Hackers

by Jack Dann

  "Let's cut to the chase, Dmitry. I wrote that P.R. pitch."

  He smiled and nodded, his head bobbing up and down. "Yes, yes, you did, didn't you? Very well." He cleared his throat again. "We need a—well, kind of a sysadmin up there, someone to coordinate all the info-hacking facilities. Of course, we're hooked into Globalnet via microwave, but we also want to have an autonomous system for the Orbital itself. There'll be all the usual personal support stuff—you can delegate that—and we'll have a cluster of teraflop nodes for process simulation. Lots of bit-hacking there, and microwave links just don't have the bandwidth for that." He paused. "I floated your name up the food-chain here, and so far the echoes have all been pretty favorable. I'm sorry I didn't ask you beforehand, but I wanted to test the water first." He looked at me, his eyebrows raised, a slight smile playing on the corners of his mouth.

  I didn't know what to say. I'd expected a lucrative project, enough consulting work to keep me solvent for a while, but nothing like this. My knee-jerk reactions was No way, but there was a small, still voice underneath that I couldn't quite smother. Why not? it asked.

  I was silent for a long time.

  "Stacey?" he said, finally.

  "Look, Dmitry, I . . ." I saw my Proxy up there in a corner of the screen mouthing my words. It brushed a strand of windswept hair from its eyes. I reached up to the screen and tapped twice on the image—it rolled up like a window shade and disappeared. "Can we drop the Proxies, Dmitry? I need to really see you."

  His eyebrows rose, then he nodded slowly. "Sure," he said, finally.

  He reached offscreen and did something. His image collapsed and was replaced immediately with another. A plain, pleasant-looking man of young middle-age looked through the screen at me. He wore a conservative, corporate-style vest, and a pair of gold hoops dangled from his left earlobe. There was a streak of purple in his straight black hair. Behind him was a cluttered, windowless office, unremarkable except for a shelf of real books. He smiled questioningly at me.

  I expected to be surprised by his appearance, but I wasn't—I already felt like I knew him. I stretched my hand to punch in the escape metacharacter on my own keypad, and when his eyebrows rose, I knew he was seeing the "real me" as well.

  "Better?" he asked. The Slavic accent was gone, replaced with a flat, Midwestern drawl.

  I nodded. "Yeah, much." We just sat there looking at each other for what felt like a long time, even though it was probably less than a minute. Finally, I sighed and shook my head. "I don't know what to say, Dmitry. I'm going to need some time to think."

  "Sure," he nodded. "But don't take too long. You know how these things go—sooner or later, the posting winds up on Globalnet and we get flooded with applicants, most of them cranks. It gets a lot harder to separate the wheat from the chaff. The Powers That Be would rather see this nailed down through word-of-mouth."

  "I'll let you know," I said.

  "Good." He looked carefully at me. "Take care of yourself, Stacey."

  "Bye." I said, but his image had already collapsed into a thin line and disappeared. I sat looking at the flat, blank space on the screen where the vidscreen window had been. I imagined I saw shapes rolling and shifting there, submerged in the depths of the phosphor.

  Afternoon sunlight streamed through the Venetian blinds, throwing a pattern of stripes across the hospital bed. Michael sat propped up on a mass of pillows, looking very small surrounded by all that puffy whiteness. He was playing some sort of hand-held simulation game—crude holos a couple of inches high swarmed across the bed. They were barely visible in the bars of intense sunlight, coming alive with color when they scurried into the shadows. The high, tiny sound of their combat filled the room.

  I stood at the door, watching him. His eyebrows were drawn down in concentration; the pink tip of his tongue protruded from the corner of his mouth. Tubes snaked from a patch on his arm to an array of soft, plastic bags hanging from a rack next to the bed.

  "Hey, champ," I said.

  He looked up and smiled. Dark circles framed his eyes, and the curve of his cheekbones seemed impossibly sharp.

  "Hey, Mom. Just a sec . . ." His fingers danced on the little console for a few seconds longer. He leaned toward the panel. "Save," he said. The armies of tiny simulacra froze, then disappeared.

