He looked offended. "You mean last night was all for show?"

  "Yes. And you put on an excellent show. Too excellent, perhaps."

  "What that mean?"

  Drexler spoke up. "Your image was captured on that cell phone, Mister Lyford, and shown on national TV. You must leave the city."

  "I ain't leaving. This where I live."

  Hank leaned toward him. "It's okay, Kewan. You're being transferred to one of the field groups."

  "What's that? I never hearda no field groups."

  "That's where the real work's going to be done. They're getting set to move. And when they do, it won't be for show." He glanced at Drexler. "Any word from your man on that final piece of code?"

  Drexler nodded. "He guarantees sometime today."

  "About time. And if it lives up to its press, when can we expect Jihad to be ready?"

  "Jihad?" said Kewan. "What's this Jihad talk? We dealin' with Arabs?"

  Hank caught Drexler's furious look. He shouldn't have mentioned that in front of Kewan and Ferron. Until his slip just now, he'd been the only Kicker in on the virus. Top-tier Dormentalists knew, but Ferron wasn't one of those.

  Drexler composed his features. "Just a figure of speech, Mister Lyford. Jihad is a holy war, and we're leading a holy war against the Internet."

  "You mentioned 'code,' " Ferron said. "Are we talking virus here?"

  Shit.

  "Another kind of code," Hank said quickly. "One we need to break."

  But Ferron was right. Jihad-its official designation would be Jihad4/20-was one hell of a virus. If all went according to plan, it would be spread across the globe by the end of the week.

  5

  "The Internet is not their real target," the Lady said.

  Jack studied her. She looked better than she had last summer right after Rasalom and his boys in the Kickers and the Order damn near killed her. Against all odds, despite the Fhinntmanchca, the mythic killing force that had zeroed in on her, she'd survived. But just barely.

  Jack first met her when he was a kid. She'd appeared then as an eccentric old woman with a three-legged dog. Over the ensuing years she'd stepped in and out of his life as females of varying ages, always with some sort of dog at her side.

  The dog was gone now-it hadn't survived the assault-but she persevered. But only as an old Lady. Used to be she could change her looks, but she seemed to have lost that ability. Used to be she could shift her presence to anywhere on Earth, but no more. She never left this apartment.

  "Sorry," Weezy said as she stepped into the room, late as usual.

  She'd shed some weight since popping back into Jack's life last summer. Instead of the baggy sweat suits she'd worn then, she was now dressed in fitted jeans and a long-sleeved black sweater under a ski vest. She'd let her dark hair grow and had it tied back in a simple ponytail. Her pale face was makeup free, a far cry from the heavy gothesque eyeliner she'd worn as a teen. She carried the Compendium of Srem under her arm.

  The group-Jack had started calling it the Ally's Gang of Four-was now complete. They'd been meeting a couple of times a month, sometimes more often, to discuss the goings-on in the world and which of those might be related to Rasalom or those doing his bidding. And also to learn what Weezy had gleaned from her ongoing study of the Compendium.

  But that was all they did: Talk. And it was driving Jack nuts.

  The meeting place was always the same: the Lady's apartment in the building on Central Park West owned by Glaeken, who had adopted the identity of Gaston Veilleur and insisted on being addressed as "Veilleur." As usual, he sat at one end of the heavy oblong table, the Lady at the other. Jack and Weezy occupied the flanks.

  Jack shook his head. The Gang of Four… a former immortal, a woman who wasn't really a woman-or even human-and a pair of thirty-something humans… all that stood between humanity and the Otherness.

  Pretty pathetic. A kind of cosmic joke. But the cosmic shadow war raging behind the scenes was anything but a joke. Two nameless, unimaginable forces vying for control of the sentient realities across the multiverse. Earth was one of those. Just one of many. Not the golden prize, simply another marble in the pouch. But only the sentient marbles were valuable; the non-sentient were brushed aside.

  Earth was currently the possession of a force people had come to call the Ally-not really an ally, and in no way benign; more like indifferent. The Otherness, however, was unquestionably inimical, and had been vying for millennia to make Earth its own. Rasalom led its forces here. Veilleur, as Glaeken, used to lead the Ally's, but had been released and allowed to age. He was now as mortal as Jack and Weezy.

  "Then what is their target?" We
ezy said.

  The Lady waited for her to take her seat opposite Jack before speaking.

  "I am."

