Trent leaned forward slightly. "I'm going to hurt them, Nathan. I'm going to kick the sons of bitches in the balls so hard they're never, never going to forget it."
"And just how are you going to do that, boy?"
Trent leaned back. He took a drink of his beer. "Well, I haven't worked that part out yet."
The man's voice was very gentle. "You know, lad, it can be done. Retiring from the hero business, I mean, working up another kind of business for yourself." Nathan's eyes were very steady on Trent. "Not having to live your life on the run."
"Well," said Trent slowly, "that sounds like the voice of experience."
Nathan stared straight at Trent. His mouth worked silently before the words came out. "Do you know who I am?"
Trent said swiftly, "No and don't tell me."
It brought Nathan up short. "Oh?"
"I have some idea," said Trent more slowly. "Some. You were somebody. Nobody has the kind of biosculpture you've put yourself through without damn good reason."
Nathan actually jerked. "How--you've been in my medical records."
Trent did not bother to deny it. "I know you were a Speedfreak, Nathan. Probably a prominent one. If I audited records of the Long Run I'll bet I could find out which one. Some day, Nathan, there is a good chance I'll find myself in PKF hands, getting my brain drained." Trent said the words one at a time, putting emphasis on them. "Nathan, I do not need to know any more about you than I do, and I do not want to."
The muscles in Nathan's jaws were standing out. "I want," he said deliberately, glaring, "to tell you a story."
"I already know how it ends," said Trent.
"Once," said Nathan, his steady glare not wavering, "there was a young man named something-or-other. Growing up, this young man was fascinated by elegant machinery. He went to space in his twenties, was one of the few thousands ever adopted into the SpaceFarers' Collective after it declared its independence. He was one of the very, very few who ever left it. He returned to Earth in 2048, and became a part of the burgeoning Speedfreak culture. He married in 2060, to another Speedfreak. By 2063 he was prominent among them. When the Unification Council tried to legislate the Speedfreaks out of existence, they rebelled. A quiet sort of rebellion; they were going to take their hovercars on the Long Run, a complete circuit of the globe, in a caravan that numbered more than a million vehicles. They did this against the direct orders of the Unification Council."
Nathan smiled too precisely. It was an amazing smile that went nowhere near the glare in his eyes. "When the hovercars were refueling in the mid-Atlantic a storm arose. They never proved it," said the man who called himself Nathan Dark Clouds, "but to this day I and many others believe that the storm that destroyed the Speed Enthusiast's Organization was engineered by the Trinity. Those who survived that storm were rounded up by the PKF, and some were executed. My wife was executed, Trent, masered to death; the PKF recorded the executions, 'leaked' them to the Boards. The ones who were not executed were sent into Public Labor for the rest of their lives. I was--not one of the ones who would have been sent into Public Labor, Trent." He was silent for a long moment. "You can do it, Trent. Live. Here, in peace."
"But," said Trent awkwardly, "it's just--"
With a sound like a rifle shot Nathan slapped a hand down on the tabletop. "You ran all the way from Earth. When does it become time to stop?"
"After I've won a round would be good. That would be a good time."
"I'd say you've won a pretty big round, Trent. You're alive and the PKF doesn't know it. You may never again get another chance like this, not ever."
"Nathan...." Trent's voice trailed off. A troubled expression crossed his features like a cloud. He began again, "Nathan--I have a lot of anger. More than I like to think about sometimes. And--six years in the Fringe. And before that, yes, they killed everybody I grew up with." Even now Trent did not consider mentioning either David or Denice. "I tell people I'm a pacifist and it's partly true. Killing other people--it's the last option, the very very last option. I've never had to use it. I've come close but I've never had to. But--" His voice halted, resumed again more slowly. "I've said sometimes, to some people, that I don't believe in hurting others if you can avoid it. And that's a lie." He looked up, met the older man's dark gaze. "Nathan, I want to hurt the Peaceforcers worse than I can say. I want to hurt them so they'll never, never forget it. Every day, every minute of every day. I'm sick in my soul from wanting to hurt them."