  "I made it up to Level 7," he said, smiling.

  "That's great, Mike." I walked over and sat down in the chair next to the bed. I reached out and brushed a strand of hair from his forehead.

  "When you get better, we'll take you to one of those places where you can play with sim-holos as big as houses . . ."

  He looked at me and frowned. "Come on, Mom, I'm not gonna get better. I'm gonna die." It was a simple declaration, not a complaint—as if he were explaining the facts of life to a slightly stupid friend.

  It felt like he had physically struck me.

  "I—why do you say that?" I stammered.

  "I'm not stupid, Mom." He lifted his arm, showing the tubes trailing from the patch in his arm. He gestured around the room at the menagerie of stuffed animals resting on every available surface. "Med-net says that they'll be able to cure leukemia in ten years with nanocritters, but that we just aren't there yet." He shrugged. He looked and sounded for all the world like a wise old man. How did little kids learn so much?

  I sighed. "I know you're not stupid, baby. It's just that . . . it's hard . . ." I didn't want to cry in front of him, to put him in the position of having to parent me. It wasn't supposed to work like that. But the tightness across my forehead got worse, and soon I could feel hot tears on my cheeks.

  "I'm so sorry, baby . . ." I said.

  He reached over and put his small hand on my shoulder.

  "It's not your fault, Mom. You didn't do anything."

  I felt responsible, though. We poisoned the world, killing off millions of our own children—our own children—so that we could have dishwashers and computers and microwave sat-links, and we were only beginning to step back from the brink. I didn't know if it was too late for us. But it was too late for Michael.

  "It just happened, Mom." His voice jolted me out of my fog of self-pity. "Stuff just happens."

  Alice sat behind her desk, waiting for me to say something. In the window behind her, the New York skyline glittered in the afternoon sun. There was a subtle quality about the colors and the distance resolution that told me it was real.

  "I'll say this for you," I said, finally. "You're good. You're very good. It's uncanny how well you . . . simulate him. I almost feel like I could forgive myself . . ."

  She smiled gently. "I want to show you something," she said. She punched something into the console at her desk and swiveled the monitor around so it was facing me.

  VIRTUAL SESSION LOG

  I looked up at her. "Solo?"

  "Yeah. If we'd been doing another tandem session, my name would be on the log, too. You were all alone in there."

  I felt something give inside me, like a door I'd been leaning on with all my strength was just beginning to budge. Alice nodded and smiled in the slightly smug and annoying way she has when she thinks she's made some sort of breakthrough with me. I didn't mind much, though. I even smiled back a little.

  Keith was sitting in his beanbag chair in the corner, curled up like a loosely tied bundle of sticks. I walked over to the window and de-polarized it. Sunlight flooded the room. Keith looked impossibly pale in the light. Oozing sores stood out on his skin like bright, red stars. He'd pulled the glucose drop again, and a crust of dried blood peeked out from under the ragged bandage on his arm.

  I turned off the console and waited. It took a few seconds, then he squeezed his eyes together and brought his arm up to shield them. Whimpering noises came from somewhere deep in his chest.

  After a little while, the whimpering stopped, and he lowered his arm from his face. He looked at me accusingly. It was like playing a tape loop, those pain-filled eyes burning into me again. It was going to be different this ti
me, though.

  "I know you can understand me, Keith," I said. "I can't take care of you anymore. I've arranged for you to go to a treatment program out on the Island. It's thirty days, and after that, you're on your own. I don't know if I'm going to be here or not when you get out, but you can't come live here again." I paused, not knowing what else to say. "I'm sorry," I said, finally. "It's got to be this way."

  I couldn't read his expression. I looked for Michael there in his hurt eyes, in the angry set of his shoulders, but I couldn't see him, not a trace. He opened his mouth again, as if he wanted to say something, but all that came out was a raspy croak.

  I stood there in the sunlight, waiting for him to find his voice.

