“Hey!” Liam croaked after him. “Gimme a fucking cigarette, will you?”
Once the Colonel was gone, Liam had the run of the room. They’d mopped it out and disinfected it and sent Joey’s corpse to an Area 51 black ops morgue for gruesome autopsy, and there was only half as much hardware remaining, all of it plugged back into the hard pucker of skin on the back of Liam’s neck.
Cautiously, Liam turned himself so that the toes of one foot touched the ground. Knuckling his toes, he pushed off towards the computers, the gurney’s wheels squeaking. Painfully, arthritically, he inched to the boxes, then plugged in and unrolled the keyboard.
He hit the spacebar and got rid of the screen-saver, brought up a login prompt. He’d been stealthily shoulder-surfing the techs for weeks now, and had half a dozen logins in his brain. He tapped out the login/pass combination and he was in.
The machine was networked to a CVS repository in some bunker, so the first thing he did was login to the server and download all the day’s commits, then he dug out the READMEs. While everything was downloading, he logged into the tech’s e-mail account and found Col. Gonzalez’s account of Joey’s demise.
It was encrypted with the group’s shared key as well as the tech’s key, but he’d shoulder-surfed both, and after three tries, he had cleartext on the screen.
Hydrostatic shock. The membranes of all of Joey’s cells had ruptured simultaneously, so that he’d essentially burst like a bag of semi-liquid Jell-O. Preliminary indications were that the antiviral cellular modifications had gone awry due to some idiosyncrasy of Joey’s “platform” — his physiology, in other words — and that the “fortified” cell-membranes had given way disastrously and simultaneously.
A ghoulish giggle escaped Liam’s lips. Venture capitalists liked to talk about “liquidity events” — times in the life of a portfolio company when the investors get to cash out: acquisition and IPO, basically. Liam had always joked that the VCs needed adult diapers to cope with their liquidity events, but now he had a better one. Joey had experienced the ultimate liquidity event.
The giggle threatened to rise into a squeal as he contemplated a liquidity event of his own, so he swallowed it and got into the READMEs and the source code.
He wasn’t a biotech, wasn’t a medical professional, but neither were the coders who’d been working on the mods that were executing on his “platform” at that very moment. In their comments and data-structures and READMEs, they’d gone to great pains to convert medical jargon to geekspeak, so that Liam was actually able to follow most of it.
One thing he immediately gleaned is that his interface was modifying his cells to be virus-hardened as slowly as possible. They wanted a controlled experiment, data on every stage of the recovery — if a recovery was indeed in the cards.
Liam didn’t want to wait. He didn’t even have to change the code — he just edited a variable in the config file and respawned the process. Where before he’d been running at a pace that would reverse the course of HIV in his body in a space of three weeks, now he was set to be done in three hours. What the fuck — how many chances was he going to get to screw around after they figured out that he’d been tinkering?
- – - – - – - – - – - -
Manufacturing the curative made him famished. His body was burning a lot of calories, and after a couple hours he felt like he could eat the ass out of a dead bear. Whatever was happening was happening, though! He felt the sores on his body dry up and start to slough off. He was hungry enough that he actually caught himself peeling off the scabby cornflakes and eating them. It grossed him out, but he was hungry.
His only visitor that night was a nurse, who made enough noise with her trolley on the way down the hall that he had time to balance the keyboard on top of the monitor and knuckle the bed back into position. The nurse was pleased to hear that he had an appetite and obligingly brought him a couple of supper-trays — the kitchen had sent up one for poor Joey, she explained.
Once Liam was satisfied that she was gone, he returned to his task with a renewed sense of urgency. No techs and no docs and no Colonel for six hours now — there must be a shitload of paperwork and fingerpointing over Joey, but who knew how long it would last?
He stuffed his face, nailing about three thousand calories over the next two hours, poking through the code. Here was a routine for stimulating the growth of large muscle-groups. Here was one for regenerating fine nerves. The enhanced reflexes sounded like a low-cal option, too, so he executed it. It was all betaware, but as between a liquidity event, a slow death on the palliative ward and a chance at a quick cure, what the fuck, he’d take his chances.
