by K S Augustin
“We speed up,” Tania said, “is that what you’re saying?”
“We call it ‘clocking up’, but it’s the same concept.”
Her eyes widened. “‘We’?”
She thought back again to the giant white rabbit but still didn’t feel comfortable enough to share that strange conversation with Carl. Not yet.
He waved her question away. “I’ll explain that bit later.” He took her hands and stared into her eyes. “As far as I’m concerned, I’ve been battling the Rhine-Temple botnet for close to fifteen years now.”
She stared back at him. “Fifteen? Years? A decade and a half?”
“That’s what it feels like. I’ve been afraid to ask this question, but I’ll ask it now. How long has it really been, Tania?”
Her gaze darted over his features, at the greying hair at his temples, the slight furrows on his forehead and the faint lines fanning from his eyes and trailing down his cheeks.
“You mean, how long since you were inserted into the Blue?”
Carl pursed his lips and nodded.
“You were inserted at nine-thirty in the morning,” she said. “Yesterday.”
He looked incredulous. “A day? I’ve only been here for one day?”
“No more than twenty-four hours.” Tania’s voice was faint. “I came as quickly as I could.”
“I tried to make contact several times over the years,” Carl told her, his voice anguished, “send you information about the botnet, but you disappeared completely from the Blue. All I found was a piece of flat vacant land where the Basement Five block used to be.”
Then the spike in traffic that Don showed her had been Carl trying to contact them. Following on from that, maybe the board’s collective fear of a foreign government attacking them was nothing more than a fantasy brought on by Carl’s determination. But then, if it wasn’t for that fantasy, she wouldn’t have been given the go-ahead to enter cyberspace.
“We were afraid of a security breach,” Tania said gently. “Don ordered all the DMZ servers to shut down last night. We only had the Basement Five private network running. The servers are up again now. The building you knew should be back.”
She hesitated. “But there’s something I still don’t understand, Carl. Why do you look as though you’ve aged so much? This isn’t the real world. As I said, you’ve only been away for one day.”
He smiled ruefully. “That took me a little while to figure out, too. I didn’t mind. It gave me something to do while I was waiting for the Rhine’s next move. I think it has to do with our self-image. According to my internal clock, I’ve been here for a long time so my brain changed my self-image to match.”
Tania frowned at him. “You’re saying that your subconscious thinks you’re in your late forties now?”
“Must be.” His grin was rueful. “And maybe some of it is a psychological effect from battling the Rhine-Temple. I can’t think of any other theory that fits.”
Now that she was over the shock of his appearance, Tania had to admit that, even with a few lines on his face, Carl Orin was still one of the most attractive men she had ever seen.
They both stared at each other for a long moment before Carl chuckled.
“Now don’t go trying to make too much sense of all this. We’re dealing with two huge variables here. Cyberspace, which we’ve only just begun to explore, and our own brains, which is another frontier we’ve barely begun mapping. Put them together and I’m surprised I don’t see giant sea serpents riding imaginary waves between levels.”
Tania couldn’t help the laugh that bubbled up from inside her. It was partly relief but she was also starting to like the newer, gentler Carl. Damn her.
He sobered. “You have a choice now, Tania. I wish I didn’t have to spring it on you so quickly but I’m running out of time.”
He pointed at the traffic moving below their feet. “See that?”
Tania took a few moments to focus, then she saw what he was referring to. A thin silvery thread stretched across the highway, staying miraculously intact despite the traffic that whizzed above it. Tania tracked the thread up the side of the building where they sat. To the disc that swayed gently on its hook at her belt.
“That tether tells the Rhine-Temple that there are actual humans in cyberspace,” Carl told her. “Rational, adaptable human beings, not rigid, static computer networks. After our first couple of battles, it learnt about me. Learnt I was a different kind of creature. So it created an army of specialised bots to track and destroy human beings. It wants to kill us before we can kill it.”
Tania felt a chill travel up her arms. “So what are you saying?”
“You need to go back. Return to Basement Five, tell them what I’m doing and tell them to hold on while I try to destroy this thing.”
“By yourself?”
He shook his head. “Not by myself. I have friends. But I’m the only one running the marathon. The others pitch in when they can, but they’re just sprinters.”
“And what do I do?”
“You wait. You tell Don and you wait for my signal.”
“When will that be, Carl and how will we recognise it?” Tania’s voice stretched with the tension thrumming through her throat. “How will we know if you’re still fighting...or if you’re dead?”
He swallowed. “I guess....” His voice husked. He cleared his throat and tried again. “I guess a real-time week should be enough time, one way or another.”
She tightened her lips. “What’s the alternative?”
“What alternative?”
