Hackers

by Jack Dann

  I nodded. I could feel beads of sweat forming on my upper lip and forehead. Alice attached sensors to my fingers, my neck. She produced a tissue from somewhere and gently wiped the sweat from my face.

  "You'll be fine," she said, and began to connect herself to the other chair.

  I was standing next to home plate in the Little League baseball field behind the ConEd cooling towers. A breeze coming in off the Long Island Sound brought with it a faint smell of salt and sewage. The sky was a soft, pale blue, a shade I hadn't seen in twenty years. I reached up and touched my face. No u.v. block. Brief surge of panic. I looked at the sky again and realized that I wouldn't need it.

  My son was sitting in the whitewashed risers paralleling the third base line, looking at me. He raised his hand in greeting. I gave him an answering wave and walked toward him. My heart was pounding in my chest.

  He looked vibrant and full of life, like he did in the yellowed, age-curled pictures I kept in the shoebox on the top shelf of my bedroom closet. It clashed with my last memory of him—withered, emaciated body, skin stretched tight across skullbones framed by crisp hospital linen, sick, flickering light in his ancient child's eyes. I sat down next to him.

  "Hi, Mike," I said.

  "Hey, Mom."

  It's crazy, but I couldn't think of a single thing to say to him. There was so much I wanted to tell him. (I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, baby.) I wanted to take him in my arms and hold him to me and not let go. An inane thought came bubbling up to the surface of my mind—I wondered if he was hungry. It was a manageable thought, though, and I held on to it like a drowning swimmer clutching a life preserver.

  "You hungry, champ?" I asked. My voiced only cracked a little.

  He smiled up at me. "Yeah." I saw Keith in that quick, sure grin, and a surge of loss and anger passed through me like a hot, sudden wind, gone just as quickly.

  A wicker basket suddenly appeared at my feet. The corners of a red-and-white checked cloth peeked out from under the edge of the lid.

  "I've got some deviled ham," I said, knowing that it would be there. "And some Ho-Ho's for dessert."

  "Great," he said, but it didn't sound right. I don't know why, but at that moment the illusion collapsed and I knew that it was just Alice there, Alice in a Michael suit, Alice strapped into a VS deck weaving a fiberoptic tapestry of ones and zeros with an insensate, cybernetic loom. To fool me into grace.

  "This is bullshit," I said.

  Michael frowned. "Mom . . . ?" The frown was very good, very Michael-like, but the illusion was already shot.

  "Just get me out of here, Alice. It's not working."

  He sighed, shoulders set with the exaggerated exasperation of a child. "Okay," he nodded.

  I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again, I was back in the VS room. I unstrapped myself and started to get up. A rush of vertigo sat me down again.

  "Hey," Alice said. "Easy." Her face hovered over me like a cloud.

  I looked at her accusingly. "I knew it was you. This is just bullshit gameplaying."

  She shook her head. "You did very well for a first virtual session. Of course, your history helps you a lot here, but some people can't even interact in V-space at all. You created the ball park; you gave me enough cues to help build a consensual reality." She smiled gently and touched me on the shoulder. "We made progress today."

  The Dinkins Arcology is built on a lattice of pontoons that stretches out from Battery Park into the Upper New York Bay like a dendritic tongue, sending fractal limbs in all directions. That's its official name, but even before the first fullerene panel was snapped into place, it was Dinkytown. It was intended to be an egalitarian effort, public housing hand-in-hand with private enterprise, the disadvantaged and the well-to-do rolling up their sleeves together and creating a community—turn-of-the-century policy speak made manifest. (Soft industrial music swells in the background. Dissolve to a schoolyard swarming with children in a tastefully balanced demographic mix.) But in fact, a stratification evolved dynamically, independent of intention. Pockets of public assistance clusters dotted the arcology ("like cancerous cells," the Times op-ed file whined), side by side with ghettos of affluence, I still have an income, and managed to buy our way into Avalon, on the Governor's Island side.