He was chuckling now, going through the code, learning the programmers’ style and personality from their comments and variable names. He was so damned hungry, and the muscles in his back and limbs and ass and gut all felt like they were home to nests of termites.
He needed more food. He gingerly peeled off the surgical tape holding on controller and its cable. Experimentally, he stood. His inner ear twirled rollercoaster for a minute or two, but then it settled down and he was actually erect — upright — well, both, he could cut glass with that boner, it was the first one he’d had in a year — and walking!
He stole out into the hallway, experiencing a frisson of delight and then the burning ritual humiliation of any person who finds himself in a public place wearing a hospital gown. His bony ass was hanging out of the back, the cool air of the dim ward raising goose-pimples on it.
He stepped into the next room. It was dusky-dark, the twilight of a hospital nighttime, and the two occupants were snoring in contratime. Each had his (her? it was too dark to tell) own nightstand, piled high with helium balloons, Care Bears, flowers and baskets of nuts, dried fruits and chocolates. Saliva flooded Liam’s mouth. He tiptoed across to each nightstand and held up the hem of his gown, then grinched the food into the pocket it made.
Stealthily, he stole his way down the length of the ward, emptying fruit-baskets, boxes of candy and chocolate, leftover dinner trays. By the time he returned to his room, he could hardly stand. He dumped the food out on the bed and began to shovel it into his face, going back through the code, looking for obvious bugs, memory leaks, buffer overruns. He found several and recompiled the apps, accelerating the pace of growth in his muscles. He could actually feel himself bulking up, feel the tone creeping back into his flesh.
He’d read the notes in the READMEs on waste heat and the potential to denature enzymes, so he stripped naked and soaked towels in a quiet trickle of ice-water in the small sink. He kept taking breaks from his work to wring out the steaming towels he wrapped around his body and wet them down again.
The next time he rose, his legs were springy. He parted the slats of the blinds and saw the sun rising over the distant ocean and knew it was time to hit the road, jack.
He tore loose the controller and its cable and shut down the computer. He undid the thumbscrews on the back of the case and slid it away, then tugged at the sled for the hard-disk until it sprang free. He ducked back out into the hall and quickly worked his way through the rooms until he found one with a change of men’s clothes neatly folded on the chair — ill-fitting tan chinos and a blue Oxford shirt, the NoCal yuppie uniform. He found a pair of too-small penny-loafers too and jammed his feet into the toes. He dressed in his room and went through the wallet that was stuck in the pants pocket. A couple hundred bucks’ worth of cash, some worthless plastic, a picture of a heavyset wife and three chubby kids. He dumped all the crap out, kept the cash, snatched up the drive-sled and booted, badging out with the tech’s badge.
“How long have you been on the road, then?” Murray asked. His mouth tasted like an ashtray and he had a mild case of the shakes.
“Four months. I’ve been breaking into cars mostly. Stealing laptops and selling them for cash. I’ve got a box at the rooming-house with the hard-drive installed, and I’ve been using an e-gold account to buy little things online to help me o
ut.”
“Help you out with what?”
“Hacking — duh. First thing I did was reverse-engineer the interface bug. I wanted a safe virus I could grow arbitrary payloads for in my body. I embedded the antiviral hardening agent in the vector. It’s a sexually transmissible wellness, dude. I’ve been barebacking my way through the skankiest crack-hoes in the Tenderloin, playing Patient Zero, infecting everyone with the Cure.”
Murray sat up and his head swam. “You did what?”
“I cured AIDS. It’s going around, it’s catching, you might already be a winner.”
“Jesus, Liam, what the fuck do you know about medicine? For all you know, your cure is worse than the disease — for all you know, we’re all going to have a — ‘liquidity event‘ any day now!”
“No chance of that happening, bro. I isolated the cause of that early on. This medical stuff is justnot that complicated — once you get over the new jargon, it’s nothing you can’t learn as you go with a little judicious googling. Trust me. You’re soaking in it.”
