The Spartacus File

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Nibbling on celery sticks and tortilla chips, the four of them settled down in front of the video; Mirim found the remote and began switching from one channel to the next.

  After nearly twenty minutes of nothing-CNN and al-Jazeera USA were covering the fighting in Siberia, while FoxNews had yet another congressman defending his record-she found a placard announcing a special bulletin on the city-mandated local news channel. She put down the remote, and a moment later the card was replaced by a man in light body armor, with a microphone in his hand.

  “This is John Covarrubias speaking to you from the corner of Market and Twenty-First. Just a few blocks from where I'm standing a construction worker by the name of Lester Polnovick has apparently gone berserk, and committed acts of wanton destruction. The situation is still confused; details remain vague. No known terrorist organization has claimed credit, nor has Polnovick made any demands.”

  John Covarrubias was replaced by a view of the construction site. The partially-completed structure near the center of the lot had collapsed against a neighboring building. Police and rescue workers swarmed over the rubble.

  “As we understand it,” Covarrubias continued as the camera panned across the site, “Lester Polnovick, a crane operator, blew up the partially completed structure of the Volcker Financial Center, using explosives from the dynamite shack and causing it to collapse against the neighboring Takeuchi building.” A closeup of the tangle of girders piled against the buckling wall of the Takeuchi building flashed onto the screen. “Most of the construction crew had gathered here for lunch. At last count, seventeen were killed by the blast or the subsequent collapse; twenty more were seriously injured.”

  Another shot, this time of a half-crushed police cruiser. “Officers Santiago and Hojaji of the city police were the first on the scene. Their vehicle was demolished by several steel girders dropped from Polnovick's crane. Officer Hojaji was killed instantly. Paramedics removed Officer Santiago from the scene, and we have no information on his whereabouts or condition.”

  Covarrubias appeared on the screen again. “After this, Polnovick apparently used his crane as a battering ram on the surrounding buildings; because of the lunch-hour break few people were in the areas assaulted, and no injuries have been reported. The area has now been evacuated. Polnovick is still in the cab of the crane, and is believed to be armed.”

  “I wonder what made him do it?” Cecelia mused.

  “Who knows?” Casper said, “If he was already a bit over the edge, it could've been anything that set him off.”

  “There's been a lot of that sort of thing going on lately,” Leonid said authoritatively. “Incidents taking place all over the country. The continent, even.”

  “Do you know much about that sort of thing?” Casper asked, looking up, wondering if Leonid might actually have a brain after all.

  “Leonid works for a security firm,” Mirim said.

  “It's part of my job to know what's going on,” Leonid said smugly.

  “And there's been a lot of this going on?” Casper asked.

  Leonid shrugged, then held up his hand for silence. “The SWAT team's on now. Let's see them take this guy down.”

  They watched as the cameras followed the SWAT team moving into position. Leonid grunted with pleasure when a team sniper fired a single round, killing Polnovick as he sat in the cab of the crane.

  A thin stream of crimson trailed down the rusty metal siding below the cab window, and the news camera zoomed in.

  “Oh, God,” Cecelia said, flinching at the sight. Casper took her hand and squeezed it.

  “It could have been a lot worse,” he said.

  “Sure,” Leonid agreed. “Only nineteen dead and twenty injured. Why, just last month a dam in Kyrgyz was blown up. Over four hundred people were drowned. And the fighting's still going on in Russia.”

  “Let's not dwell on it, huh?” Mirim asked.

  “Just pointing out how lucky we are to live in the States.”

  “I'd feel lucky if I could get something to eat,” Casper interrupted.

  “Good idea,” Cecelia quickly agreed. “Give me a hand, Cas?”

  “Sure.” Casper followed her to the kitchen. As soon as they were around the corner, he lowered his voice and asked, “Where'd Mirim find that ape?”

  “Shh. I don't know. He doesn't come by here very often. Mirim usually goes over to his apartment.”

  “Probably just as well. What do you have for dinner?”

  “Chicken sounds good.” Cecelia pulled the instruction strip off the end of the box of a frozen chicken diner, put the box into the heat chamber of the oven, and fed the instruction strip into the oven's control panel. The defrost cycle began immediately.

  “Have you got any plans for after dinner?” Casper asked.

  “I'm open to suggestions. You got any?”

  “Not offhand, but tomorrow's Saturday-no work even if they get the mess cleaned up. It's a good night to stay out late.”

  “Sounds like a good idea. I'll order a newspaper and we'll decide what to do after dinner.” She leaned back and kissed him.

  When they got back from the movie Cecelia decided that it was far too late to send Casper home-especially with the headache he had developed. Instead she demonstrated that she had some interesting ways to take his mind off the pain.

  Chapter Three

  A single window near the top of NeuroTalents LLC building showed a light long past closing. Behind that window five men and three women were holding an urgent meeting, called hastily that afternoon. All of these people were unhappy. Half were angry, and the other half were more than a little frightened.

  “You're sure it was our doing?” the man at the head of the table asked, glaring at one of the young executives.

