The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “I got nothing,” she mused. “He’s not gonna talk; psychopaths don’t break under threat. My code monkey can’t link him to RedKing. And we don’t know what RedKing does or why it made a kid kill his own mother. We’ve identified dozens of infected people, and they all acted differently.”

  I let that hang a long time before I stated the obvious. “Only one thing to try now. I load it up and see what I can tell from running the copy we got in quarantine.”

  Tain leaned her head forward and looked at me through her dark eyebrows. “You know why we called you in? Why you’re here? Our usual code monkey is on extended leave. She fried her head trying just that.”

  “Occupational hazard,” I said.

  “Don’t tough guy me. My father was a cop, and my grandfather. When they busted a heroin ring, they didn’t go home and shoot smack to try to understand addiction from the inside.”

  “It’s not the same,” I said.

  “Looks the same to me.”

  “All right, maybe it is. But what if, what if there was a new drug every week, all the time, and you couldn’t know what it would do to people—what it would make people do—if you didn’t just try it. Then I bet your grandfather, or your father, would have shot up. Because they wanted to fight it, right? And they needed to know how to fight.”

  “Bullshit,” she said. But she didn’t say anything more. She didn’t say no.

  * * *

  They put me in a conference room, bare white walls, a table that tipped back and forth if you leaned on it. Tain stared at me, her jaw working, while the tech brought me a memory stick. I slotted it into my field deck immediately, not wanting to give Tain time to change her mind. I’d set up a buffer and then a process echo, so my deck could record everything that was happening.

  I plugged straight into my skulljack and in a few seconds I copied the code over into my implants.

  “I got an interface,” I said. “Pretty simple.”

  A single sentence appeared in my visual field. Do you want to be King? it asked. I looked at the word yes and willed it to click, giving it permission to run on my brain OS.

  A rush of colors washed over me. I felt cold, exhilarated, as if I fell down a bright well of light. I think I shouted in something like joy.

  Then it was over. There stood Tain, her eyebrows up in an expression of alarm mixed with disapproval.

  “How long?” I asked.

  “Long? You just plugged in.”

  I frowned.

  “Well?” Tain asked.

  “It’s…” I thought about it. “After the initial rush it’s nothing. Nothing yet, anyways. I don’t know.”

  I looked around, meeting Tain’s eyes, then the eyes of the cop waiting bored by the door. I did have a slight sense that maybe I felt a little … tenuous. But it was nothing definite. It’s hard when you are waiting to hallucinate. You tend to start to work yourself into a psychedelic state if you try too hard to expect one.

  “Let me clear the buffer and start it up again.”

  I took a deep breath and did it. We waited a while. “Nothing,” I said.

  Tain sighed. “Bad batch of code? Maybe they sent you the neutralized compile.”

  I shrugged.

  “All right,” she said. “Shut it down. Look over your sample again, see if something is wrong with it. I’ll call Code Isolation and see if they sent you the wrong sample.”

  We pulled the plugs. Someone knocked at the door. “Stay here,” Tain said. She went out into the hall and the other cop followed her.

  I lifted my deck off the table. That’s when I realized my deck’s wireless had been left on.

  * * *

  I slipped out of the conference room and walked quickly back to my desk, trying to stay calm. Or at least trying to appear calm. When I set my deck down I looked back. The door to my office was open, showing the long hall that stretched all the way to the center of the building, a corridor that diminished into infinity. And, along the sides of the hall, it seemed every cop in the building stood, hand on holster, looking at me. And down the center of the hall came Tain.

  I turned and hit the crash bar to the emergency exit next to my desk. As I passed through, I cracked the red fire alarm crystal by the door. An alarm began to shriek.

  “Stop!” Tain shouted. I didn’t look back to see if she aimed a gun at me. I threw the door shut and ran down the steps.

  * * *

  I was on the street before they could get word out to stop me. The fire alarm was painfully loud, causing a lot of confusion. A few cops milled by the station’s front steps, wondering if the alarm was a drill or mistake. I walked past them and to the block’s corner. When I turned out of sight, I ran.