It took Murray a moment to parse that. “You infected me?”
“The works — I’ve viralized all the best stuff. Metabolic controllers, until further notice, you’re on a five-cheeseburger-a-day diet; increased dendrite density; muscle-builders. At-will pain-dampeners. You’ll need those — I gave you the interface, too.”
A spasm shot up Murray’s back, then down again.
“It was on the cigarette butt. You’re cancer-immune, by the by. I’m extra contagious tonight.” Liam turned down his collar to show Murray the taped lump there, the dangling cable that disappeared down his shirt, connecting to the palmtop strapped to his belt.
Murray arched his back and mewled through locked jaws.
Liam caught his head before it slammed into the Toyota’s hood. “Breathe,” he hissed. “Relax. You’re only feeling the pain because you’re choosing not to ignore it. Try to ignore it, you’ll see. It kicks azz.”
- – - – - – - – - – - -
“I needed an accomplice. A partner in crime. I’m underground, see? No credit-card, no ID. I can’t rent a car or hop a plane. I needed to recruit someone I could trust. Naturally, I thought of you.”
“I’m flattered,” Murray sarcased around a mouthful of double-bacon cheeseburger with extra mayo.
“You should be, asshole,” Liam said. They were at Murray’s one-bedroom techno-monastic condo: shit sofa, hyper-ergonomic chairs, dusty home theatre, computers everywhere. Liam drove them there, singing into the wind that whipped down from the sunroof, following the GPS’s sterile eurobabe voice as it guided them back to the anonymous shitbox building where Murray had located his carcass for eight years.
“Liam, you’re a pal, really, my best friend ever, I couldn’t be happier that you’re alive, but if I could get up I would fucking kill you. You raped me, asshole. Used my body without my permission.”
“You see it that way now, but give it a couple weeks, it’ll, ah, grow on you. Trust me. It’s rad. So, call in sick for the next week — you’re going to need some time to get used to the mods.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Do whatever you want, buddy, but I don’t think you’re going to be in any shape to go to work this week — maybe not next week either. Tell them it’s a personal crisis. Take some vacation days. Tell ‘em you’re going to a fat-farm. You must have a shitload of holidays saved up.”
“I do,” Murray said. “I don’t know why I should use them, though.”
“Oh, this is the best vacation of all, the Journey Thru Innerspace. You’re going to love it.”
- – - – - – - – - – - -
Murray hadn’t counted on the coding.
Liam tunneled into his box at the rooming house and dumped its drive to one of the old laptops lying around Murray’s apartment. He set the laptop next to Murray while he drove to Fry’s Electronics to get the cabling and components he needed to make the emitter/receiver for the interface. They’d always had a running joke that you can build anything from parts at Fry’s, but when Liam invoked it, Murray barely cracked a smile. He was stepping through the code in a debugger, reading the comments Liam had left behind as he’d deciphered its form and function.
He was back in it. There was a runtime that simulated the platform and as he tweaked the code, he ran it on the simulator and checked out how his body would react if he executed it for real. Once he got a couple of liquidity events, he saw that Liam was right, they just weren’t that hard to avoid.
The API was great, there were function calls for just about everything. He delved into the cognitive stuff right off, since it was the area that was rawest, that Liam had devoted the least effort to. At-will serotonin production. Mnemonic perfection. Endorphin production, adrenalin. Zen master on a disk. Who needs meditation and biofeedback when you can do it all in code?
Out of habit, he was documenting as he went along, writing proper tutorials for the API, putting together a table of the different kinds of interaction he got with different mods. Good, clear docs, ready for printing, able to be slotted in as online help in the developer toolkit. Inspired by Joey, he began work on a routine that would replace all the maintenance chores that the platform did in sleep-mode, along with a subroutine that suppressed melatonin and all the other circadian chemicals that induced sleep.
