Trouble and her Friends

by Melissa Scott

  “Thanks,” Starling said, and the two of them followed her into the little room. Trouble motioned for them to take a chair, and let the door fall closed behind them.

  “Have a seat, please,” she said. “You sure you don’t want coffee or something?”

  “No, thanks,” Levy said again. He and Starling pulled chairs away from the table and sat down, apparently very much at their ease. Trouble did the same, hoping she seemed equally calm. The chairs and table were less battered than the furniture in the lobby: this room was used for negotiations with outsiders, and the fittings were correspondingly better.

  “So how can I help you?” Trouble said again, and the two agents exchanged quick glances.

  “We’ve had some reports of cracking and intrusions that have been traced back to BVI-four,” Starling said. That would make him the technical expert, Trouble thought, and kept her face expressionless. “But we lose the perpetrator there, at BVI-four—we haven’t been able to trace him on any of the major outgoing lines—so we’re checking all the local nets that use that gateway, in case he’s staging through one of them.” He paused. “You’re the only syscop for this system, Ms. Carless?”

  In spite of his best efforts, Trouble heard a whisper of incredulity in his voice, and bit her tongue to keep from responding to it. A lot of people still assumed that a woman couldn’t run a bulletin board on her own, much less act as solo syscop; if they wanted to make that mistake, this was not the time to enlighten them. “That’s right,” she said aloud, and waited.

  “Do you mind telling me about the setup here?”

  “Not at all.” Trouble paused and took a deep breath, willing herself to switch to enthusiast’s mode. “This is an artist’s co-op here, we’re registered with the NEA and the state foundations. Because of that, we need versatile machines, a lot of raw power that can be turned to different uses at different times. We have a local net within the compound, mostly home machines and famicon, to facilitate load-sharing, and a couple of linked minis for graphics—one of our people is a fractalist, and we also rent time to some other graphics people who can’t afford their own machine suite. We have four printers here, too, all top of the line, and a babybox to run them. All of that is on the local net, so that we can pool jobs when we have to, or buy time from other co-ops. Seara—she’s the fractalist—she takes some odd commissions sometimes, things that need a lot of power.”

  “Such as?” Starling asked.

  Trouble shrugged. “Last year, somebody wanted fractal wallpaper, and we had a printer that could run it. The design took everything on our net, plus a hundred hours of bought-time just for the formulae, and then it tied up the printer and the babybox for a month.”

  “Fractal wallpaper,” Levy said.

  “I didn’t care much for it myself,” Trouble said, and there was a little silence, almost companionable, as the three of them contemplated the possibilities.

  “What about your net connections?” Starling asked, shaking himself back to business.

  “We have two basic nodes, one general, one high-speed data,” Trouble answered, “both transferring through BVI-four. I monitor both on a random schedule, and keep a watchdog running at all times.”

  That was the standard procedure, and Starling nodded. “So graphics is the primary business of your net?”

  “Yes and no,” Trouble said. “It’s the reason we have this much power, and the high-speed connection, but most of the time people don’t need much more than their home machines. We tend to use the BVI-four gate primarily for information and trading, and once every couple of months we run a big job through it. And, as I mentioned, we do sell time when we have it.” She paused, gauging the agents’ response, and ventured a question of her own. “I’m assuming you’re looking for someone sneaking packet data through the high-speed node?”

  “Among other things,” Starling said.

  “What about access to the big nets?” Levy asked.

  Trouble looked at him. “Do you mean who has it, or how we work it?”

  “Who has it?”

  “We have a household account on Tele-net, through BVI-four, which I manage through some homebrew accounting routines. All the adults have access. It’s a standard password setup. I try to get them to change the codes regularly, and never use anything from a dictionary, the usual routine, but you know how that goes.” Trouble shrugged. “We get odd charges—stuff I can’t identify, and nobody admits to—maybe once or twice a year.”

