He alt-tabbed to bring the Neuro-Sensor software to the front again, but even as he did so, he realized something strange. For the last twenty minutes, he had been crawling around inside the computer network of the White House. He had activated programs, spun data-webs, even written short bursts of code.
But he hadn’t touched the mouse or the keyboard at all.
Ursula had a whole bunch of other exercises to improve his skills, but he was getting impatient, so he bypassed them and loaded the next module.
“Neuro-visualization,” Ursula told him smoothly. “The neuro-sensors in your headset are also transmitters. They not only pick up signals from your brain, but they also can feed sounds and images into your brain by stimulating brain waves in your visual and auditory cortices.”
“Cool,” Sam said, nervously flicking a glance at his watch. It was 8:16. Only a minute had passed.
“Close your eyes,” Ursula said. “I am going to send an image to you now. Nothing fancy, just a red triangle. Relax and allow your brain to receive and interpret the image. If you open your eyes, the feed will automatically shut off. This is a safety mechanism to ensure you do not overload the visual receptors in your brain with information from two different sources.”
Sam closed his eyes.
“Visual feed starting now,” Ursula said.
A blurry red dot appeared behind Sam’s eyes.
“It had better get better than this,” he muttered.
“You should now be seeing a fuzzy red shape,” Ursula said. “Focus on it; try and draw it toward you.”
Sam focused, imagining himself speeding toward the red nothingness. It began to grow in size.
After a moment, it filled almost half of his vision, and although still out of focus, it was clearly a large red triangle.
“Concentrate on the triangle; try and bring it sharply into focus. As it changes, I want you to press the Plus and Minus keys on your keyboard. If it gets clearer, press Plus. If it becomes less distinct, then press Minus. When it is perfectly sharp, press the space bar.”
Sam waited until the edges were sharp and clear, then pressed the space bar.
“Okay,” she said. “Now for color. I am going to show you a series of color images. When you see the one that has a red dot at the top, a blue dot at the left, and a green dot on the right, then press the space bar.”
It was the first image.
“Good. Now I am going to send you a color image. If you can identify the image, then type the name on the screen,” she said, and added, “with your mind, of course.”
Sam opened his eyes for a moment to check his watch (8:53 p.m.), and when he shut them, a huge, clear image of the famous da Vinci painting Mona Lisa was hanging right in front of him, occupying all of his vision. It was bigger and clearer than he could have ever dreamed possible, and he realized that the image was being beamed directly into his visual cortex.
Mona Lisa, he thought, and the words appeared over the top of the picture. The bemused smile on the face in the painting broke into a grin, and Mona Lisa said, with Ursula’s voice, “Congratulations. You are correct. You are now ready to use your neuro-connector to view and operate your computer. Have fun!”
The painting disappeared, replaced by his normal Windows background and icons. He opened a few programs and closed them again just to prove he could do it. He opened a word processor and typed a few sentences with his mind. He ran an MP3 file and was astounded to hear the music inside his head. He tried the same with a video and was rewarded by the movie starting to play in a small window.
He closed it and glanced at the clock in the lower right corner of his screen (did you call it a screen when it was inside your head?) and noticed that it was 8:59 p.m.
“Dinnertime,” he said out loud.
Without touching the mouse or the keyboard or looking at the LCD screen of his laptop, he ventured back into the electronic corridors of the White House.
He checked the clock in the bottom right corner again. 9:00 p.m.
Open, he thought, staring at the file.
It opened.
There was a brief second or two of a standard hourglass; then the software took over the whole of his screen, the whole of his vision!
It opened into an image, a virtual version of the White House. He was somewhere in the grounds of the big building. It was a sunny day, and the grass was green underfoot. In front of him, a fountain, surrounded by a low hedge, sprayed virtual water up into the air, digital droplets sparkling in the bright sun before cascading back to earth.