  By the time I reached the subway steps my chest hurt and a sharp stitch slowed me to a hobble. I’m a code monkey, not a runner. But I made it down inside, hair lifted by the stink of hot air that a coming train pushed out of the dark. I turned all my implants on, wanting to get the full input now. I mustered a last burst of energy and slipped down the next set of steps and onto the train just as its doors shuddered closed.

  Only a handful of people sat in the car. No one met my gaze. Still. Someone here could be undercover. Hard to know. I stared around, wondering what I should do next. If the whole department was infected, what would be the right course of action? Report to Code Isolation? That would be procedure. Only, I thought, I should get myself secure first. I needed a place to hide. I needed my gun.

  * * *

  It was easy to outsmart them. It would be foolish for me to go home, but then they’d know it was foolish for me to go home, and so they wouldn’t look for me at home.

  So I went home. I took the back door, the one that opened onto the parking lot for the few of us with cars. A short elevator ride, a few steps down an empty hall, and I pushed my way into my apartment.

  In the kitchen, under the pale LEDs of my undercounter light, I keyed open my safety drawer. My gun sat with my passport and some spare cash. I picked it up and held it. The grip vibrated once to tell me it recognized me. I stuck it into my coat pocket.

  Time to go. No sense in pushing my luck. I was smarter than all of them, sure, but even idiots could fall into fortune. So: I reconsidered. Should I report to Code Isolation? As I thought about it, the idea paled. Code Isolation had sent me the program I’d run on my deck. They had to have known my deck would transmit it. They were likely infected already.

  I’d have to solve this on my own. And I could. It was just a matter of recognizing that anyone, everyone could be my enemy—and then outsmarting them all. I felt a thrill of excitement, a soaring determination. Because I realized I could do it. I could trick them all.

  First step would be to lose myself in a crowd.

  * * *

  The Randomist was a noisy bar half a block from my apartment building. I’d walked by it hundreds of times but had never gone in. The boisterous cheerfulness of the crowd, the painful sense that one had to be very hip to fit in, had alienated me immediately the few times I’d considered stopping for a quick drink. But now I went directly in under the electric blue archway.

  I got a beer at the bar, something local and artisanal with a silly name. The bartender slid it to me but smiled insincerely. “Hey, buddy, how about turning it down a little?”

  “What the hell you talking about?” I asked.

  “You’ve got your implants turned all the way out. It’s hard to walk past you, you’re broadcasting so much. And what is it you’re blasting? Some kind of program? That’s not cool.”

  “Drop dead,” I told him. I took my drink and turned away, all the hairs on my neck raised. He might work for the cops, I realized. An informant for the infected precinct. I might have to shoot him.

  But the crowd swallowed me instantly, and I relaxed. Forget the bartender. He couldn’t see me or get me in this dense mass of people.

  Bumping shoulder to shoulder as I pushed through, I felt a great worry lift. The cops would never find me
in here. And I loved this crowd, with their implants humming all around me invitingly.

  There was a beautiful girl in the back, standing alone, waiting for someone. I decided she was waiting for me.

  “You’re a loud one,” she said, as I walked up.

  “I like to speak my mind,” I said.

  “More like shout it.”

  But she didn’t leave. I leaned in close.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Sparrow. What’s that you’re broadcasting, anyway? You an ad? One of those walking ads? Come on, turn down your broadcast. I’m serious. It’s too much.”

  I shook my head. “Let me tell you what I do, Sparrow. I’m a cop. But a special kind of cop. I protect people from the only real threat, the threat of their computers and their implants going bad. I’m fantastic at it. I’m the smartest person in the world.”

  “Yeah? You don’t look like a cop.”

  “I could show you my gun.” I put my hand in my pocket and felt the handle thrum against my palm.

  She frowned, not sure if I had intended some dirty joke. She pointed over my shoulder. “Now she, she looks like a cop.”