  “What about kids?” Starling again. “Are there any, and do they have access?”

  Trust Treasury to ask first about the kids, Trouble thought. She said, “Yes, and yes. We gave everyone full access to the local net, but I gave the kids special passwords that access a different set of programs—games, mostly, some arts and science tools. If they try to use the gateways when they’ve logged on with those passwords, I’ve set the system to flag me. If they’ve got a reason, schoolwork or something, or their folks’ permission—and if they’re not going into one of the really expensive datastores—I’ll generally let it go through.”

  “What about kids using their parents’ passwords?” Starling asked. “Do you get much of that?”

  “I don’t think so,” Trouble said. “Certainly I haven’t spotted any anomalous activity patterns on any of the accounts. We’ve only got half a dozen kids in the compound, and they don’t seem to be into computers much.”

  “Lucky,” Levy said.

  Starling said, “Have there been any changes in usage patterns? Or any signs of intrusion, charges you can’t account for, say, over the last five months?”

  Trouble frowned, hiding the annoyance at being addressed as a total novice, and did her best to simulate genuine confusion. “No, nothing recently. And I keep good records—they’re filed with the sheriff every other month.” That much was required by law; she doubted she needed to tell Starling, at least, that the files were thoroughly edited before they went to county records. Starling grinned as though he’d read the thought, the first human expression she’d seen from him.

  “Do you spend a lot of time on the net?” Levy asked abruptly.

  Trouble looked at him warily. “Depends on how you define ‘a lot of time.’ I handle all the co-op’s on-line business, time sharing or selling, anything like that. I’m the one who deals with the net when people need it. Why?”

  Levy ignored the question. “Has anyone locally been talking about any kind of unusual charges, intrusions, unexpected problems in their local systems?”

  “No,” Trouble said, with more confidence, recognizing where the question was headed. “We share time with a lot of local nets—we’re all small-scale around here, a couple of mom-and-pop datastores, town libraries, things like that. If anybody was having troubles, they wouldn’t tell the rest of us, for fear it would cut into their income.”

  “Would you tell us?” Levy asked.

  Trouble smiled. “I’d tell you,” she said, and emphasized “you.” Go ahead, pursue that line, she thought. It would only lead them into the tangle of the BBS, and they could spend the next ten years there, chasing their tails, without finding anything useful.

  “I wonder if you’ve heard of someone coming back into the shadows,” Starling said softly. “Netwalking, cracking—you know the sort of gossip on the BBS. Especially in the syscops’ forums. The talk-name is Trouble.”

  Trouble froze for a heartbeat, made herself move again with an effort that was almost painful. “I’ve heard the name before,” she said, dry-mouthed. It would be suspicious to say anything else; she had been a name to conjure with, once upon a time. “But not recently—not for a couple of years, at least. I thought somebody told me Trouble died.”

  “The reports were greatly exaggerated,” Starling said.

  Levy said, “So you haven’t heard anything about Trouble?”

  Trouble shook her head. “Like I said, I haven’t heard that name in a couple of years.”

  The two agents exchange
d a quick, unreadable glance, and Starling said, “Can you show us the setup? The physical plant, I mean.”

  “Sure,” Trouble said, and pushed herself up out of her chair, hiding her unease. “It’s across the way—everything’s in my basement so that I can keep an eye on things full-time.” She palmed open the door, and led the way out into the lobby, Starling and Levy following at a polite distance.

  She took them through her condo and down into the basement work area, where the minis sat behind a heavy dust-wall, and the smaller machines—the network controller and its backup, and the souped-up home machine that she used for her own access—sat side-by-side on their low table. Levy glanced around as she pointed out the various features, but she could see Starling’s eyes tracing every cable and connection as she explained the system.

  “And you’re on-line yourself, of course,” he said, when she had finished.

  “Yes.”