"They're not a person, lad. You can't ever hurt them the way they've hurt you."
Trent became aware that the palms of his hands were damp. "I can try. Besides, I have one great advantage."
What anger there had been in Nathan Dark Clouds' spare, craggy features had vanished as though a switch had been thrown. He sat across the table, studying Trent carefully, saying nothing.
Trent tried to smile at the man. He thought he almost carried it off. "I'm alive and the PKF doesn't know it. I may never get another chance like this."
The old man said very quietly, "People have been trying for a long time, Trent."
"Actually," said Trent, "I have two advantages. I was raised by Peaceforcers. Everyone in Project Superman was. I know them. I know the PKF, Nathan."
"Other people," said Nathan Dark Clouds, "have known the Peaceforcers too. And it didn't do them a damn bit of good."
Trent said, "I know them inside and out, I know how they think, I know how they plan, I know how they work."
Nathan shook his head ever so slightly; for the first time since Trent had known him he seemed truly old. Not even looking at Trent, Nathan said, "They'll kill you, lad." As though Trent were not even there, he said again, "They'll kill you."
Trent said softly, "I know them in my blood."
* * *
17.
"Federal Express."
The webdancer sitting in front of the DataWatch terminal flicked open his eyes, glanced at Trent quickly, held up a hand in a "one moment" gesture, and went back Inside.
It was after three a.m. Standing in the lobby of the Luna City branch of the Lunar DataWatch, wearing a stolen blue Federal Express softsuit and carrying a package in a vacuum bag, Trent waited patiently. He had seen almost nobody on his way up to the DataWatch offices.
Trent took his softsuit's gloves off, hung them at his belt, and looked around while he waited. The lobby was sparsely decorated; pale gray carpeting, a couple of long, low couches with video tablets chained to the arms of the couches. The office was located on A2, in the complex that held both Luna City Hall and most of the U.N. civil offices. It was at the opposite end of the city from the all-night bars and dance clubs and restaurants.
The webdancer sitting behind the desk at the entrance to the lobby ignored Trent for two solid minutes before finally abandoning the Crystal Wind. "Sorry about that," the webdancer said at last, eyes opening fully. He was a short pudgy man on the verge of obesity; his smile was anxious and his traceset was crooked, the trode at his left temple barely making contact with his skin. "I'm the only webdancer on duty in the whole damn city right now, and I just barely stay on top of things. What do you have there?"
"Package for Colonel Despardin. Is he in?"
The webdancer sighed loudly. "Look, I just said I was the only one on duty right now. If--"
"You said you were the only webdancer on duty," Trent said mildly. "You mean you're the only person in the whole building?"
"Yes."
Trent chuckled, and the webdancer looked puzzled.
Trent said, "Then I guess you can have this." He unzipped the vacuum bag and withdrew the squirt gun. He shot the man in the face once, put the squirt gun back in the bag and walked around the desk without hurry while the webdancer toppled forward slowly, gracefully, onto the huge control panel in front of the terminal. Trent pulled the traceset from the man's head and gave him a gentle push to aid him on his way, out of the seat and onto the floor, kicked the chair out of the way and stood over the keyboard. He removed his handheld
from the vacuum bag, jacked it into the terminal and donned the traceset.
There were a pair of ten-terabyte infochips in the handheld, one to record the session as it went down, another for copying out databases as they were uncovered.
Johnny Johnny blossomed slowly around Trent. Trent's eyesight faded even before he closed his eyes, and his hearing and sense of smell; finally he lost all contact with his body and went Inside, to the waiting Crystal Wind.
... the file formats were standard, no different from those used by the DataWatch on Earth. Johnny Johnny pulled the terminal's autohelp and copied it off into the handheld without examining it. He scanned through the terminal's Emergency Notices; there were five in the queue, and a sixth was added as Johnny Johnny watched. Notices were rated Standard, Important, Very Important, and Urgent; the first five in the queue were Standard, and only the sixth was rated Important. There was a log of all Emergency Notices routed through that terminal in the last five years; Johnny Johnny glanced through it briefly, found amazing numbers. There were 758,000 residents of Luna City, with an average of 445 transactions per user per day; an average of 340 million transactions per day. In the twenty-one years that had passed since DataWatch's establishment of its control of the infant Lunar InfoNet, DataWatch had monitored over two trillion transactions in Luna City alone.
