by Bruce Bethke
“Check.”
“Cranial positional sensors?”
“Check.”
“ProctoProd—er, jacked in?”
“ProctoProd in Jack. And just so you know, I’m in no danger of getting used to this thing.”
“Good,” he said as he shut the manual and dropped it on the floor. “Then it’s showtime. VR boot in three, two, one—”
I opaqued the video goggles as he unsealed the Net portal. For a moment I had this terrible claustrophobic feeling of being sucked down inside a giant pitch-black sewer pipe, then…
Pop! I was standing on a pleasant green hillside in Virtual Reality, where all the men are strong, all the women are good looking, and all the children are wanted on felony charges. “Okay,” Gunnar said in my ear, “you made it. Everything looks cool up here, so I’ll cut the audio and video feeds in a moment and go to biotelemetry. But first: Max?”
“Yes, Gunnar?”
“Good luck, man.”
I made a thumbs-up sign. “Thanks. Save a couple doughnuts for me.” (We’d had quite an argument about this earlier and decided that eating bran muffins before using the interface was probably not a good idea.) I heard a click on the line as Gunnar’s audio link went dead, and a moment later felt that “lonely” feeling in the back of my head that meant he was no longer looking out through my eyes.
I took a deep breath, pooled together all my nerves, and I tought, Okay Max, let’s go for it. With a snap of my fingers, I summoned my new virtual Harley Ultraglide into existence.
My new and very much improved Harley Ultraglide.
Okay, I admit it, it was a kind of silly and useless thing to do. But the anxiety attack that’d nailed me about 3 A.M. that morning left no hope of my getting back to sleep, so I’d fired up the workstation, strapped on my goggles, and put in a few really serious hours on reworking my virtual bike. Now, thanks to both my new superuser skills and my at times anal obsession with detail (unfortunate word choice, that), the hog was as real as I was, or maybe even more so. I mean, it was real down to the steady drip, drip, drip, of ninety-weight gear oil from the primary drive cover.
I took a slow walk around it, just to admire my handiwork, then saddled up, pulled on my black studded gloves, adjusted my black shades, and checked my greasy black hair in the handlebar mirror. With a wave of my right hand I summoned a lit cigarette into existence and stuck it in my mouth—took a deep drag and about coughed my lungs out—then I gave the bike a tilt to the right to get the kickstand up, pulled in the clutch handle, and started her rolling down the virtual hillside. When it looked like I had sufficient momentum, I stepped the tranny down to first, switched the ignition on, and popped the clutch.
With a rumble of ominous thunder like the sound of Thor’s Own Lawnmower, 1100 cc’s of Heavy Milwaukee Iron roared to throbbing, belching, fire-breathing life! I leaned back in the saddle, twisted the throttle wide open. Hit the drainage ditch at the bottom of the hill at about 100 miles an hour, jumped the bike clean over four lanes of traffic, and landed in the far left lane of the Information Superhighway, heading for Business World balls out and hell for leather.
Jack Burroughs, frankly, was chewing his fingernails down to little bloody stubs, but Max Kool felt good.
On the Road, 8:12 A.M.: Boy, was I glad LeMat could no longer see what I saw or talk in my head! Now that I had some practice at it I could control this Cubism thing and switch it on and off at will, but still, LeMat was right. BusinessWorld, through the eyes of a superuser, did look like a Fernand Léger painting.
FERNAND LÉGER
French painter, b. 1881, d. 1955.
It was still a claustrophobic world of enormous gray data blocks, of course, but now I could also see that the blocks were not mere blank and featureless monoliths, but rather marvelously dense and intricate structures, made up of mile upon tangled mile of pipes, tubes, webs, and ducts. The effect was that of an oil refinery, merged with the Pompidou Center, and invaded and conquered by giant mutant radioactive silkworms. I slowed my bike a moment to enjoy this living testament to data anarchy and informational entropy and dwell thoughtfully on an article on chaos theory that I once skimmed in a Reader’s Digest in my dentist’s office. Humans will communicate. (Except when they’re married to each other, but that was a different article.)
