Saint Vidicon to the Rescue

by Christopher Stasheff

  “It’s going to be a really big problem really fast if you can’t get that racket off our station,” Josh’s voice said. “What the hell got into you, playing that teenage garbage during drive time?”

  The boss, of course! “I ain’t playing it, Josh.” Gordon swept the board with a glance. “It’s not coming through the board at all.”

  “You kidding? Everything comes through the board.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Inspiration struck. “Everything except . . .” Gordon turned to the automation computer and saw the activity light fluttering. “Josh, it’s the computer! It kicked in early!”

  “That kind of music on our computer?”

  “It’s a computer, Josh, and we’re hooked into a music service. It feeds all kinds of music.”

  “You mean somebody actually broadcasts that sludge?”

  Gordon froze, listening to the music. That repetitive beat, inhumanly regular, and the teenage lack of resonance . . . “Josh, that ain’t coming from the music service. If that’s a pro band, I’ll eat the hard drive!”

  “A garage band?” Josh sounded confounded. “How could they be on our station?”

  “Because they hacked into our computer, that’s how! Haven’t you heard the kids around town griping because none of the stations plays their kind of music? Get our computer consultant down here fast or we’ll lose every listener we’ve got! ’Bye, now—I’ve got a few phones to answer.” He hung up, rolled his eyes up to Heaven for a brief “St. Vidicon, protect us from Finagle!” under his breath, then punched another line and picked up the phone again. “Rollin’ Oldies, but not our usual style . . .”

  “Hey, Tony!”

  Tony looked up at Harve, feeling the thrill of the call to battle. “Something come up?”

  “Just your cup of coffee! Get down to WOLD-FM right away—some kid has hacked into their automation computer!”

  Tony didn’t stop to ask how they knew it was a kid, just grabbed his laptop and headed down to the garage and slipped into a company car. Once outside the steel box of the building, he turned on the radio and realized why they were sure the hacker was a teenager.

  Bells were ringing, and they weren’t on Santa’s sleigh. Gordon took a quick look at the phone and saw every line glowing. “Send an engineer, St. Vidicon! ’Scuse me, now—I’ve got phones to answer.” He hit another line. “Rollin’ Old . . . yeah, I know it’s a shock. Wires crossed somewhere; it’s not what we’re playing . . . How? Well, we think some kid has hacked into our computer . . . Thanks, I’ll need it. I’ve got it turned way down low, but I have to keep an ear on it, and I’m out of ibuprofen . . . No, you don’t really need to bring me any; why should my problems be your problems? Don’t worry, I’ll get it off the air as soon as our engineers figure out how to disconnect it. G’bye, now!” He hit another line. “Rollin’ Oldies One-oh . . . Yeah, I’m real sorry about that, ma’am, but there isn’t a whole lot I can do about it yet—the wonders of modern computers, you know? We’ll get back to the British Invasion as soon as we . . . Yeah, you too, thanks.” He punched another line. “Rollin’ Oldies One-oh . . .” The doorbell rang. He looked up in relief, and said, “Lemme put you on hold just a sec. The repairman has arrived.” He punched hold and ran to let Tony in. “Thank heavens you’re here! There’s the computer! Good luck!”

  Tony almost said he wouldn’t need it but bit back the show of arrogance and only grinned as the DJ hurried off to answer another call. Tony patched in his laptop, powered up, and gazed at the screen, letting his consciousness drift into the circuit, trying to do as St. Vidicon would as his fingers flew over the keyboard. He knew St. Vidicon was with him when the program became more real to him than the room around him and he found himself swimming through a tide of ones and zeros. But it was a rip tide, torn by another stream surging through a jury-rigged gateway that shouldn’t have been there.

  Know your enemy—or at least, your opponent. Before Tony did anything to close that ramshackle gateway, he swam through it and upstream to find out where the alien signal was coming from.

  In a bedroom on the other side of town, the cheering slackened and the short, pudgy African-American teenager clapped her hands over her keyboard. “I am so wicked!”

