The Archimedes Effect nf-10

by Tom Clancy

  Because the screenwriter willed it so, Jay knew. No other real reason, despite whatever throwaways the writer would toss off about ancient civilizations and other such rot. Jay was just using the setup, he hadn’t created it. . . .

  Jay grinned. Well, realism wasn’t exactly primary in a scenario wherein he swung through the trees yodeling, knocking down bad guys, and rescuing fair damsels. . . .

  But back to the conversation. Jay was here to learn something, and eventually it would come out. Where exactly was the cave? He didn’t know that, but if he stayed with this group long enough, he would.

  As the five sat around the fire, front-lit by the orange glow, with fitful sparks flying into the darkness, Jay of the Jungle sat on his branch, master of it all, listening.

  In the night some unseen creature went, “Ooh-wow! Ooh-wow! Ooh-wow!”

  Nice touch that, if he did say so himself . . .

  “Jay?”

  It took him a second to track. Here was a voice that didn’t belong—

  Thorn. One of two people with overrides to reach into Jay’s VR world.

  He would have to get back to the evil hunters later. If the boss was calling and willing to interrupt Jay while he was in VR? That meant it had to be important.

  “End scenario,” Jay said.

  The jungle faded away, leaving Jay in his office, wired in his suit.

  Thorn stood in the doorway.

  “ ’Sup, Boss?”

  Thorn said, “I just had a wonderful discussion with General Hadden,” he began.

  “Uh oh.”

  “Yeah, you got that part right . . .”

  20

  Near Mare Ingenii

  Luna

  The FBI and military intelligence had ops chasing information on the dead terrorist, too, and after talking to Thorn, Jay decided that his time might be better spent working on things they couldn’t find as well as he could. So after Thorn left, Jay bagged the jungle-man scenario and flew off to the other side of the Moon.

  From the lip of the crater where he stood, Jay had a good view of the alien base. For all that it was the “dark” side of Luna, there was a good amount of light—unnatural light, to be sure, but still. The terrain was rocky here, just north of Mare Ingenii—the Sea of Cleverness, which seemed an appropriate location.

  He was at one of the final levels of the bug game. And it was stumping him—he couldn’t figure out which military base it corresponded to in the RW.

  He jumped, falling down the wall of the crater. Gravity was only 0.165 that of Earth, but there was inertia, so he used his braking rockets to slow his descent even more. He floated downward like a broad leaf.

  The VR was gorgeous. Dynamic lighting and particle effects added to the visuals, making him feel that he was really here. The stark lighting and eerie silence combined with the very realistic alien base to give him the creeps. Smooth, powdery dust flew from his boots as he bounded down the steep slope, ghosting into the vacuum and back down in slow motion.

  He wasn’t live in this mission—the goal here was to evaluate the base and see if he could find out what his team had missed. So the game was frozen as he roamed around the set.

  He trotted toward the base, kicking up more slo-mo dust.

  Good thing this isn’t real-time, or they’d see me coming for sure.

  The base was roughly hexagonal, the most unusual layout he’d seen yet. It was a deep blue color, and slightly translucent, as if made from huge sapphire crystals. There were alien-sized air locks on all six sides, with larger, vehicle-sized locks on three walls.

  The walls had a monumental look, like something built in ancient Sumeria or Babylon. He almost expected to see huge bull-gods emblazoned on the wall, or ziggurats peeking up from inside.

  Some memory nagged at the back of his mind. As if he’d seen this before—something like it, but not this, exactly.

  He hit a button on his space suit and was propelled upward by a small rocket on his backpack. The wall was well-defined VR, but not quite as sharp as the rest of the scenario. The crystalline texture seemed to have been overlaid on somewhat older code. It wasn’t as . . . integrated as the rest of the scene.

  He reached the top of the wall and looked at the roofline.

  Here was a sharper, more defined VR—a herringbone of giant crystals.

  The roof is newer.

  Jay paused the scenario and shifted frame of reference, which grew larger as the base shrank to the size of a coffee table.

  “Remove newer base sections as defined by these parameters,” he said to the analysis program. He rattled off some code.

  The base shimmered for a moment, and then it reformed, still six-sided, but now looking more like an ancient walled city, without a roof.

  He had seen this before. But—where?

  Jay paused the scenario and exited to personal cyberspace. He was in a wood-paneled hallway with leather-wrapped doors leading off it. Here was the Game Room, the repository of games he had gathered over twenty years, going back to when he was a kid. Each door had a brass plate with a year engraved on it.

  When had he seen it? What year had it been?

  A few VR glove motions later, the walls of the corridor morphed outward, expanding into a cavernous space. Acres of blond oak floor stretched out toward art exhibits, each representing a favorite video game he’d played.

  Here, a Rodin-like pose by Gordon Fremaux from Half-Life 4. There, a model of the Ghost Attack Craft from Halo. Over on the wall opposite was an oil painting from the tenth level of Goldeneye—the updated Nintendo-21 version.

  None of these, of course. But he was sure it was this way.

  He reached the section of VR games made up of realistic dioramas.