  "Because the Internet feeds the noosphere?" Veilleur said in his rumbling voice. A broad-shouldered man with a scarred face, a gray beard, and a dominating presence-not unexpected, considering he'd been born thousands of years ago in the First Age.

  The Lady nodded. "And the noosphere feeds me."

  The noosphere again. Jack had first heard the term last summer; Weezy had bandied it around a lot back then, but not much since. He hadn't quite grasped it then, and most of what he'd learned had slipped away over the ensuing months. He'd had other things on his mind.

  "Can you give me a refresher on that?"

  Weezy said, "Where are you fuzzy?"

  "Around the edges… and all through the middle."

  She smiled. "Okay. Capsule version: Back in the nineteenth century a Jesuit named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin had a theory that the growth of human numbers and interactions would create a separate consciousness called the noosphere. Turned out he was right. It's real, and it's fed by every thought, every interaction between every sentient being on the planet. It's not cyberspace, though cyberspace adds to it. Every email, every Twitter tweet, every MySpace or Facebook add or app or comment, every chat-room quip, every blog entry or comment, every text message or eBay bid-billions upon billions of interactions every hour, all between sentient beings, and all adding to the noosphere."

  "I should have been destroyed by the Fhinntmanchca," the Lady said. "The noosphere suffered devastating damage and, under different circumstances, would not have been able to support my existence. In fact, for a few heartbeats, I ceased to exist… was, in fact, dead. Again."

  "Again?" Weezy said.

  "The first death occurred in Florida. The Fhinntmanchca caused the second. A third time and I will be gone."

  Weezy looked shocked. "Where does it say that?"

  The Lady gestured toward the Compendium. "You will find it somewhere in your book. After the third death I will be resorbed into the noosphere."

  "And that's it?"

  "I will eventually reemerge, but as a child. And in the interval, my beacon will be extinguished. That nearly happened this time, but because the Internet has made the noosphere so much stronger than the One or anyone else realized, I was able to return almost immediately, albeit without my companion."

  Yeah. Her dog… Jack kind of missed him.

  "I think it was more than just the noosphere," Veilleur said.

  Weezy turned to him. "You think the Ally stepped in?"

  He shook his head. "No. The Ally has minimal presence in this sphere. I sense that something else was involved in bringing you back. By all tradition, the Fhinntmanchca should have completely crippled the noosphere and blasted you into nothingness."

  Weezy said, "Another player? Please don't tell me you think there's a fourth force at work here."

  Jack didn't want another player either, but…

  "Fourth?"

  "We've got three now." She ticked off on her fingers. "The Ally, the Otherness, us."

  "Us? I could see you saying the noosphere, but-"

  "The noosphere is us-humanity. We created it, and it can't exist without us. It's not fighting for us, it's humanity fighting for itself." She looked at Veilleur. "You're not suggesting divine intervention or anything like that, are you?"

  He shook his head. "Of course not. I think the Lady herself might have had something to do with her own return."

  She frowned. "I don't see how that is possible. I am no one. I am simply a projection, an avatar of the noosphere."

  That might be true, but Jack couldn't help thinking of the Lady as a person. She was all that stood between humanity and a takeover by the Otherness. She was a beacon, announcing to the multiverse that this place was inhabited by sentient beings. If she were snuffed out, the Ally would discard the Earth as worthless, leaving the Otherness to reshape this reality to its liking-a hell for humanity.

  "No one?" Veilleur smiled. "No, my dear, I think you are someone. I think you are more than you realize."

  She shook her head. "I know what I am and am not. I am no one. Without a healthy noosphere, I cannot exist."

  "But the noosphere isn't healthy. You expected to be getting back to your old self by now, but that hasn't happened."

  "True. It is taking more time than I anticipated for the noosphere to heal itself. Imagine the noosphere as a mountain lake, fed by many streams. It has had a sidewall blown away and much of its water has flowed downhill-and will continue to leak away until the breach is repaired. The Internet is one of the lake's major feeder tributaries."

  Jack said, "So the One's crew must think if they bring down the Net, they'll empty the noosphere to a point where it won't be able to sustain you."

  She nodded. "If the Internet is cut off before the breach is healed, the noosphere will dry up… and I with it."

  "If that's really their purpose," Weezy said, "I don't think we have much to worry about. The Internet's infrastructure is too spread out and too redundant."

  "What about a huge EMP?" Jack said.