  “You go, Randy!” The bass player slapped her shoulder. “You got us on the air!”

  “Easy picking,” Miranda assured him. “Seems they never stopped to think somebody might want to change their playlist.”

  The lead singer had his ear to the radio. “That really us? Sounds thin.”

  “Hey, they ain’t got the kind of equipment I do,” Randy protested. “ ’Course they’re gonna sound coarse!”

  “ ’Course they’re gonna sound coarse!” the lead guitar player repeated, musing, and the drummer took it up. “ ’Course they’re gonna sound coarse!” He hit the kick drum and added a lick on the snare topped by the tom-tom, then repeated it again and again.

  “ ’Course they’re gonna sound coarse!” the rest of the group chanted. “’Course they’re gonna sound coarse!” They picked up their instruments.

  Randy glanced at the CD light to make sure the recording was still spinning, then heard the music behind her and decided the nature of the problem had changed. Could she put this band on the air live?

  Of course she could! She was almost tempted to tell those fat middle-aged listeners, “This is Randy, bringing you the music of today!” but there was no point in giving the cops her name and address, was there? After all, what they were doing was technically illegal.

  “Tell the computer guy I want that racket stopped now!” Josh raged over the phone. “Then tell him to trace the hacker! I want that kid in jail for life!”

  “Yeah, sure, Chief, but he’s working as fast as he can.” Gordon glanced at the engineer, who sat motionless, gazing at the automation computer’s screen with a very thoughtful look on his face. It wasn’t really a lie—hadn’t Edison said brainwork was the toughest kind of all? And he should have known, he had hired enough brains to be an expert.

  “Tell him to unplug the blasted thing!”

  “He can’t, it’s hard-wired,” Gordon explained. “So’s the input from the music service.”

  “Tell him to cut the lines!”

  “First off, he says that if we do that, it will take a day and a half to get the system back on-line,” Gordon explained, “and the kid will just hack in again anyway. Says he has to find out how the hacker got in and un-hack him. It’ll be quicker and a lot more permanent.”

  Josh groaned.

  A harried middle-aged woman called up the stairs, “Miranda! Time for dinner!” But she heard the music and started the climb, shaking her head with a sigh. Those kids would never hear her over that noise—and if it was that loud, they were practicing something new, not listening to a cut they’d recorded earlier. They wouldn’t be happy about having to shut down—but they all knew what her cooking was like, and in teenagers, appetite just might win out over the need for self-expression. Good thing she’d cooked enough for a small army.

  It was a tough problem for Tony—how to get the kids off the air, without leaving a trace for a security expert to follow. They seemed like good kids, and there was no point in getting them in trouble for a prank. A mighty big prank, mind you, and one that was costing the station a lot of money, but nonetheless a prank. He could scramble the code as a first step . . . He dived into the data stream and flailed about, making ones and zeros crash into each other, changing the music to static—and was shocked to see them being restored to their positions and the music clearing.

  That was why—here came an unearthly-looking creature with more heads than Tony could count and at least a hundred tentacles, carefully setting the numbers back in order with a uniform distance between them. “Who the heck are you?” Tony cried.

  “I am a Centimanes; I am the Hundred-Handed,” the creature replied,

  “A Centimanes?” Tony stared. “You can’t be inside a circuit! You’re a Titan! You’re sup
posed to be the size of a mountain!”

  “We are magical creatures.” The monstrosity didn’t miss a beat, or a digit. “I can take any size I deem necessary for the service of Order.”

  “Well, you’re certainly performing a disservice to the radio station that’s trying to broadcast oldies!”

  “That is no concern of mine,” the Centimanes answered. “I am the Servant of Order; I see to it that the data stream is kept neat and tidy.”

  Tony frowned. “And you don’t worry about whose data you’re ordering?”

  “Neatness counts,” the monster answered. “Tidiness is next to godliness.”

  With a shock, Tony realized he had met a supernatural obsessive-compulsive. “You’re only dealing with the symptoms,” he protested. “You have to attack the problem at its source.”