  GENE WARS

  Paul J. McAuley

  Born in Oxford, England, in 1955, Paul J. McAuley now makes his home in Strathkinness, in Scotland. He is considered to be one of the best of the new British breed of "hard-science" writers, and is a frequent contributor to Interzone, as well as to markets such as Amazing, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Asimov's Science Fiction, When the Music's Over, and elsewhere. His first novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars, won the Philip K. Dick Award. His other books include the novels Of the Fall and Eternal Light, a collection of his short work, The King of the Hill and Other Stories, and an original anthology co-edited with Kim Newman, In Dreams. His most recent book is a major new novel, Pasquale's Angel.

  In the dizzyingly fast-paced little story that follows, he paints a sharp portrait of a new kind of hacker and a new kind of entrepreneur, a self-made man—twenty-first century style.

  1

  On Evan's eighth birthday, his aunt sent him the latest smash-hit biokit, Splicing Your Own Semisentients. The box-lid depicted an alien swamp throbbing with weird, amorphous life; a double helix spiraling out of a test-tube was embossed in one corner. Don't let your father see that, his mother said, so Evan took it out to the old barn, set up the plastic culture trays and vials of chemicals and retroviruses on a dusty workbench in the shadow of the shrouded combine.

  His father found Evan there two days later. The slime mold he'd created, a million amoebae aggregated around a drop of cyclic AMP, had been transformed with a retrovirus and was budding little blue-furred blobs. Evan's father dumped culture trays and vials in the yard and made Evan pour a liter of industrial-grade bleach over them. More than fear or anger, it was the acrid stench that made Evan cry.

  That summer, the leasing company foreclosed on the livestock. The rep who supervised repossession of the supercows drove off in a big car with the test-tube and double-helix logo on its gull-wing door. The next year the wheat failed, blighted by a particularly virulent rust. Evan's father couldn't afford the new resistant strain, and the farm went under.

  2

  Evan lived with his aunt, in the capital. He was fifteen. He had a street bike, a plug-in computer, and a pet microsaur, a cat-sized triceratops in purple funfur. Buying the special porridge which was all the microsaur could eat took half of Evan's weekly allowance; that was why he let his best friend inject the pet with a bootleg virus to edit out its dietary dependence. It was only a partial success: the triceratops no longer needed its porridge, but it developed epilepsy triggered by sunlight. Even had to keep it in his wardrobe. When it started shedding fur in great swatches, he abandoned it in a nearby park. Microsaurs were out of fashion, anyway. Dozens could be found wandering the park, nibbling at leaves, grass, discarded scraps of fastfood. Quite soon they disappeared, starved to extinction.

  3

  The day before Evan graduated, his sponsor firm called to tell him that he wouldn't be doing research after all. There had been a change of policy: the covert gene wars were going public. When Evan started to protest, the woman said sharply, "You're better off than many long-term employees. With a degree in molecular genetics you'll make sergeant at least."

  4

  The jungle was a vivid green blanket in which rivers made silvery forked lightnings. Warm wind rushed around Evan as he leaned out the helicopter's hatch; harness dug into his shoulders. He was twenty-three, a tech sergeant. It was his second tour of duty.

  His goggles flashed icons over the view, tracking the target. Two villages a klick apart, linked by a red dirt road narrow as a capillary that suddenly widened to an artery as the helicopter dove.

  Flashes on the ground: Evan hoped the peasants only had Kalashnikovs: last week some gook had downed a copter with an antiquated SAM. Then he was too busy laying the pattern, virus-suspension in a sticky spray that fogged the maize fields.

  Afterwards, the pilot, an old-timer, said over the intercom. "Things get tougher every day. We used just to take a leaf, cloning did the rest. You couldn't call it theft. And this sluff . . . I always thought war was bad for business."

  Evan said, "The company owns copyright to the maize genome. Those peasants aren't licensed to grow it."

  The pilot said admiringly, "Man you're a real company guy. I bet you don't even know what country this is."

  Evan thought about that. He said, "Since when were countries important?"

  5

  Rice fields spread across the floodplain, dense as a hand-stitched quilt. In every paddy, peasants bent over their own reflections, planting seedlings for the winter crop.