Then I saw the lights.
I slowed the bike even further and let the view fill in with more detail. Every one of those corporate structures was simply swarming with a nimbus of tiny, darting, brilliantly colored lights, like fairy ice castles infested with fireflies. Now and again a laserlike shaft of dazzling green light would leap from one part of a structure to another, or even from one corporation lo another, and the effect was somewhere between not bad if you like light shows and Fourth-of-July glorious. What do those lights represent? I wondered. The spark of creativity? The beauty of the free exchange of information? I kicked the bike into neutral, coasted in close to the Advanced Multifoods datablock, and tried to get a good look at one of those glittering virtual fireflies as it darted past. A tiny blue glow sprang into existence on the wall near me, and I grabbed it.
It turned out to be an obscene and badly drawn fax cartoon about divorce settlements, sent by a bored sales rep at Advanced Multifoods to her old college roommate over at General Cognetics.
I wasted another minute or two catching all the little lights I could reach, then I turned them all loose and wished for a way to wash my virtual hands. The lights, I realized, represented desktop PC modems and fax cards, and the vast and hideous bulk of them were being used to transmit such uplifting material as the very latest blonde jokes. The green laser beams were only slightly more interesting: for the most part, they turned out to be resumés from people seeking to barter company trade secrets in exchange for jobs with competitors.
Feeling vaguely disappointed that the personal computer revolution had crapped out to this, I stomped my bike down into first and open the throttle wide.
BusinessWorld, 8:22 A.M.: The MDE corporate datablock rose into view in that peculiarly flat and perspectiveless way so familiar to consumers of low-budget Japanese animation. I slowed the bike and pulled off onto the shoulder, then fished my virtual binoculars out of my saddlebag and gave MDE the once over, just to see what I could learn from a distance.
The answer was, not much. The MDE data structure was about what I’d expected to see: huge, tall, broad, incoherent, with entire departments hanging pendant in empty space, supported only by the sheer tenacity of one manager clinging desperately to the coattails of the vice president above. There were quite a number of free-floating apex points drifting aimlessly in midair, about halfway up the organizational chart, like brain-dead drone bumblebees. These puzzled me, until I took a closer look at one and realized it was a virtual representation of Scott Uberman.
Taken as a whole, the MDE corporate data structure looked like the sort of gravity-defying mobile sculpture that an artist with a sick sense of humor and a glue gun might slap together from studio scraps on a slow day. It was only after I’d been looking at it for a while that I realized, it did have a rigid core, and that was all that kept the whole mess from subsiding into corporate compost. One consistently profitable division, I guessed, supporting all the rest. Scaling up the magnification, I strained to discern the outlines of that central pillar.
Oh. Sanguinary TechSystems. I should have known.
Scaling the magnification back down to normal, I finished my remote recon of MDE. If I had a week, I decided, it would be interesting to come back here and try to map the data flow. That glossy web centered in the left side of Dynamic InfoTainment, for example: what did that represent? And all those pulsing laser beams: clearly, the big green one at the pinnacle of success was the direct channel from the CEO’s office to the INH Executive Inner Coven, in B100, Paris. But what about all those smaller ones, flickering on and off between MDE’s vice-presidential level and the upper echelons of our competitors? If I traced those beams, whose windows would
I be peeking in? And, I thought, as I remembered Kathé in the outplacement office, what kind of leverage would it give me if I had that information?
Suddenly, the MDE structure seemed like a interesting place.
My virtual watch pinged. I tugged at my black leather sleeve, and checked the time. Damn, 8:30 already. Making a mental note to myself to revisit this topic later, I tossed the binocs in a saddlebag and started the motor. If I had a week, I was thinking. But I didn’t have a week. I had a window of opportunity that would be closing in fifteen minutes, tops.
Kicking the bike into gear, I cranked the throttle open and went looking for the MDE exit ramp.
MDE Parking Lot, 8:32 A.M.: Coasting slowly and casually down the Information Frontage Road, I waited until I was fairly sure no one was watching me, then darted behind an information dumpster and morphed into—
An absolutely faceless guy in a gray pinstripe suit and a black bowler hat.