  “I care not whence the digits come,” the Centimanes returned. “I only care that they stand neatly.”

  A wave toppled the numbers—a minor power surge. The Centimanes righted them.

  Tony made another try. “The numbers keep scrambling because there are two information flows. Let’s go find the junction.”

  But the Centimanes kept tapping numbers with its hundred hands. “I must be sure they stand in order.”

  With a flash of inspiration, Tony realized how he could lead the micro-monster to solve the radio station’s problem without hurting Randy. “Let’s go!” He shot away through the silicon, reaching out a hand to topple numbers like a child running a stick along a picket fence. The Centimanes gave a squawk of horror and dashed after him, righting numbers as it went.

  Randy had an audio mixer for the band, of course—she had made it in electronics class, and the instructor had been so delighted he had given her an “A.” She had designed it with an input for each instrument plus five singers’ mikes, and they were all plugged in and showing green on her peak meter. With a devilish grin, she plugged the output into her computer, called up the audio card’s mixer, made sure the levels were right, then routed the signal into the data stream. “You’re on the air—live!”

  Chapter 18

  The drummer hit a triumphant lick topped with a cymbal crash and the lead singer began his chant:

  “ ’Course it’s coarse,

  Our music hoarse!

  Remember its source

  Is dirt and force!”

  Nodding her head with the beat, Randy presided over the middle class of the city hearing from its angry youth—and about time, too.

  Riding Randy’s data stream, Tony shot through the gate she had opened into the automation computer. Ahead, he could see the other gate, the one she had closed to stop the flow from the music service. Now the problem was opening the one and closing the other, and he certainly couldn’t do both at the same time; they were gates of digits, and he only had two hands.

  But he knew someone who had more.

  The gate that held back the music service was only a quadratic equation; Tony wrenched the factors apart and the digit-encoded music flowed. It collided with Randy’s stream. Digits toppled one upon another, making for utter confusion.

  Keening like an ambulance, the Centimanes dived into the maelstrom, its hundred hands sorting bunches of digits and righting others. It would take the creature only a second or two to straighten them both out. Tony had no more time than that to figure out how to shunt Randy’s data stream away from the transmitter.

  In Randy’s room, the band froze, staring at the radio, which was emitting a blast of static that drowned out the band’s music. “They’re trying to jam us,” she called over the roar. “I’ll set up another gate!” Her fingers flew over the keys.

  “Jam!” the drummer cried, and tore into a solo. The rest of the band cheered and added their throbbing notes to underscore his beat. The drummer topped his lick with a cymbal, and the bass took up a solo of his own.

  Ahead, another gate materialized, but Tony shot through it before it could close and grabbed ones and zeros, assembling them into an algorithm that blocked it open. He swam on, searching for the output to the transmitter.

  There it lay ahead, with Randy’s data stream flowing through it! He rocketed on, formulating the equation that would divert hip-hop.

  On the other side of the gate he circled back, fighting the current flow, and set his shoulder to the gate as he recited the code to shut it. Inch by inch, the gate began to close.

  With a roar, the Centimanes slapped tentacles onto the gate, pushing against Tony. “The flow must not be impeded!’

  “Why not?” Tony shouted. “It wasn’t here in the first place! This gate is only shutting off the data stream that was intended to flow through this circuit!”

  “I care not for was—I care for is!”

  Tony gave a recursive curse and, while it was circulating between himself and the Centimanes, ran his hands over the gate, sensing its form, translating it into code in his head. When he had it, he worked out the countercode and recited it as he proceeded to take the gate apart bit by bit.

  It took only nanoseconds and left him staring at the Centimanes through a snow-storm of ones and zeros that the Centimanes automatically righted and spaced as it demanded, “What have you done, mortal?”

  “Eliminated the gateway,” Tony said, “and the invading music with it. This circuit is as it was designed, creature. Keep it well!” With that, he withdrew his spirit-extension and found himself staring at the screen, fingers poised over the keyboard.

