The night was alive with flashing lights, fading sirens, and the crackle of fire dining on everything it could chew and consume.
The building, a five-story job built after the big quake of 1906, was burning like, well, like a big house on fire. Black smoke poured from the upper two stories, flames shot out through imploded windows on the third floor. Pumper engines filled the street with red lights and throaty mechanical drones. A hook-and-ladder with a mounted inch-and-halfer giraffe line blew water into the upper story, while ground-based hydrant-fed three-inchers as stiff as wooden beams spewed water into the third and fourth floors. Cops kept the lookie-loos back, and firefighters ran back and forth, moving hoses, gearing up with air tanks and masks, doing what they were supposed to do.
Jay Gridley, dressed in a stiff and clumsy fireman’s turnout suit—coat, bunker pants, gloves, boots, and helmet, light reflecting off the glo-flex strips on the clothing—stood with a group of other firefighters near one of the building’s entrances.
A captain stood there in front of a chart on a stand. He listened to a handheld tactical radio, looked at the team, and said, “Okay, here’s the situation. We got the building cleared of people so far as we know. Fire started on the third floor, which is two-thirds engulfed, and is spreading laterally and going up fast, but the first two floors are still cool. I want your line here.” He pointed at the chart. “Baker and Charlie squads are entering the structure from the east and south, and setting up here, and here.”
Gridley wasn’t up to speed on real fire fighting tactics. He’d started creating this scenario a few days back, but hadn’t had time to do the research, so he doubted this was how it would work in RW. Would they go into a building on the ground floor if the floors above it were burning? Not something he’d want to do. His scenario was based on entertainment vids he’d seen, and everybody knew the movies never let truth get in the way of a story.
Fortunately, in VR, it didn’t actually have to mirror reality. It didn’t even have to look that good, unless you wanted to invite somebody else in to play. It was only the anal-retentive types like Jay who wanted the scenario to be as real as possible—most people didn’t bother. For Jay, the test of his creation would be to bring in a squad of real firefighters and have them look around, nod, then say, “Yeah, this is how it really is.” He figured if you could fool somebody who really knew what it was like, you had a decent scenario.
Most people could buy off-the-shelf software and be perfectly happy. Most people weren’t Net Force’s top VR honcho, Smokin’ Jay Gridley. If he couldn’t do it right, he didn’t want to do it.
The captain finished his directions. The team started into the building, dragging a stiff and heavy pressurized hose. The power was out, so they switched on helmet and hand-carried lanterns. The sounds they made were loud in the darkness, and the roar of the fire a couple of stories up was muted but audible, the building vibrating as it was being eaten alive by the orange monster. A lot of firefighters anthropomorphized fire, Jay knew that much. They talked about it as if it were some kind of malevolent creature rather than what was essentially a real fast version of rust-oxidation and combustion . . .
Back at Net Force HQ, Jay and his team were working their computers, trying to find the source of the problem at Blue Whale—and they weren’t alone—but in this scenario, he was about to take a turn up a dark hallway by himself to get closer to the source of the fire. Not something any sane fireman would do, and certainly not alone, he knew at least that much.
As the team moved to the location where it was supposed to deploy its hose, Jay slipped into the stairway and started climbing. The smell of burning material and the hint of smoke in the stairwell was a nice touch, he thought, congratulating himself.
As he climbed to the second floor landing, then past it, he suddenly thought about Saji. Despite her life-is-about-suffering Buddhist thing, she was very excited about their upcoming wedding. And while the idea of being without her and back like he’d been before they had met was as bleak a scenario as Jay could imagine, he had to confess to himself that he’d had some second thoughts. Getting married had never really been in Jay’s life plan. Oh, sure, he had figured there’d be women in his life, maybe even children someday, but the reality of it was different than the vague imaginings he’d had. That he would marry a Buddhist he’d met on-line while recovering from an induced-stroke—a woman whose net persona had been that of an old Tibetan lama—had never figured into his fastasies. And now that the actual date had been set and the plans were being carefully laid, the idea that he was going to be married to somebody had begun to hit home.
One woman, for the rest of his life. Day in, day out, always around . . .
Yeah, the sex was great, and yeah, he loved her, couldn’t really imagine being alone, no Saji around; still, there was this . . . finality about the idea of saying “I do” and signing a lifelong contract that had never really occurred to him until it was actually staring him in the face . . .
He got to the third floor. Took off his right glove, pressed it against the door. The door was cool to the touch. He took a couple of deep breaths of the stale-tasting compressed air from his bottle, then reached for the doorknob. Worry about getting married later. Right now, he had a job to do. Some guys were screwing with the web, and he was the guy who was going to track them down and stop them.
They obviously didn’t know who they were messing with . . .
On the Bon Chance
The fire scenario was okay, but overblown. Jay had always been too gaudy about such things, spending too much time on how good something looked when he should have been concentrating on how well it worked. Style and not substance.
Still, as Keller stood there in his fireman’s gear, watching Jay work, he had to give him credit. He was sniffing in the right direction.