  He stepped up to her control board, ran a long-fingered hand along the edge of the casing—a netwalker’s hand, Trouble thought, superstitiously, and felt a surge of fear. He tugged the datacord out of its housing, and his attention sharpened abruptly. “You must spend a lot of time on the nets,” he said, and pulled the cord out to its full length, displaying the double head.

  Trouble froze again, damning herself for her carelessness. A double jack, high-speed data line and regular dollie-jack combined, was the tool of the serious netwalkers; it was also the only way you could process enough information to satisfy the brainworm. Most users—even most syscops—made do with the ordinary jack, and lived with the time lags. If she had stood up and shouted, the message couldn’t have been plainer. “I do spend a lot of time out there,”she said, deliberately misunderstanding. “Like I said, we do a lot of graphics, both in-house with the fractals and as a time vendor. I spend a lot of time monitoring those jobs, and you have to be able to shut down fast if something goes wrong.”

  “Oh?” That was Levy, sounding almost interested.

  “Yeah. When you’re running the big color printer and there’s a glitch in the program, well, the faster you can close it off, the less ink and paper you waste. And Seara uses a lot of unconventional materials, all of them expensive.” She gave Starling a guileless glance, and did not think he was impressed.

  “You must do test runs to prevent that kind of thing,” Starling said.

  “Oh, sure,” Trouble answered, and let a genuine grievance color her voice. “But you don’t know artists. They keep fiddling with a program even after it’s supposed to be set, and when you run what’s supposed to be the final job, you find out they’ve added a line or two of code—” She let her voice go high and thin, imitating Seara. “—just a half-tone difference in one color mask, that’s hardly a change at all—and that will be the thing that screws up the entire run.”

  “Uh-huh.” Starling was still looking at the double-headed cord, his eyes moving from its housing to the host machine to the main display. Trouble kept her expression open and innocently helpful, hoping that he believed her—but that was almost too much to expect, with the shadow-walker’s cord staring him in the face.

  “When did you send your last report to the sheriff?” Levy asked.

  “The beginning of August,” Trouble answered. She could feel the fear swelling in her belly, took a slow, deep breath to keep it down, and tucked her hands into her pockets again.

  “So the next one’s due any day now,” Starling said.

  Trouble nodded. “I was working on it when you called me.”

  Starling looked at Levy. “I think we might as well wait until that one’s in, Ben.”

  “Whatever.” Levy looked back at Trouble. “Will you send us a copy as well?” He held out a card, and Trouble took it mechanically.

  “Sure. Is there anything I should be looking for?”

  Starling shook his head. “Just the usual. You will let us know if you hear anything—anything at all—about Trouble?”

  “Absolutely,” Trouble said.

  “Or anything else,” Levy said. “Any talk of intrusions, funny accounts, anything at all. Our numbers are on the card.”

  Trouble looked at it, the codes barely registering, looked back at Levy. “I’ll let you know,” she said again, and doubted they believed her.

  She walked them back upstairs and let them out her front door, watched them walk away across the lawn. They hesitated for a moment at the entrance to the community hall, but then Starling said something, and they turned away, heading toward the compound gate and the carpark beyond. They walked in step as if by habit, and Trouble shivered despite the sunlight. They were bound to be suspicious—they had to be suspicious, after she had been careless enough to leave the double jack out in plain sight. It was just a question now of what she would have to do. She closed the door gently, throwing the locks out of old habit, and started slowly back down the steps to the basement.

  She seated herself in front of the keyboard again, but did not reach for the datacord. They would expect her to do that, to go on-line to find out anything she could about them—the netwalkers would know, as they knew all the important enforcement agents; it was just a matter of asking the right people—and if they were any good at all, they would be monitoring her system from their car. If they were as good as she suspected Starling might be, her system would already be crawling with their watchdogs, lurking programs to track her progress across the nets…. She shook herself then, clamping down hard on the panic that had seized her. She had checked the system this morning when she went online—though maybe not as well as she should have, after what Butch said—and there had been nothing out of place, nothing she didn’t recognize. She just hadn’t expected Treasury to show up so quickly.