Now, finally, he understood what Skullface had meant. It wasn’t just an online forum; it was virtual-meeting software, where their avatars would see and talk to each other in a cyberworld. Like Third Life. They would probably meet in the Oval Office itself, he thought. No, Skullface said dinner—it would be in the formal dining room.
By thinking himself forward, he began to move, skirting around the side of the fountain toward the front doors.
He moved across a roadway, past the white pillars, up a flight of stairs toward the huge double doors of the White House, which were set in an arched entranceway.
He imagined the doors opening, but they did not.
He opened his eyes and tried clicking on the doors with his mouse, but they remained solidly closed.
He closed his eyes again and looked around.
To the right of the doors, conveniently placed at head height on the door frame, was a black rectangular plastic shape with a white button in the center.
A doorbell.
Sam chuckled to himself. So simple. The final hurdle was not a hurdle at all.
At the start it had seemed impossible, yet here he was, at the front door of the White House, about to embark on an incredible new adventure. What would he learn? Who would he meet?
He took a deep breath and clicked on the doorbell.
A sound intruded and he opened his eyes with a start, shutting off the audiovisual feed from the neuro-connector. The White House doors and the doorbell were still there, though, staring at him from the laptop screen.
Surely he had just imagined that sound.
He kept his eyes open and tried again, this time preferring traditional methods. He reached out and grasped his mouse with his right hand and moved it over to the doorbell.
Drawing in his breath again, he clicked on the button a second time.
And jumped out of his chair with sudden, terrible knowledge and fear.
Outside his bedroom, past the kitchen, where his mother was preparing dinner, at the end of the hallway, at the front door of their sixth-floor apartment, the doorbell rang again.
8 | KIWI
Sam lay on the lumpy mattress on the metal-framed bunk, staring blankly at the ceiling of his cell and watching fuzzy specks of eyeball dust float around like microbes in a solution on a microscope slide.
He felt he was going mad. Three days locked in a cell they called a bedroom. But it had wire mesh on the windows, and the door was permanently locked, which seemed more like a prison cell to Sam.
Three days ago, he had raced down the hallway to the front door of their apartment. Terrified of opening the door, but even more terrified of his mother opening it first.
The man standing there wore tactical black SWAT-type coveralls and a Kevlar vest. A pistol in a black leather holster was strapped halfway down his thigh. He was in his late twenties. Not short, but not tall either. His hair was slicked back in a style reminiscent of old fifties rock ’n’ rollers, as if to make him taller, and he wore dark aviator-style mirrored glasses, which he removed as Sam opened the door.
The man was flanked by two others in identical uniforms but who had automatic rifles slung across their chests. They stood back from the doorway, against the wall on the opposite side of the hall, and their gazes flicked left and right as if they were expecting trouble.
All three of them wore flesh-colored earpieces with a curly wire that disappeared around the back of their necks.
Through a half-open door on the other side of the corridor, Louis, the Neanderthal fourteen-year-old, watched, wide-eyed.
“Sam Wilson?” the first man asked.
Sam nodded mutely.
“I’m Special Agent Ranger Tyler from the Department of Homeland Security, Cyber Defense Division. I am placing you under arrest on suspicion of government network infiltration and sabotage. You have the right …”
Sam didn’t get to hear his rights. Not just then, anyway.
“What?” his mother screamed from right behind him. “What is going on? What are you doing? What …” There were quite a lot of “what’s,” in fact.
None of which fazed the men in black at all.
Since then, he had been here. Wherever here was. It was somewhere near Washington, D.C.; that much he knew. A collection of old-looking buildings surrounded by tall trees and a high razor-wire fence, a mile or two from the nearest town.
He had seen it when they had flown over in the black Learjet emblazoned with Homeland Security logos, and again, up close, through the wire-mesh windows of the black Chevy van that had brought him from the small airfield to his new home.
As prisons went, it could have been worse, he thought. The floors were a polished dark wood, and the walls were timber panels, although he suspected they covered a more solid, concrete construction. There was a toilet in a cupboard on the left side of the bedroom and a communal shower block at the end of the hallway.