In twenty-one years no Player had ever danced successfully in the U.N. Luna InfoNet.
Johnny Johnny hesitated a moment, then copied the data out into the handheld for later analysis, and descended deeper into the terminal.
Johnny Johnny knew within instants that this system was not a working part of the Key transputers; its function was to track and analyze those Luna City InfoNet transactions that the LINK transputers, at the massive Farside DataWatch facility, tagged as anomalous. The Lunar Information Network was incredibly slow by Earth standards. Before data could be copied across public access lasercable it was necessary for users to upload a description of the data to the LINK transputers at Farside, the ID code of the user sending the data, and the ID code of the user receiving it. By law the data description sent to the LINK transputers could be generated by one of only three approved algorithms; uploading a manually created description was a crime.
Before a user could log onto a public Board the same routine was required. As a result there was a perceptible delay at each step; every transaction had to wait for a description to be generated, for the data to be transmitted to the Key transputers, for the LINK to examine the description, approve or deny the transaction, and then send that approval or denial back to the user requesting access to resources.
Only DataWatch users had unfettered access to the InfoNet; they were provided access codes that identified them as pre-approved users of all resources in the U.N. Lunar InfoNet. The pre-approved access codes were changed every hour on the hour; a checksum was webcast to every node in the InfoNet, and the keys to the checksum were webcast to the PKF DataWatch terminals. Without the keys the checksum was completely meaningless, and it was impossible to backtrack the keys from the checksum.
Disgusting, thought Johnny Johnny clearly. Protected by the PKF authorizations this terminal possessed, he danced out into the Crystal Wind.
Halfway around the world at the Farside DataWatch, Watchdog, a program that hung very near the fine line that separated the illegal, self-aware AIs from the huge collection of expert systems that all of human space depended upon, roused itself and went out into the Lunar InfoNet.
InfoNet lasercable transmissions in Luna City had jumped by a twentieth of one percent; and Watchdog was not receiving an appropriate increase in encoded descriptions.
Something was badly wrong.
Johnny Johnny flickered through Board after Board, filtering and editing and channeling the data that his biological component received, spooling the balance of the data into the handheld. It was all so appallingly slow; most of the hardware in the Lunar InfoNet was old by comparison with Earth-based computer systems, and even the relatively few state of the art systems were hampered by the mandatory checks placed on every transaction; at times, Johnny Johnny was shocked to learn, the delays stretched so long that humans became aware of them.
He cataloged the resources available to him. There was logic available, unused, in the comsats that circled Luna, and Johnny Johnny sent phages up through the microwave relays of the Lunar City telexchange to find and take what resources they could. The Luna City telexchange was not, properly speaking, a part of the InfoNet, but it was intimately connected in many ways; Johnny Johnny was surprised to discover that the telexchange was used by Free Luna territories and United Nations territories alike--not for the territories to speak with one another, but for communications with the comsats. Johnny Johnny attached over two hundred of the Free Luna data lines and spooled the conversations and data being transmitted across them into the handheld.
One of the phages called down to Johnny Johnny; it had acquired a comsat. Johnny Johnny considered and then leaped--
--up.
From the safety of the comsat Johnny Johnny looked down upon Luna, upon its twenty-eight million United Nations citizens, the three and a half million residents of Free Luna. Video coursed through him, ten thousand conversations, every byte of the data being sent from Boards and users inside Luna City to Boards and users elsewhere on the planet.
There was a curious emptiness to it all.
Johnny Johnny paused, dissatisfied, tempted to disengage and split into his component parts but displeased with the lack of useful information about the LINK. The public face of the LINK transputers, the protocols whereby all transactions were marked and encrypted, was both unbreakable and perfectly clear. But after the risk of hijacking an actual DataWatch terminal, it galled Johnny Johnny to find that he knew no more about the LINK itself than he had known when he began. Every piece of knowledge he had of the thing was from observation of what it did; Johnny Johnny lacked completely any feel for what it was.