  I wasn't ready to go home yet, so I took the long way, out along the "boardwalk"-a promenade with the roof that runs around Dinkytown's circumference. Before long, the crowds thinned out, and I strolled slowly along the bay, enjoying the cool breeze coming in off the water. There was a trace of sewage smell and a hint of acrid chemicals, but it wasn't too bad. Some fool was windsurfing up near the mouth of the East River, begging for a dose of septic shock. They'd cleaned things up a lot since the twentieth, but it still wasn't exactly safe.

  Some things you can't clean up, though, no matter how hard you try. Michael. I remember the day it happened. I was mainlining and somebody brought the system down cold. Sense impressions filtered in through the nausea—people rushing back and forth, voices shouting, several news feeds on at once. "Partial meltdown . . . Montauk nuke . . . another Chernobyl." Things blurred together. I made my way up to the roof heliport somehow and threatened a chopper pilot with my Swiss Army knife to take me to Montauk. It took three large men to hold me down.

  It turned out to be just a "small" release, quickly contained. And it was late in the day, so the prevailing winds were blowing the radioactive plume out to sea, away from the thirty-odd million souls in the Greater New York Metropolitan Area. But it didn't spare Montauk. And it didn't spare Michael.

  I could picture him standing there in the schoolyard, smiling, the wind ruffling his hair, as the gamma rays tunneled through his body, leaving an irreparable wake of damaged cells. The fatality rate in Montauk was 30 percent during the first year, 20 percent during the second, then it tailed off rapidly from there. Michael was still alive three years later, we thought he'd been spared. Then, all of a sudden, his immune system collapsed. He started losing weight like crazy. Great, purple bruises appeared all over his body, like mysterious objects floating up from the bottom of a murky pond. The leukemia ripped through him so quickly you could almost see him fading away in realtime. When it was over, there was hardly anything left to bury.

  A pair of young men walked toward me along the promenade, holding hands. Their cheeks bore elaborate scars, a pattern I recognized as the chop of the Lords of Discipline.

  "Don't stay out too long, Mama," the one on the left said. "UV count t'rough de roof today, mon." His boyfriend looked like he ought to know—a spiderweb tangle of ruptured blood vessels laced through the scars on his cheeks.

  "Thanks," I nodded.

  There were dirty dishes on the kitchen table, which meant that Keith had been up and about. I glanced down the hallway to where his door stood open a crack. He was probably back under. Just as well.

  I sat down at my desk to check my e-mail. There were four ads and a message from Dmitry over at Cellular. I'd been doing some biotech database hacking for him, building a set of software tools for him to manage his technical library. It's not as boring as it sounds. Just because you can nanoscript a terabyte of data onto a slab of substrate the size of a mosquito wing doesn't mean you can retrieve it easily. In fact, with so much information available at your fingertips, encoding and navigating gets pretty hairy.

  I flushed the ads and scrolled the message from Dmitry, a not particularly subtle inquiry as to just when I might have the bugs shaken out of the infosurfing macros I was looking up for him. I pounded out a quick reply—telling him that all good things come to those who wait, to cultivate the patient heart of a grandmother, and to get off my case or I'd accidentally mail his shiny, new virtual toys off to DevNull.

  I enjoyed jerking his chain a little. I'd never met him in person, but we'd been working together online for a couple of years. His Proxy was a short, balding, somewhat chubby man who wore dark, rumpled suits with suspenders and frayed cuffs. The frayed cuffs were a brilliant touch—
it was easy to forget you were looking at a sim. Of course, he probably looked nothing like that. Online relationships are almost all smoke and mirrors.

  I got to work. I pulled down a couple of windows on the big monitor and dropped some shell scripts into the queue for the public database. The private and corporate 'bases were a little trickier. I fired off an autonomous agent to deal with the protocol.

  I quickly became submerged in the work. It was soothing, like immersing myself in the hot, swirling waters of a jacuzzi. It wasn't quite like mainlining, but it was close.

  Mainlining, pure info-surfing: there's no other rush like it, chemical or virtual. And I had been good. The Net was a tangled, spidery sprawl of pulsing light, nodes of brightness for other surfers. Structs were patches of infrared and UV that I could sense by the quality of the pain they caused. My paradigm for navigation was the avoidance of discomfort.

