by Andrew Ives
The last thing Sedgwick wanted was to be left out on a limb with nowhere to go and Eric was his one and only chance to make PsiNapse work in a different guise. Sedgwick had even considered Karen at one point, but she was too headstrong for his liking. He never gave her job offer back to her though. Eric was more malleable.
PsiNapse was Eric's brainchild and nobody understood it as well as he did. Sedgwick hoped to get Eric onside, customise the current headset by pruning some of the more advanced circuitry and ultimately sell the result to Dreamland. Only by goading Eric into such a collaboration could he hope to do this. Sedgwick had everything planned, but it was all about to go very wrong for him.
An Offer You Can't Refuse
"Twenty-five grand, eh?" asked Eric, feigning interest.
Eric was astounded by the suddenness of Sedgwick's proposition, let alone the sheer audacity of asking someone with such a known dislike for him.
Eric wasn't about to go into any partnership with Sedgwick, profitable or otherwise. He had been angered by Sedgwick a number of times previously, and being the shy character he was, had never let Sedgwick know quite how peeved he had been on those occasions.
In addition to this, Eric was reluctant to let his invention go to anyone for a fraction of its worth - even in its current incomplete state, and especially not to Dreamland, a company with a hard-earned reputation for defrauding its own programmers and engineers. Eric was absolutely dead set against the whole idea.
"Yeah. Twenty-five each." Sedgwick's face lit up at the thought of pulling off this intricate (to his eyes) ploy. Paying Eric a fraction of the redundancy money that he was owed anyway, in return for his expertise to be used later in another further moneyspinner seemed like the stuff of dreams for Sedgwick. He continued enthusiastically.
"You must be interested? You can't turn down money like that. Most of it is already earned." Sedgwick nodded his head towards the pieces of helmet that lay to his side atop a nearby rubbish box.
"'Fraid not. I couldn't be less interested if you were offering me a pet wolverine. You have it." Eric was pleased at how he had stood up for himself for once. He immediately turned away to hide his smirk and walked off towards the exit with his dumbfounded boss behind him.
"But all the development's done. We've had all this R & D for nothing. It would be stupid to let it go to waste when we could be earning from it. Come on Eric. Use your sense." Sedgwick really was clutching at straws. He hadn't envisaged this happening.
Eric turned around as if to concede, only to finalise his refusal.
"It doesn't work though. I'm sorry to rain on your parade but I'm not going to have my hardware scrambling kids' brains. Dreamland might not care but I do. Even a cut-down version wouldn't work properly in the way that's needed. It's mad to even consider it. Forget it!" He turned again and left. Eric had found a new vein of confidence in seeing Sedgwick buckling under the weight of his reasoning. He descended the stairs knowing he had done the honourable thing.
Sedgwick, alone in the lab, examined some remnants of helmet beside him. It seemed to be straightforward enough.
"How difficult can it be?" thought Sedgwick, poking some yellow wires in their wrongful place. Thinking that he just might be able to get this thing at least partially working, Sedgwick was disappointed to find a screw on the reverse side gripping some PCB fragments where a major card had broken off in the helmet's flight to the rubbish box. He rummaged around and found the hideously complex card, and after realising that it too was incomplete and damaged, put them both down in submission. There was no way he was ever going to get that working. He never progressed beyond NAND gates at school.
The Devil and The Deep Blue Sea
Sedgwick was beginning to rue revealing his intentions quite so easily. Dr. Harvey could ruin everything for him, although there wouldn't be much to ruin anyway if he refused to cooperate as he had done. He was hardly likely to be able to sell PsiNapse on his own.
If Eric could not be made to `play ball,' Sedgwick would find himself limping around painfully for the rest of his curtailed life.
Sedgwick owed people. And he owed them a lot - half a million to be precise.
He had successfully fiddled the redundancy money, but two-fifty was going to be nowhere near enough. He would need some of that to live on while he looked for new work, new scams to pull, and these people were too impatient to stand for much of that. It was possible that Dreamland just might be the solution to his money worries.
"How could he get Dreamland to buy PsiNapse without Eric's help?" was a question that invaded his every waking hour.
Perhaps Eric had some plans at home, notes, anything that he might be willing to let Sedgwick have without putting up too much resistance. It must be worth a try. Perhaps Eric might even change his mind when he realises what an opportunity he has turned down. Or perhaps not.
If he didn't, there were three avenues open to Sedgwick - either emigrate to somewhere far, far away where his knees might stay intact, fake his own death (a somewhat tricky option), or face up to his debtors and tell them he can't pay which didn't bear thinking about.
Sedgwick found none of these options particularly appealing and decided that visiting Eric in the hope of persuading him was his best bet. He just might get lucky.
Strike Two
The elevator doors pinged open and a young lad walked out with a tan and white dog leading the way. The mongrel belonged to Karen, but was being exercised as usual by her next-door neighbour's young son, Harry Goode.