(If I were still doing infonuggets, I would seize this opportunity to insert a brief critical essay about the life and career of René Francois Ghislain Magritte [b.1898, d.1967], the Belgian painter responsible for all those pictures of blank gray businessmen with green apples for faces. But I’m not, so nyeah.)
When the transformation was complete, I took an extra moment to inspect myself and convince myself the disguise would pass, and two extra moments to crank my courage up to its highest possible setting. Then I pulled my briefcase out of one saddlebag, and my umbrella out of the other, and as nonchalantly as possible—I believe I even whistled a jolly little flat tune as I twirled my umbrella—I strolled around the corner to join the milling mob of faceless business drones queuing up to pass through the main gate. No one seemed to react to my presence.
I took that as a positive sign and forged ahead.
8:37: The queue was moving slowly, slowly, s-l-o-w-l-y. It wasn’t until I got near the front that I started to understand why. Old Carl was standing there, of course—yes, Carl, the security guard, Employee 00000002. Not the real one, mind you; he was still presumably standing in the lobby of B305. But when Bubu and I had overhauled the main security routine last January, we’d decided it needed a human face, and so we’d clipped an image scan out of the employee files and given it Carl’s.
Somebody else had obviously tinkered with the main security routine since then, though, because—while it still had Carl’s face—it now had a tall, gleaming, actually rather evil-looking robotic body, and an assortment of nasty sharp toys straight out of some Hollywood set designer’s vision of a medieval dungeon. Somewhere along the line it had also acquired a sinister laugh worthy of Vincent Price.
I didn’t remember Bubu adding that.
The security routine grabbed the poor bastard up at the front of the line, threw him into an iron maiden, and leaned against the open door. “What,” the security routine demanded in a voice like thunder, “is your user name?”
“ANDY_R!” came a muffled, panic-stricken voice from inside the iron maiden.
The security routine gave the door a little nudge, and grinned. “What,” it demanded again, “is your password?”
“KLM005!”
The security routine took a step back from the iron maiden, then spun on its chromium heels and snapped a third question. “What,” it shrieked like a demon, “is your favorite color?”
“Huh?!” came the voice from inside the box. “What kind of security question is that?”
“Wrong answer!” the security routine bellowed gleefully as it threw all its weight against the door of the iron maiden and slammed it shut. There was a brief, agonized scream from inside the box and a gush of fresh blood from some vents at the bottom.
The security routine turned back to the queue. “Next!” It reached for me, but I ducked aside at the last moment and it latched its big chrome skeleton hands onto the woman standing next to me instead. She went headfirst into the guillotine.
Her name was MARY_W. Her password was VNT417. She didn’t know the name of Millard Fillmore’s vice president. Her head bounced and rolled across the parking lot like a soccer ball.
“Next!” I tried to duck aside again. This time, the six or eight people behind me grabbed onto my coat and pants and pushed me forward. The security routine caught me in its claws and threw me into some kind of tight iron cage that hung by a rusty chain about three feet off the cold stone floor.
“What,” it demanded, “is your user name?”
“Admin,” I said calmly. It’s a generic administrative account name. Almost every system has one.
The security routine paused and considered me with narrowed eyes. “Ooo,” it said, smacking its thin, cruel, virtual lips. “So we think we’re the system administrator, do we? Well, we have something special we save for system administrators.” It straightened up abruptly, and clanged its metal hands together. “Igor!” it bellowed, “bring me the cables!”
A nasty little deformed dwarf hobbled into the scene, and hissed, “Yess, masster!” Then it shuffled off, to return moments later dragging the biggest damned set of jumper cables you ever saw. It connected these to the bars of my cage.
The security routine leaned against my cage and set it gently swinging. “These cables,” it said, with a thick and creamy gloat in its voice, “are connected to a fifty-thousand-volt high-tension line. All I need do is throw this switch,” it stepped back from the cage and rested its steely skeletal hand on a giant threepole knife switch that looked like something out of Dr. Frankenstein’s rec room, “and you will be burned down to dust. The real you. Lethal feedback. So tell me, Admin—” it paused, to chortle “—if that is your real name—”
LETHAL FEEDBACK
Okay, one more infonugget, just to kill this canard off once and for all.