  After Michael, I started losing it. The only thing that keeps a surfer on that knife-edge of perception is discrimination—the ability to distinguish real from Memorex. Mine was shot. I'd be walking down the street, and the sparkles of light from the silica chips in the pavement would dissolve into the coruscating signature of the struct I'd navigated that morning. I'd be in the middle of a conversation and start framing my responses as instruction sets.

  I fell apart for a while. When my medical leave ran out, I quit Sony. I still had connections, and managed to pull together an occasional consulting gig. Before I knew it, I had my hands full freelancing. I was surfing again, and it was good, but I never mainlined anymore. And Keith was always there to remind me why I shouldn't, just in case I forgot.

  I don't know how long I worked, but slowly a sense of physical space began to seep back into my consciousness. It had gotten dark; my hands on the keypad were illuminated only by the glow of the monitor. Outside, the sky held the last blush of twilight. Reflected lights from Manhattan and Brooklyn made shimmering castles in the water at the mouth of the East River.

  I logged off the satlink and sat there in the dark for a few minutes. It was time to look in on Keith. I took a deep breath, then another.

  The room was dark except for the tiny, amber console lights. I could sense his shape, though, sprawled in the beanbag chair wedged into a corner. The soft, raspy whisper of his breathing filled the room. A stew of sour smells hung in the air—body odor, traces of urine, a strong whiff of feces.

  I turned on the light. Keith didn't even flinch—the rig's induction field coupled right into his optic nerve. Not much bandwidth, but what it lacked in information content it more than made up for in the sheer intensity of the pleasure it provided. I'd tried it once—I felt so lousy when I came out of it, I was scared to try it again.

  Not Keith. He'd been jacking off ever since the rigs went alpha. It was just a weekend thing at first, but after Michael died, he started going under more and more. Now he was down almost all the time. It was as if grief were a black hole, and he'd disappeared somewhere beyond its event horizon.

  He was naked except for the incontinence pants bunched around his waist. Diapers, really. They gave him the bizarre appearance of a sallow, gray-haired baby. I could count his ribs. A streak of blood ran down his arm, and the IV rig lay on its side in the middle of the room. Probably ripped out the glucose drip and went looking for solid food after I left in the morning. He did that sometimes. I was always surprised when he got himself out from under long enough to get out to the kitchen and back.

  I got a fresh pair of diapers from the closet, cleaned him up, and changed him. I set the IV up again and stood there for a while, looking at him. He still hadn't registered my presence. Every now and then, a muscle in his arm or thigh twitched. It reminded me of a dog I had when I was a child. She used to curl up in front of the fire to sleep, and every now and then, her hind legs would jump and scrabble at the carpet.

  "Chasing rabbits in her dreams," my father would say, if he wasn't passed out yet. I wondered what kind of rabbits Keith was chasing.

  I walked over to the console and turned it off. The glaze faded from his eyes and he clutched at himself.

  "Wha—?" It came out like a croak.

  I don't really know what I was thinking about. I guess I wanted to talk to him about Michael, but that was crazy.

  I looked down at him. His eyes were burning flecks of pain. For a second, I saw Michael there, held in the hollow angles of his cheekbones. Then the impression was gone.

  "You sick fuck," I said. I flicked the console back on and walked out of the room.

  "Why do you stay with him?" Alice asked. The window behind her was in Aquarium mode—schools of brightly colored fish darted through shafts of sunlight over a carpet of waving, green kelp. It really irritated me.

  "I hate that window," I said.

  She reached under her desk and did something. The aquarium dissolved slowly to a neutral gray.

  "Better?"

  I nodded. "A little."

  She sat there, smiling faintly. Waiting.

  "So, why do I . . . ?"

  She nodded.

  I took in a deep breath. I felt like I wasn't getting enough air. I let it out with a sigh.

  "I . . . don't know. There's nobody home—he's a total wirehead. He's been like this ever since Michael died."

  She nodded.

  "He . . . needs me."

  She nodded again, looking at me. Waiting.

  I could feel myself tensing up, digging in my heels. I wasn't going to give her what she wanted.

  Finally, she said, "What do you need, Stacey?"

  I looked at her for a long time. Finally, I shook my head. "I don't know."