  In the center of the UNESCO delegation, the Minister for Agriculture stood under a black umbrella held by an aide. He was explaining that his country was starving to death after a record rice crop.

  Evan was at the back of the little crowd, bareheaded in warm drizzle. He wore a smart one-piece suit, yellow overshoes. He was twenty-eight, had spent two years infiltrating UNESCO for his company.

  The minister was saying, "We have to buy seed gene-spliced for pesticide resistance to compete with our neighbors, but my people can't afford to buy the rice they grow. It must all be exported to service our debt. Our children are starving in the midst of plenty."

  Evan stifled a yawn. Later, at a reception in some crumbling embassy, he managed to get the minister on his own. The man was drunk, unaccustomed to hard liquor. Evan told him he was very moved by what he had seen.

  "Look in our cities," the minister said, slurring his words. "Every day a thousand more refugees pour in from the countryside. There is kwashiorkor, beri-beri."

  Evan popped a canapé into his mouth. One of his company's new lines, it squirmed with delicious lasciviousness before he swallowed it. "I may be able to help you," he said. "The people I represent have a new yeast that completely fulfills dietary requirements and will grow on a simple medium."

  "How simple?" As Evan explained, the minister, no longer as drunk as he had seemed, steered him onto the terrace. The minister said, "You understand this must be confidential. Under UNESCO rules . . ."

  "There are ways around that. We have lease arrangements with five countries that have . . . trade imbalances similar to your own. We lease the genome as a loss-leader, to support governments who look favorably on our other products . . ."

  6

  The gene pirate was showing Evan his editing facility when the slow poison finally hit him. They were aboard an ancient ICBM submarine grounded somewhere off the Philippines. Missile tubes had been converted into fermenters. The bridge was crammed with the latest manipulation technology, virtual reality gear which let the wearer directly control molecule-sized cutting robots as they traveled along DNA helices.

  "It's not facilities I need," the pirate told Evan, "it's distribution."

  "No problem," Evan said. The pirate's security had been pathetically easy to penetrate. He'd tried to infect Evan with a zombie virus, but Evan's gene-spliced designer immune system had easily dealt with it. Slow poison was so much more subtle: by the time it could be detected it was too late. Evan was thirty-two. He was posing as a Swiss gray-market broker.

  "This is where I keep my old stuff," the pirate said, rapping a stainless-steel cryogenic vat. "Stuff from before I went big time. A free luciferase gene complex, for instance. Remember when
the Brazilian rainforest started to glow? That was me." He dashed sweat from his forehead, frowned at the room's complicated thermostat. Grossly fat and completely hairless, he wore nothing but Bermuda shorts and shower sandals. He'd been targeted because he was about to break the big time with a novel HIV cure. The company was still making a lot of money from its own cure: they made sure AIDS had never been completely eradicated in third-world countries.

  Evan said, "I remember the Brazilian government was overthrown—the population took it as a bad omen."

  "Hey, what can I say? I was only a kid. Transforming the gene was easy, only difficulty was finding a vector. Old stuff. Somatic mutation really is going to be the next big thing, believe me. Why breed new strains when you can rework a genome cell by cell?" He rapped the thermostat. His hands were shaking. "Hey, is it hot in here, or what?"

  "That's the first symptom," Evan said. He stepped out of the way as the gene pirate crashed to the decking. "And that's the second."

  The company had taken the precaution of buying the pirate's security chief: Evan had plenty of time to fix the fermenters. By the time he was ashore, they would have boiled dry. On impulse, against orders, he took a microgram sample of the HIV cure with him.

  7

  "The territory between piracy and legitimacy is a minefield," the assassin told Evan. "It's also where paradigm shifts are most likely to occur, and that's where I come in. My company likes stability. Another year and you'd have gone public, and most likely the share issue would have made you a billionaire—a minor player, but still a player. Those cats, no one else has them. The genome was supposed to have been wiped out back in the twenties. Very astute, quitting the gray medical market and going for luxury goods." She frowned. "Why am I talking so much?"