It wasn’t a prison for adults. It was some kind of remand center or juvie hall for youth offenders. Nobody he saw through the mesh on the window looked older than eighteen.
There was a beep from the electronic lock on his door and it opened. It was one of the wardens, a hard-faced man named Brewer with a gut that hung low over his belt.
Brewer looked around the cell before placing a large cardboard box on the floor. It bore a red label with the word “inspected.”
He scowled at Sam and left.
Sam got up off the bunk and opened the carton.
On the inside flap, he found a huge heart drawn with a thick marker pen and I love you, Sam written in his mother’s neat hand.
That was the only communication from his mother in three days.
The carton was full of clothes: shirts, shorts, and socks.
Under the first layer of clothes was his model of Thunderbird 2, carefully wrapped in a couple of T-shirts. He took it out and placed it on the windowsill.
Below that were some sweaters, although it was too warm for those just yet.
He started to lift them out, then stopped, his fingers nerveless. He let the sweaters slip back into the box. In his mind, an image of his mother, sitting by herself at the small round dining table of their apartment, eating meals by herself.
Another image. This one of him sitting in this same cell as the fall leaves drifted off their branches. As the cold winter winds began to howl across the state and the first tiny soft snowflakes turned into flurries of white ice.
He had been so sure of himself, so confident of his own cleverness, that he hadn’t ever really stopped to consider the consequences of his actions. He had charged around the country’s networks as if he was playing a computer game. But it wasn’t a game. It was real.
He’d thought he couldn’t be caught, and yet the whole time they had been watching him, just waiting to pounce. That uncomfortable feeling he had had inside the Telecomerica network. That had been more than just a case of nerves or indigestion. Thinking he could fool them with a C-3PO mask at the hackers’ conference. What a joke that was.
But the joke was on him.
And there were consequences. And at the moment, the consequence was a cell, a “bedroom,” in an unnamed security facility somewhere near the nation’s capital.
He turned back to the window, picked up the Thunderbird model, and hurled it against the far wall.
It shattered and fell.
He lay back down on the bed and cried.
That afternoon, he was allowed out for exercise in the courtyard for the first time. It did not meet his expectations of a prison courtyard at all. It had pleasant, grassy, parklike grounds, bushy trees, and a small pond.
There were about seventy or eighty other inmates, all boys, wandering around the courtyard in groups or pairs or playing soccer on a flat patch of ground in the center, using shoes to mark out goalposts.
Others played basketball on a concrete court over by the administration block.
Sam kept to himself in an empty area of the park. He had heard too many horror stories about life in prison to want to get on the wrong side of the wrong people. Right now he didn’t even know who the wrong people were.
The sky was that kind of indecisive overcast that could fade away to sunshine or intensify to showers just as quickly.
He sat on the grass, keeping his eyes low, careful not to make eye contact with the other inmates, and contemplated his own stupidity.
“G’day, mate,” a voice intruded, and he looked up. He hadn’t heard the boy approach.
He was about seventeen, in Sam’s best guess, and wore a pair of thin, wire-framed glasses. His hair was wild. His mouth was open in a goofy grin that made him look a little soft in the head. Sam wondered if he was.
“Um, hi, I guess,” Sam responded. “Australian?”
“Nyew Zilder,” the boy said, which Sam took to mean “New Zealander.” That was a small island off the coast of Australia, he thought, or was that Tasmania?
The boy stuck out his hand. Sam took it and shook it. He seemed harmless enough.
“Jase,” the boy said. “They call me Kiwi.”
He pronounced it koy-wee.
“Kiwi, like the fruit?” Sam queried.
“Like the bird,” the boy, Jase—Kiwi—said.
“Sorry, no offense,” Sam said.
“No worries,” Kiwi said.
“I’m Sam,” Sam said.
“What are you in for?” Kiwi asked.