Karen took her dog to their flat every morning, they looked after him while she was at work, Harry would walk him every evening after school and return him to Karen when she arrived home. This arrangement meant Harry got the dog he had pestered his parents for without them incurring any of the cost, Karen got her dog walked without having to go out after work and the dog got the best of both worlds.
Harry walked along the hallway, looking out through the Plexiglass walls at the city below. Night was falling and being November it had become dark earlier than usual. The horizon shone a dirty yellow, going through sulphurous shades of green to blackness above. Only spots of light could be seen from such a high vantage point. The city seemed strangely quiet. In summer, work would just be starting around this time, but in winter it was coming to an end. Soon the streets would be deserted, with only traffic and beggars remaining. Harry was glad he had got back before that happened.
The hall's unusually bright lights reflected inwards off the glass making it difficult to see outwards, shielding the inhabitants from the unpleasant scenes outside. The height muffled the sounds of the city until they were barely audible, further swamped as they were by the sound of the automatic cleaning cart trundling by in the hallway. The air-conditioned, air-filtered skyrise served as a refuge from the crime and pollution below.
Harry knocked on Karen's door. Her radio doorbell being just about permanently out of order, he had stopped pressing it now through habit.
While awaiting Karen's answer, Harry leaned on the window pane by his forehead alone. This allowed him to see further down and the exhilaration given by the extreme height always excited him slightly.
Karen promptly answered, having only arrived home a few minutes before. She had taken off her crash helmet and was removing her gloves as she opened the door. Not being entirely keen on heights, she felt uncomfortable seeing the boy leaning on the glass. Harry stood up as he heard the door open.
"I've brought Winky back. I've puffed him out." Harry said jokingly. Harry was quite plump (as most kids of twelve are these days) and Winky was a fit dog, able to drag Harry around for another hour easily. Harry unclipped the lead and Winky trotted in past Karen to his water bowl.
"Before I go, I wanted to ask you if you would try this out for me." Harry unzipped his coat's breast pocket and handed Karen a floptical disk.
Karen was usually tired after work, but she had done next to nothing today and was more hospitable than she would normally
have been. She invited Harry in and put her computer on for him, asking what was wrong as she did so.
He explained that the disk was sometimes corrupted and at other times it wasn't. Karen thought this sounded like a straightforward disk fault and left him to try it out while she took her leathers and boots off in another room.
On returning, she found Harry playing a game with two giant robots fighting each other on the screen. He was sitting back away from the computer with a joystick, and as she needed some cheering up after her last day at work and it had been a while since she last played a computer game, she unplugged the mouse and put in another joystick to join him. She played a few times before eventually asking him what the problem was. Harry told her that while she was out, he needed to try the disk five times before it finally worked, the errors being different each time.
Karen stared pensively while the name Alien Metal Giants drawn in chrome filled the whole screen. Harry waited to hear her answer. Karen was only momentarily puzzled before it suddenly dawned on her what the problem was. This was an illicit copy...
...and as such, had been pirated, copied, copied, and copied. Somewhere along the line, it had picked up an 'infection.'
Karen immediately turned the computer off at the power switch. Harry gave a momentary expression of resistance, as if to say "Don't! I was enjoying that." He soon realised the seriousness of what he had done.
After ejecting the disk, Karen turned the computer back on and it booted up from its internal hard disk. She was relieved to find it still worked as normal and had seemingly been unaffected. She loaded one of Psi's data examination tools to check the contaminated disk. A text search revealed nothing more incriminating than the word "Jason" written several times on the whole disk. It seemed normal enough, perhaps Jason was the author of the game, or the cracker. It was nothing too suspicious.
Karen ejected the disk and turned her computer back off again. She gave the disk back to Harry, recommending that he wrote over the disk with something else. Pirate games were illegal anyway and there would be nothing to be gained by keeping it, especially if it was contaminated with some virus.
Harry agreed, intending only to get another game anyway. Karen thanked him for taking her dog out and said she would see him again tomorrow. Harry stroked Winky some more and left happy in the knowledge that his computer was OK, it was just the disk.
As Karen closed the door behind him, she was in a far more worried state. She rushed back to her computer and again it booted. She quickly loaded in her PsiNapse work which she kept on her hard disk. She was horrified to find her code with 'Jason' written all through it at random intervals, obliterating the code below. She loaded it back in again only to find 'Jason' written over it again at different intervals, adding to that before. The more she loaded it, the more got destroyed.
This was all she wanted!
Psi was isolated from outside interference from viruses, and they had an intelligent virus killer running perpetually. She hadn't taken such precautions. She never intended to use anything but work programs on her own PC. When she rarely had the cause to use any different disks, she would check them thoroughly first. She would normally have had a backup copy, and this had been backed-up, but as always, rather long ago. So much had been written since then, the back-up was hardly worth using. She decided not to even try it until she had wiped her hard drive clean again, erasing all her work for the last few months.
She was obviously reluctant to do this, as it would definitely wipe every trace of her work and there was no going back afterwards. She turned the computer back off, hoping she might think of another less drastic course of action.