Voltage is an analog concept. The only value of “lethal feedback” is to scare ignorant junior-high school hackers, because as soon as you try to digitize that voltage for data transmission, you’re either going to toast your D/A converter into smoking ruin or else clip the voltage down to a nice, safe, transmittable level. But if we somehow ignore that inconvenient law of physics, the whole idea of sending high voltage over a plastic laser fiber optic line is just plain silly…
Okay, for the sake of argument, let’s say you’re working with the Ma and Pa Kettle Phone Company, and through some incredible freak of circumstance you manage to make an analog metal circuit all the way from the security system to my personal computer. Whereupon your fifty-thousand-volt charge comes blasting into my local data bus—
And within nanoseconds, the molecule-sized gates on the IC chips and the hair-fine wiring on the PC boards instantly act like thousands of tiny fuses, melting down into harmless slag and breaking the circuit long before my first neuron gets even a little warm.
Lethal feedback, my ass.
It lunged at me. “What’s your password? Quick! Tell me!”
And that’s about the point where I decided I’d had enough of this shit, went into superuser Cubist mode, and punched my hand right through the security routine’s chrome ribcage. Before it could react I grabbed hold of the cold and misshapen blue lump that took the place of its heart and twisted it to Accept.
Instantly, the security routine’s demeanor changed. “Good morning Admin,” it said politely, before I’d even pulled my hand back out of its chest. “You are cleared for entry.” It unlocked the iron cage, let me out, and ushered me through the main door. “Have a nice day.” It smiled at me as it held the door open, nodded slightly, and touched two steely claw-fingers to the brim of its hat, as if in salute.
I stepped through the door, marched briskly into the root lobby of the MDE data structure, and shuddered only a little at the sound of the iron gate clanging shut behind me. “Next!” Somewhere on the other side of the door, a woman screamed.
It took everything I had not to break into a run.
Two minutes later, I’d ducked and dodged my way trough the globs of flying spam and worked my way up
to a little-used virtual corridor just outside the Global EthniFoods domain. The positive side of this trip was that MDE’s internal data structure was thoroughly rigid and predictable, and mapped to virtual reality just like the actual building, only cleaner.
The downside was, it’d still taken me two minutes. This was not good. I checked my virtual watch again, and swore silently. 8:39. I was already into danger time.
I took one last look around to make sure none of the faceless gray drones in the hallway were watching me, then darted into a virtual broom closet and closed the door gently. Working quickly, I set down my briefcase, popped the locks, peeled off my green apple face mask, and ditched my black bowler hat.
The briefcase opened of its own accord, and out from the case sprang Thing1 and Thing2.
“Listen up,” I said to them. “We’ve got a problem.”
“I’ll say we do,” Thing1 said.
“I’ll say it, too,” Thing2 chimed in.
“We’re really short on time,” I said.
“You need to make it rhyme.”
I wrinkled my nose until it was halfway up my forehead and stared at my two little monsters. “What the fuck?”
A flash of panic darted through Thing1‘s eyes, and he turned to Thing2, who tapped his foot, scratched his chin, and started into muttering. “Duck? Buck? Luck? Firetruck?”
Thing1 turned back to me and shrugged. “Sorry, boss. It helps if you give us more syllables to work with.”
What I gave them both was a hand clamped around the throat, and I squeezed until their little blue eyeballs bulged out. “Now listen, you things,” I said through clenched teeth, “and listen real close. We’ve got just five minutes, and then we are toast.”
“He’s getting better,” Thing1 gasped. “Don’t you think?”
“Definitely better,” Thing2 wheezed, nodding.
I dragged them in close until we were almost nose to nose. “You know why I made you,” I hissed. “You know why we’re here. That data is out there. Get your asses in gear.” I gave them both a good shake to reinforce the point, then released them. They fell to the floor, clutching at their throats and gasping for breath.