This Alien Shore

by C. S. Friedman

  A backup warning is in effect, particularly in areas of travel and tourist services. Northstar Hotels, one of Salvation’s most prestigious chains, has reported the loss of reservations data from its Aires office. If you have routed reservations through Northstar Aires in the past twelve hours, please check with the main office to see that your data arrived safely.

  GUERA NODE TIANANMEN STATION

  THERE WEREN’T enough spores.

  Dr. Masada looked at the data five times, ten times, a hundred. Still the numbers weren’t right. Still they didn’t match what he knew must be out there.

  With a sigh he pushed his chair back and shut his eyes, rubbing the ache out of his head with a weary hand. His wellseeker sensed the change in focus and took the opportunity to remind him that his caloric requirement for the day was far from met, and in fact yesterday’s had gone at a deficit. He was about to shut it down again—for the fourth time today—but then he stopped and thought, why not? He needed a break from this damned screen, and the even more frustrating data displayed on it.

  Mankind wasn’t designed to stare at a screen all day, and handling data like this in such a frustrating format hour after hour was almost enough to make him load Lucifer right into his head, just so he could deal with the damned thing directly.

  Almost.

  Not quite.

  With a sigh he visualized the icons that would shut down his programs and save all his data. He had a set of five high-security icons that he was using, dense and complicated visual designs that not only had to be formed in his mind’s eye, but rotated properly as well. The likelihood of anyone managing to guess at such patterns was astronomically small, and not one he worried about.

  Although someone could do it, theoretically. The security system didn’t exist which someone couldn’t break into. Who knew that better than Kio Masada, who had written the book on data security?

  There were half a dozen Guild folk in the nearest commissary, two nantana, three natsiq, and a yuki. Programmers, all of them, who wore the sign of Gaza’s department proudly on their left breast. He might have gone over to the yuki if he’d been alone, just to hear another human voice—sometimes even an iru needed such things—but the closeness of the group and the energy of its laughter dissuaded him. How he missed the ordered ranks of his students, the comfortable security of the educational ritual: human company without the stress of individual contact. Not for the first time since coming here he felt a wave of vertigo, as if he had suddenly been transported to a mountaintop barely inches wide, miles over the land which others inhabited. His wellseeker flashed a query, and he gave it permission to go ahead and adjust his brain chemicals to compensate for the sensation, but he knew from experience that mechanical adjustment alone couldn’t make the feeling go away. It was part and parcel of who he was, and the price he paid for his special talent.

  He flashed a request for a sandwich of some local synthetic meat, marinated “Paradise style” ... whatever that meant. That and a cup of tea would satisfy his immediate appetite. His wellseeker processed the order while he ate, and informed him that he had 1237 calories yet to go to make his day’s quota. So he ordered another drink, something fattening and frothy that sent the target number down to 829. Good enough for now.

  And he thought about Lucifer.

  He had spent the last E-week tracking the virus himself. Gaza’s preparatory work had been excellent, of course, providing samples of every generation of the damned virus—every generation they knew about, anyway—but after a day of working with his figures, Masada had realized that he needed more data than Gaza had thought to provide. Perhaps on an intuitive level he’d sensed the numbers were all wrong, and gone to search for the right ones.

  He’d designed sieve programs and sent them out to all the nodes, a repetitive and exhausting job, especially since he couldn’t deal with the outernet directly. He’d sent out sniffers of his own, keyed to Lucifer’s memory storage sequences. And then he’d waited, studying the most recent and deadly mutations while his programs scoured the outernet for spores of the elusive virus.

  And there weren’t enough of them. There just weren’t.

  He knew how many times Lucifer had replicated to date, give or take a generation. He knew what the parameters of that replication were. He knew—knew!—the numerical range that should define its current population. And that number was off from the real thing, by a good factor of ten.

  Those extra spores were somewhere, he was certain of it. But where? And—more important—why weren’t they still cruising the outernet, doing their destructive duty?

  When his tea was done and his wellseeker was satisfied that no more caloric input was immediately forthcoming, he walked slowly back to the triple-locked workstation, running the numbers through his mind. Most programmers would have said he was crazy for focusing on a numerical discrepancy like this. Gaza wouldn’t. Gaza’s mind was like his own, ordered and precise, and like Masada he had utter certainty in his work. When Masada told Gaza that his projected numbers didn’t match reality, the man hadn’t asked—as Hsing might have—whether Masada had perhaps erred in his own calculations. He had simply said “What do you need?” and, when told that, provided it.

  It was good to work for a man who didn’t doubt him every step of the way. Even in the Guild, that was a rare pleasure. Gaza seemed to have utter confidence that he would beat this thing. He wished he shared it.

  Be confident, Masada. The answer is out there. You just have to figure out how to find it.

  Frustrated by the failure of all his other search methods, he had finally sent out special versions of the virus to all the major nodes, with homing patterns woven into their substance. It was a dangerous move—anything that released more copies of Lucifer into the outernet was dangerous, no matter how much care you took to see that your versions could neither harm people nor reproduce—but it had to be done. All other methods had failed thus far, and every hour in which he failed to bring Lucifer under control, it was spawning new and deadlier spores. Any day now it might evolve into a form that would attack civilians, and then ... well, in Gaza’s words, all hell would break loose.