Of course there was always a copy at Psi, but it would be shipped soon and her swipe cards had been cancelled. She could not get another copy from there easily. Eric should have a copy at home. He was bound to, he was a careful and reliable workaholic. Although she might have trouble persuading him to send her a copy, supposedly having no further need for it now, she felt he would oblige. She wanted it to show as an example of her work in any later job applications.
Karen decided to call Eric. It was after six and he should be home by now, besides phone calls get cheaper after six and he was prone to being a bit of a gasbag.
Spilled Milk
Karen punched up Eric's number on the videophone's memory. Phones were still as jerky and blurry as they always had been. She would have used the conference function on her computer had it not been in such a dodgy state.
Eric answered, just having arrived home. He lived only a short motorbike ride away from Psi and was home in only twelve minutes once the rush hour had died away. It was unusual that he received a call from Karen and he was pleased by its rarity.
"Eric, I'm glad to see you're home. Sorry to trouble you like this but I've had a major data loss on my PC. All my PsiNapse work's been corrupted and I doubt if I can retrieve it. I wouldn't normally ask for your help, but because it was our last day today, I can't get another copy tomorrow. I've lost everything unless you have a copy. Tell me you have.”
"Ah." Eric paused with his mouth still open.
"I'm sorry to have to tell you this Karen, but I only have a copy of my own work at home. My hard disk isn't big enough to store everyone else's. The only places where there's a copy of your code are our two hard drives at work. I don't know what you've got on yours, but mine has everything. I don't know how you can get a copy of it though." Eric was at a loss at how he could help. He wanted to help but it seemed as though Karen had lost her program for good.
"We can't even ring them up. They're isolated and it would all be disconnected now anyway." Eric felt worse at pointing this out.
"You don't know if anyone else has a copy do you? Would Bob have a copy at home?" Karen knew she hadn't much hope.
"He might have. The trouble there is he's flying off to Frankfurt tonight. I think he said his flight was about eight, so he would have gone by now. I reckon he knew about the job for longer than he let on. He was probably told not to tell everyone that Psi was about to close down." Eric hoped to slightly guide Karen away from the subject of her data loss. There was no point crying over deleted data.
"Well thanks anyway Eric. I'll bring your satellite card round as soon as I can and I'll see what I can do about selling your bike." Karen tapped her breast pocket where the note was, conceding that her data really was lost forever.
Eric smiled sympathetically. They waved jerkily to each other as they both put their phones down.
Better In The Flesh
Simon Allen returned to his dark bedroom. It was 11:51pm and he was supposed to be going to bed. He had school tomorrow, but he never learned anything worthwhile there these days and he wasn't going to let schoolwork interfere with his little extracurricular project.
As he opened the door to his gloomy room, only a small red LED could be seen. The computer's power light glowed brightly, still having been working since late that afternoon.
Simon turned on the room light and locked the door. He didn't want his parents finding him still up on a school night, 'wasting his time with silly computers'. He turned the monitor back on to see how the rendering was progressing. The computer had fully rendered a disappointingly small eleven frames since Jeff left.
Simon did not let this dampen his spirits though. The frames that were complete were the best he had ever seen on any computer. The face was entirely convincing in every respect.
The texture-mapped flesh would normally be too perfect to fool anyone. The lighting, the setting, the whole impression of the scene would never look quite right. A simulation would always arouse suspicion in some way, something made it look computer-generated. But this was different. This was something special.
The television programme Jeff taped had served its purpose admirably. Jeff had perfect reception on his cable and together with Simon's digitising equipment (bought some time before with hacking's ill-gotten gains) and new pirated raytracing package, the three elements had
combined giving the best result possible.
After Jeff left, Simon set about getting his 'texture' for the ray-tracer. This involved finding a scene on the video tape where a manager of some sort was talking directly into the camera. Simon wanted someone with plenty of power - the more the merrier. He found this in the shape of a vice-president of Virtual Reality Developments. An unknown, but interesting nonetheless. Simon digitised a section of the footage, creating a series of true-colour images on the computer.
These were stored and doctored as necessary. Then they were cut up and joined together to form a background - in this case an office. Fortunately, the subject moved about enough to get a whole glimpse of the background and for a collage of the constituent pieces to be constructed, making a photo-quality image of the whole office. This would be saved for later.
Afterwards, numerous frames of the subject were taken and the background removed from them. These would be laid over the three-dimensional head to give it full realism. Every pose necessary was available on the tape and Simon made mental notes of his intended victim's mannerisms. These would be used later to add full authenticity.
The faces then needed to be rendered, with the flesh texture-mapped onto them. This was the process Simon was in the midst of and by morning all thirty-two poses would be completed.
Simon turned the monitor back off, leaving the computer to finish the remaining frames while he slept. After school tomorrow, he would ask Jeff over to help with some of the other aspects of his scheme.
A normal person would have had difficulty sleeping after seeing such a sinister 'carcass'. A carcass was in effect all it was. It was a lifeless shell, a cyberpuppet that would jump to Simon's every command.