New York Nights [Virex 01]

by Eric Brown

  Halliday looked at Barney. He turned to the screen. ‘How do you know about that, Joe?’

  Kosinski gestured impatiently. ‘Wellman told me. I called him a couple of hours ago.’

  Halliday nodded. ‘Why do you need to see me?’

  ‘I can’t tell you, not over this thing. It’s not a secure network. If what I know got out, into the wrong hands . . .’ He paused. ‘Look, the entire computer system, the Net, you can’t trust it, okay? The information you got on the Nigeria case - if it’s on your com-files, it’s not safe. I’d back it up, then wipe your files.’

  ‘We don’t know that much,’ Halliday said. ‘Anyway, who’d want to . . .?’

  ‘You’ll regret it if you don’t!’ Kosinski said. He stared out at Halliday with scared eyes. ‘You have no idea how dangerous this is!’

  Halliday said, ‘Joe, we have all the latest anti-invasion software protecting our system . . .’ The guy was obviously possessed of genius, but Halliday felt as if he were an adult talking to a kid.

  Kosinski was shaking his head, almost frantically. ‘Mr Halliday, you might be a good private eye, but quite frankly you know fuck-all about data security.’

  ‘Okay, Joe. We’ll do as you say.’

  Kosinski nodded. ‘Good, I’d feel better about that.’

  Halliday glanced up at Barney.‘Where’s he want to meet you?’ Barney whispered.

  Halliday turned to the screen. ‘Joe, you said you wanted to meet me. You tell me where, and I’ll be there.’

  Kosinski gave a frightened grin. ‘Like I said, I can’t tell you over this network.’

  ‘Then how . . .?’

  ‘There’s a food-stall just outside your place - Chinese franchise.’

  ‘You want to meet there?’ It seemed improbable. Why didn’t Kosinski come up to the office?

  He was shaking his head. ‘Hear me out. Kid called Casey works there. She’s got an envelope for you. In it are instructions for meeting me. Follow them to the letter. Oh, and the envelope is coded . . .’

  ‘What’s the code, Joe?’

  ‘Casey has that in a second envelope.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘The instructions’ll lead you somewhere else, where you’ll pick up another set. Eventually you’ll find yourself at the meeting place.’

  ‘Okay, I understand.’

  ‘As a precaution, destroy each set of instructions as you go, okay? This might seem like an elaborate charade, Mr Halliday, but I’ve got to ensure we aren’t observed.’

  ‘I understand what you’re saying.’

  ‘If you set off from your office at one, that’ll give you enough time. And another thing, come alone. I don’t want anyone following you. Not even your partner, Mr Kluger, got that? The fewer people know where you’re going, the safer it is.’

  ‘One thing,’ Halliday said. ‘Who are we trying to avoid?’

  Kosinski hesitated, as if considering whether to tell Halliday. He shook his head, looked pained.

  ‘Cyber-Tech’s rivals, right? The people Nigeria sold the information to?’

  ‘Mr Halliday, inter-company rivalry has nothing to do with this. It’s much bigger than that. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, and I’m not going to do that now.’ He reached out with a shaking hand to kill the screen, then halted. ‘Mr Halliday, make sure you wipe this call, okay? I did my best to scramble it, but you never know . . . I’ll see you later.’ He cut the connection.

  Halliday stared at the blank screen. He sat back in the swivel chair and let out a long sigh. Barney hitched himself onto the corner of the desk, side-saddle, his lips pursed in consideration.

  ‘What the hell do you make of that, Hal?’

  ‘I don’t know whether to feel pleased the case is still open, or apprehensive. Something tells me that Joe Kosinski is shit-scared with good reason.’

  ‘Do we trust him?’

  Halliday shrugged. ‘I see no reason not to, at least until we find out what he’s got to tell us. I know I’ve only met him once, but I liked the guy. He might be a genius in his field with the IQ of Einstein, but I think I know where I stand with him.’

