Quintessence Sky

by David Walton

  Using slight movements of his eyes, he navigated deeper into the system, found a procedure called "Connect NAIL Public Portal", and executed it. At its request for a pass-image, Mark envisioned a regular icosahedron, faces shaded blue, and it granted him access. Most people chose familiar faces for their pass-images, but Mark preferred geometric shapes. They required a good spacial mind to envision properly, reducing the chance that someone else could hack into his system.

  Mark checked the satellite he was connected through, verifying it was not the one they were targeting. Wouldn't do to lose a connection before they were able to clean up. A few more queries told him the NAIL satellite now entering the eastern sky was a dedicated one for federal military use. So much the better. He opened the account directory and chose an entry. It didn't matter which, since he didn't intend to complete the call. At random, he selected a recipient at the Navy base in Norfolk, Virginia.

  You there, Darin? he sent.

  Right in here with you.

  Mark paused. Despite his bravado out on the hill, this would be the most ambitious jack they'd ever attempted. If they crashed it, the security agents would snag their IDs, and well, the federal government didn't have much clout anymore, but it could still lock them away for a long time. But hey, where was the rush without the risk? He took a deep breath, and placed the call.

  No turning back now. In order to call, the software had to access the encryption algorithm, which meant opening a socket—a data hole—into the command level. The hole would be open for less than a microsecond, but a hole was a hole.

  Mark watched the process logs: account lookup . . . server handshake . . . message collation . . . Sensing the open socket at the precise moment, his software reacted, opening a chute to prevent it from closing normally.

  Chute is holding, Darin reported, and then, Dropping caterpillar. Another cracker, one of Darin's, copied itself through the chute into the system beyond.

  Mark hoped the caterpillar would be quick. Written to resemble a worm, which the security software agents fought on a daily basis, the caterpillar was bait. Thinking it was just a worm, the software agents would kill it, and the caterpillar, just before dying, would fire back crucial information about the agents to Mark and Darin.

  At least, that was the plan. Mark always feared the worst: that a top-flight software agent would sniff the jack and follow the trail right back through the chute. A caterpillar had to be quick, or the risks outweighed the gain.

  Anything yet? he sent.

  I knew you'd snap.

  Have not. I'm just falling asleep waiting for your junkware.

  The caterpillar spouted a stream of data. Mark studied it to see what they would be up against. Looked like a few sentries, a strongman, and . . . Scan it!

  What?

  A nazi. They've got a nazi. That's it, I'm collapsing the . . .

  Keep your panties on. We've got a few seconds—drop your kevorkian.

  But—

  Drop it!

  Cringing, Mark obeyed.

  Nazis were the most feared of security agents, but common lore said their weakness was in their strength. They were so powerful that they were equipped with fail-safes, mechanisms to put them to sleep if they started attacking friendly system code. A kevorkian played off this concept, faking data to convince the nazi it was doing serious damage. The nazi then killed itself, and would remain dead—they hoped—until a sysadmin could take a look.

  Mark had written this kevorkian himself, and was proud of it, but it had never been tested against a genuine nazi. He cringed, expecting at any moment to see a surge of data that would mean disaster.

  You got him, said Darin.

  What?

  You got him.

  Mark swallowed the acid that had been rising in his throat. Of course I did. Now jump in there and get this bird turning.

  MARIE Coleson knew enough about slicers to be careful. Despite practically living here at the Norfolk anti-viral lab for the last two years, she'd never handled software so volatile. The slicer reacted unpredictably to every test, and never the same way twice.

  Because it was human. Not a person—Marie refused to believe that it could genuinely think or feel emotion. But generated from a human mind, and just as complex and flexible and,well, intelligentas the original. Marie's job was to break it down, understand its inner workings, and write tools to defeat it. Fortunately, she'd caught it just as it went active on one of the city's rental memory blocks. If it had distributed copies of itself on the open net, it would have been much harder to contain.

  She stood, stretched, and walked to the coffee machine. It was past nine, but that was hardly unusual. Since she'd walked into a Navy recruitment center last April, she'd spent most of her time in this tiny room, with its faded paint and ten-year-old promotional posters. In the six decades since the Conflict, the federal Navy's volunteer list had declined as rapidly as the federal government's power, so she figured they were desperate for anyone. Uncle Sam would have grown her a soldier's armored body, but by the time her turn came up, she'd proved so useful in the lab that she was assigned electronic security detail instead.

  It didn't matter to Marie. Not much mattered to her anymore. Not since a flier accident two days before Christmas had killed her husband and son. Two years ago now. She mourned Keith, but didn't miss him; the marriage had been falling apart anyway. That last year, he’d rarely been home, and when he was, they’d done nothing but fight. But Samuel, little Sammy, her angel, her peanut: what could be worth doing now that he was gone?

  Sometimes, late in the evening, alone in the lab like she was tonight, Marie fantasized about becoming a mother again. It wasn't impossible.The fertility treatments that had produced Sammy had left an embryo unused. It was still there at the clinic, kept in frozen possibility. But she was forty-two years old, for heavens sake. Too old to consider starting such a life.

  This was her life now, this lab—fighting viruses, worms, phages, krakens. Investigating, classifying, designing anti-viruses, sometimes for twenty hours a day. Any time not required for other military duties, she spent here. It kept her mind busy, and that she desperately needed.

  She sipped her coffee, staring through the faded walls into her memories of the past. She was still standing there when Pamela Rider peeked through the door. Pam worked for Navy administration in the next building over, but she stopped by whenever she could.

  "Don't you ever go home?" Pam said.

  "Hi, Pam."