  The executive replied unhappily, “We're still investigating, sir, but it does look that way. Yesterday the subject in question, Lester Polnovick, had an appointment for an ordinary pre-programmed imprinting to learn accounting, personnel management, and computer skills. This wasn't a corporate contract; he'd saved up for it himself, to improve his employment prospects. He showed up on time, and was handled according to normal procedure, but our records indicate that instead of the package he had requested, he received an optimization imprinting. One that had nothing to do with the skills he had wanted.”

  “How did that happen?” the man at the head of the table demanded. “Don't we have technicians watching for this sort of thing? My lord, what are we paying them for?”

  “Well, uh… well, yes, sir, we do. They saw that there was an optimization in progress, but the technicians don't necessarily know what a particular client is in for. That's all supposed to be taken care of by the computer; when the contracts are drawn up the computer is told what's wanted, and from then on it's all up to the machines.”

  “Nobody checked? After all, we don't do a lot of optimizations.”

  “Nobody checked. The computer said it was following the contract, and the technicians believed it.”

  “All right, then, was the contract drawn up correctly?”

  “Yes sir, it was, and the right information was fed into the computer at that time. We have a hardcopy record, with print-out time and date, and it was correct.”

  “So it was changed? What this man was supposed to get changed somewhere along the line?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “All right, then, why did the computer make the change? Who told it to?”

  “That's not my department, sir.” The executive looked with relief at the woman who sat across the table from him. She cleared her throat nervously.

  “Mr. Yamashiro,” she said, “it appears to have been a hardware failure. A bad disk sector, compounded by a previously-unknown bug in the error-handling code.”

  The chairman glared. “How could that happen?”

  “Uh… poor maintenance, apparently.” She looked embarrassed.

  Yamashiro stared at her for a moment, then demanded, “Who's responsible
for that?”

  “We don't know yet.”

  Yamashiro snapped, “Find out.” Then he sighed. “All right, what's the damage? What exactly happened? What did this bad disk do?”

  “Well, sir, when the client came in for his appointment, he was scheduled for a pre-programmed imprinting in small business accounting and management. The computer lost a variable, and defaulted to an optimization program.” She paused for breath.

  “Go on,” Yamashiro told her. “What sort of optimization?”

  “Well, that's the tricky part,” the woman said. She glanced at her notes. “The switch appears to have bypassed three entire levels of security-if I may say so, sir, whoever put together the unified software should be fired and blacklisted, because that shouldn't have been possible. The error-handling code apparently assumes that any lost variable should be assigned the maximum available value-I suppose the idea was to go for maximum flexibility, but the effect is to bypass limits and safeguards. That's bad programming.”

  Yamashiro nodded. “We bought it from the lowest bidder,” he said. “Sometimes you get what you pay for.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Go on,” the chairman said. “What happened?”

  The woman nodded and continued, “The computer accessed highly classified files, material we developed jointly with… with a certain client.” She looked up. “You will recall that transaction two years ago?”

  Yamashiro nodded. “You mean the black-budget government work. I don't think you need to be coy; we're all grown-ups here tonight.”

  “Yes.” She continued, “The computer examined only these classified files as its available options, and finally chose the Godzilla File as the best fit for this particular subject.”

  “The Godzilla File,” Yamashiro said. His fingers tapped the table.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “There's something in there called the Godzilla File?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  After a second of angry silence, Yamashiro demanded, “Who the hell gave it a stupid name like that?”

  “Well, sir, the names are generally chosen to reflect the nature of the file. For example, the Ninja File programs the recipient as an assassin, the Houdini File…”

  Yamashiro interrupted, “I don't need the whole list. All right, they've all got cutesy names. So what, exactly, is this Godzilla File?”

  “Demolitions and other related skills, primarily-intended for sabotage and terrorism overseas, I suppose. It's mostly concerned with the destruction of urban areas. The title refers to the old-time movie monster, for obvious reasons. And it's a compulsory patterning-the recipient feels a need to use his new skills.”

  Mr. Yamashiro said, with acid in his voice, “You're telling me that this client was imprinted with the urge to stomp on buildings.”

  “Basically, yes.” She nodded, then added, “We were lucky in this instance.”

  “Lucky?” Yamashiro stared. “We're liable for nineteen deaths and hundreds of injuries and billions in property damage! How the hell can you consider our situation to be lucky?”

  The woman flinched. “Well, sir, he was taken down before he did more damage-it could have been far worse if he had been, say, a pilot rather than a crane operator. Also… well, the method used with these files is a wetware flash. This involves the file being fed into the client's brain very rapidly. Optimization is a complex process, and we've discovered that slower methods can sometimes result in psychological damage from conflicts between the old and new patterns. A flash is so fast such conflicts don't have time to develop.”

  “Yes?” Yamashiro demanded. “So?”