  Past the Doom 5 exhibit he saw a huge building on top of a hill, a great walled city from the Bronze Age, complete with winged bulls.

  The city layout wasn’t hexagonal, but that would have been easy to change with a few lines of code. What was important was that, aside from the shape and the new overlays, this was the same basic structure.

  Jay read the card posted on the wall of the exhibit.

  Siege of Troy—Student MPO, v1, MIT. The date—day, month, and year—were there. A couple years after he’d graduated.

  He remembered it. VR games had been fairly new, and someone had written a massive multiplayer on-line version of a game that had hundreds of players attacking the ancient city of Troy.

  A buddy had told him about it, so he’d gone to see it via VR. The experiment had turned into several weeks of multiple-player gaming, culminating in the destruction of the ancient city. It was a beautiful, thoughtful, complex scenario. Jay had been impressed at the time. It was still impressive. Helen, Paris, Achilles, Ajax, the gods . . .

  He VR-shifted and was inside the game again.

  No doubt about it—same wall structure, same gateways.

  The purpose of all the other bug-game levels had been to break into real-world bases, but something was not right here. What was he missing?

  “Topographic scan to crater walls, overlay and search for Terran base matches.”

  An aural progress bar played—this one the sound of a locomotive chugging closer and closer before Dopplering away. When it was finished, a steam whistle blew. Maybe this wasn’t so much about a real base as it was about something else?

  “One match found.” His generic, non-scenario-specific programs usually had a sexy, sultry female voice. This one was no different.

  Jay tapped a space near where the steam whistle had sounded and a blue globe appeared in front of him. It spun and rotated. He triggered a flyby mode, and suddenly he was scaled to human size over the globe, flying across it, heading toward where the program had found a match.

  There.

  He was moving past the northern tip of South America to the Caribbean. Now he was heading toward the water.

  He went along with the sim and found himself underwater, looking at a huge submerged base, domed in some section
s, more like tin cans in another. A nuclear submarine was docked at the base.

  He had his answer. This was an Army VR construct—it wasn’t real. Some kind of practice run, to get the topographic stuff right. A test pattern.

  Jay grinned. At least that part of the problem was solved.

  So, either somebody who had access to it had swiped the game data from MIT, or maybe whoever had built Troy, the game, was the person who used it as a basis for the bug-war scenario. Either way, it was a big clue. It gave Jay a place to start filtering.

  You can run, but you can’t hide.

  The Fretboard

  Washington, D.C.

  Kent wiped his guitar down with the black silk and put it into the case. Jen put her instrument away.

  He took a deep breath. “You, uh, want to get some supper?”

  She stopped latching the case for a second, glanced over at him.

  “Supper?”

  “Yes. Food. Dinner. At a restaurant.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  He said, “Help me out here. I haven’t done this in a long time.”

  “You haven’t had food in a long time?”

  He laughed.

  “Sure. I’d like that,” she said. “Maybe we should leave the guitars locked up here? Safer than in the car.”

  “Sure. You know any good places locally?”

  “A couple.”

  “You want to drive or give directions?”

  “I’ll drive.”

  The night was chilly as they walked toward her car. She said, “So, Abe, when was the last time you asked a woman out?”

  He thought about it for a moment. “Four, five years ago?”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She shook her head. “Wow.”

  “Better than that—she turned me down.”

  Jen laughed.

  “I won’t keep you out late,” he said. “Wouldn’t want your cat to get hungry.”

  “Don’t worry about the cat,” she said. “She’s got an on-demand feeder in the kitchen. She won’t starve.”

  He smiled. So far, so good . . .

  She drove them to a little Italian place maybe a mile away from the music store. Dino’s was one of those checkered-tablecloths, candles-in-wine-bottles kind of cafes, ten tables, most of them full. The guy at the front, a good-looking dark-haired kid of maybe twenty, smiled at Jen when he saw her come in. “Ah, Miss Jennifer, how are you this night?”

  “Fine, Gino. Got room for two?”

  “We do.” He collected a couple of menus and led them to a small table in a dark corner. “Pasta with clam sauce is the special tonight. Enjoy.”

  Before they could do more than sit, a busboy brought glasses of water, a basket of garlic bread, and a bottle of red wine with two glasses.

  Kent noted the unasked-for wine as he picked up the menu. “What’s good?”

  “Pick anything—never had a bad meal here. I come in once or twice a week. Gino’s father is the cook, his mother the cashier, and there are a couple of sisters who work here.”

  The waitress, a young woman who was indeed obviously related to Gino, arrived. “Good evening, Miss Jen.”

  “Hey, Maria. This is General Abe Kent, one of my students.”

  The young woman smiled at Kent. “Ah, welcome to Dino’s, Generale.”

  Jen ordered the special, and Abe asked for spaghetti with meat sauce. After Maria left, he took a bite of the bread as Jen poured them each a glass of the house red. Both the bread and wine were excellent. “How did you know I was a general?”

  “I have a computer and access to the Internet,” she said. “I looked you up.”

  “Ah.”>

  “Ah?”

  “Well, I looked you up, too. You never mentioned that you had a couple of music CDs out.”