Keller waited until Jay went past, heading for the source of the “fire.” Maybe he could figure something out, maybe not, but he wasn’t going to get the chance. Keller followed Jay up the stairwell, being careful to stay out of sight, tracking him by the sound of his boots on the steps.
Once Jay was on the right floor, Keller moved in. It was dark, smoky, hot, all in all, a pretty good representation, as such things went. Jay was always big on details. But that was the curse of a small picture man, wasn’t it? Couldn’t see the forest for the trees in the way. No long-range vision.
From a cabinet near the door, Keller pulled a thermite bomb, shaped like a bowling ball. He triggered the timer for ten seconds, then rolled it across the floor toward the unseen Jay Gridley. Heard Jay stop and listen.
See you later, Jay. You lose this round.
The bomb went off in a flare that destroyed the scenario as Keller dropped out of VR and back into his cabin on the Bon Chance. He pulled off the sensory gear, laughing. “You never had an opponent like me, Jay. I know all your best moves. You don’t have a prayer.”
11
On the Bon Chance
An old man, maybe seventy-five or so, sat in a recliner in a low-rent room, pointing a remote at a battered television set, pushing buttons, but getting only scrambled, frantic pixels whirling on his screen.
A deep, masculine voice said, “Tired of losing your net service? Unable to log onto the web because your server can’t get its act together?”
The old man clicked the remote a couple more times, then shook his head and tossed the control onto a scratched table next to the worn and scuffed leather recliner.
A big, happy-looking German shepherd padded over to the old man. In his mouth, the dog held another remote, a silvery, glittering, truncated cone-shaped device. The old man looked at the dog, who dropped the device into his lap and gave him a dog smile.
“What’s this, boy?” the old man said.
The dog gave one sharp bark.
The old man picked up the remote.
The opening notes for Strauss’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra” began playing quietly in the background.
A dee
p voice said, “We at CyberNation understand your frustration. And we have a guarantee—if you are ever kept off the net for more than an hour on a CyberNation server, we’ll not only give you your money back for that entire month, we’ll give you your next month of service absolutely free.”
The music grew louder. Boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom . . .
The old man looked at the dog and raised one eyebrow in question. The dog barked once, and it was obvious what he was saying. “Go for it!”
“At CyberNation, we are always here for you, twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. You have our word on that, and we put our money where our mouth is.”
The old man pointed the remote at his television set.
The music’s volume increased so that it rumbled over the old man and dog as if a full symphony orchestra was in the next room.
The set morphed, changed into a giant window that expanded to cover the entire wall. People stepped out and into the shabby living room. There was an Indian holy man in a turban and long flowing white robe; a black woman in a grass skirt, bare from the waist up; a cowboy; an Arctic explorer; a big-game hunter. In addition, a rhino, an ostrich, and a small dinosaur stepped from the window into the suddenly expanded living room. All of them seemed to get along famously.
The music reached its peak, thundering Strauss, horns blasting their dramatic sting.
“Anywhere, anytime, anybody you want to be—CyberNation can take you there. Come along. Join the millions of satisfied citizens of the net in mankind’s greatest experiment. The future is waiting for you.”
The old man and dog both smiled as the music faded.
“What do you think?” Chance said.
Roberto said, “An old man and a dog?”
“Not everybody goes for the sex ads,” she said. “Dogs are always good. You know the old story about the book title?”
’Berto shook his head.
“Well, the theory is, people like dogs. They also like Abraham Lincoln and they like their doctors, for the most part. So a book title that would guarantee instant sales would be Abraham Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog.”
’Berto smiled.
“It’s all about demographics. We catch a lot of the young male computer geeks with the sex come-ons. But we also have specific ads tailored for generation Xers, aging baby boomers turning into AARPers, young mothers, as many large groups as we can identify and niche-market to. Net, TV, radio, print ads, movie trailers, billboards, bus benches, sports sponsorships—everything from T-shirts to signs on racing cars—high school cable ed, you name it. Since the Blue Whale scramble, we’ve picked up eighty-eight thousand new subscribers on the U.S. West Coast alone.”
“That’s good, right?”
“Not as good as we’d hoped. The Net Force ops got in and patched things up faster than we expected. We should have gotten twice that many new linkers.”
He shrugged again. “So?”
“Truth is, things aren’t moving along as quickly as we want. We are falling short of our projections. It looks as if we are going to have to . . . step things up.”
“More ads? More software scrambles?”
She looked at him. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. “Don’t pull my chain, Roberto.”
He chuckled. “You have a new piercing you haven’t told me about, Missy?”
“Screw you.”
“I’m ready when you are.”
She smiled. Well. He had his charms, even when he played at being duller than he was . . .
Net Force HQ Quantico, Virginia
Dressed in Net Force sweats and cross-trainers, John Howard stood under one of the chinning bars at the obstacle course, rotating his head slowly to stretch the muscles of his neck. Physical training was another thing he’d slacked off on during his short-lived retirement. Not that he’d stopped completely—he’d kept up morning calisthenics, and he still hit the weights down in the basement a couple times a week, plus he jogged most days for a few miles; still, he hadn’t run the course in almost a month, and normally he’d do it at least twice a week.