  Barney frowned. ‘About not being followed . . . I’m uneasy about that.’

  ‘I’ll be in touch as soon as I find out where we’re meeting.’

  ‘While you’re gone . . .’ Barney pulled a lugubrious expression as he stared down at the desk-com. ‘You think I should copy everything on the Nigeria case and wipe the system?’

  ‘I’d be tempted to go along with him.’ Halliday swilled an inch of coffee around the bottom of his cup, swallowed it and stood up. ‘Catch you later.’

  ‘Take care, Hal. And remember to call when you know where you’ll be.’

  Halliday left the office and hurried down the steps and into the street, zipping his jacket against the icy wind. Even at this early hour, in the freezing cold, refugee kids were huddled around the food-stalls that lined both sides of the street. Fragrant steam hung in the air above the canopies, and the odour of cooking meat reminded Halliday that he was starving.

  He crossed the street to the food-stall where Casey worked. She was warming her hands over a steaming wok, her pinched white face betraying her Southern white-trash origins.

  ‘How’s it going, Casey?’

  ‘Hiya, Hal. Hey, some guy was around earlier, left something for you. Kind of important-looking envelopes. Here you go.’

  He took the envelopes and ordered dim sum and chicken spring rolls. The package warmed his hands as he crossed to the Ford and started the engine. He piled the food on the passenger seat and switched on the overhead light.

  The seal of the first silver envelope was numbered from one to ten. He opened the second envelope. On a single sheet of paper was a string of eight digits. He tapped the code into the seal of the first envelope and withdrew a sheet of hand-written scrawl.

  Mr Halliday,

  At one o ‘clock set off from your office. Head downtown on Park Avenue and turn down East 23rd. There’s a bar on the corner of 23rd and Fifth Avenue called Connelly’s. The black bartender with the silver head tattoos: I left another set of instructions with him. Tell him Joe sent you and he’ll hand over a second sealed envelope. Same code.

  See you later.

  Joe

  Halliday opened the spring rolls and took a bite. He read the note again, then remembered Joe Kosinski’s instructions. He ignited the car’s lighter and set fire to the note, then opened the door and dropped the flaming sheet into the street.

  He pulled away from the kerb and turned south, chewing on another spring roll and wondering what the hell Joe Kosinski was so frightened about. He considered the Nigeria case, the dissatisfaction he’d felt at its closure. Now, despite everything Kosinski had said about the danger, despite what he’d seen in the hotel bedroom yesterday, he felt good about being back on the case. His only qualm was that he was deceiving Kim.

  Fifteen minutes later he turned onto East 23rd Street and stopped before the bar. A defective fluorescent shamrock stuttered in the window. Halliday crossed the sidewalk and pushed into the warmth. The bar was almost empty at this hour, but for dedicated drinkers seated at the bar watching West Coast football and skyball on the wallscreens.

  He ordered a Caribas from a big black guy with silver face decals. ‘Friend of Joe’s. He left something for me earlier?’

  ‘Sure, pal. Right here.’

  Halliday took the beer and the silver envelope, identical to the first one, to a booth at the back of the bar. He swallowed a mouthful of beer and entered the code into the seal. He slipped out the note and laid it flat on the table-top.

  Mr Halliday,

  At one-thirty leave Connelly’s and head crosstown to the Mantoni VR Bar, Chelsea, corner of West 23rd and Tenth Avenue. Pay for a one-hour ticket, go into any booth in the Bar and enter this into the site menu on the wallscreen: Himalayasite, 37aBRT. Tank at 1:45 and look for the shrine - you can’t miss it. I’ll be with you five minutes later. />
  See you then.

  Joe

  He balled the note and slipped it into his pocket. The thought of entering VR again filled Halliday with a strange unease. He wondered if it had been his first trip into VR that had disturbed the ghost of Eloise in his mind, or if it would have surfaced to haunt him in the natural course of events. If the former, then he wondered what new ghosts might be raised by his next immersion in the tank.