  Jones Beach stretched out in front of us, a long pale ribbon, bordered on one side by the slate gray of the ocean and on the other by a checkerboard scatter of parking lots and ball fields that now served as sites for sprawling tent villages. Michael walked beside me, his head bent in concentration, absorbed with a piece of techno-trash he had picked up somewhere. A graceful curve of metal wound in a converging helix around a core of bundled fiberoptic cable. Wires trailed loosely from one end. It looked like a prop from a cheesy science fiction movie. Every now and then, he aimed it at an imaginary target and made ray-gun noises, gzh-gzh-gzh, his eyes narrowed with intense concentration.

  The beach was filthier than I remembered. Ocean-tossed detritus of civilization lay everywhere—used hypodermic syringes, plastic bottles, the occasional limp, wrinkled condom. Coney Island whitefish, my father used to call them. I chuckled softly and looked over at Michael.

  "What you doing, champ?" I asked.

  Michael looked up at me and smiled his quick, sure smile. "Changing stuff."

  "Oh, yeah? What are you changing it into?"

  "Making everything go away." He trained the ray gun on a dead seagull lying half-buried in the sand a few feet away. Gzh-gzh-gzh.

  "Why do you want to do that?" I asked.

  His face wrinkled in the disdain the children reserve for stupid adults. "It's soft."

  I smiled ruefully. "It sure is, champ."

  Gzh-gzh-gzh. A tangle of seaweed and glittering strands of polyfoil was sent off to never-never land.

  We walked together in silence for a while.

  "If you could put anything you wanted here instead," I asked, finally, "what would it be?"

  He thought for a moment. "In school, we were in a sim with dinosaurs. It was so way. There was this big one and it chased the little one and ate it. We were on a beach but there wasn't anything there." He looked up at me and smiled. "I'd put dinosaurs."

  "Dinosaurs. Cool." I paused. "Do you know what happened to the dinosaurs?" I asked.

  He nodded. "They died."

  "How did they die, champ?"

  His eyebrows drew together in a frown as he struggled to remember the words. "They couldn't, uh, adapt." He looked directly at me. "They couldn't adapt to cataclysm."

  We stood there in the hot sun. I could see Alice looking at me through Michael's eyes wit
hout pretense now, calm and knowing. I was aware of myself standing on the cusp between reality and illusion, one foot in each. The coppery smell of decaying seaweed hung in the air, and the wind caressed my face in light, feathery touches.

  Dmitry's "benevolent uncle" persona beamed at me from the vidscreen. "I have a proposition for you, Stacey," he said. There was a faint trace of Slavic accent in his voice.

  I think of Proxies as fashion accessories, not all that much different from makeup or hairstyle—another layer of illusion we project to help us navigate the reefs and shoals of human interaction. Of course, there are the usual, endless Globalnet flamewars about the moral implications of being able to construct your own persona from scratch and modify it according to your own mood and who you're talking to. That's mostly the neo-Luddites, though, tooth and nail with the crackpot Libertarians—a lot of heat and smoke, not much light. My own feeling is that we all do that anyway to some extent, even in realspace.

  "I'm listening, Dmitry." I was wearing what I thought of as my Conan the Librarian Proxy—a lean-limbed warrior goddess with blond, sun-streaked hair, a deerskin vest (a bit offensive to some, I know), and a quiver of arrows at my back. A button pinned to my vest read will hack for food. I had a monitor window open in the upper left corner of the vidscreen, and I could see the image that Dmitry was looking at. Rolling green hills dotted with grazing sheep spread out behind me. The sky was a deep, cloudless blue.

  He cleared his throat. "You know that Cellular has recently purchased shares in the Velikovsky Orbital."

  I nodded. Of course I did—I'd hacked a substantial portion of the background documentation on orbital biotech for their Stockholders' Report.

  "We're putting together a small community up there to get a facility going—pharmaceuticals, protein construction, genetic mods. Not just biotech, though—we've got plans to shirt a substrate farm, grow high-T superconductors, micro-gee metallurgy, the works."

  I nodded again. No surprises there. Everything he'd mentioned required a zero-gravity environment for profitable manufacturing.