  "Or out?” Pam sat the wrong way around in a swivel chair, the backrest between her legs and her arms crossed on top. Her tan was smooth and permanent, and her elegant legs had been lengthened and tapered by regular mod treatments. In a cotton flower-print dress, she cut a striking image, making Marie feel frumpy in her plasticwear overall.

  "When was the last time you saw a guy?" asked Pam.

  "You know I’m not interested."

  " It's been two years, Marie. Two years! It's not healthy. Leave Keith already."

  "No, that's not—"

  "Listen, if the guy were still alive, you'd have dropped him ages ago. Relationships don't last that long. If you ask me, three months is ideal—any less, and you've hardly gotten to the good parts, but any more, and he starts to feel like he owns you."

  "Pam—"

  "Come on, I remember Keith. He wasn't worth that kind of loyalty even when he was alive."

  "Seriously, it's not Keith. I just don't want to go looking for another guy now."

  "It's the kid, isn't it."

  "The kid," Marie echoed. Yes, it was the kid. Sammy had been born three weeks early and had never looked back. He was quick to walk, quick to talk, quick to form complete sentences. He’d loved construction vehicles and chocolate candy.

  "Come out with me tonight," said Pam.

  "I can't."

  "Come on. This is a Navy base. They line up for miles to talk to a pretty woman, which you are. A hundred tasty slabs of manflesh, just dying to be eaten
up. You'll be mobbed before you take a step."

  "Are you looking at the same woman I see in the mirror?"

  Pam cocked her head. "You could use some sprucing up, I won't deny it. But nothing I can't manage."

  "I don't know, Pam. I'll probably work late tonight. I flagged a data spike on one of the city's rental memory blocks. Turns out it's a slicer."

  "Yeah? What's a slicer?"

  "It's a person. Was a person. They slice down into someone's brain, copying it neuron by neuron into a digital simulation. The original brain doesn't survive."

  "Get out of town. People do that?"

  "It started as an immortality technology—you know, flash your mind into crystal and live forever. But it doesn't work. The trauma's too much for the mind; it goes insane."

  Such a grisly practice appalled Marie, but also fascinated her. What could ever drive a person to make a slicer? She assumed a group, one member of whom sacrificed his life for the endeavor, must create them. Terrorists, maybe, or cultists of some sort? Marie knew what it was like to wish she were dead, but she couldn't relate to that kind of commitment to a cause.

  "Somehow, the people who create it can control it," she said. "I'm trying to figure out how."

  "Well, finish up, and then come out with me tonight."

  Marie laughed. "We're talking about a slicer, here, not some teenager's porn virus."

  "Like that means anything to me."

  "Tell you what. Give me an hour to run some tests and send it off to a colleague, and I'll come join you."

  "One hour. Promise?"

  "Promise."

  "Don't stand me up, now. I'll hold you to it."

  Half an hour later, Marie thought she had the answer, though it made her a little sick. The slicer seemed to be controlled through pleasure and pain. A little module ran separately from the main simulator, a master process that could send signals to the pleasure or pain centers of the mind. Since the slicer wasn't limited by a physical body, those sensations could be as extreme as the mind could register. It was a revolting concept, like torturing someone who was mentally handicapped.

  She didn't understand the whole process, though. She needed another opinion. She decided to send the slicer out to Tommy Dungan, a fellow researcher at the army base at Fort Bragg. Transporting malicious code could be dangerous, but their dedicated NAIL satellite used isolated channels, and she trusted Dungan to keep the slicer secure once it reached his end.

  Just as she logged into the NAIL system, she saw an incoming call on the lab's private channel. She answered it, but the sender had already disconnected. Wrong number, probably. Marie sent the slicer to Dungan, logged off for the day, and went out to meet Pam.

  MARK fiddled with the settings on his chute analyzer, watching for any sudden change in data rate—the online equivalent of pacing the room. His kevorkian ought to have knocked down that nazi for good, but what if a sysadmin happened to spot it and cycled it back up? If the data rate across that chute so much as hiccupped . . .

  He looked back at the analyzer just in time. An enormous surge of data was pouring back across the chute toward him.

  Abort, abort! He couldn't collapse the chute until Darin pulled out, or he would hang Darin's session inside, leaving a wealth of information for sysadmins to find and track at their leisure.

  Abort! Get out of there!

  Done. I'm out.

  Mark opened his eyes, breathing hard. Darin tore off his netmask.

  "A close one," said Darin.

  "We should have been caught. That nazi had plenty of time to ID us. Plenty of time."

  "Cheer up. We made it.” Darin pointed to the eastern sky. "Let's enjoy the show."

  While Praveen made final adjustments to the camera, Mark overlaid a corner of his vision with a digital countdown.

  "Five," he said. "Four. Three. Two. One."

  Several seconds passed.

  "Zero," Mark said, belatedly.

  The eastern sky remained dark. Darin grunted.

  "What happened?" said Mark.

  "Don't ask me. You did the calculations."

  "The calculations were correct. We did three simulations; you know they were."

  "But the bird turned! I saw the telemetry before I jumped out; it was all correct."

  "I don't get it," said Mark."You mean you got it wrong?" said Praveen. "I knew I should not have come. I could have been working this evening instead of hauling all this gear up to the rim for nothing. Next time, don't . . ."

  A brilliant flash of light leapt at them from the east. Mark opened his mouth to cheer, then shut it again. There was no way that light was from the satellite. It was too far north, and besides, it was too red.

  Mark could only say, "Looks like an ex—" before he was cut off by a deafening boom that echoed off the hillside. The base of the eastern mountain seemed to be on fire.

  He dialed up his vision to maximum and saw fire and smoke, and behind it, a torrent of rushing water.

  "It's the dam," said Mark, disbelieving. "Someone blew up the dam."