  At one-thirty he finished his beer and left the bar. He remembered to burn the second note, and then drove along West 23rd to Chelsea.

  The Mantoni VR Bar wore the holo-façade of a fairy-tale castle, its spun-ice confection incongruous beside the redbrick expanse of an old meat warehouse. It was a smaller concern than the Park Avenue Bar, with only a short queue of customers lining the sidewalk. Halliday parked up and took his place in line, looking around for Joe Kosinski. There was no sign of the Cyber-Tech vice-chairman.

  Five minutes later he reached reception and paid two hundred dollars for a one-hour ticket, as instructed. He passed into the waiting room and a red-uniformed hostess escorted him to a single booth.

  He stared at the jellytank in the centre of the small tiled room, a coffin-shaped glass-sided box filled with disgusting brown gloop, like some kind of futuristic catafalque. The unpleasant act of immersing himself in the stuff seemed counter to the promise of the wonders on offer. He touched the wallscreen and entered the code into the site menu. He selected to keep his own body and clothing.

  Before he undressed, he got through to Barney.

  ‘Hal, where are you?’

  ‘In the Mantoni VR Bar, Chelsea. I’m meeting Kosinski in VR, of all places. I’ve bought a one-hour ticket. I’ll call as soon as I’m out, no later than three, okay?’

  ‘Talk to you then, Hal.’

  At one forty-five he undressed and piled his clothing in a storage unit. He attached the leads and face-plate, then stepped into the warm jelly. He sat down, feeling the stuff slide around his body with an unpleasant, invasive intimacy. He lay back, and experienced a thirty-second period during which he gradually became deprived of his senses. He seemed to be floating, bodiless - with a wonderful feeling of calm and well-being - and then awareness hit him in a rush and, unbelievably, he was no longer in the jellytank.

  He was standing on a sunlit, upland meadow, a brilliant green sweep of land rising to a distant range of mountains. The sight of the rearing massifs took his breath away. To take in their entirety he was forced to tilt back his head. Their summits towered above him with an intimidating, impersonal grandeur, clad with snow so blindingly white it shone with a heavenly effulgence.

  He reminded himself that these were not actually the Himalayas, but some clever neural hallucination.

  He looked around for the shrine Kosinski had mentioned. Below, a dizzying sweep of valleys stretched away for as far as the eye could see, threaded with the silver filaments of rivers and patched with the brilliant green squares and rectangles of fields under cultivation.

  Up the incline, beside a stand of pine, was a small stone-built shrine topped with a terracotta-tiled roof. Halliday made his way towards it. He marvelled at how natural it felt to be inhabiting what seemed to be his own body. He climbed the hillside, feeling the play of the muscles in his legs, a warm breeze on his skin.

  Beneath the shrine sat a stone-carved effigy of Buddha, in the lotus position.

  He looked around for any sign of Kosinski. He alone seemed to inhabit this virtual Shangri-La. In the distance, he made out individual yaks cropping the grass, and the occasional twist of smoke rising from huts down the valley.

  It was a few minutes before he became aware of the monastery. He was staring up at the ramparts of the mountain to his left when he saw, built up in a vertical extension of the cliff-face itself, the sheer walls of a fortress-like structure topped with a dozen peaked, tiled roofs on various levels.

  ‘Impressive, isn’t it?’

  He turned. Joe Kosinski advanced from the trees, but a Kosinski much altered from the nervous, awkward young man Halliday had met in New York.

  He was garbed in the maroon robes of a Mahayana Buddhist monk, and his head was shaven, the absence of hair emphasising the size of his nose and his Adam’s apple. He appeared calmer in virtual reality, as if he’d left his nervous energy along with his Western apparel back in the real world.

  ‘Every week I go to the lamasery on retreat, to meditate, take lessons, Mr Halliday.’

  ‘Hal, okay? Call me Hal.’

  The Buddhist monk nodded. He gestured around him at the sloping verdant meadow, the mountains and the sweeping valleys. ‘What do you think?’