  A hand slapped Tony’s shoulder. “You did it!”

  Tony frowned, looking up at a strange, middle-aged beefy face. “Sure. Kid stuff.”

  “I want the kid who did that stuff!”

  “Uh, Tony Ricci,” the announcer said hesitantly, “this is Josh Largan, our owner.”

  “It’s not that easy to trace a hacker,” Tony said, “especially after I’ve cut ’em off. Why would you want the kid, anyway? Didn’t really do that much damage. There’s no need to get her in trouble.”

  “Trouble?” Largan bellowed. “I want to hire her! Any kid who can break into this computer, can figure out ways to keep other kids out—and at a quarter of the price I have to pay you!”

  Tony was only too glad to pack up his laptop and head for the door—after all, he had a date that night.

  The negative side—or maybe very positive side—of being back together was that Tony was much less inclined to resist temptation, if it meant hurting Sandy’s feelings and maybe losing her. Sandy, on the other hand, was much less inclined to offer that temptation, or to push for anything more than petting. The result was mutual confusion and growing frustration.

  Basically, Tony’s approach was not to seek what wasn’t offered, and Sandy wasn’t about to offer anything that he would probably reject, no matter that he wanted it badly but was trying not to take advantage of her.

  On a silvery Saturday, they went to roam the city, kicking through the snow, gossiping, stepping into coffee shops whenever the chill crept in, laughing over the newspapers at a bistro, strolling through three different museums, walking along a sidewalk lined with artists’ pictures and pointing out several to remember, then going to another bistro to compare notes about the pictures they’d thought worth comment—but not exchanging those comments where the artists could hear. Museums, shopping for knick-knacks and paintings, talk and laughter and the occasional kiss made up a day Tony knew he would never forget.

  When they arrived back at her apartment building, he said, “We’re still on for the movies tonight, aren’t we?”

  “Of course,” Sandy said with a smile.

  “Okay, I’d better run home and change.” Tony gave her a quick kiss. “Six-thirty?”

  “Yeah . . . sure.” Sandy sounded surprized, maybe disappointed, but gave him a kiss back—only this time, it lasted a bit longer, and when Tony backed away, she seemed more cheerful.

  He went home, changed, picked her up, and had an evening that would have rivalled the day if Sandy hadn’t kept glancing at him o
ut of the corners of her eyes as though wondering if he were still there. Trying to reassure her, he held her hand whenever she wasn’t eating popcorn, and it seemed to help a little.

  They came out, happily dissecting the movie, but when Tony started to turn into their favorite club, Sandy held back, and said, “I don’t think so. Not tonight.”

  “What?” Tony looked back surprized, then said, “Okay, then. Home?”

  Sandy nodded, and he flagged down a cab. He kept asking her opinion of one aspect of the movie after another but received very short answers; Sandy seemed very nervous for some reason, and Tony started feeling as though he were in her way. When she turned the key in the lock of her outer door, Tony said, “Guess I’d better go, then. Thanks for a wonderful day.”

  “What?” Sandy turned, astounded. “Aren’t you coming in?”

  “If I’m invited,” Tony said. “I’m not assuming that I’m welcome every night.”

  Sandy stood staring at him for a moment, then said very softly, “Thank you, darling. You were right; this is one of those rare evenings that should end here.”

  Tony forced a smile, making it as warm as he could, and kissed her on the cheek—only she moved her head, and his lips met hers instead. It was a long and lingering kiss, but when it ended, Sandy pressed a finger over his mouth, whispered, “Good night,” and was gone through the door.

  Tony stood staring at the doorbell for a few minutes, sorting out his confusions, then turned and went down the steps. He was surprized to find the taxi still there. He leaned down to the window and asked, “Are you free?”

  “Sure am,” the driver said. “I always stay to make sure my fares get in their doors. Pays off sometimes, too.”

  “This is one of those times, I guess.” Tony slid into the back seat and gave her the address.