She glared at him. “There’s always an alternative. What is it?”
He slanted her a long look, a smile twitching the corner of his lips. “You stay here and help me. Together, we destroy that red-tentacled monstrosity. But...you cut your tether. That’s the only way to guarantee a minimum standard of safety from the Rhine’s seeker bots.”
“And how do I do that?”
“Cut your tether?”
She nodded.
“You open it and issue the shutdown command. You have to do it twice, confirming the command each time.”
Sounds of faint traffic, a hum rather than a roar, drifted up to Tania. The silence between her and Carl was complete. He watched her as she mulled over her thoughts and she watched him against the backdrop of a slowly-expanding, sentient botnet.
She wanted to go back to her world. Continue her research. Lecture.
Find a man?
She tried to dismiss the question but that wasn’t fair. Intimacy was as much part of the human condition as acquiring knowledge. And Carl Orin….
Her gaze roamed his face again. She was still so mad at him she thought she could nail him a good one but events in cyberspace had moved too fast to allow her her dose of righteous anger. And, damn him to hell, besides being hellishly good in bed, he was also one of the smartest men she’d ever met. She hadn’t come across that combination too often.
Finally breaking eye contact, she looked down at the disc at her belt, pondering it for several long minutes. When she clicked open the lid, she was surprised that her hands weren’t shaking. The small screen showed the packets of data, indicators of her position and status, travelling back to Basement Five. Using the small thumb keyboard, she entered the command to terminate the tether.
“You have to enter it in twice, you say?” she asked, not looking up.
“Twice.”
Tania confirmed the shutdown the first time and one of the icons along the upper rim
of the disc’s lid flashed amber. She took a deep breath and typed the command in again. When the second confirmation flashed on the screen, she hesitated only for a second before committing to her decision. As the icon blinked red, the silver line vanished from her belt.
For better or worse, she had terminated her tether. She just hoped to hell she had done the right thing.
As Carl watched Tania, a delirious form of joy filled him. He had missed her so much. Missed the feel of her body next to his, warm and soft from sleep. Missed her acerbic wit and the not unpleasant way her personality rubbed up against his. Missed the sharp intelligence that lurked in her tawny eyes.
Back when he was young and stupid—oh, maybe a day ago real-time, he admitted wryly—he thought life was a game and the object was to amass as much prestige and money as he could. There was nothing and no woman Carl Orin couldn’t coax around to his point of view. He was the first guy in his high-school class to get laid, one of the first hackers to crack into his bank’s systems, and the first computer specialist to enter the Blue. He was Basement Five’s poster-boy and he had lived up to that image even in cyberspace, viewing the information landscape around him as nothing more than one more puzzle for him to conquer.
It had taken enforced solitude, and a few visits from a friendly yet insistent giant white rabbit, to make him see the truth. What he needed was not to be the richest man he could be. Or the most attractive. He needed to be the best man he could be. Which was why he was still in cyberspace, rather than trying to find a way back to the lab. The Rhine-Temple botnet was more than a semi-sentient accumulation of infected processing cycles. It was his test. His trial of fire. The ultimate ordeal, and an opportunity to prove to himself that he had really grown up, that he was worthy of calling himself an adult rather than an over-eager, oversexed teenager.
And, as if he was part of some mythic quest, Tania Flowers had dropped into his home at exactly the right point, just before he was about to commit suicide.
Carl watched Tania enter the shutdown commands in her tether and, no matter his noble intentions, he couldn’t force himself to stop her. He might be condemning her to an accelerated life in the Blue, but he needed her with a yearning that was almost physical.
He would make it right for her, pay her back for this sacrifice, he promised himself that much. He would find the time to transfer all his assets to her name, launch her back to reality, and wish her all the best in a world he would never be part of again.
Because by the time she made it back, he would be dead. That was the only way.
A flash caught his attention and he saw the tether wink out of existence a split-second after Tania jabbed a button on the small thumb keyboard in front of her. She looked up at him but, behind the defiance, he saw a tremor of fear. He didn’t blame her.
“Now what?” she asked.
“Now we relax, while I fill you in on what I’m planning.”
He got to his feet and she followed suit.
She looked at him in disbelief. “Now we can relax? We couldn’t have done that before? You couldn’t have taken time out of your busy schedule to fill me in on the grand plan before I terminated the tether?”
He knew the heat in her voice had more to do with apprehension than anger.
“Not while the tether was alerting every random seeker bot out there to your presence,” he said. “Now that it’s gone, we can take our time.”
He launched himself from the roof of the tall grey block and, with all the grace and presence of a sharp-eyed raptor, she followed. He wasn’t used to the company, to the feel of someone next to him as he soared through cyberspace. It felt..good.