“Stuff,” Sam said, not wanting to give away too much. “What about you?”
“Armed robbery,” Kiwi said.
Sam blinked. With his casual appearance and goofy grin, Kiwi didn’t look like a typical armed robber. “Really?” he asked.
“True as a fart in a suitcase,” Kiwi said, although Sam had no idea what he meant. “I robbed a bank in Nebraska, armed with a computer.”
Sam laughed. “Computer fraud?”
Kiwi hushed him. “Don’t tell any of them.” He nodded at the rest of the inmates. “They keep away from me. Think I’m dangerous.”
“Sure thing, killer.” Sam smiled.
“So what are you in for?” Kiwi asked. “You’re cyber, too, right? I saw the CDD van when you arrived.” He saw Sam’s quizzical look and elaborated. “Cyber Defense Division. Homeland Security boofheads.”
Sam shrugged. “They reckon I was somewhere I shouldn’t have been.”
“Where?” Kiwi asked.
“I’m not admitting anything,” Sam said.
“Yeah, yeah, same, same, but what did they accuse you of breaking into?” Kiwi asked. He sat down on the grass beside Sam and crossed his legs like a first grader on a teacher’s mat.
Sam looked at him and decided that he was an unlikely snitch.
“The White House,” he admitted at last.
Kiwi’s jaw dropped. “No way.”
“That’s the accusation,” Sam said.
“The White House! That’s impossible. You’d never get near it. It’s on GovNet; it’s air-gapped and Therminated. You wouldn’t have got within a hundred miles.”
He wasn’t quite as dumb as he looked, Sam decided.
“The White House,” he confirmed.
“Oh, that’s funny.” Kiwi laughed. “How far did you get?”
“Could have peed in the presidential john if I’d wanted to.”
“No way of the dragon!” Kiwi breathed.
“How long have you been here?” Sam asked. “How long did you get
?”
“Just three years,” Kiwi said. “ ’Cause of my age. Woulda been worse if I’d been older. I got one year here at Recton, then a couple of years upstate. After that I’ll be repatriated. Sent home to New Zealand. Kicked out, in other words. How about you?”
“I dunno,” Sam said. “I haven’t been officially charged with anything yet, as far as I know. I haven’t seen a lawyer, haven’t been to court. Nothing like that. I haven’t even spoken to my mom.”
“Right,” Kiwi said knowingly. “CDD.”
“What does that mean? How long can they keep me here?” Sam asked.
“Long as they want,” Kiwi said. “They got me under the Fraud Act—that’s criminal. But they would have got you under the Terrorism Act. Since Vegas, if they call it terrorism, they can do what they want with you. You’ll stay here till you turn eighteen; then you’ll head upstate to a real prison. With the adult prisoners. Good chance that they’ll throw away the key and forget you ever existed. Sorry, mate, but I’d rather be in my shoes, if you know what I mean.”
Kiwi must have seen the look on Sam’s face, as he added quickly, “You should e-mail your mum, let her know that you’re okay. There are computers in the library.”
“There’s a library?” Sam asked.
“Over by the admin block.”
“With computers?”
9 | THE LIBRARY
The library was old and, if it was possible, even more wooden than the long hallways and bedrooms of the dormitory block.
The tables were scrawled over with graffiti, most of it obscene. There was shelf after shelf of books, but Sam didn’t stop to investigate just yet. First stop was the computer table.
There were four computers in all, separated by wooden partitions. Only the first one was in use. The user was a rat-faced boy with the word “BadAss” tattooed, not professionally, on the back of his neck.
Sam chose the farthest computer.
He sent a quick e-mail to his mom, assuring her that he was okay and not to worry; then he browsed around the computer, seeing what was available to the inmates.
It was a standard HP computer, running a Microsoft operating system. But it was locked down tighter than any computer he had ever seen. Net Nanny, WebMarshal—the list went on—all bound into a managed environment so the user couldn’t reconfigure the machine in any way.
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