  Actually, hell would break loose the day the press got wind of this. Masada was amazed that hadn’t happened yet. But then, why should it? Lucifer’s creator would have gone to great lengths to assure that his program would remain a secret. No one in the Guild could possibly benefit from the matter being made public. So it hadn’t made the newsies ... yet.

  One small thing to be thankful for.

  He wondered if Lucifer’s creator knew that the Guild was searching for him. No doubt he would assume it; any sane programmer would. And he would have taken precautions, setting programs in motion to mislead the Guild, to confuse them ... well, thus far they had all worked. If Masada was going to track this damned thing to its source, he was going to have to think of some angle Lucifer’s creator hadn’t thought of, some element of data he hadn’t thought to disguise.

  Like the numbers?

  Maybe.

  He brought up the screen again, hating its limitations, and watched the cold code scroll across it in response to his mental commands. Every time he thought he had a handle on what made Lucifer tick, another mutation would surprise him. He understood now why Gaza was so tense about the thing, and that tension was infectious.

  All right. Check the numbers.

  He sent out a request to the Guild’s data node to collect anything which had arrived with his special icon embedded in it, and deliver it to him. It was frustrating having to deal with such a system, but necessary. Direct contact with the outernet would mean that if Lucifer’s designer realized he was being hunted, he could ride Masada’s signal right back up the line to Masada’s own head. You couldn’t take a chance like that, not with a programmer of such obvious skill and malevolence. This way, if Masada’s tracking programs were detected, the most anyone could learn from them was that they were being collected by a processor somewhere on Tianan
men Station. That was a far different thing than having some hacker in his head, real-time.

  The data began to come in. Sieve figures from Hellsgate, Reijik, Salvation. All wrong. Still. Then some private mail from various Guild officers whom he had queried, mostly amounting to some diplomatic version of “I don’t know.” It amazed him that people so dependent on the outernet could be so ignorant of its workings. Guildmaster Delhi had invited him out to her station if he felt that would help him in his research, as had Varsav. Kent had not yet responded to his query on outpilot conditioning. There was a sealed packet, neatly bundled, which he opened with an icon—

  And there it was.

  He stopped breathing for a minute. His own code. His homing program, come back to roost. He drew in a deep breath, then flashed it the command to transfer to his screen, where he could see its message unfold.

  He had prepared several thousand truncated versions of the virus, too weak to do any damage, and had added to their substance a sequence which would report back to him if it was interfered with. Any collection program which was gathering up random spores would have triggered such action, sending back a signal to Tiananmen that in this place, and at this time, a spore of Lucifer had been yanked from the outernet.

  And it had worked.

  He wondered if he should report it to Gaza yet, or wait until he knew more. It could be mere coincidence, after all. Perhaps some antibody program had simply been scouring the outernet for viruses, and had caught his. Or his “Lucifer-X” had accidentally wandered into some system where security programs inspected all foreign material, and had gotten trapped.

  Perhaps.

  Or perhaps the enemy was out there, even now.

  He felt a rush of elation in his soul, a flood of chemicals in his brain such as other humans might know in a moment of love, or perhaps religious insight. It was a rare experience in iru psychology, that left him dazed for a good minute or two. Then, with meticulous care, he reeled in the precious code, and began to dissect the message that it carried.

  Something had grabbed hold of his spy-spore, all right. Its response had been immediate, triggering the signal to Masada before any real analysis of the threat could be completed. That was all right. What mattered was that now he had a way of tracing exactly where a spore had disappeared, and could search for the program that had intercepted it.

  He called up a locator program and fed it the information that his spore had gathered. A good second passed while it consulted its files, which seemed like eternity.

  Then the words appeared before him.

  SOURCE NODE: SALVATION

  SOURCE STATION: AIRES

  SOURCE SYSTEM: NORTHSTAR HOTELS, INC.

  SUBSYSTEM: RESERVATIONS

  He stared at the words in silence for a minute. A hotel chain? Perhaps a nantana could have made sense of such information, armed with the proper instinct for such things. He couldn’t. Fortunately, it wasn’t his job to. Once he confirmed that spores were disappearing into the bowels of Northstar’s computers, and he could hand over the data to Gaza in a nice ordered packet, the Guild could sort through questions of motive and means until the next step of this search was defined for him. That was their job, for which the gift of Hausman had prepared their brains.

  A hotel chain?

  All right, that doesn’t mean Northstar is guilty, it just means the capture program is sitting on their machine. An employee could have gained access to their system. Management could have traded access to some other company. A hacker could have broken in. This is the first step to the enemy, just the first step, and the trail is going to be long and winding, and it could well lead through every node in the system.

  He wanted to track it himself.

  For a long moment he sat before the silent machine, studying that thought in his head. What had prompted it? Pride? Curiosity? Or even ... boredom? Too many days spent staring at a screen, instead of interacting with the wealth of data that was out there?