  “Well, sir, ordinarily, before receiving a wetware flash, the client is prepared by a medical technician, with medication and hypnosis. If this preparation is not made, the client can have very noticeable adverse reactions-migraine headaches, nausea, minor memory loss-as the brain readjusts to its new patterns. These can disguise the immediate changes to some extent. More importantly, without the preparation, the skills tend to become available a piece at a time, rather than all at once; compulsions and abilities may remain in the brain as untriggered potential for extended periods before they're accessed. Without the preparation, it may take months or even years before the skills become fully available, and some are lost entirely. We're very fortunate there was no significant delay in Polnovick's case.”

  Yamashiro stared at her. “Do you mean to tell me that you consider it lucky that this man went berserk in only a day, instead of years?”

  “Yes, sir,” the woman said, holding her head up. “This client was unusually fit physically, and apparently had very few old habit patterns that conflicted with the Godzilla File. He seems to have achieved fairly complete access to the imprinted file within twenty-four hours. Because of this very brief delay, we've been able to piece together what happened. Much of the pertinent information came from short-term data storage, which is kept only twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Now that we have these clues, we'll be able to go over the long-term records and see if this has happened before.”

  The chairman nodded. “All right, I see-we were lucky. So what's being done to see that this doesn't happen again?”

  “Our technicians are completely overhauling the whole system.”

  Yamashiro frowned. “That's not good enough. The system messed up once, it can mess up again. I want those files, the dangerous ones, taken out of the system and locked away in the company vault.”

  There was a long silence around the table. The Assistant Executive Director, who had not previously spoken, rolled a pencil between her palms. “That might not be possible,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “These files are, technically, not the property of NeuroTalents LLC. They belong jointly to our parent corporation and that client Ms. Valakos mentioned, and we have to be ready to provide immediate access to these files at any time. It's in our contract.”

  “What contract?”

  “Sir, our contract with that client.”

  Yamashiro considered that unhappily for a moment, then yielded. “All right, then. Find some way to make sure there aren't any more accidents. And find everyone that's been imprinted with one of those files. And don't let anyone else find out about any of this!”

  Yamashiro rose gracefully and left the room, leaving his subordinates to handle the details themselves.

  Chapter Four

  Despite being active until well after midnight Casper found himself wide awake at six o'clock the next morning.

  This was not customary for him; usually he needed half an hour before his eyes would stay open in the morning. He lay on his back and stared at the ceiling for ten minutes, simply enjoying the sensation.

  He had too much energy to contain it any longer than that; he got up and dressed. Cecelia stirred slightly beside him, then settled back to sleep.

  Casper slipped out of the apartment, went down to the lobby, and stopped at the security desk. The guard looked up from his magazine. “May I help you?” he asked.

  “Hi,” Casper said, “I'm staying in Four-Ten. I want to go for a walk. Will I have any trouble getting back in without waking the people I'm staying with?”

  “I'll fix you right up with a temporary pass, sir,” the guard smiled. “Just put your thumbprint here. This pass will get you in, then the lock will destroy it.”

  “Thanks.” Casper took the laminated card and ambled out of the building.

  The morning was cool and crisp, and he trotted down the sidewalk. He gradually increased his speed until he was loping comfortably along, despite his uncomfortable shoes. He made it around the block four and a half times before he had to stop. Breathing heavily, he started back towards the apartment building.

  A police cruiser sidled up to the curb next to him. “Need any help, mister?” the officer riding shotgun asked.

  Ordinarily, any contact with the cops terrified Casper-and just about any other sensible citizen of his class. This morning, though, h
e couldn't bring himself to worry about it. He felt good.

  He didn't know why, but he felt good.

  “Oh, hi,” Casper said. He leaned casually against the side of the cruiser, catching his breath. “I was just out for my morning run.”

  “You're not exactly dressed for it.”

  “Yeah, I know, I spent the night with a friend and I didn't have my sweats.”

  “Your friend lives around here?” the officer asked.

  Casper nodded and handed him the temporary pass from the apartment building. “Just the other side of this block,” he said.

  The officer turned to his partner for a moment, then handed the pass back.

  “You want a ride?” the officer asked.

  Casper knew that his normal reaction would be to recoil in fear, that he never wanted to be in the back of a police vehicle, that too many people never came back from such rides-but today it seemed more important to be friendly, to observe the cops closely. And acting nervous might make them suspicious, something he'd known since he was a kid but never tried to use; today, for the first time in his life, he was able to not act nervous if he chose.

  “Sure, that'd be great.” He gave them a broad, disarming smile.

  The rear door of the cruiser popped open, and Casper tumbled in. The cruiser quickly rounded the block and halted in front of Cecelia's apartment building. Casper thanked the officers as he clambered out, then ran up to the door. He noticed that the cruiser remained out front until he was inside.

  Careful, those cops, he thought to himself. Good procedure. They hadn't said a word while he was in the vehicle, either. Disrupting the city force could be difficult.

  Maybe they could be won over, though.

  He stopped and shook his head. Won over to what?

  He didn't know. He went on up.

  Mirim was in the kitchen making breakfast, wearing a red and white striped robe, when he let himself back into the apartment. She looked up from her batter and smiled.

  “Where have you been?” she asked.