  She made a face and reached for the datacord, slipped it into the slot behind her ear. The main thing now was to control the damage, find out what, if anything, they had running in her system; failing that, she would need to find out why they had connected her with the stranger calling itself Trouble. And that would take some fancy shadow-walking. In the old days, it would have been simple to deal with the problem: she would simply have packed up her machines and gone to a new city, found an apartment and started over again. It had always taken months for the law to track her, and the one time she’d been unlucky and they’d found her right off, it had still taken them so long to figure out who had jurisdiction that she had been able to get out of town before the warrants could be issued. But that was a very long time ago, before she’d met van Liesvelt—before you met Cerise, a voice whispered—and things hadn’t been that easy in years. Not since Evans-Tindale—and all of that, she admitted silently, was less the problem than the fact that she herself was out of practice. It had been three years since she’d walked the shadows, at least in any serious way.

  She leaned back in her chair, staring at the screen that mirrored the image that hovered in front of her eyes, not really seeing the lines of minuscule type and flickering icons. The first thing she needed to do was find out why Treasury had come here looking for this new cracker. Once she knew that, knew whether she was actively suspected or if she’d just been unlucky, then she would know what more she had to do. She hesitated, wondering if it was worth the risk, then entered the sequence that recalled the brainworm’s control panel. She adjusted virtual levels until she was running at half strength, the setting that would give her the extra control she needed but minimize the inevitable feedback from the brainworm itself.

  Virtuality steadies around her, becomes faintly tangible, a hint of roses and lavender filling the air. Everything seems to be in order in the local net, but she whistles anyway, summoning the nearest watchdog, and it comes lolloping over. She stoops to pet it, feels the spikes of its code sharp under her hand, touches ears and nose and finds them cold as ice. It, at least, is in perfect health, and she says, seek, boy, and lets it run, following its track in the pools of phosphorus it leaves behind. It comes cantering back in half an interminable second, lolling
tongue trailing drops of fire, flops at her feet: nothing amiss, nothing to hunt and catch. Stay, she says, and strides out toward the gateway, heading for the main nets and the information she needs.

  3

  Cerise watches from the edge of the board, surveys her domain. The programs stretch before her, dark squares laced with the hot red-gold of the internal datastream, live unreal wires pulsmg with the ebb and flow of information. The light squares swarm with golden haze, warm light like butter melting, folding over the pastel flicker of the workers in their core. Overhead arches the blue of IC(E), hard-edged, geometric, walling in the chessboard that has become her world.

  And it’s a good world: her thoughts flash like darts along the angled tracks, flicker along the lava cracks of the datastreams. She pauses at the edge of the golden shell, and a program like a snake’s tongue tastes the bytes that whistle through her. A hundred lights bloom and fade before her: all is as it should be, her pawns—the company’s pawns, if she’d admit it—controlled, contained, and protected by her lattice of hard IC(E). The data itself slips unconstrained through the internal nets, the brainworm turning it sharp and sweet as candy, like a taste of honey in the wind.

  A light flares, hot pink, winks instantly to the blue of IC(E), but she’s seen it and is moving, launching herself along the familiar paths. She draws armor about her as she goes, blue-grey IC(E) as sharp as steel, slips within the datashell in the blink of a code. The bright shards of data slid past unchanged, stinging rain against her skin. Nothing missing, nothing spoiled—but she queries the system and finds nothing there, too. No one has been there, the system says, and that is wrong. She sets the intruder alert wailing, sends the message racing along the datastream, confining all but the highest-level users to their own spheres. The lights dim around her as the internal codewalls thicken. Beyond it, the alarm flares like lightning, crackling along the lattice of the external IC(E); behind her, the junior syscops and their watchdogs come on-line, bright shapes coursing the system, leaving her to deal with the hole in the heart of their most secure system.