  Halliday shook his head. ‘It’s overwhelming, the whole experience. I’m at a loss for words. I don’t understand the technology behind it, so it seems to me like magic.’ He looked at Kosinski. He thought about what had happened on the beach, and the subsequent appearances of Eloise. ‘But things can go wrong,’ he said.

  ‘Meaning?’

  He told Kosinski about the hallucinations.

  ‘Ah, you’re talking about accidental engram retrieval.’

  Halliday smiled to himself. ‘I might be ... if I knew what that meant. The other day, on the VR beach, something seemed to explode in my head. I felt a sudden, terrible depression.’

  Kosinski was nodding. ‘The hallucinations go away, in time. You see, the virtual experience works by directly activating the brain’s signalling fibres, or axons, and thus simulating synaptic function. Virtual reality isn’t somehow beamed into the eyes and conducted through the skin, as some people think - it’s a direct program-cerebral link. Occasionally, glitches in the program - infinitesimal errors of computing - can lead to the decoding of engrams, or buried or suppressed memories. In exceptional cases, these result in hallucinations back in the real world.’

  ‘But you said they’d go away?’

  ‘The recorded cases so far have never lasted more than a few days.’

  Kosinski gestured towards the shrine. They climbed three steps and sat on a timber bench in the shade. Halliday stared down the mountainside towards the distant, rucked valleys and mist-shrouded flatlands.

  ‘Why the Mantoni VR Bar,’ Halliday asked, ‘and not one of Cyber-Tech’s?’

  Kosinski sighed. ‘That brings us to why we’re here, Hal. You see, the Mantoni system is closed. As far as I can ensure, it’s safe from infiltration, invasion. We can be assured of absolute secrecy in here, secrecy we couldn’t guarantee out there in the real world. We could have met in the most remote region of upstate New York, but we might have been overheard.’

  ‘Are you in this Bar? I didn’t see you

  The Buddhist monk smiled. ‘I’m in my own tank, in a safe house.’

  ‘Then how are you linked to the Mantoni VR world?’

  Kosinski smiled, minimally. ‘Highly illegally, is how,’ he said. ‘I manufactured the link myself when I went into hiding. I’d rather use the Mantoni VR system to meet you than Cyber-Tech’s. You see, Cyber-Tech have links everywhere. We wouldn’t be safe in any Cyber-Tech VR site.’

  Halliday shrugged. ‘Safe from who, Joe?’

  For the first time, Kosinski manifested some of his old uneasiness. He bobbed his head in a quick, nervous gesture, briefly avoided Halliday’s gaze. ‘You wouldn’t believe me if I came straight out with it, Hal. I’ll have to begin at the beginning, work up slowly to what all this is about. You see, sometimes the truth is too much.’

  Halliday lodged a foot on the bench and embraced his leg, watching Kosinski as the monk gathered his thoughts.

  ‘It started about five years ago, in the early days when we were experimenting with the fundamentals of virtual reality. One of the big difficulties we faced was the sheer mass of information, the data, required to generate a convincing simulated reality: the computing power alone is breathtakingly phenomenal. Stated simply, we needed an operating network capable of unifying the programming and the technological hardware in an integrated sy
stem. We came up with something we called, for want of anything better, the Linked Integrated Nexus: scientists love acronyms, Hal. LINx was a series of supercomputers processing in parallel, learning to reprogram and reconfigure itself exponentially. The great thing about it was that it worked. It allowed us to build a prototype virtual reality site at least three or four years ahead of our rivals. It was nothing like this, of course, but it was a start.’

  ‘So far, so good.’

  ‘Yeah, so far . . .’ Kosinski nodded. ‘I had a great team up at Cyber-Tech. I was just twenty, technically still majoring in computational theory at MIT. I’d started Cyber-Tech in my spare time, not realising it’d take off as it did.’ Kosinski stopped there and stared down the mountainside.