There was little hesitation in Tania’s movements as they arrowed in on his apartment/lab and Carl realised he was proud of how fast she was acclimatising herself to the Blue. He was sure it had taken him longer. He remembered the days of intense loneliness and aimless wandering before he had discovered the genesis of the Rhine-Temple botnet. He had watched the botnet grow, originally drawn by its uncharacteristic structure, then fascinated and repelled when he finally figured out what it was trying to do. When the first spiders from the botnet detected him, Carl knew he had no choice. It was either activate the tether and flee to the safety of Basement Five. Or break it, stay in the Blue, and try to find some way to destroy the monster.
Every now and then, he’d meet someone. A person who managed to stay in cyberspace long enough to clock up and carry on some meaningful conversation, but such episodes were few and far between. And between his innate stubbornness, the Rhine-Temple, and the occasional distraction, it had taken years before he realised what was missing from his life.
Tania.
She had started out as his rival and a potential conquest. The woman he needed to best, both mentally and sexually, in order to win the prize as the world’s first cybernaut. Did he have something to prove? Of course he did. He was the enfant terrible, the self-taught hacker who had progressed from being almost a high-school dropout to owning his own high-tech consulting business. He knew he didn’t have the qualifications of his rival, Doctor Tania Flowers, nor the in-depth knowledge of how information slotted together. Where Tania had logic, he operated on intuition. It was good enough to land him a spot at Basement Five, but the lack of formal education had made him feel defensive through the entire period of tests and trials.
And now?
He looked at Tania as he ushered her through the front door of his “apartment”.
Now, after more than a decade of self-reflection, Carl decided that he didn’t like his real-time self any more. The sooner it was gone, the better, and he saw his impending death as a form of atonement. The ultimate apology. He only hoped she appreciated it.
She turned to face him the moment he shut the door.
“You said you had a plan?”
Had he ever been that impatient, he wondered, and conceded that he probably had.
“We have time.”
Strange how he had needed to speed up in order to learn how to slow down.
He moved through the lab, tidying up but, in reality, just keeping his hands occupied while he tried putting his thoughts in order.
Her voice drew his attention. “How much time?”
“You won't give up, will you?” He smiled to soften his words. “Okay, here goes. At the beginning, the Rhine-Temple moved very quickly. I didn’t think I had any room to move at all. I’d watch it in the morning and, by the time I paid a repeat visit in the evening, it would have doubled in size.”
“What I failed to realise,” he said, moving to his small pod of living room space, “was that the first growth is always phenomenal. Like watching embryonic cells divide.”
He sank into a plush chair and gestured for her to do the same. After a slight hesitation, she cautiously accepted the invitation.
“But then it becomes like that game of cellular division. You know, when cells die unless a series of conditions are met.”
Tania frowned. “Do you mean the game ‘Life’?”
She was so quick. She knew instantly what he meant. At one time, their being on the same wavelength scared the hell out of him. It made him want to dominate her. Now, he just sat back and smiled, a small curve of pride on his lips.
“Exactly. How does it go again? Cells divide but with constraints. If they can’t find food in an adjacent cell, they starve and die. If they’re surrounded by similar cell
s, they also starve and die.”
“Yeah,” she said, “something like that.”
He could feel the impatience rippling off her and hid his smile. “So, when I first cut the tether, I thought I had been watching months of incredible growth and I made the incorrect assumption that it would continue at the same pace.”
“But it slowed down instead?”
“Right. The botnet had to move in order to expand and, as you’ve noticed, there isn’t much of an information highway between levels in this universe.”
“Just flat layers, one on top of the other.”
“Flat layers,” he repeated, nodding his head. “Not only did the Rhine-Temple have to expand and not cannibalise itself, but it also had to create its own vertical ‘streets’ to go from one layer of the Blue to another.”
“And that took time.”
“Lots of time. Lots more than I had expected.”
Enough time for him to come up with a plan. It wasn’t perfect, but it was the best one he had.
Suddenly, his hands ached with the need to hold her. It had been so long since they’d embraced and she had consumed almost every waking thought of his that hadn’t been focused on how to destroy the Rhine-Temple.
Knowing he was taking a chance, but unable to stop himself, Carl moved to her chair. He saw the surprise and wariness in her warm eyes and the flush that heated her cheekbones under her luscious tanned skin, but he continued to draw closer.
Expecting a rejection, he was surprised when she shuffled over, giving him some space on the cushion.
Now what was he supposed to say?
Sorry I was such a bastard to you, but a decade and a half of almost solitary confinement has a way of sharpening a man’s thoughts?