Probably he’d lost a couple of steps, but not that much.
He jumped up, caught the steel bar, palms forward and slightly wider than his shoulders, and started doing chins. He knew after the first couple that his usual twelve or fifteen routine was out of the question. By the fifth one, he was straining, and it was all he could do to gut out ten.
He was glad Julio Fernandez was not here to see this. If he had been, Howard would have had to find three or four more reps somewhere, and like as not, he’d have pulled a muscle doing ’em.
He let himself hang for a few seconds after the tenth rep, to stretch out his lats, then dropped to the ground, disgusted with himself. Who was it—Gertrude Stein?—who’d said that after you hit forty it’s all patch, patch, patch?
Didn’t matter who said it, it was sure true. On the one hand, he still felt like a kid of nineteen. Yeah, his hairline showed a little more face than it used to and there were little tufts of gray at the temples. But there weren’t too many wrinkles, and his general shape and weight wasn’t that different from twenty, twenty-five years ago. If anything, he’d put on some muscle since his first hitch in the regular army. But the days of partying all night and then working a full day were gone. The occasional strain or bruise took longer to heal, and if he didn’t stretch and warm up before he started working out hard, he got a lot more strains and bruises than he had as a kid. He thought he’d come to terms with getting older and slowing down, but he realized that didn’t mean he could slack off. He wasn’t going to get any younger or stronger, but if he didn’t stay on top of things, he was going to get older and weaker a lot sooner. A layoff like this just pointed out what he knew was so—you might not be able to win in the end, but you were going to get there quicker if you didn’t resist it every step of the way.
He took several deep breaths and looked at the obstacle course. He had his stopwatch, an old mechanical sweep-hand job he’d picked up from a Russian surplus place. Like that shotgun he’d given the commander, the Russians still did a lot of stuff the old-fashioned way. Not necessarily because of any desire for quality, but because they didn’t have the technology to do it on the cheap. You could get a windup pocket- or stopwatch with an eighteen-jeweled movement for less than fifty bucks; a shotgun that was sturdy and well-made for maybe three, four hundred. Try that in the U.S. If you could even find such things, they’d cost an awful lot more.
He decided to skip the stopwatch and just run the course. He didn’t really want to know how much he’d slowed down. He’d be happy just to get through without breaking something.
He set himself, and got ready to go. He was a religious man, he believed in God, and he’d been right with Jesus for a long time. He believed he would be admitted to the Kingdom of Heaven if he led a righteous life and he worked at it. But like the old joke his father used to tell, he wasn’t ready to go now. He had a teenaged son and a loving wife, and he wanted to stick around long enough to smile at his grandchildren. Retiring had been part of that, but he realized as he gathered himself to hit the course that sitting back in a rocker on the porch and watching the world go by might not be the solution. You could get hit by a runaway bus sitting on the porch—that had happened to some guy in D.C. only a couple months back—instead of being shot by some psycho while you were leading a Net Force military team. God had His plan, and Howard’s number was gonna be up on a certain day, on a certain hour, no matter where he was or what he was doing. He’d thought that he’d been tempting fate, but after that bus had left the road and squashed a guy younger than he was who’d been sitting in a porch swing, he’d realized that death could come from anywhere at any time.
Run, John, and worry about the meaning of life later—it won’t get you through the obstacle course, all this thinking.
He grinned. That was true. There was a time to think and a time to move. Right now, moving was the order of the moment.
He took a final deep breath and began his sprint.
Michaels looked up from his desk to see Toni, dressed in business clothes, standing in front of him.
“Hey, babe.”
“Commander,” she said with a short nod.
“Uh . . .”
She smiled. “If I’m going to be working here, even temporarily, we need to keep it businesslike.”
“What, I can’t grope you in the hall?”
“Not unless you want a sexual harassment suit.”
They both smiled.
“Okay,” he said.
“So, what’s the situation?”
“Better than we’d hoped. Jay and the gang managed to find the problem with the server pretty quick. They had help from InfraGuard and the NIPC out of the CWG.”
“And how are the National InfraGuard Protection Center and Crime Working Group?”
“Same as always. If they could make a wish, you and I and all of Net Force would disappear in a reeking puff of sulfur and red smoke.”
Toni chuckled.
“Anyway, give them credit, they pitched in and helped Jay.”
“How’d the terrorists get in?”
“Passwords. They had them up to the highest level.”
“Social engineering,” she said. “They bribed somebody.”
He shook his head. “Maybe not. The VP in charge of Blue Whale’s security was killed a few days ago, along with a couple of ex-FBI bodyguards. At the time, it looked like a simple traffic accident—car ran off a cliff, no signs of anything hinky. That seems awfully coincidental.”
“Yes.” She started to say something, then noticed the shotgun in its case, propped in the corner. “What’s that?”
“A shotgun,” he said. “John Howard got it for me.”
“For what?”
He took a breath. “To keep at home.”
He wasn’t sure exactly what he expected, but with her being a new mother and all, he was halfway thinking she’d be against the idea. Instead, she said, “Good idea. We need a gun in the house.”
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