  “It’s been a couple years since I did one of those. Old glory.”

  “I enjoyed hearing them. I knew you played well, but those were very nicely done.”

  She shrugged. “I’m no Ana Vidovic,” she said. “If you get a chance to hear her Prelude to Bach’s Fourth Lute Suite? Best version out there in the last twenty years, for my money, even if it is a little showpiece fast. But now and then, I have my moments.”

  She sipped at her wine and looked at him over the rim. The candlelight sparkled in her eyes. “So, we have checked each other out.”

  “So it seems.”

  “To what end, General Kent?”

  “Well, right now, dinner.”

  She smiled, large and lazy. “And after dinner? Would you like to come back to my place?”

  He paused and took a slow sip of his wine. He had been out of this game for a long, long time.

  “Yes, ma’am, I would be honored.”

  She smiled at him again.

  They drank more wine.

  Washington, D.C.

  Saji was holding the baby on her lap when Jay got home, rocking him in the creaking wooden chair. It had been a long day, and the traffic had been horrendous. The President had gone to some kind of function and they had shut down so many streets that it had taken Jay an hour and a half to drive home. He was really going to have to start doing more web-commuting. As soon as he could get out of having to do RT visits to the damned Pentagon . . .

  “Hey, babe,” he said.

  “Hi.”

  “You okay? You look tired.”

  “No, I’m fine.” There was a long pause. “You got a call a few minutes ago, from a Captain Rachel Lewis.”

  Jay felt his stomach clutch. Why was she calling him at home?

  “She wants you to call her back as soon as possible. She said it was important.”

  “Yeah, sure.” If it was so important, why hadn’t she called him on his virgil? She had the number. Jay’s belly tightened even more. Why did he feel guilty? He hadn’t done anything!

  He shrugged. “She’s the Army computer guy I told you about.”

  “Funny, you didn’t mention she was a gorgeous blond female guy.”

  Made the call on-cam, too. Damn.

  “Not my type. I hardly noticed.”

  “Uh huh.”

  Jay went over and gave Saji a kiss, then stroked Mark’s young head. He loved to touch that silky fine baby hair.

  “You’re funny,” he said. And: “I love you.”

  He moved to the house phone on the table next to the couch and brought up the number from the caller ID. The call went through, and Rachel answered. She had her phone’s cam lit, and apparently she had just stepped out of the shower—her hair was wet, and she had a towel wrapped around her, covering her from the breasts down.

  “Jay.”

  “Captain Lewis.”

  “Captain Lewis? Oh, come on, Jay, we are way past that!” She laughed and shook her head.

  He should have made this call from his office, he suddenly realized. While the phone’s viewscreen wasn’t angled so Saji could see it from where she sat rocking the baby, she wasn’t deaf.

  “What’s up?”

  “I came across a piece of material, regarding the game. It looks as if somebody posted something on a university board a few years back, using similar tropes.”

  “Yeah, I found that, too,” Jay said. “Joint MIT/CIT files, a couple years after I graduated. But it was posted anonymously and when I tried to backwalk it, I hit a dead end.”

  “Me, too. But I found a link embedded in the software. Not in the credits, but in a line of code. An old URL. Long gone, but I got a copy of it from Antique Pages—we should check it out. Might mean something.”

  “Great work.” Jay felt a sudden stab of . . . something. Irritation? That she had found something he’d missed? Well, he didn’t have time to run down every line of code in an old game, even if it was similar to the bug game. Probably it didn’t mean anything anyhow.

  “We should get together and compare notes,” she said. She leaned back in her chair.

  The towel wrapped around her chest ca
me undone and all of a sudden Jay found himself looking at Rachel’s bare breasts.

  Quite a spectacular view, pebbled and erect nipples and all.

  Jesus Holy Christ!

  It seemed to take a long time for her to collect the towel and wrap it back into place. “Oops,” she said. “Sorry about that.” She smiled. “Call me later, we’ll set up a meeting to go check out the page.”

  After he discommed, Jay had trouble looking over at Saji.

  “Everything okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah, fine. Here, let me take the boy. I’ve missed him.”

  Jay walked over to where Saji sat and lifted his son up to face level. “How’s the world’s best baby doing today?”

  His son grinned at him, and chortled.

  Jay smiled back. He had a beautiful, brilliant, loving wife and a gorgeous, happy baby. He didn’t need anything else. Certainly not anything that might cause any strain in his family life. No, sir.

  But—Lewis was a smart and not-hard-to-look-at woman who obviously didn’t think Jay was all that hideous himself. It was flattering, to have a sharp and good-looking woman flirting with you. As long as you didn’t follow up on that, no harm and no foul, right?

  Why, then, was his mouth so dry? Was it because that quick flash of Rachel’s breasts matched exactly the VR view of them he had seen when first they’d met? Right down to the little red mole next to the left nipple?

  “Hey, sweet boy,” Jay said, putting his son’s face over his shoulder. “What say Daddy takes you for a little walk, hey?”

  Yeah. Out in the nice, cool air, where Jay himself could let some of the heat in his face escape . . .