  I turned. Tain stood there, a few steps away, under a red light. She was all shadows and angles in the dim focused glare. Her hand was at her hip.

  I scanned the room. People were starting to freeze in place and fall quiet as seven uniforms filed in. I counted them slowly. Then an eighth. Then a ninth, slipping behind the bar.

  There were seventeen rounds in my gun. I could shoot all these cops and still have seven rounds left. I pulled my gun from my jacket pocket.

  Tain’s hand didn’t move, but Sparrow screamed as a blur shot forward and two darts stuck into my chest. My body went rigid as a current slammed my nerves into overdrive.

  I heard my gun clatter on the hard floor. I blacked out.

  * * *

  When I came to, someone was sitting on me.

  No, that wasn’t it. My hands. My hands were strapped down. And something gripped my head. A hat or helmet. I opened my eyes.

  A white room. A hospital room. The sharp stink of disinfectant wafted over me. Every muscle in my body ached. Tain stood nearby, talking to a doc in a white coat. Behind her a big window was black with night, mirroring the white room back at us. A code monkey stood behind Tain, field deck strapped on her back. Stepin, a field agent specializing in brain system wipes. She was short and broad shouldered, with a calm but distracted look that made it seem she was always thinking hard about something distant and slightly sad.

  “They got you, too,” I said.

  Stepin looked over at me.

  “Who got me?” she asked.

  I looked at Tain. “Her. The others in the precinct. They’re contaminated with RedKing. You can’t trust them. If you’re not infected, step away from her, Stepin. Get me out of this. I’m the only person who can stop this. I can fix everything.”

  Tain took a step forward. “How do you think we got contaminated? You’re the one who loaded up the RedKing.”

  “My computer’s transmitter was on,” I said, looking at Stepin because it was useless to appeal to Tain. Tain would be gone now, inhuman. “I thought I was loading the virus but instead I was transmitting it.”

  “Put him under,” Stepin said. “I’ve got to do a complete OS replacement. It’ll take me a few hours.”

  The doctor stepped forward and adjusted my IV. A huge weight closed down on my eyes. As the darkness fell, I heard Stepin say to me softly, “Field computers don’t have transmitters. You know that.”

  * * *

  When I woke, I was alone in the room. The straps lay open, my wrists and legs freed. Sunlight streamed through the window at a nearly vertical angle. I’d been here a long while, asleep on tranqs. I had a bad headache but otherwise felt normal. I opened my brain menus, and found they worked fine, although the arrangement was all factory normal. I logged into my work desktop and began to review my notes.

  Some program had detected my waking, because in a few minutes a nurse brought me food, and then an hour after that Tain arrived, wearing new clothes.

  We looked at each other. I chewed air, trying to get started on an apology. Tain let me struggle a while, before she nodded once. She pulled up a chair.

  “All right, code monkey, just tell me what happened. We knew something was wrong when you left the test room.”

  “RedKing is subtle,” I told her, relieved to be talking about code. “First, it convinces you that nothing has changed. And that remains throughout: I literally could not even imagine that I was running the virus in my head. I don’t know how it inhibits such a basic belief, but it does it very well. That’s a breakthrough of some kind. We’ll have to study it very carefully and—”

  “Don’t tell me your research plans,” Tain interrupted. “Tell me what it does.”

  “Right. It made me paranoid of anyone who might be a threat to the virus. I think my brain tried to make sense of my irrational fear of you and the others, and so I concluded you had the virus. I probably invented the idea that my computer had transmitted it in order to explain my fear to myself. Also, I began to feel … smart. Super intelligent. I became convinced that I could solve any problem. That I was smarter than anyone.”

  “You were reaching for your pistol when I tazed you.”

  I nodded. “I meant to shoot you all. It was … bizarre. I didn’t see you as people. I saw you as puzzles. Puzzles to be solved by my brilliant mind.”

  Tain leaned back. Her jaw worked a while as she thought it through. Finally, she said, “So, what we have is code that convinces you that you are a genius, and makes you paranoid, and makes you see other human beings as worthless.”