  Going after the trail of this thing meant hooking up to the outernet, plain and simple. It couldn’t be done any other way. It meant letting the touch of that vast beast into his head, that living thing so unlike other living things that no man truly understood it. Tides of data no man could control. Hungers and diseases and tensions and conflict—

  He shut down the screen and turned away from it, eyes shut. His hands were shaking. Data still filled his field of vision until he shut that down, too. Then there was only darkness.

  You have to do it someday.

  It was only data. He had given it other names, he had called it alive in the hopes of understanding it, and he had used the language of life to help others learn how to program for it. That didn’t mean it was really alive. What did he think that it was going to do if he connected to it, eat him?

  Silently, without further thought on the matter, he rose up from his seat and stretched. A ritual stretch, allowing him to concentrate on each muscle rather than the thoughts that might otherwise be in his head. Sometimes he could shut down like that, sometimes when he was very tired ... or afraid.

  There’s nothing to be afraid of. You know that.

  It was only data. Right?

  She came to him in his dream, just as he remembered her. Dressed in blue, as always. Perfectly coifed sleek black hair. Meticulously groomed, as always.

  He watched her as she played the keyboard for a while, aware that she was dead, strangely undisturbed by it. She was playing a Bach fugue, and for a while he lost himself in the overlapping cascades of melody. Data. It was all data. All the world was data, codes and patterns rearranged into a thousand different forms. Even living flesh broke down to the same simple codes, if you looked deep enough.

  He heard the rustling of her dress before he saw her move. He looked up and saw her dark eyes fixed on him, strangely soft.

  “And love?” she asked him. “What is love?”

  He smiled faintly. “Data of the heart.”

  “And hunger?”

  Such wonderful eyes. He would never forget them. “Data of the soul.”

  “And fear?”

  He had no answer.

  She kissed him on the tip of his nose then and, even as she did so, began to dissolve. Pink lips fragmenting into fractal patterns of light and dark, skin breaking down into an array of chemical symbols, dark eyes giving way to a glittering display of retinal sparks.

  And fear?

  He couldn’t do it in his lab, of course. That room had been designed without net access deliberately, to avoid any chance of accidents. Instead he would have to do it—where? All spaces on Tiananmen were equally unfamiliar. It generally took months for his iru soul to settle into a new environment, and here he had barely had an E-week. No place would be comfortable, it was as simple as that. There was simply the choice to be made between doing it around people or not, and nothing else mattered.

  It was no choice at all, really.

  He locked himself in his room, a small but well-appointed chamber on the main level of the station. As he shut the door, his wellseeker gently informed him that his hands were trembling. As if that were news.

  For a while he just stood there, staring at the empty space before him. Then, methodically, deliberately, he sat down in front of the desk and looked up at the tiny node in the comer of the ceiling which would carry his signal to the galaxy at large. Such an unobtrusive thing, really. Hard to believe such a simple mechanism could give access to such an awesome creation.

  He’d taken off his headset on the way from the lab, a planetborn habit; now he raised it up again and fitted it onto his head, over the contacts embedded in his skull. He felt a faint buzz as the magnetic clips took hold, fixing it in place so that it wouldn’t move while he worked. He imagined he felt the subtle heat of the contacts coming online, but of course that was nonsense; the brain had no internal sense organs. He pushed a lock of hair out of his eyes, where the metal band had disarrayed it.

  Then: no more steps left. No more avo
idance possible. Do it now, or do it never.

  Shutting his eyes, he envisioned the icon that would prepare his brain for interface. He imagined he could hear a faint hum in the headset’s wiring as it began to process the signals necessary to log him onto the outemet for the first time. He found his palms were sweating, and wiped them off on the sides of his shirt. There was nothing to be afraid of, really. It was just a larger version of the system that every civilized planet used, which he worked with every day. So what if it had the history and idiosyncrasies of a thousand alien cultures jacked into it. So what if it was peppered with full-second delays, where a signal had to be skipped off the ainniq to a neighboring node ... or even full-minute delays, if several such skips had to be made. So what if its signals crossed open space, to be intercepted by data pirates, altered by them, precious data corrupted in transit or simply stolen, the ultimate coin of the realm for this technological age. So what if the result of all that made for a system so dynamic and unpredictable that it might as well be alive, and therefore must be courted rather than controlled. He knew how it worked. He had written the book on it. The galaxy looked to him for guidance in how to understand this thing.

  ONLINE, the headset informed him.

  Trembling only slightly, he eased his way into the system. Gateway icons appeared one after the other, Guild-signs that had to be neutralized before he could contact the outernet directly. He gave them the codes they needed. The system tried to tie him into some virtual control system, which would allow him to visualize his options as doorways and his progress as physical movement, but he shut that down as soon as it started up. Such tricks were for those whose minds couldn’t deal with pure code, not for him.

  At last the outernet icon filled his field of vision, confirming his connection. He drew in a deep breath, scanned his collection of real-time investigative programs to make sure they were all ready to go, and requested a link to Aires Station.