Liam returned from Fry’s with bags full of cabling and soldering guns and breadboards. He draped a black pillowcase over a patch of living-room floor and laid everything out on it, wires and strippers and crimpers and components and a soldering gun, and went to work methodically, stripping and crimping and twisting. He’d taken out his own connector for reference and he was comparing them both, using a white LED torch on a headband to show him the pinouts on the custom end.
“So I’m thinking that I’ll clone the controller and stick it on my head first to make sure it works. You wear my wire and I’ll burn the new one in for a couple days and then we can swap. OK?”
“Sure,” Murray said, “whatever.” His fingers rattled on the keys.
“Got you one of these,” Liam said and held up a bulky Korean palmtop. “Runs Linux. You can cross-compile the SDK and all the libraries for it; the compiler’s on the drive. Good if you want to run an interactive app –” an application that changed its instructions based on output from the platform — “and it’s stinking cool, too. I fucking love gear.”
“Gear’s good,” Murray agreed. “Cheap as hell and faster every time I turn around.”
“Well, until Honorable Computing comes along,” Liam said. “That’ll put a nail in the old coffin.”
“You’re overreacting.”
“Naw. Just being realistic. Open up a shell, OK? See at the top, how it says ‘tty’? The kernel thinks it’s communicating with a printer. Your shell window is a simulation of a printer, so the kernel knows how to talk to it — it’s got plenty of compatibility layers between it and you. If the guy who wrote the code doesn’t want you to interface with it, you can’t. No emulation, that’s not ‘honorable.’ Your box is 0wned.”
Murray looked up from his keyboard. “So what do you want me to do about it, dead man?”
“Mostly dead,” Liam said. “Just think about it, OK? How much money you got in your savings account?”
“Nice segue. Not enough.”
“Not enough for what?”
“Not enough for sharing any of it with you.”
“Come on, dude, I’m going back underground. I need fifty grand to get out of the country — Canada, then buy a fake passport and head to London. Once I’m in the EU, I’m in good shape. I learned German last week, this week I’m doing French. The dendrite density shit is the shit.”
“Man und zooperman,” Murray said. “If you’re zo zooper, go and earn a buck or two, OK?”
“Come on, you know I’m good for it. Once this stuff is ready to go –”
“What stuff?”
“The codebase! Haven’t you figured it ou
t yet? It’s a startup! We go into business in some former-Soviet Stan in Asia or some African kleptocracy. We infect the locals with the Cure, then the interface, and then we sell ‘em the software. It’s viral marketing, gettit?”
“Leaving aside CIA assassins, if only for the moment, there’s one gigantic flaw in your plan, dead-man.”
“I’m all aflutter with anticipation.”
“There’s no fucking revenue opportunity. The platform spreads for free — it’s already out there, you’ve seeded it with your magic undead super-cock. The hardware is commodity hardware, no margin and no money. The controller can be built out of spare parts from Fry’s — next gen, we’ll make it WiFi, so that we’re using commodity wireless chipsets and you can control the device from a distance –”
“– yeah, and that’s why we’re selling the software!” Liam hopped from foot to foot in a personal folk-dance celebrating his sublime cleverness.
“In Buttfuckistan or Kleptomalia. Where being a warez d00d is an honorable trade. We release our libraries and binaries and APIs and fifteen minutes later, they’re burning CDs in every soukand selling them for ten cents a throw.”
“Nope, that’s not gonna happen.”
“Why not?”
“We’re gonna deploy on Honorable hardware.”
“I am not hearing this.” Murray closed the lid of his laptop and tore into a slice of double-cheese meat-lover’s deep-dish pizza. “You are not telling me this.”
“You are. I am. It’s only temporary. The interface isn’t Honorable, so anyone who reverse-engineers it can make his own apps. We’re just getting ours while the getting is good. All the good stuff — say, pain-control and universal antiviral hardening — we’ll make for free, viralize it. Once our stuff is in the market, the whole world’s going to change, anyway. There’ll be apps for happiness, cures for every disease, hibernation, limb-regeneration, whatever. Anything any human body has ever done, ever, you’ll be able to do at-will. You think there’s going to be anything recognizable as an economy once we’re ubiquitous?”
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 388