  I sighed. “It’s worse than that.”

  “How?”

  “Two things. First, I think I tried to spread it last night. To transmit it.”

  “It’s too much code to transmit implant to implant.”

  “I’m not sure. I think there might be a workaround, to make people call it up off of some servers. You have to test everyone in that bar.”

  She stood, shoving her chair back. “Damn. We’ll have to act fast.”

  “Get me out of here and I can help. We can get a court order to trace the bar charges and track everyone down.”

  “Damn,” Tain repeated. She got a faraway look as she started transmitting orders from her implants. “What a mess. We’re back where we started, and things are even worse.”

  “Maybe not,” I said. “If I’m right, and the program loads from another server, then that’s a weakness. If we can find someone infected, and can find the address that they downloaded RedKing from, we can find Legion’s hidden servers.”

  “All right. That’s something. So what’s your second bit of bad news?”

  “I’ve been reviewing the decompile, and I’ve confirmed my hunch. But before I explain that, I want to see Legion. We need to set up a meeting with him.”

  “Why?”

  Before I could answer, the door to the room banged open. Ellison strode in. “Hey, code monkey, you sick or something?” She looked at Tain, made it clear that she was not impressed by the lieutenant, and looked back at me. “Or you get shot? That’d be newsworthy, if you got shot.”

  “You will get out of here right now,” Tain said.

  “Hey, is that any way to treat a guest? I was invited.”

  Tain glared at me. I held up a hand to urge her to wait a minute.

  To Ellison I said, “I got something for that crappy blog of yours.”

  “Blog. Yeah, really funny, code monkey. I never heard that one before. But Dark Fiber magazine gets more hits in an hour than there are cops in America. So don’t misunderstand who has the clout in this relationship.”

  “I got something about RedKing.”

  Ellison immediately looked cagey. She gave Tain a sidelong glance. “Okay. I’m interested.”

  “Of course you are. Only: We don’t have the whole story yet. B
ut I can tell some of it. An important part of our investigation, let’s say.”

  “You’re asking me to help you get a piece of the story out. All right: Can you promise that I’ll be first to get the whole story when you put it together?”

  “Tain,” I said, “set up that meeting we were talking about. Because you and I will be ready in a few hours.”

  * * *

  There were four of us now in the small interrogation room. I sat across from Legion, in one of the metal chairs. Both Tain and Legion’s lawyer stood. Everyone eyed me suspiciously.

  “My client has already made a statement,” Legion’s lawyer said.

  “To me,” Tain said. “But our code security agent would like to ask a few questions.”

  “My client does not have to answer any more questions.”

  “No. But he can listen to them, can’t he?”

  Silence. Legion looked around the room, feigning boredom. Finally his eyes settled on me. I met his gaze and held it.

  “RedKing is brilliant code,” I said. “A small packet can be transmitted head to head and make a network call for the rest of the code.”

  “That’s been done before,” Legion said.

  The lawyer stepped closer. “Mr. Legion, I strongly advise you to say nothing.”

  I nodded. “But the way it tricks implants into seeing RedKing as an operating system upgrade—that’s very good. I didn’t know such a thing could be done. But that’s not the special thing.” I glanced at Tain to let her know that this was my second bit of bad news. “The special thing is that it mutates. That code we found on your machines? A genetic algorithm toolkit. You wrote RedKing to mutate. As it spreads itself, it changes a little bit each time it’s copied. That’s why its operational profile is so variable. Eventually, there’ll be a version that probably won’t kill people—after all, dead users can’t transmit the code—but it will just spread and spread. If your program works, it’ll be the most influential, the most important virus ever written. It’s historic.”

  Legion smiled. “Why tell me about this?”

  “You read Dark Fiber?”

  “I read lots of things.”

  I set a tablet on the table and turned it around. The cover of Dark Fiber blared a headline in big letters: REDKING CULPRITS FOUND?: POLICE SUSPECT CRIMEAN HACKER GROUP VEE.