  She blinked. "You mean a high-altitude nuke? If they had that, they wouldn't be messing around with portable EMP generators in data centers. And even if they detonated one over the U.S., high enough to take out the whole country, there's still the rest of the world up and running."

  "Maybe they've got a bunch of nukes."

  She shook her head. "The Kickers and Dormentalists like to tell the world that they're everywhere, but they're not. They're all over, yes, but not everywhere. They can't launch nukes all over the world to knock out the entire Net. They simply can't."

  Jack wished he could be so confident.

  "Hank Thompson isn't stupid, Weezy, and he's hooked up with Drexler, who's definitely not stupid. They're all working together. And that tells me that last night's attack on that data center means something. They didn't build EMP guns and go to all that trouble for nothing. They've targeted the Internet."

  Weezy leaned back and tapped her fingers on the table. "Maybe it's just Thompson. He could be acting on his own. You know he's got a thing against the Internet. He was very up front about that in his book."

  Jack banged a fist on the table-not too hard, just enough to vent some frustration. "Too bad I'm not inside anymore. Might be able to pick up something. At least I was doing something then."

  But Jack had managed to make himself persona non grata at the Lodge, both with and without a beard.

  "We have Eddie inside the Order."

  "But he's like a social member, with no access to the inner circles and their agenda. And besides, you aren't talking to him."

  "He called me yesterday."

  Weezy told him about Eddie's call and how he was going to "look into" the Order's renewed search for her. The news sent bolts of alarm through Jack.

  "Did you tell him not to?"

  She looked offended. "Of course I did, but he wasn't having any of it. I'm worried about him."

  "So am I. I'll give him a call and warn him off. Eddie's not cut out for that kind of stuff."

  As a kid he'd always been the loose lip of their trio, the one most likely to blow a secret.

  "So… what are we going to do about this Internet plot?"

  Veilleur shrugged. "What else can we do besides watchful waiting until-"

  "Damn!" Jack said. "That's all we do! Watch and wait. Which is the equivalent of doing nothing. Why do we even bother with these meetings? To find more things we can't or won't do anything about?"

  He saw Weezy roll her eyes.

  "Don't do that, Weez."

  She shrugged. "Sorry. But we seem to be having this argument every time we meet lately."

  Frustration burned in Jack's gut. "Because all we do is sit around and talk and let the One and his toadies do whatever the hell they want. I'm sick of it."

  "But your alternative is too risky."

  "I disagree.
"

  Veilleur spoke up. "Remember your promise."

  "I remember. I want you to release me from it."

  Veilleur shook his head. "I'm afraid I can't."

  "Why the hell not? The One is human, right? Flesh and blood like you and me, right?"

  "Not quite like us. He has tremendous healing ability." He sighed. "Like I used to have."

  "So you've said, and a few other tricks that make him something more than human. But he's not invulnerable and invincible, right?"

  "No. Not either."

  "That means he can be taken down."

  "Only with an enormous amount of deadly force."

  "I can bring that. Cut me loose."

  Veilleur shook his head again. "You might never find him."

  "At least I'd be doing something."

  The constant passivity of waiting for the other side to make a move… that lay at the heart of Jack's frustration. Defense wasn't how he solved problems.

  "And even if you did find him, and even if you brought this deadly force to bear, what if you failed?"

  "Then I'd try again."

  "But then he'd be on to you. He pays no attention to you now. But he would then. And through you he'd find me. And then he'd know that I'm simply an old man who is no longer a threat to him. He must never learn that. The consequences would be catastrophic."

  Veilleur had presented this argument to Jack last year. It had made sense then, but less and less sense since. He bitterly regretted his promise then to keep away from Rasalom.

  "As I've said before and I'll say again: I think the potential benefit outweighs the risk."

  He caught Weezy staring at him with that look. He wasn't sure what "that look" meant, but he'd glanced up and seen it often enough when she'd been staying at his place. She seemed to be looking through his skin, seeing his core. It made him a bit uncomfortable.

  He checked his watch. Almost one o'clock. Where did the day go? He bottled his frustration. "Gotta run."

  Nearing the time to pick up and Gia and Vicky and hustle them out to the airport.

  One more reason to hate LaGuardia.

  6

  Eddie hadn't gleaned much from his eavesdropping-or would that be ventdropping? The sounds of conversation had been muffled and distorted. He'd picked up a word here and there, but nothing of any consequence except "jihad." He'd caught it twice, and was pretty sure he had that right, but without context it was meaningless.