The swift question was so lacking in emotion it seemed polite.
I am Watchdog. Who are you? Are you a "Player"?
It did not wait for an answer.
In the instant of the question's asking, without warning, Johnny Johnny felt himself ripped free of the comsat he had stolen. With astonishing speed he found himself tumbling down into Realtime, as vast sections of the Crystal Wind were denied him, closed off one by one. He lost the comsat first and the Lunar telexchange in the next moment, as the monstrous, dispassionate master of the LINK called Watchdog closed in on him. Johnny Johnny fought back in near panic, in all the fashions he knew, generated ghosts and left them behind to distract Watchdog, scrambled memory in the processors he had claimed before releasing them. Johnny Johnny could feel the moves surprise Watchdog, slow it slightly; in all its existence it had never encountered a Player with the sorts of resources any Player had in Earth's InfoNet.
It was an instant's respite, and without consulting his biological component--there was no time--Johnny Johnny seized upon it, fled down into Realtime only slightly more quickly than Watchdog could sort through the myriad of false trails he left behind.
Trent slammed down into Realtime with physical impact.
His eyes opened onto the information-sterile lobby. In a daze, Trent looked slowly around the room, then down at the form of the unconscious PKF webdancer at his feet.
A long moment passed. There was a loud ringing in Trent's ears.
"Boss?" The voice came from the handheld's speaker, not through the traceset Trent still wore.
"Yeah?"
"You okay?"
Trent shook himself slightly. Never in his life had he come down out of the Crystal Wind so violently. His hands shook. "I think so. What happened?"
"I don't know." Johnny Johnny was silent a beat. "This was a bad idea. Boss, give them the Luna InfoNet, let's run away and Play somewhere else. I want out of here. I don't want to dance on Luna, I don't want to be on this planet. That thing scares me."
> "Me too, Johnny Johnny. Me too. Running sounds like a ... good idea." It seemed to Trent that his thoughts moved very slowly indeed. "Johnny? Any alarms out there referencing this location? Did it track us this far?"
"No alarms in the terminal, Boss. I'm not going into the InfoNet to find out about other locations."
"Okay." Trent grinned suddenly, shakily. "How many transactions did we go through?"
"Thirteen thousand, seven hundred and nineteen."
Trent unjacked his handheld.
He typed a message on the terminal, the letters glowing bright red on blue:
Score, Luna City; 2048-2069:
DataWatch: Two trillion and change.
Players: 13,719.
He sealed his handheld and squirt gun in the vacuum bag and left, walking quickly through the empty corridors.
Newsdancer Terry Shawmac once wrote that when you get off Earth the best way to guess a stranger's politics is by his watch. There is a degree of truth to this; in United Nations territories the clock is usually set to Capitol City time. Free Luna, Mars, and most but not all of the Belt CityStates run on Greenwich mean time. The SpaceFarers, bound to no planet, live by a ten-hour metric day, which, while admittedly beginning and ending at the same moment as those days that run under twenty-four hour Greenwich mean time, nonetheless adds yet another element of confusion to the subject; when a SpaceFarer tells you he will meet you at five o'clock, he means noon--"centerday," as SpaceFarers like to say.
The problem of varying standards of time is worst in Luna City itself. It is the oldest city on the Moon, and by far the largest. Despite being in United Nations territory it receives both tourists and businessmen from those Belt CityStates that have not made the mistake of sponsoring cities in Free Luna. On top of this, the SpaceFarer presence is large: outside of Navajo Spaceport on Earth, at any given time Luna City sports the largest number of SpaceFarers to be found in one spot on any planetary surface in the System.
It is, despite the claims of trade centers in Free Luna territory, the source of over a third of all trade goods that leave the moon. It possesses the largest dome and the longest catapult--by virtue of its length the Luna City catapult is the only catapult on Luna capable of handling passengers. At the launch head its acceleration is under four gees, and it drops to less than three gees by the time the capsule has reached the far end of the catapult.
The Long Run Page 25